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Polls and Ineffective Borderline Behavior
I’ve had conversations with several BPD “experts” about borderline behavior. There seems to be an assumption that many people with BPD are “silent” or “high-functioning” and do not engage in dangerous and/or ineffective behavior often attributed to the “typical” borderline. In my group recently, a non-BPD was questioning his own “sanity” (I put it in quotes because I don’t believe that people with BPD are insane) and speculating that he was the one with BPD. One of our longer-time posters replied: If you’re not throwing full-blown temper tantrums, freaking out because EVERYONE is out to get you, threatening to hurt or kill yourself, running away from those who love you…
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Borderlines vs. Psychopaths
Just a note or two on BPD vs psychopathy… Firstly, when shown the Ekman faces (just google it if you don’t know what those are), borderlines are likely to view neutral faces as angry and angry faces as extremely threatening. Borderlines think “that person is angry *at me*”. With fear faces, borderlines actually express empathy, even if Baron-Cohen says they don’t. I disagree with him in this regard. I believe the lack of empathy in borderlines occurs during a “failure to mentalize” and is not a general BPD trait. Psychopath’s brains only activate on fear faces. Disturbingly, they get “excited” about fear in others (i.e. the pleasure centers of the…
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The Implicit/Explicit Connection
When we have a conversation with someone, there are really four “people” trying to communicate. These people are you in your implicit thoughts, feelings, motivations, intent (all things inside your head and unavailable to the other person), you in your explicit expressions, words, body language, actions (all the ways you try and communicate), the other person in their implicit and the other person in their explicit. The most connected conversations are those in which each person can have the other’s “mind in mind.” This state is what complete mentalization is about. It is about understanding the meaning of the other person’s behaviors and words. In a Non-BP/BPD relationship, this connection…