 |
| Photo by flickr.com / Gemma Taylor |
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.
I wonder how extreme it has to be to be considered a disorder? Do we help by calling our ups and downs a disorder?
ReplyDeleteWe all have our ups and downs and that is definitely not a disorder Anne. What makes some behaviors to be called a disorder has to do with how persistent are these behaviors across time and context. In other words, when these emotional patterns are an integral part of the personality and make it difficult for the person to function in the working place or in their relationships then, it may be called a disorder. On the other hand, we all have some elements of BPD in our personality but this does not mean that we have the disorder. In general, I believe it's a question of to what extent we see these behaviors and how intense they are. Thanks for the comment!
ReplyDelete