In the course “Dynamics of Individual Differences“, students write a blog post on a topic of their interest that is related to an aspect that differs between individuals and changes across the lifespan. Mila Le Truong shared her blog post with us, enjoy the read!
Have you ever watched a person you love experience mood swings, feel like their emotions were out of control, or been terrified that their loved ones would abandon them? For many people, those emotions fade as quickly as they arise. For others, however, such feelings are constant and overwhelming, and for those supporting them, these situations can be confusing, painful, or frightening. This can be the reality of those living with, or supporting someone with, borderline personality disorder.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental health condition marked by emotional instability, unstable sense of self, and chronic feelings of emptiness (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2024). The daily lives of people with BPD are like rollercoasters: unstable, with intense (emotional) highs and lows, that impact many aspects of their lives and decrease their overall happiness (Wibbelink et al., 2025).
The emotional challenges faced by people with BPD don’t appear out of nowhere but are often connected to how their brain and emotions learned to function when they were infants (Crowell et al., 2009). Understanding the connection between early life experiences and later emotion regulation is essential if we want to offer better support to people with BPD. So how exactly do early caregiving experiences shape the emotion regulation patterns of people with BPD, and what does this mean for those supporting them?
Building emotion regulation: The role of early caregiving
Emotion regulation, or ER, is our ability to understand, manage, and respond to our emotions in a way that is healthy and appropriate to the situation (Center For Mental Health, 2025). These skills begin to develop in infancy, as babies rely on interactions with their caregivers to regulate their feelings (Calkins, 1994): when a baby is upset, the caring touch or soothing voice of their parent teaches them to manage their emotions. In this first period of life, our brains are still developing, and regulation relies on external sources. These repeated moments of comfort teach a baby that emotions can be soothed and understood, helping them develop their emotion regulation skills (Calkins, 1994). Over time, these experiences become the infant’s foundation for emotion regulation and will become especially important when the growing child starts self-regulating.
In general, the family context is a crucial external source of emotion regulation. Children may learn about ER by observing those around them, and therefore often learn from how their parents react to and express emotions. Additionally, the emotional climate of the family: what parenting style is used, how emotions are dealt with (whether they are talked about, or rather swept under the rug and ignored), if the parents have a good and emotionally healthy relationship (Morris et al., 2007). Children also often face better outcomes if their caregivers respond to their distress in a consistent, warm and predictable way (Benoit, 2004).
For someone supporting a person with BPD, it is important to understand that a child who did not grow up with consistent safety, comfort or emotional stability, may grow up without a strong ability to regulate their emotions, because their environment did not teach them how to do that early in life. This means that when people with BPD have intense reactions that we may interpret as “overreactions”, these are their normal reactions, they reflect an inability to self-regulate and use skills to manage their emotions.
When development is impaired: invalidation, trauma, and chronic stress
So, what happens when a child’s emotional needs are not met early in life? While positive early caregiving can foster ER, disruptions such as invalidation, trauma, or chronic stress can negatively impact this process.
Some children grow up in invalidating environments: households in which their emotions are often dismissed, minimized or invalidated. In such situations, they do not have the opportunity to learn how to communicate their emotional needs (Linehan, 1993, as cited in Grove & Crowell, 2017). Additionally, invalidating caregivers may reinforce extreme expressions of emotion, reacting only when the child’s emotions are very intensely or overwhelmingly expressed (Linehan, 1993, as cited in Grove & Crowell, 2017). Not only do these negative interactions increase in frequency and intensity over time, but they also teach the child that their feelings don’t matter, or aren’t worth understanding, unless they show very strong displays of emotions. This prevents the child from learning to understand their feelings, instead leaving them confused about their emotions or making them think that their emotions are not valid. Other forms of early adversity, such as trauma and chronic stress, can also impair emotional development.
In stressful situations, the quality of the relationship between infant and caregiver is important. If the caregiver reacts in comforting and predictable ways, this can protect them from stress. However, if the caregiver is causing the environment to be invalidating or traumatizing, the child’s early emotional experiences will be characterized by confusion, fear, or isolation, which will impair their ability to recover from negative emotional events, and limit the development of their ER skills (Mosquera et al., 2014). These early experiences can help explain the intense emotional reactions you may witness today as someone supporting a person with BPD. Lacking a reliable internal system to manage strong feelings can lead to, as an adult, experiencing rapid mood swings, fear of abandonment, or overall strong emotional reactions.
