How do you deal with intense emotions with borderline personality disorder?
Imagine you have a cut. The skin around your cut heals. But it heals all wrong. The scarred tissue is extra sensitive. So much so that every time you simply touch the area, it’s like the wound tears open again, and again, and again; and the pain peaks every single time. Now imagine this wound represents your emotional sensitivity and how you deal with the world every day. This is akin to the emotional susceptibility of borderline personality disorder (BPD). As Shari Y. Manning, Ph.D, writes in her excellent book Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, “People with BPD have an exquisite vulnerability to emotions.” And this susceptibility is hardwired. For instance, Manning cites one interesting study where researchers tickled infants on their noses with a feather. Their responses ranged widely: Some infants didn’t react at all, others moved around and still others started crying and it was tough to calm them down. These babies were seen as “sensitive to emotional stimuli.” Like other disorders, BPD also involves an environmental component. (Not everyone who’s emotionally sensitive goes on to have BPD.) Individuals with BPD aren’t just genetically vulnerable to emotions; they’ve also grown up in an “invalidating environment.” So they might’ve never learned how to regulate their emotions, or their emotions were continuously ignored or dismissed. What It Means To Be “Emotional”According to Manning, being emotional isn’t a lack of control; it has more to do with “three separate tendencies that cause emotional arousal in different ways.” These are:
An Exercise in UnderstandingIn Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, Manning also helps readers better understand what it’s like to be emotionally vulnerable. She suggests thinking about an extended period of time when you were very emotional. For Manning her emotional explosion happened when the company she’d worked for was going bankrupt. Not only was everyone upset and Manning barely sleeping but then her friend passed away. “At that point I felt like every emotion that I had was at the surface of my skin. I physically felt like I would explode with emotion if one more thing happened.” She notes that she was “an emotional sponge.” She didn’t even want sympathy because she felt like this would put her over the edge. When thinking about your own highly emotional experience, Manning writes:
How Loved Ones Can HelpManning shared her insight on how family and friends can help in a two-part interview on Psych Central (Part 1 and Part 2). And loved ones can do a lot, especially when it comes to helping the person when they’re upset. In her book, Manning provides readers with step-by-step strategies and detailed examples. Below is a brief list of suggestions from her book:
Also, it’s important to remember that people with BPD do get better and simply need to learn the skills of managing their emotions. While this requires hard work and effort, treatments such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) have been shown to be highly effective. You can learn more about DBT here and here. |