The other topic from chat today was observing the tendency that people with BPD have to lack adequate nonverbal emotional cues. This is something that Linehan observes in her books, and also something that I see in myself and others. As a result of invalidatinf environments, we learn not to show our emotions most of the time. The flip side that goes along with it is that we react in extreme ways when nobody seems to understand how we feel, and then we explode and others wonder where all of that came from, because they couldn't see it coming, since we don't show signs of what we feel until it gets to that point. Much of the time, we aren't aware of our own emotions and we don't see it coming either. We learn to invalidate and discount our own emotions, hiding them to get by and protect ourselves, and then usually get some results when we finally get out of control, so that gets reinforced too.

It might not be all learned. Marsha Linehan says that it is also possible that people with BPD are born with an emotional system that is less obviously expressive than others, and the inborn tendency to underexpress emotions might set up situations in the environment where others don't get the feedback (emotional cues) from us that they need to monitor their interactions with us appropriately, which sets up the pattern and tends to continue it.

I think that people with BPD tend to also be "highly sensitive" and that our sensitivity contributes to toning down our emotional expression, as well as picking up on other people's emotional cues more readily. A lot of this happens outside of our own awareness, but still is sensed and contributes to feeling overwhelmed or overstimulated, and, ironically, also probably contrubutes to tuning out and dissociating and numbing.

I'm interested in what others think about these ideas. I'm not always sure what to do about it, other than to observe and work on being more aware of these patterns and our emotions and what we sense and what we express, and how. With awareness, maybe we can learn to express emotions more easily.

Another observation is that this may be why online communication is more comfortable or easier for some of us. Since the nonverbal cues don't get transmitted anyway, nobody is seeing them or displaying them and one disadvantage is removed or altered. But it can be a crutch because we can get into a comfort zone here and avoid real life communication and interaction.

Feedback is welcome.