Overwhelmed by Emotions: Affective Dysregulation in Borderlines, Narcissists

And so what do you do when you constantly misinterpret the emotions or other people? This triggers in you emotions that are alien to you and that you misinterpret equally, and you're terrified by this situation because you feel that you are like a puppet and everyone is pulling your strings.

Well, one way, one solution is what is known as emotional dissemblance.

Emotional dissemblance is a lack of correspondence between an individual's internal affective state and the outward expression of these emotions.

So it could be intentional. The semblance could be intentional. The individual is lying about their emotional state.

But the semblance is often unconscious. Where the individual's emotional broadcast, emotional facade, emotional emanations are actually ill correlated or lowly correlated with what's really going on inside.

And this discrepancy, this gap creates internal tension because it's dissonant. And this tension accumulates and it becomes anxiety. And the anxiety finally shuts off all the regulatory mechanisms and we have emotional dysregulation.

You're beginning to see that emotional dysregulation has many sources and that it has consequently many facets or many aspects. Some of them mutually exclusive and irreconcilable.

So it's a very wide spectrum phenomenon. And when I say emotional dysregulation, of course I'm talking about emotions.

So what are emotions? And in which way emotions are not the same as feelings or not the same as affects or what are we talking about? Let us define these words before we proceed.

It is important to understand that many scholars believe that emotions are just one type of cognitions. They are kind of thought. Thought that is experienced in a different way to cognition, but they are still cognitions.

Be that as it may, emotions are complex. They're not simple. There is not a single simple emotion. You say anger, when you say love, when you say hate, and you say envy, it's a complex thing.

And emotions, as I said earlier, are directional. They're outward or public facing, outward looking. They are reactive to the environment. Emotions are reaction patterns.

And they involve many, many elements, experiential elements, behavioral elements, even physiological elements.

We can induce emotions through the body. We can even induce emotions through visual input. We can induce emotions.

The famous experiments were people, in the experiment, people were made to experience tachycardia, like a faster heartbeat. And then they were shown pictures, photos of potential partners, and they said that they were falling in love.

So the body informed the mind. So emotions emerge from the body very often.

And emotions are there because we weigh things differently. Some things are more important to us. Something are more significant. Something is a perceived as strengths or a menace something is a perceived as crucial for survival.

All this system of weighing or waiting things is regulated or mediated, I would say, via emotions.

Emotions attempt, it's an attempt, an emotion is an attempt to deal with a personally significant matter, person or event.

The specific quality of the emotion, anything from shame to love, from fear to anger, specific quality is determined by the specific significance of the object of the emotion.

Be that another person, be that a decision, be that an environment, be that an institution, whatever the object of the emotion is, we love someone, we hate someone, whatever and whoever that someone is, this determines the profile of the emotion and the quality of the emotion.

If the significance involves threat, fear is likely to be generated. If the significance involves disapproval, shame is likely to emerge. And if the significance is about, you know, having found your soulmate, the reaction would probably be love. Sex appeal or attractiveness would generate infatuation and limerance.

Emotion typically involves feeling, but it's not the same as feeling because it has an overt or implicit engagement with the world.

And this is where this dysregulation comes in. The world can and does dysregulate people. Reality dysregulates people. The environment dysregulates people.

Emotional dysregulation is often induced from the outside, not from the inside.

In other words, the perception that emotion of dysregulation is a wholly contained psychodynamic process is manifestly wrong. And unfortunately, underlies most of the literature on personality disorders, especially borderline and narcissistic. It's completely wrong.

The same individual with borderline personality disorder is likely to not react with emotional dysregulation or react with emotional dysregulation depending crucially on the environment, on the intimate partner, on the type of relationship, on expectations, on previous experiences, including immediate experiences, on cues, on triggers, on stimuli, it's an endless array of possibilities, of switches.

So it's wrong to characterize emotional dysregulation as emanating from the inside, confined to the inside, like some kind of caged animal in the zoo of personality disorders.

I said that emotion contains feeling, but is outwardly directed, directed at the world it's a mode of engaging with the world you could even conceive of emotions as forms of communication, as signaling, a type of signaling. For example, anger is intended to signal displeasure and modify people's behavior.

So there is a manipulative element in emotions. When we communicate emotions, we expect other people to comply, to somehow alter, change and modify their behaviors, to reduce the intensity or even the existence of the emotion.

You see that emotions are much more complex than I get up in the morning and I'm angry.

