traits of bpd

Reversing Emotional Dysregulation In Individuals With Traits of BPD

Part 3 of the Blog Series: Traits of Borderline Personality Disorder in High Conflict Women

Welcome to Part 3 of the Nicola Method Blog series on understanding high conflict women, those women who have some traits of borderline personality disorder, or BPD, but do not qualify for a diagnosis.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series we explored many of the differences between those with traits of BPD and the average person. In this last installment we will be exploring the similarities. It is through understanding the similarities between the average person and the person with traits of BPD that we find the key to stopping their destructive behavior.

At the end of this blog post you will be shown a technique that lets you use this understanding along with an awareness of human neurology to move a person with traits of BPD from a state of emotional dysregulation to an emotionally balanced state.

If you would like to skip this discussion about our similarities and learn how to stop these negative behaviors patterns right away, just scroll down to the section entitled “Reversing the Negative Behaviors”.

What Makes Someone With Traits of BPD Seem So Different

An individual with traits of BPD is actually no different than the average person as far as the emotions they are experiencing. However, they experience them at a much higher intensity level. They are also much more sensitive than we are to the negative judgment of others. Just like the rest of us, their sensitivity is greatly magnified when it concerns the judgment of a romantic partner.

But the most important thing the average person has in common with someone with traits of BPD might surprise you.

Why Insecurity Is Only Human

The characteristic that causes people with traits of BPD to lash out or try to control others is actually a character trait that almost all humans have in common. People are naturally very insecure socially. We all have a need for positive reassurance in our social interactions in order to feel emotionally safe. Because of this natural insecurity, if someone treats us in a neutral way, without all of the positive cues that we are used to receiving, we experience their treatment of us as slightly negative.

Most people live their lives completely unaware of their natural social insecurity. This is because acting positively towards others in assuring ways is a universal custom so common that we don’t think about why we do it. Whether it is a disarming smile, a light joke or a positive spin on a sensitive subject, we all participate in social reassurance on a regular basis. It is only when someone who does not share our characteristic of social insecurity interacts with us that we find ourselves feeling oddly uncomfortable.

The people who do not possess the characteristic of social insecurity are often those with light autism, in other words people with some traits of autism but not enough to be diagnosed. Because they do not share this characteristic, it doesn’t occur to them that others would have it. However, they soon find out that in order to fit in socially, they must learn not to trigger the many social sensitivities that average people seem to possess.

When people try to teach them appropriate social skills, it is usually the teacher who ends up confused and unable to answer the question so many autistic people ask about us. Interestingly enough, this question is the same one that we often ask about those with traits of BPD: “Why do I have to walk on eggshells in order not to upset them?”

In case you are still not convinced that this all too human character trait causes us to make errors in judgment of how people are treating us, just as we did in Part 1 of this blog series, we are going to borrow the concept of a spectrum of autism from the experts in that field.

This time we will adapt that scale to measure oversensitivity to what others think about us. For our purposes we will call this imaginary scale a spectrum of social sensitivity.

traits of bpd

The Spectrum of Social Sensitivity

This scale represents a person’s sensitivity to social rejection. In other words, it tells us how suspicious someone will become that others might not like them. It also reflects just how much assurance a person needs from others in order to feel emotionally safe.

Let’s place a person with traits of BPD at the extreme end of our social sensitivity scale. We can then place the average person next to that individual. To further illustrate just how socially insecure even an average person is, we are going to place a person with light autism at the mid point of our scale.

Again, it might seem strange to say that someone with light autism would be placed in the middle instead of at the opposite end of insensitivity. We do this to show that although fear about social rejection may feel normal because we all suffer from it, it doesn’t erase the fact that most of us naturally suspicious creatures who can easily think the worst of others.

When we look at this spectrum, it is easy to imagine that the lightly autistic person may feel the same way about you as you do about the person with traits of BPD. They probably think that the average person is extraordinarily socially insecure and that they need tremendous amounts of assurance just to keep their suspicion levels down.

And if we are to be honest, we would have to admit that the autistic perspective is accurate and we are the ones that wear the glasses with a lens that distorts the intentions of others in a negative way. Imagining that distortion at an even higher magnification allows us to understand more clearly what a person with BPD might experience in their social interactions with others.

To gain even more clarity on the challenges that people with traits of BPD struggle with, let’s take this observation about human insecurity one step further.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we all had light traits of BPD. If we all felt extremely socially insecure, we would be putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into assuring those around us that we were not going to reject them. This effort would soon become part of our culture since it would be necessary for comfortable interaction. We would think of these extreme measures as normal.

Let’s now imagine a world where everyone had light character traits of autism. In a world where no one suffers from social insecurity, we would see no need for this type of assurance at all, and our culture would change to match that societal norm.

