People with a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis can often seem to overvalue their own thoughts and feelings. In the cognitive behavioral therapy tradition, this phenomenon gets labeled as “emotional reasoning.”
The logic of emotional reasoning goes like this: what I feel or think with conviction MUST be true because I feel so strongly that it’s true.
The problem, of course, is many things feel true that aren’t. For example, the earth feels flat, but isn’t. A watched pot may feel like it takes forever to boil, but it always does given the burner works and is turned on.
Here’s where it gets complicated. People with BPD treat their thoughts and feelings as facts because:
- Caregivers historically have not taken their thoughts and feelings seriously at all (i.e., invalidating emotional environment)
- The invalidating emotional environment makes sufferers of BPD self-invalidate; this means, they don’t take themselves seriously!
Why would someone who doesn’t really believe that their internal world matters treat their thoughts and feelings as factual? The answer is quite simple: it’s too painful to relive the experience of emotional invalidation. So, people with BPD try like heck to convince themselves that their feelings are valid, they are reasonable, and they matter.
In fact, the impulse to defend even misguided beliefs is really a healthy, self-protective one for people with BPD. If someone with borderline personality disorder stops defending cherished thoughts and feelings, it’s likely a sign that they are amid a major depressive episode.
What constitutes an emotionally invalidating environment:
Marsha Linehan, PhD identifies several characteristics of an invalidating environment:
In short, the rigidity with which sufferers of BPD protect thoughts and feelings is an adaptation to the environment described above.
What’s the best way to deal with people who defend “irrational” thoughts or feelings with anger and hostility?
Show them that you understand how they would come to that conclusion.
For example:
“The earth is flat!!!”
“It most certainly feels that way. If I hadn’t seen the pictures of earth from space, I’d agree with you.”
Of course, this is not always easy and it won’t diffuse every situation. But, it’s much better than accusing the sufferer of BPD that they are crazy or behaving irrationally. They’ve probably heard something similar many times before.
And it’s very, very painful.
Folks with Borderline Personality Disorder probably won’t (and shouldn’t) accept such an accusation without a fight.
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