They have to do with a strategy for surviving within a specific environment in an adaptive way. They are, I would say, evolutionary survival strategies and also at the same time, signaling mechanisms and communication modes.

Feelings are much more primitive. Feelings are much more basic.

The feeling is a self-contained, phenomenal experience.

So when most scholars, and not to mention self-styled experts and laymen, discuss emotional dysregulation, they actually mean to say feeling dysregulation.

Feeling is indeed self-contained. And it's an experience, and there is a phenomenology to it, but it's self-contained.

Feelings are subjective, they're evaluative, they're independent of sensations, thoughts, or images that evoke them. Independent.

They are not reactive like emotions. Feelings are inevitably evaluated as pleasant or unpleasant but they can have more specific intrapsychic qualities.

So the affective tone of the feeling could be determined in a variety of ways. For example, the affective tone of fear is experienced as different to the affective tone of anger.

The core characteristics that differentiate feeling from cognitive or sensory or perceptual intrapsychic experiences is the fact that affect is connected to appraisal.

You remember appraisal, we discussed appraisal earlier. It's like building blocks. There's affect, there's appraisal, put these two together, you get a feeling.

Direct the feeling outwardly at the environment and you get an emotion.

Feelings differ from emotions. They are purely mental, whereas emotions are designed to engage with the world, but otherwise feelings are a crucial component of emotions.

What about affects? We keep saying affective dysregulation. Affects are not emotions.

Affect is the experience of feeling, the experience of emotion. It's how you experience these things.

Suffering, for example, is not an emotion. It's an affect.

You experience suffering, and suffering is a composite of multiple emotions. You experience elation, similarly.

There are simple affects, complex affects, depending on the ingredients or on the composition of the affect, on what comprises the affect, because feelings and emotions could also be simple or complex.

There's normal affect, pathological affect, because emotional reactions could be normal or pathological.

And of course, ultimately there is reduced affect or even lack of affect known as flat affect. That is a form of numbing, self-numbing, which implies the utter failure of regulation, a failure that threatens the individual from the inside and forces the individual to shut down the entire emotional mechanism.

Affect can be positive or negative, mood and emotion are affective states, but they are not affects.

Along with cognition and conation, I have a video dedicated to conation, by the way, affect is one of three traditionally identified components of the mind.

Now, what is positive affect? Positive affect is the internal feeling state, the affect that occurs when something good has happened to you. A goal has been attained. A source of threat has been removed or avoided. You have accomplished your dream or your wish, fulfilled your wish. You're satisfied with the present state of affairs. Whatever the case may be.

When you experience such states, this is called positive affectivity in emotionally dysregulated people, people with borderline personality disorder and to some extent narcissistic personality disorder.

Positive affect and negative affect are indistinguishable from each other. The valence, the value of the affect, plus or minus, is not relevant. The very existence of the affect can and sometimes generates emotional instability, emotional dysregulation, shuts off the regulatory mechanism.

Affect is not tolerated. It's as if these kind of individuals have an allergic reaction to affect.

Whenever affect is present, there's a risk that the whole house of cards will fall apart and the individual will be overwhelmed and reduced to sobbing or reduced to inactivity, catatonic state.

Now in narcissism, emotional dysregulation is totally context dependent.

Narcissists emotionally dysregulate only in highly specific states. Collapse, narcissistic collapse, narcissistic mortification, and sometimes narcissistic injuries.

It was Kernberg who suggested that narcissism is actually a defense against emotional dysregulation, a defense against borderline personality disorder or borderline personality organization.

So narcissism is the opposite of emotional dysregulation. It's a solution to emotion dysregulation.

It's a pathological solution, dysfunctional solution, hurtful solution, crazy solution, but it's a solution. It reduces the incidence of emotional dysregulation in the individual.

However, narcissism, like any solution, is not fail safe. It fails, and when it fails we have emotional dysregulation.

The individual narcissist actually becomes clinically indistinguishable from a borderline patient.

Negative affect is the internal feeling that occurs when you fail to achieve a goal, or when there is a threat present, or when you're not satisfied with your life, or whatever the case may be.

Negative affectivity, positive affectivity in healthy people, very different.

In mentally ill people, people with personality disorders, and people with other kinds of disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, depressive illnesses, in all these people, the positivity or negativity are much less relevant than the existence, the presence and the intensity of the affect.

The affective tone is the mood or the feeling that are associated with a particular experience or stimulus.

