Borderline Misunderstands Her Emotions (as do Narcissist, Psychopath)

Borderlines and narcissists mislabel their emotions.

Emotions start with cognitions (thoughts), information gleaned from the body, plus data from the environment (contextual intake).

When there are fundamental, ubiquitous cognitive deficits and biases, emotions get misidentified (impaired internal reality testing).

We know this is true from multiple experiments and from the fact that techniques such as reappraisal and exposure (approaching the avoided emotions) work. In reappraisal we change the emotion by altering the underlying cognitions.

Borderlines suffer from emotional dysregulation and, like narcissists, they often exhibit inappropriate affect (understandable when emotions get misconstrued).

Empathy deficits: cold empathy (narcissists, psychopaths) or functional empathy (borderline, codependent, and histrionic) when full-fledged emotional empathy is turned off by negative emotionality, splitting, object inconstancy.

Studies show that increased empathy and age-related increase in empathy DECREASE recognition of emotions in others (Israelshvili, Agneta Fischer, Nannis).

Cognitive emoting: analysis, comparison to others.

Cluster B patients cope with these deficits in emotional cognizance by: 1. Repressing or avoiding the emotions (narcissist, primary psychopath); 2. Misjudging the intensity or semiotics of the emotions (misreading cues, signals, and information) (histrionics); or 3. Dissociating the emotions (borderline, secondary psychopath).

Coping strategies involve self-soothing (including self-defeating, self-destructive, self-trashing, and reckless behaviors) and approach-avoidance and other repetition compulsions (with the gradual formation of a persecutory introjected object)

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