Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotions

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People with BPD experience emotions more intensely and for longer periods than others. In many cases, negative emotions from the past resurge in their consciousness in a repetitive and intrusive manner. This can cause a lot of distraction and dissociation and makes it more difficult for them to achieve emotional balance. People with BPD not only experience emotions in an extreme way but they lack the coping mechanisms and strategies to regulate and mitigate these emotions. 

Emotional Instability

The fact that people with BPD experience emotions with great intensity can have positive and negative effects. On the one hand, they can feel intense love, joy and care about other people, which helps nurture their relationships and make them adorable and sympathetic. On the other hand, they can experience intense grief, shame, embarrassment and rage, which can be really difficult for others to handle. This happens because people with BPD have a general emotional instability and immaturity and face great difficulty in their effort to control and process their feelings. 

Shutting down emotions

Sometimes after emotional outbursts people with BPD can feel extremely ashamed of themselves. In order to face this shame they try to shut down their feelings completely. This can be a quite problematic strategy because negative emotions can be a warning sign for problematic situations in our life that help us find solutions and avoid difficult circumstances. Blocking the entire range of emotions can be a great problem in handling the everyday relationships and taking the right decisions.

Dysphoria

Last but not least, people with BPD are prone to intense feelings of dysphoria (feelings of mental and emotional distress). Researchers have identified four types of dysphoria that are typical to people with BPD 1) extreme emotions that are difficult to handle (as mentioned above) 2) destructiveness or self- destructiveness 3) feeling fragmented or lacking identity and 4) feeling victimized. These feelings of dysphoria intensify the lack of identity that so many people with BPD experience and make it more difficult for them to handle their relationships. 

What is your opinion on BPD and emotions? Please share in the comments below.

Introduction to Borderline Personality Disorder

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Borderline Personality Disorder is a personality disorder which is characterized by difficulty in regulating emotions, instability in relationships and a problematic sense of the self. People with this disorder have difficulty understanding and expressing their emotions, they cannot easily invest in relationships with others and live with a fragmented sense of the self.

People with BPD experience intense fears of abandonment, anger and irritability that come to surface unexpectedly and are difficult to understand. These symptoms usually originate from traumatic experiences in childhood, which remained unexplained and unprocessed. All these experiences were so overwhelming that left a permanent influence on the person’s character.

Furthermore, people with Borderline Personality Disorder are quite sensitive to the emotional reactions of other people and they tend to respond impulsively and with anger before they clear out the others' intentions. This often leads to misunderstandings that are usually left unexplained and unresolved.

People with BPD often idealize and devalue other people in an extreme way. They change abruptly their opinions about others from admiration to disappointment, which makes it quite difficult for them to form mature relationships. Instead they create fragile and volatile bonds that are easily disrupted. This happens because people with Borderline Personality Disorder cannot perceive others as complete beings with positive and negative characteristics. They split their perceptions and create fragmented relationships.

Apart from that, when people with Borderline Personality Disorder face the possibility of rejection or loss they react with increased impulsivity and unstable behaviors. Since they don’t have a stable sense of the self that would help them process their emotions, they behave without thinking and they usually burst out their feelings to family, friends and coworkers. This creates a lot of stress to the people who live around BPD patients.

The above feelings and behaviors of the Borderline Personality Disorder are persistent, inflexible and mark the person’s life throughout a variety of contexts. Usually the symptoms of BPD start from adolescence or early adulthood and continue throughout the life span. However, some psychologists claim that we can identify a personality disorder even from late childhood. Similar to most personality disorders, once BPD is established it becomes an integral part of the person’s character and is very difficult to change. 

What is your opinion on Borderline Personality Disorder? Please share in the comments below.