So the affective tone, most healthy people, most normal people, are aware of the affective tone.

But mentally unhealthy or mentally disordered people, they are not self-aware in many important ways, and this is no exception.

They cannot describe the affective tone, the mood or the feeling associated with any cue or information from the environment or stimulus or experience. They just can't verbalize it.

Not only verbalize, they can't really experience it. That's why they find it difficult to communicate it.

There is a breakdown between the apparatus or the mechanism of experiencing and the mechanism of emoting and the mechanism of mood.

So it's like experiences are objective ontological events and phenomena that give no rise to an emotional correlate, to a feeling, to a mood.

It's as if you would say to a healthy person, the sun is 150 million kilometers away from Earth. Okay, that's a cognition, that's a thought, that's a fact, but it doesn't provoke any emotional reaction.

But if you were to tell your healthy person, your loved one has just died, that's also a fact, but it would, of course, provoke an outburst or a total collapse, mentally, emotionally, and so on.

With the borderline and the narcissists, the two sentences are indistinguishable as far as the affective tone, as far as the internal experience of them.

When you say the earth is that far from the sun or a loved one died the narcissist and to a lesser extent the borderline register it as neutral statements as far as inner experience as far as emoting.

Now it's not to say that these kind of sentences cannot invoke or provoke or elicit internal dynamics in the narcissist and the borderline. They do, but it is the experience of these dynamics that is either compromised or impaired or lacking. This distinction is very important.

When you tell the borderline your loved one, your intimate partner has been cheating on you. There's infidelity here.

The borderline is likely to erupt in enormous rage or to collapse completely into a heap or to fall apart or to act out or to do something crazy and so destructive she's definitely going to, something is definitely going to happen there.

And yet the internal experience of all this is mysteriously opaque, inaccessible even to the borderline.

She goes through the motions, but she feels compelled from the outside or compelled from the inside. Doesn't matter.

She feels as if she is a puppet, a marionette. Someone is pulling her strings, someone internal or someone external. It doesn't much matter because she outsources her internality to the outside. So it doesn't matter. This distinction, external, internal, doesn't exist in borderline and in narcissism.

So she feels as if she is a plaything, some kind of plaything, flotsam, jetsam, on the waves of life.

This external locus of control explains the lack of affective tone. And it leads to dysregulation, an excessive, poorly managed kind of environment where regulation ceases to operate.

The mechanism is very important. The mechanisms that keeps the equilibrium, the homeostasis, the balance, the internal balance, and that creates a semblance of continuity and stability. It's a semblance, but in healthy people it's a very convincing semblance. Even it even convinces them.

So this mechanism breaks down.

And then we have extreme or inappropriate emotional responses to situations.

Temper outbursts, deliberate self-harm. I mean, you name it.

And of course, all this has to do with a lack of regulatory environment. When the regulatory environment is either extremely primitive, habitually outsourced, or prone to breakdowns, very fragile, very vulnerable, then we have the preconditions for constant state of dysregulation.

Self-regulation is when healthy people control their behaviors through the use of self-monitoring, they self-observe. There's introspection here. There's a record of one's previous experiences, life history, behaviors, and so on.

It's as if a healthy individual compiles a library as he goes or she goes along life, along the trajectory of life.

This self-observation, this self-monitoring, this introspection, they're critical for regulation, because they lead to the next stages of self-evaluation, assessing the information obtained during the self-observation, and self-reinforcement, rewarding oneself for appropriate behavior or attaining a goal, and on the contrary, punishing oneself for having been delinquent or lacking somehow.

Self-regulatory processes are very crucial and form a part of many therapies like behavioral therapies.

Now the problem with people with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, but as I said, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, psychological trauma, CPTSD, complex trauma, brain injury even.

The problem with all these people is that the components of self-regulation are either out of whack they don't feed each other appropriately or in a timely fashion or they are disabled or impaired, compromised, dramatically corrupted somehow or they collude in trying to destroy the individual, to eliminate the individual.

They have a nefarious, malevolent agenda of self-negation, whereas in a healthy person, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement would work together in order to enhance, to increase self-efficacy and guarantee positive outcomes from the environment.

In a mentally ill person, these very modules will collude, as I said, will conspire to destroy the individual, to reduce self-efficacy, to induce anxiety and dread, to disable and paralyze the individual.

And so we have this self-regulatory resources theory. It's a model in psychology and it states that self-regulation depends on global but finite.

