Emotional Permanence and BPD
It’s not a diagnosing criteria, but most people with BPD that I’ve met struggle with something called lack of emotional permanence.
I’m hoping that by sharing my experience with having a lack of emotional permanence, people without bpd will come to be a little more understanding of certain behaviors that people with bpd often do that, from the outside looking in, might seem outlandish or bizzare or over-reacting. I find that non-borderline people often don’t get why I’m acting the way I am and are comparing my behavior to their own experience and assuming that my relationship with emotions is the same as theirs is, and judging me based on how they think that would handle a situation.
What is emotional permanence? Well, you’ve probably heard of object permanence. It’s a term used to describe a stage of childhood development where a kid develops the ability to recognize that things continue to exist after they go away (this is why “peek-a-boo” works as a game for tiny children… they literally are surprised every single time your face reappears, because to them you stop existing when you are no longer visible).
People with BPD often experience the emotional equivalent of this. I can only ever describe my experience with this symptom, but other people with bpd that I’ve talked to have shared similar experiences with me.
A lack of emotional permanence kind of a two pronged thing.
So the first part of of the struggle with emotional permanence that I’m going to talk about is our ability to perceive/understand/engage with others feelings for us.
Here’s a thought exercise for non-borderline people: think about someone you love who loves you back who isn’t with you right now. Think about how they feel about you. Think about how nice and safe it feels to know that you are loved. I bet you probably have a warm, glowy feeling when you think about that. That must be really nice. I wouldn’t know. I have a general understanding of what this is like because I read a lot and others have described it to me. It sounds really, really lovely. I envy people that experience.
When I try to think about how other people feel about me (when they are not actively right there telling me how they feel about me), I tend to draw a blank. I literally can not experience that emotional recall. It has stopped existing in a substantial, interactable way. It is not real to me.
It’s like having a folder on your computer labled “other people’s feelings for me”. I can see that there is a folder there. I know what should be in that folder. When I go to click on that folder, there are files in it for all of my relationships. I can see the files are there. I can see that they exist. But for me, when I go to open the file? It’s been corrupted. It’s gibberish. It’s just strings of numbers and letters. I can’t read it. I know that there should be something there. I know what the contents should be.
But when that person is there, it’s almost like they have the ability to unscramble the file, or to restore it, I guess. I can read it, I can feel it, it feels real to me. I can open it, interact with it, it is real. Lovely. Wonderful.
But when they leave? Like literally, when they are not right there with me? The file goes back to being gibberish.
This means that when I am with someone, I get to experience an understanding and belief that the other person loves me and likes me and wants to be with me. Those things feel real. But when the other person isn’t there? I lose my ability to understand that as real. I can try to convince myself that it is real. “They just told me they love me like one hour ago. Feelings don’t change that quickly” I might say to myself. In response, my brain just fires back with internet dialup noises and error messages, or maybe with a “sounds fake, blocked” meme. It might take a few days, or a day, or an hour, but eventually, my ability to concieve of other people’s positive feelings for me disappears completely. It just drains away.
Another way to explain this is to imagine a cup with tiny holes drilled into the bottom. This is my ability to hold on to and recall feelings of love and validation from people who are in my life. When someone is there with me, giving their love and attention and affection, it fills the cup. As long as they are interacting and paying attention and offering support and validation, the cup appears (to the outside viewer) to be full. The moment they leave, though, all of those feelings and emotions start to drain away, until I’m left with nothing
This also means that when I try to think about how you feel about me when you’re not right there with me (or if you haven’t been directly paying attention to me), I probably default to “well, they probably hate me now ”. It doesn’t matter whether or not we just saw eachother two days ago and you told me how much you love me earlier this morning. To me, that’s not real. It’s gone. I can’t hold on to it. For me, if you’re not right there telling me that you love me, it means that you probably hate me. I know, it’s ass-backwards. It doesn’t make sense. But this is a big part of what a lack of emotional permanence entails.
The second part of how this manifests in my life is how I interact with emotions as they are happening.
It is incredibly difficult for me to engage with any emotion that isn’t happening right now. That does two things. It makes it so that I am unable to interact with the memories of the experience of other emotions. So for example, I have a really hard time remembering what happiness is like when I am very depressed. I also have a hard time interacting with negative emotions about someone that has hurt me a bunch of times when they are currently being nice to me, or interacting with overall positive emotions about someone when they have done something shitty. Honestly, it is my belief that this is the root cause of splitting, which is a bpd symptom where someone with bad swings back and forth between idealization and devaluation of people.This is very problematic, since both being able to act on feelings related to bad treatment even if someone is currently being nice and being able to moderate hurt feelings by putting them into a greater context with other positive behaviors are both pretty important skills for maintaining/ troubleshooting relationships.
The other thing that this does is make it incredibly difficult for me to compare intensity of emotion. So, for example when I’m sad, it is genuinely, honestly the saddest I’ve ever been, because I am unable to interact with comparable instances of sadness. When I’m happy, it is the happiest I’ve ever been. When I’m feeling lonely, it is the most alone and isolated I’ve ever felt. When I’m feeling abandoned, it is the most I’ve ever felt abandoned (and this makes sense when I’m unable to interact in any real way with positive emotions about others to help balance my perspective on this) . This emotional intensity exists even if the prompting event doesn’t fit the facts for the intensity of that emotion.
People with bpd are often accused of being “drama queens,” or just generally over-reacting to everything. In context, though, at least for me, I’m not exaggerating my experience because in that moment, I’ve genuinely hit my threshold for that emotion as I am unable to interact with other emotions that I should be able to compare it to (but can’t). This means that even if my reaction isn’t in proportion to the thing I’m reacting to, it’s not done on purpose to be difficult, it’s genuinely how I’m experiencing that emotion right in that moment.
This leaves me boomeranging back and forth between super intense emotions, often very quickly. Think about how often your emotions shift and change subtly throughout the day, and imagine if you ramped each of those emotions up to the highest intensity of that emotion that you could feel. That’s what it’s like being borderline.
A lack of emotional permanence is the symptom that, for me, causes me the most distress and suffering out of all of the symptoms since it pretty much influences all aspects of my life and interactions with others, and significantly impacts my behaviors and ability to moderate these behaviors.
I’m not saying that these behaviors are okay, or should be excused if they are causing harm. There are techniques and tools that people can use to manage these symptoms, and boundary setting is an important part of navigating any relationship, but doubly so with someone who is borderline. Understanding the relationship between a lack of emotional permanence and these behaviors is a critical first step in learning how to best manage the effects that this symptom can have.
I guess I also just hope that people can understand why it is so fucking difficult for us to change these behaviors, and that even if we manage to do so, the urges and thoughts and lack of emotional permanence that prompt them never really goes away.
So if you’re borderline and you fight this every day to act in ways that are effective? You’re a fucking super hero in my eyes and I hope that the people in your life appreciate the enormous effort it takes to manage this every single day.
For the non-borderline people reading this, I have a message for you as well. To the best of your ability, please be gentle with us, especially if we are working on learning how to manage these behaviors. Please try to remember how this symptom can impact our behavior and try to be understanding with us as we navigate our responses to it. We are fighting a battle that is more intense than you could ever really understand if you aren’t experiencing it.
Having the support of people who actively try to understand how our disorder manifests in our lives and impacts our behavior makes a HUGE difference in our quality of life and our ability to navigate the symptoms, so thank you to those who are making the effort.