By understanding our own tendency to distort the intentions of others due to fear of rejection, we can relate better to the struggles of a person who might have a few traits of BPD and those of someone who might have these characteristics in addition to negative experiences trusting others in their past.

A Perfect BPD World

Although this may surprise you, if you were to give a person with traits of BPD the kind of continual assurance they would need to keep their insecurity at bay, you could easily keep them from acting out against you. In fact, if you were able to eavesdrop in on their thoughts whenever they got upset and could see exactly what triggered them, you could overcome their fears.

You could simply tell them something like, “Oh, I can see how when I said that it made you think I didn’t care about you. I’m sorry it came out that way. That’s not at all the way I meant it.” If you could identify exactly what you did that made them suspicious and tell them why it might affect them that way, you would be able to instantaneously calm their fears of betrayal and they would stop acting out.

Using the Nicola Method to Regulate Emotions

The type of approach described in the last paragraph is, in fact, the technique that the Nicola Method for high conflict teaches partners of women with traits of personality disorders to stop them from using abusive or aggressive behaviors in their relationship.

To use this technique, partners must be taught the specific fears around betrayal which trigger people with traits of BPD to become emotionally dysregulated and which cause them to use defense mechanisms. They also need to learn which of these fears is their partner’s key trigger. They are then provided with language that has been developed to overcome that particular fear.

Although that method is for partners of individuals with traits of BPD, there is another technique from the Nicola Method that anyone can learn to temporarily regulate the emotions of a person with traits of BPD that works on an episode by episode basis.

Reversing the Negative Behaviors

You are now going to learn how to reverse the behaviors that people with traits of BPD use to defend themselves against feeling insecure by blaming those around them. You will be given a sentence to use that has been specifically constructed to pass through defenses of a person with traits of BPD without setting off any alarms. You will simply be making a very casual observation that will re-direct them to a certain way of thinking without them realizing it was you who got them there. Here is the sentence you will use.

“When you said that it seemed like you thought I did something wrong.”

Let’s take a look at why this sentence works to regulate emotions of anger which is what the person with traits of BPD uses to ward off feelings of social insecurity.

Natural Emotional Regulation

This sentence works several ways. One of the things it does is it directs a person’s thoughts in a way that encourages the individual to use a part of their brain that helps them think better by inhibiting or lowering their emotions. Most people are aware that when they get into a highly emotional state, their cognitive functions become incapacitated, in other words, they can’t think straight. What they might not know is that when you enter a highly cognitive or intellectual state, your emotions become incapacitated.

The use of the word “something wrong” in this sentence is there for a reason. Let’s say we used “something you didn’t like” in the place of “something wrong.” The sentence would read, “When you said that it seemed like you thought I did something you didn’t like.”

Although doing something wrong and doing something someone doesn’t like may sound similar, questions of right and wrong actually fall into the category of ethics. Ethical questions of right and wrong are philosophical questions that encourage us to use a neurological processing center in our brain that lowers emotions that get in the way of this kind of complex thinking.

Another way this sentence works is it dismantles the defense mechanism that most people with BPD use to protect themselves from shameful feelings due to their insecurity. Defense mechanisms themselves are a form of neurological phenomenon. Very uncomfortable emotions can actually cause us to divide our awareness into two separate parts. In order to try to protect us from uncomfortable feelings, our subconscious mind may tell our conscious mind things that are not true. The divide between these two parts is so real that our conscious mind may be completely unaware that our subconscious mind is feeding it incorrect information.

In order to dismantle this defense mechanism, we need to only show the person’s conscious mind the flaw in their thinking that is causing them to blame us. If you can get their conscious mind to focus directly on the flaw, which is the fact that you didn’t do anything wrong, the subconscious part of their mind will lose all of its power.

This can be quite a challenge. If you tell the person’s conscious mind that you are innocent, their subconscious will simply tell them that you are being defensive and not to believe what you say. The sentence you are going to use gets around that barrier by using a subtle suggestion that makes them want to look at it for themselves.

It is the combination of these two approaches that lets you both regulate their emotions and overcome the insecurity defense with one sentence. When both of these components are working together you will find that the person will be returned to a rational state of mind, and you will be able to once again communicate normally and productively.

Traits of Borderline Personality Disorder In High Conflict Women

Defense Mechanisms of the High Conflict Woman In Relationship

Dismantling The Defenses of Female Relationship Insecurity

If you would like to learn the Nicola Method so you can put an end to the high conflict situations you may be experiencing, click on this link to the welcome page of this website where you will find the resources you need.

If you want to try out some of the basic techniques of this method for free to see if this method is right for your situation, you can learn them from an intro guide flip-book here or a PDF version of the intro guide here.

Visit Joanna on Google+