Temperament, sensitivity, and pathways to BPD in adolescence
If early environment is so important, you might wonder: why doesn’t every child in an invalidating home develop BPD later in life?
Describing the emotion dysregulation that may result from a child’s environment alone does not paint the full picture. BPD is best understood as resulting from the mix of their personal natural sensitivity, which they are born with, and the environment they grew up in (Crowell, Beauchaine, & Linehan, 2009).
Some people are simply born more emotionally sensitive than others. In fact, many people who develop BPD were more emotionally sensitive as children. They may have felt more intense emotions, have had more strong reactions, have struggled more with calming down, or been more impulsive in reacting to their feelings. In research, this emotional sensitivity is often described as higher trait anxiety, higher trait impulsivity, and the temperament traits of negative affect and low effortful control (Grove & Crowell, 2017). Imagine a child who feels everything more strongly and is more prone to negative emotions: this must already be quite hard for them. While this sensitivity may be manageable, or become a strength, if paired with a supportive environment, it can be a major vulnerability when faced with an invalidating environment. Indeed, when this sensitive child must face an unsafe, dismissing or humiliating environment, they won’t learn to calm themselves down, when necessary, and instead feel like their emotions are confusing, or wrong.
Emotional struggles caused by biological sensitivities and an invalidating environment often become more apparent during adolescence. For many teenagers, this period of their life is characterized by increased emotional reactivity and vulnerability to poor outcomes (Hare et al., 2008). For adolescents who had early emotional difficulties, however, puberty can intensify early vulnerabilities. On top of the typical teenage risk-taking or mood swings, they may also experience changes that include more intense and prevalent emotional struggles. Importantly, these patterns of emotional dysregulation in those with early vulnerabilities often do not dissipate, as they usually do after adolescence. Instead, they may persist into adulthood, turning into the chronic emotional instability that characterizes BPD (Kaess & Cavelti, 2025).
What this all means for those supporting someone with BPD
Understanding how these patterns develop is important not only for clinical treatment, but also for the people who live alongside, and care for, individuals with BPD. For example, emotional outbursts often do not aim to seek attention, control or manipulate, especially when they happen between a person with BPD and someone they have a close relationship with. These outbursts are rather the portrayal of long overlooked sensitivity; they show an attempt to survive what feels like an overwhelming threat. While this does not excuse harmful behavior, it may help understand where it is coming from.
People with BPD may have strong emotional reactions, which cannot necessarily be rationalized with. What you can do in this situation, however, is to stay calm, and be consistent in your reactions. Stability is often something that people with BPD struggle with and therefore need others to remain calm and collected. Reassurance can be helpful in the moment, but its effect is often temporary, because the underlying fear and trauma have much deeper roots. Additionally, people with BPD may struggle to feel where their person ends and where others begin, which can make them very sensitive to the emotions of people around them (De Meulemeester et al., 2021), so your emotion regulation impacts them, and staying stable and emotionally regulated will help them more than reacting strongly or becoming upset. Lastly, while it is important to empathize with people with BPD, especially if you are supporting them in your daily life, it is also crucial to keep boundaries and to reinforce them. These things do not replace professional treatment but rather show that a supportive environment can make a powerful difference.
Conclusion: the path to healing and growth
So, what if you, or someone close to you, developed BPD? How do you help yourself or another beyond a supportive environment?
BPD can be seen as the result of a mix of attachment experiences, invalidating environments, and a biological vulnerability. The good news is that the patterns shaped in early life, that may have led to BPD, can change. And vice versa, the emotion regulation skills that a person with BPD may never have had the chance to learn in childhood, can still be learned as an adult!
Several evidence-based approaches can support the healing process of people with BPD. Psychoeducation helps people understand their emotions, and gain self-awareness of these emotions (Lam et al., 2020). Cognitive reappraisal teaches ways to reinterpret a situation, so its emotional impact changes (Buhle et al., 2014). Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) combines acceptance of feelings and reality, with a challenge to change yourself in beneficial ways, by teaching crucial skills for people with BPD, such as tolerating distress, and regulating emotions (Cleveland Clinic, 2022). For supporters of people with BPD, one of the most powerful things you can do is to be a consistent, calm and validating presence in their life. Professional treatment is crucial but having a support system that understands the roots of these struggles and responds with both compassion and boundaries, helps make the journey more bearable.
