Read a thing on quora today about BPD people actually having low empathy levels despite thinking they're "highly empathetic" and it got me thinking.

After pondering about it some time, I think it might be partially true. Personally, I used to think that I have like no conscience or something (which isn't true but sometimes I feel like it is). What do you guys think?

Here's the quota post I'm referring to:

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People with BPD have lower levels of empathy than people without BPD.

Yet many people with BPD claim to feel higher levels of empathy. This is because they are confusing lacking healthy boundaries with others, enmeshment, co-dependency, emotional dysregulation, and personal distress with empathy. None of the aforementioned five things are empathy, though.

BPD is often caused by childhood trauma (most commonly child sexual abuse.) As a result of that trauma, the survivors grow up lacking an ability to set healthy boundaries with others, and so they often get completely enmeshed with loved ones to a high degree. This is why they often feel strong emotions at the emotions of others.

Additionally, untreated trauma causes survivors to be hypervigilant and ultra-alert to the emotions of others. This is because in order to avoid danger or protect oneself growing up in a dangerous or abusive environment, young victims had to be especially attuned to the emotions of others. This attunement to the emotions of others is not out of empathy or care for the other person, but out of a concern for the victim’s own safety. As such, when they grow up, their hyper-attunement to the feelings of others remains as a protective mechanism. Thus, BPD people feel extreme personal distress at the emotions of others. Personal distress is not empathy. Personal distress is often confused for empathy, because it is an internal feeling that arises based off the internal feelings of another. But personal distress is a state of internal turmoil based in one’s own need to feel safe. This is another reason that BPD people misconstrue that they feel higher levels of empathy or extreme affective empathy. BPD people will often try to comfort a loved one or try to make a loved one feel better; this is not done out of empathic concern as much as personal distress and fear; BPD people need for the other person to feel better so that they themselves can feel less distress of fear for their own safety. BPD people feel safe when others are calm or happy, and distressed in fear for their own safety when others are highly angry, sad, emotional, anxious, or panicked.

Lack of empathy is not a diagnostic criteria of BPD. There are many variations between people with BPD, including variation in the level of actual empathy they feel. But when you hear a BPD person say: “I feel too much empathy; I feel extreme empathy; I feel higher levels of empathy than normal,” what they are communicating to you is that the issues they are dealing with presently are lack of healthy boundaries with others, emotional dysregulation, and personal distress at the emotional reactions of others - as well as a lack of self-awareness. A bpd person who has substantial self-awareness will already know what I explained here, and will not express that they have too much empathy. There is no such thing as “too much” empathy. “Too much empathy” is not a thing. If someone tells you this, they are telling you that the first five problems I mentioned initially are the dysfunctions that person faces, as well as a lack of awareness that those are their dysfunctions.

Edit: In the case of my above answer, to clarify: it is not the case that it is either empathy, or enmeshment/dysregulation/personal distress. It is the case that empathy and the dysfunctions often appear together. So a person with BPD does not lack the capacity to empathize (as other disorders lack the capacity itself.) It is the case that enmeshment, dysregulation, and/or personal distress is most often what makes the empathy feel like “too much empathy” or “a higher than normal level of empathy.” Empathy itself is never “too much” - but enmeshment, dysregulation, or personal distress amplifies the emotional response until it feels overwhelming. (This is also why bpd people tend to overestimate their empathy levels - not because there is no empathy when they say there is - but because the feelings are amplified by issues other than empathy, but they mistake those other issues as added layers of empathy when they are something else that are separate resolvable issues.)
