The Borderline Personality and Emotional Intelligence
The Borderline Personality and Emotional Intelligence
The Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) individual distinctively has a challenge managing emotions. Whether the emotions stem from the fear of rejection or abandonment, acting appropriately in social settings, handling children with love & affection, or spinning into manic or depressive states, the emotions of the BPD are intense, unpredictable, and volatile.
The BPD may be socially inappropriate, to the point of embarrassing those around her. Through all the books & research that I have encountered regarding BPD, I haven’t heard any of the experts mention Emotional Intelligence (EI). In fact, as of 2008, the relationship between EI and BPD had only been examined in less than a hand-full of studies.
Salovey and Mayer define EQ as, “The ability to perceive emotion, integrate emotion to facilitate thought, understand emotions and to regulate emotions to promote personal growth.” In the most recent study (Wiley Interscience 2008), a relationship between EI and BPD was recently identified. EI was found to overlap considerably with alexithymia (an inability to experience & communicate feelings consciously and a construct associated with emotion processing & emotion regulation). The relationship between alexithymia and BPD suggest that difficulty identifying, differentiating, understanding and communicating emotions and feelings (somatic sensations) impairs ability to regulate emotions. An inability to discriminate emotions and somatic sensations explains why people with BPD who are distressed use deliberate self-harm as a means to emotion regulation.
Another study (Emotional Intelligence and Borderline Personality Disorder suggests that the affective instability, chronic feelings of emptiness and inappropriate, intense anger of BPD are all indicative of challenges with processing emotion or low EI. Similarly, other characteristics of BPD such as impulsivity, self-harm, fear of abandonment and dissociative symptoms are abnormal responses to emotions; therefore, those with low EI might display these behaviors and characteristics due to insufficient ability to manage their emotions. Additionally, a low EI is related to all the main BPD symptoms.
I can affirmatively conclude that BPD is the contributing factor for the mess of emotions and resulting erratic behavior that my BPD mother exhibits. From a very early age, I realized how inappropriate my mother is in social settings, how she didn’t manage herself very well in personal settings, and how she didn’t really have a ‘filter’. After I studied EI while earning my master’s degree, as well as studied BPD, I know that my mother may have a high Intelligence Quotient (IQ) but a very low EI. Let’s discuss the constructs and how they apply to my mother: Self-awareness — the ability to read one’s emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide decisions. Due to my mother’s overwhelming fear of rejection and abandonment, her gut feelings are tainted, and thus her decisions are rash, quick to judge, and irrational. Self-management — involves controlling one’s emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances. She has very little self management and doesn’t adjust her reactions or behavior according to the situation. Therefore, she will act the same at a fine dining dinner party as she would in a concert. She will act the same with rowdy friends as she would with professional colleagues of her husband’s. She doesn’t filter what she says, talking about some of the most inappropriate topics and subsequently doesn’t observe the reactions of others as these rude things are coming out of her mouth. She doesn’t take any context cues from those around her, not realizing she is offending so many, and thus not managing herself appropriately. Social awareness — the ability to sense, understand, and react to others’ emotions while comprehending social networks. She does not react to other’s context cues in social situations, realizing one person should be handled in one way, whereas another should be handled differently. She will be boisterous and aggressive to each individual regardless of how they present themselves to her– and she doesn’t acknowledge, in her actions, the differences in those in the social setting. Relationship management — the ability to inspire, influence, and develop others while managing conflict. She manages to deflate, demotivate, and destruct those close to her. Although she appears loving, supportive, and empathetic to the outsider, her sudden shifts in mood, self-destructive behavior, paranoid distortions, and obsessive ruminations are very apparent to those closest to her. Additionally, she doesn’t manage conflict, she creates it. She drums up crusades and creates conspiracy theories, trying to recruit as many people to her cause and spending countless hours on her mission. When I think back on it, the first evidence of low EI was evident