Understanding what BPD is and where it comes from doesn’t just reduce stigma, it helps us respond with empathy. For those with BPD, healing is absolutely possible, and no one has to walk this path alone.
References
American Psychological Association. (2018, April 19). Apa Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association.https://dictionary.apa.org/impulsive
Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Paediatrics & Child Health, 9(8), 541–545. https://doi.org/10.1093/pch/9.8.541
Buhle, J., Silvers, J., Wager, T., Lopez, R., Onyemekwu, C., Kober, H., Weber, J., & Ochsner, K. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: A meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex, 24(11), 2981–2990.https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bht154
Calkins, S. D. (1994). Origins and outcomes of individual differences in emotion regulation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59, 53–72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1166138
Carey, W. B. (2009). Normal individual differences in temperament and behavioral adjustement. In H. M. Feldman (Ed.), Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics (4th ed., pp. 74–86). Saunders.
Center For Mental Health. (2025, May 26). What is emotional regulation and emotional dysregulation?. Center for Mental Health.https://www.centerformentalhealth.in/understanding-emotion-regulation/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20APA%2C%20emotional%20regulation%20is,Bounce%20back%20from%20setbacks%20*%20Build%20resilience
Cleveland Clinic. (2022, April 19). Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22838-dialectical-behavior-therapy-dbt
Crowell, S. E, Beauchaine, T. P., & Linehan, M. M. (2009). A biosocial developmental model of borderline personality: Elaborating and extending Linehan’s theory. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 495–510. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0015616
De Meulemeester, C., Lowyck, B., & Luyten, P. (2021). The role of impairments in self–other distinction in borderline personality disorder: A narrative review of recent evidence. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 127, 242–254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.04.022
Grove, J. L., & Crowell, S. E. (2017). Invalidating environments and the development of borderline personality disorder. The Oxford Handbook of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, 46–68. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198758723.013.47
Hare T. A., Tottenham N., Galvan A., Voss H. U., Glover G. H., Casey B. J. (2008). Biological substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in adolescence during an emotional go-nogo task. Biological Psychiatry, 63(10), 927–934.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.03.015015
Kaess, M., & Cavelti, M. (2025). Research review: What we have learned about early detection and intervention of borderline personality disorder. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 66(12), 1829–1848. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.70011
Knowles, K. A., & Olatunji, B. O. (2020). Specificity of trait anxiety in anxiety and depression: Meta-analysis of the state-trait anxiety inventory. Clinical Psychology Review, 82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101928
Lam, A., Leung, S., Lin, J., & Chien, W. (2020). The effectiveness of a mindfulness-based psychoeducation programme for emotional regulation in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders: A pilot randomised controlled trial. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 16, 729–747. https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S231877
Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and ResearchClinic. (2024, January 31). Borderline Personality Disorder. Mayo Clinic.https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20370237
Morris, A. S., Silk, J. S., Steinberg, L., Myers, S. S., & Robinson, L. R. (2007). The role of the family context in the development of Emotion Regulation. Social Development, 16(2), 361–388. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2007.00389.x
Mosquera, D., Gonzalez, A. & Leeds, A.M. (2014). Early experience, structural dissociation, and emotional dysregulation in borderline personality disorder: The role of insecure and disorganized attachment. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/2051-6673-1-15
Shiner, R. L., Buss, K. A., McClowry, S. G., Putnam, S. P., Saudino, K. J., & Zentner, M. (2012). What is temperament now? Assessing progress in temperament research on the twenty‐fifth anniversary of Goldsmith et al. Child Development Perspectives, 6, 436–444. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2012.00254.x
Tinajero, R., Williams, P. G., Cribbet, M. R., Rau, H. K., Silver, M. A., Bride, D. L., & Suchy, Y. (2020). Reported history of childhood trauma and stress‐related vulnerability: Associations with emotion regulation, executive functioning, daily hassles and pre‐sleep arousal. Stress and Health, 36(4), 405–418. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2938
Wibbelink, C. J. M., Arntz, A., Kamphuis, J. H., Groot, I. Z., Sinnaeve, R., & Evers, S. M. A. A. (2025). Burden of Disease of Borderline Personality Disorder: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Quality of Life and Societal Cost of Illness. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 81(9), 832–846. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.70000
Be First to Comment