So there's a global but finite pool of resources. These resources are scarce. They're accessible to all the psychological dynamics. They are accessible to all the psychological constructs and processes.

I call them the databases. Yeah, they're accessible, but after all they're finite. They're scarce.

And so they can be depleted by situational demands.

Then there is something called ego depletion. It's a state marked by a reduction in the capacity for volition, initiative, choice, self-regulation, and so.

So when we have a situation where the circumstances, environment, other people, especially significant people, and so impose too many demands and requirements and constraints and expectations on the individual, it could create ego depletion.

Ego depletion is temporary. The ego is restored to rest. Positive emotions interfere and intervene to mend fences and and reconstruct everything and so on. Volition is replenished. Volition is a faculty by which the individual decides on a particular course of action, commits himself to this course of action.

Freud would have called it cathexis. I mean, Freud hated the word, but it's the equivalent of cathexis.

And so when there is no direct external influence, it comes from the inside volition.

It's a crucial set of activities involving the self, choice, decision, self-control, intentional action, active response rather than passive response.

And volition depends on a limited resource. This resource is expanded whenever the self makes a decision or exerts control or attempts to interact with the environment.

So we have this picture of some kind of a pool of resources, some kind of mental energy or what Freud called psychic energy and so on, and then it's limited, it scares.

And whenever you do something, whenever you act, whenever you make a choice, whenever you make a decision, whenever you interact with other people, whenever you attempt to change environment or modify other people's behaviors, whatever you try to do, you are using up these resources. You're depleting them and they need to be replenished.

So your ego is depleted in the self-regulatory resources theory and it needs to be replenished.

The problem with mentally ill people, people with borderline narcissistic personalities or others. Problem with these people is that their capacity to replenish the ego, if you wish, the self or the self, the resources of the self, their capacity is extremely limited.

They are not self-regenerating. They are not self-refreshing. They are not self-regenerating. They are not self-refreshing. They are not self-reconstructing.

And the reason is very simple. They don't possess a self.

The self in borderline personality disorder, narcissic personality disorder, and arguably in other mental illnesses, the self is either fragmented, so not coherent, not cohesive, it's not action-oriented somehow. It is delusional in psychosis, in narcissism, it's delusional.

So impaired reality testing reduces ability to act in or on in the environment, or on the environment, that reduces self-efficacy.

Something is wrong with the self.

In some extreme situations, the self has never been formed. There's been a disruption in the formation of the self.

In most of these people, there's identity diffusion, identity disturbance. There's no core identity. There's nobody there.

So who's going to do the refreshing and replenishing? There's no one there. No central agent, no executive authority.

So these people get depleted very fast. Their resources are much more finite and scarce than the resources of healthy people. Their volition easilydwindles and wanes and never waxes.

And the whole edifice of self-management falls apart, crumbles, with every challenge, with every stimulus, with every demand, with every change, with every transformation, with every new person, with every new job, with every new relationship, the whole thing falls apart.

Self-management is lacking, and I'm being charitable, in people with these disorders, especially borderline and narcissism.

Self-management is the ability to control behavior, especially when a specific objective is in question.

Goal-oriented behavior, the pursuit of specific objectives, I don't know, weight lossGoal-oriented behavior, the pursuit of specific objectives, I don't know, weight loss for example, self-management is a desirable aspect of the individual, both personally and social.

But some forms of self-management may be detrimental to mental and physical health.

So when self-management goes awry, out of control, when it becomes too rigid, too strict, or on the other hand, when it's completely lacking, when it's missing, both these situations are very pathological and they lead to a collapse in self-control.

Self-control is the ability to be in command of one's behavior, overt, covert, emotional, physical and to restrain oneself and to inhibit one's impulses, impulse control.

And so when short-term gain is pitted against long-term, greater gain, self-control is the ability to opt for the longer-term outcome.

So self-ability, self-control is intimately connected with the notion of time.

And indeed, in borderline, in narcissism, there's no time, or in other cases like bipolar and so on, time is cyclical. There's no long term and short term. There's no term at all.

Impulsiveness results.

If short term is the equivalent of long term, because they are both non-existent, the outcome is impulsiveness.

And there's no self-discipline. There's no control of one's impulses and desires.

Freud would have said that the id takes over and the ego is kind of relinquished or abandoned.

And so there's immediate satisfaction instead of delayed gratification or longer term goals.

Immediate gratification is the experience of satisfaction or the receipt of a reward as soon as a response is made.

