Lack of cognitive empathy, ToM, mentalizing, social cognition, or emotional intelligence was found to be a common feature among patients with BPD.
Those with borderline personality disorder, or BPD, a mental illness marked by unstable moods, often experience trouble maintaining interpersonal relationships. New research indicates that this may have to do with lowered brain activity in regions important for empathy in individuals with borderline personality traits.
When their feelings become too unbearable, a person with quiet BPD frequently will detach emotionally from their experience, also known as dissociation. This can feel as if you are watching your life happen from afar and disconnected from painful feelings and desirable feelings such as happiness and love.
For example, it's possible to demonstrate empathy to an extreme degree, even to the point that it harms you and others. In scientific literature, this is commonly referred to as "borderline empathy" or "hyper-empathy," and it is related to borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is associated with an assortment of characteristics that undermine interpersonal functioning. A lack of empathy is often cited as the primary distinguishing feature of NPD.
They can be the result of genetics (or the characteristics you inherited from your parents), environment (especially in early childhood), disease, or physical or psychological damage and trauma related to an event. Two psychological terms particularly associated with a lack of empathy are sociopathy and psychopathy.
A key example here is the empathic paradox that occurs in patients with BPD. The empathic paradox, or borderline empathy paradox, is characterized by enhanced empathy, in spite of impaired interpersonal functioning.
Early evidence indicated that outpatients with BPD, compared to non-psychiatric controls, have crucial deficits in the important domains of emotional intelligence including self-awareness, control of emotions, motivating oneself, and empathy [4,5,6,7,8].
One of the experiences of interacting with individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (BP/NP) is that they sometimes do not seem truly sorry. Even though a BP/NP may say he or she is sorry, there may be something lacking.
Individuals with borderline personality disorder often experience intense and overwhelming emotions that they struggle to regulate. As a result, they may exhibit extreme behaviors, such as lashing out in anger toward others or withdrawing from others, in an attempt to cope with their emotions.
For many folks with BPD, a “meltdown” will manifest as rage. For some, it might look like swinging from one intense emotion to another. For others, it might mean an instant drop into suicidal ideation. Whatever your experience is, you're not alone.
Cyclical Nature of BPD Abandonment
The fear of being abandoned often causes people with BPD to form unhealthy attachments. Sometimes, they may abruptly cut off these relationships, effectively abandoning their partners. Other times, they make frantic attempts to hold onto relationships.
Many people feel that their loved ones or relatives with symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) don't care how they feel because it is often not present in their behavior. This is because one frequent feature of those who experience symptoms of BPD is very weak empathy.
Often, the borderline person is unaware of how they feel when their feelings surface, so they displace their feelings onto others as causing them. They may not realise that their feelings belong within them, so they think that their partner is responsible for hurting them and causing them to feel this way.
Borderline Personality
Patients fear being abandoned, yet relationships rupture easily. Together with a chronic feeling of emptiness, patients with BPD are highly susceptible to feeling intensely lonely.
Once upset, borderline people are often unable to think straight or calm themselves in a healthy way. They may say hurtful things or act out in dangerous or inappropriate ways.
People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense mood swings and feel uncertainty about how they see themselves. Their feelings for others can change quickly, and swing from extreme closeness to extreme dislike. These changing feelings can lead to unstable relationships and emotional pain.
The scans revealed that in many people with BPD, 3 parts of the brain were either smaller than expected or had unusual levels of activity. These parts were: the amygdala – which plays an important role in regulating emotions, especially the more "negative" emotions, such as fear, aggression and anxiety.
Loneliness may be common with BPD, but it's not impossible to overcome. There are many strategies you can use to feel less alone, such as joining a support group, taking classes, caring for an animal, and finding new ways to communicate with your loved ones. You may also want to consider engaging in therapy.
Those with BPD experiencing dissociation often feel lost, scared, and detached from reality. While dissociation is not the primary symptom of BPD, it is one of the symptoms that make getting treatment for BPD all the more urgent.
To evaluate crying behavior, we used a set of specially designed tools. Compared to non-patients, BPD patients showed the anticipated higher crying frequency despite a similar crying proneness and ways of dealing with tears.
Research indicates that BPD is linked to above-average intelligence (IQ > 130) and exceptional artistic talent (Carver, 1997). Because your partner with BPD may be exceptionally bright, they digest information and discover answers to problems more quickly than the average person.
Many people who live with borderline personality disorder don't know they have it and may not realize there's a healthier way to behave and relate to others.
In a functional neuroimaging study, patients with BPD exhibited more and faster initial saccades towards the eyes of angry faces compared to a healthy control group. This interpersonal threat hypersensitivity was associated with increased amygdala activation [28].