Last update: 07 September, 2017
One of the characteristics of people with borderline personality disorder is the difficulty in managing their emotions. They usually get overwhelmed by them and fail to be stable.
They can experience many emotional ups and downs that hinder, and in some cases compromise, their relationships with the outside world. Precisely for this reason, they need specific help that will equip them with useful tools related to social behavior.
It must be understood that a person with borderline personality disorder (BPD) behaves in a rigid and inflexible way. We are talking about people who cannot easily relate to one unbalanced social life, profound emotional instability and a very negative self-image.
But why is it so difficult for people with this disorder to manage their emotions?
The biosocial theory of borderline personality disorder
Biosocial theory holds that the main problem with BPD is the absence of emotional regulation. Furthermore, this deficiency could have several origins: a certain biological predisposition, an environmental context of invalidation and the interaction of both factors. According to this theory, emotional imbalances would be the consequence of emotional vulnerability and the lack of affective strategies to regulate emotions.
Emotional vulnerability is defined as a form of hypersensitivity to any emotion, regardless of its value (positive, negative or neutral). This hypersensitivity usually results in a very intense and variable response on the part of the person with BPD. This intensity produces an imbalance that people with BPD hardly know how to remedy.
On the other hand, the instability and lack of emotional regulation, according to the biosocial theory, has a biological phase, but this does not mean that it is hereditary. This biological predisposition can be different in each person, therefore a common biological factor present in all cases of borderline personality disorder has not yet been identified.
A disabling family environment harms emotional regulation
One of the factors affecting the difficult emotional regulation of people with BPD, but also of those who do not suffer from BPD, is the context and family environment in which they grew up. These are usually families who have not validated their children's emotional needs. Emotions are seen as unimportant expressions.
A disabling family can severely undermine a person's self-esteem, as it is formed in childhood. If the parents ignore or respond in an extreme way to the needs of the child, he will not feel important, a condition that will generate in him rejection and misunderstanding. The critical environment promotes the emotions of frustration, anger, sadness and fear as characteristics of the child's personality.
So, for example, if the baby cries, instead of dealing with it or trying to see what happens to him, they tell him that he is a crybaby and that he must stop crying. In this way, the little one learns that you don't have to show your emotions and that when he expresses them, he is even scolded. The child learns to express his emotions in an extreme way, either inhibits them or completely disinhibits them; growing up this dysfunctional expression is accentuated.
How do people with BPD respond to emotions?
Extreme intensity and emotional sensitivity
People with borderline personality disorder are very sensitive to external experiences, because they fear abandonment. For this reason, they react with great intensity to any emotion, be it anger or cheerfulness. They suffer from severe emotional instability that is difficult for them to control. For example, they often have intense episodes of anxiety and frustration that project onto other people through disrespectful behaviors.
Difficulty regaining emotional neutrality
Regaining calm, following the intensity with which they feel emotions, is not easy. They can be very impulsive and in the presence of something that upsets them often they are unable to modulate their emotions. On many occasions, they even involuntarily delegate control of the actions committed to their emotions.
Furthermore, these people are used to having reckless, radical and very fickle opinions. Their instability in this sense also penalizes the social circle of support on which they count. Such a circle is usually less substantial than that of a person without BPD e those who belong to it have understood that many of the impulsive behaviors adopted by the person are the product of the disease.
Emptiness and deep sadness inhibited
The sense of emptiness is a very common feeling among people with borderline personality disorder. Nothing fills them enough and this generates a great non-specific emptiness in them, as a result of which they experience such sadness that they often cannot explain or express. In this way they fill their emotional backpack with a melancholy that they end up breathing and of which they cannot get rid of.
Repressed anger and self-harm
It is very difficult for these people to regulate their anger. For this reason, they burst outward out of control or inhibit emotion to the point of injury. Self-harm is a way to express anger that they don't know how to bring out otherwise.
In these cases it is essential to learn to manage it, consciously choosing how to discharge the energy that accompanies this emotion, so as not to let it go out through an immeasurable impulse with consequences that you will regret later.
How to regulate emotions in borderline personality disorder?
A first step will be learning to accept and validate your emotions as they are. Identify which emotions exist on your horizon before they take over and accept them as they come, without wanting to deny reality. In this sense, it will be important learn to tolerate your emotional distress with emotional regulation strategies.
One of the therapies that has shown the best results is the DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) devised by Marsha Linehan. This therapy is based on teaching social and motivational skills to reduce impulsive behavior and suicidal ideation, so that people with BPD can see the world as a place where there is room for them too.
Enriching the emotional skills of people with borderline personality disorder is a very important aspect to improve their social and personal adaptation. Individual therapy, therapeutic groups and activities to be carried out at home will be fundamental for this purpose, as long as they are regulated and managed by a specialist.