And adults and healthy people delay this. They delay gratification because they forego immediate reward in order to obtain a larger, more desire, more pleasurable, bigger reward in the future.

There's a concept of the future. There's a horizon. There's ability to extrapolate, to predict. There's a theory, isn't it? A working model of the world? A theory of mind of other people. Mentalization.

All this is missing.

Because all this is missing.

Everything is immediate. Everything is reflexive. Everything is responsive. Everything is reactive, and it gives no place and no rise to self-regulation, to regulatory mechanisms to operate, because regulation by definition is the ability to suspend immediate responsiveness, immediate reactance, and immediate gratification in favor of longer-term outcomes, internal or external.

That's a great definition of regulation. Regulation is about not doing what you want the minute you want to do it. Regulation is about not falling to pieces when you're confronted with a challenge or a difficulty or hardship. Regulation is about not giving in to your infantile and primitive side, imposing on it the strictures and the benefits of social structure as embedded in your higher levels of the mind, especially the adult parts.

And there's no such thing in mentally ill people.

Freud would have said that in mentally ill people the pleasure principle prevails over the reality principle.

Let me explain this a bit.

The pleasure principle is a view that human beings are governed by desires, by drives, by urges for gratification, for pleasure, for the discharge of tension that builds up as pain.

When there is internal dissonance or conflict or tension between what you want and what you cannot get, what you want and what society tells you shouldn't pursue, when there are these tensions, the discharge of the tension is by pursuing pleasurable things.

Pleasurable objects, pleasurable experiences, pleasurable activities, pleasurable objects, pleasurable experiences, pleasure activities, pleasurable people. It's a discharge of the tension because attention is experienced as painful or unpleasant when gratification is lacking.

So in classical psychoanalytic theory, Sigmund Freud said that the pleasure principle is a force. It's a psychic force and it motivates people to seek immediate gratification of instinctual, libidinal impulses, sex, hunger, thirst, elimination even, and so.

The pleasure principle dominates the id, operates more strongly during childhood, and later in adulthood, it is opposed by the reality principle as embedded and enshrined in the ego.

And this is the pleasure pain principle versus the reality principle.

I am not necessarily an adherent of all these structures, id, ego and so on. I think they are metaphors, they're not realities.

But I think the dichotomy or the contradiction between pleasure and reality is real. And I think it's a very interesting organizing principle.

The reality principle, in classical psychoanalytic theory at least, is the regulatory mechanism. This is regulation. It represents the demands of the external world, and it requires the individual to forego or to modify instinctual gratification to postpone it to a more appropriate time.

It is unlike the pleasure principle because the pleasure principle is dominant and as I said governs the id, the instinctual impulses, the reality principle governs the ego and controls impulses.

Reality principle enables people to deal rationally, effectively and in the long term with the situations and exigencies of life.

And it leads to something called self-regulated learning.

Self-regulated learning is a process. We continuously monitor and control our learning. We observe everything in every human being, healthy or unhealthy, there is a monitoring agency, surveillance agency, the NSA, the internal NSA. It's a kind of agency that observes, records, monitors and so.

So this is a crucial part of self-regulation.

Self-regulated learning involves metacognition, cognitive control, motivation, and a strategic use of learning and learned behaviors.

And metacognition is the awareness of one's own cognitive processes.

I would even say the awareness of one's own emotions if we adhere to the belief that emotions are cognitive processes.

And it involves a conscious attempt to control these emotions and these cognitions and so metacognition is crucial and it's missing in borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

They're unable to stand outside themselves, to stand aside and watch themselves and observe themselves as neutrally and objectively as humanly possible.

They don't do this. They go with the flow. It's as if they're diving all the time. They never emerge to survey or to look at the landscape. They're constantly underwater.

The internal experience of narcissists and borderlines is like they're underwater all the time.

And they have to survive somehow underwater and they are struggling with breathing, other kinds of functions and so on so forth just in order to survive and they have no time for regulation because everything is in the present in a bad way, not mindfulness, but in a bad way.

Everything is immediate. Everything is impulsive. Everything is exigent. Everything is the here and now.

And when everything is the here and now, you cannot develop a theory of yourself. You cannot see yourself. You cannot, of course, regulate yourself.

This presentism, this immersion in the here and now as a threat, the here and now as an exigency, the here and now as a vicissitude, this is what undermines any attempt at self-regulation or regulatory process inside the borderline and the narcissists.

This lack of time. They're frozen like ants in amber.