Mindreading and Borderline Personality Disorder

hi my name is dr. Daniel Fox I'm a licensed psychologist in the state of Texas and an expert in the area of personality disorders and today I wanted to talk about if you can read my mind and specifically we're going to talk about mind-reading so how accurately can you read someone's mind or feel that you can read someone's mind by looking at their face and judging their body language and this is exactly what we're going to talk about today and how it relates to those with and without borderline personality disorder so let's get into it the goal of this video is to help you identify how well you can or cannot determine someone's thoughts emotions and intent based upon their facial expression and their body language now we also have to be aware of what are called cognitive distortions and in this case we're going to talk about the distortion of mind-reading so what is mind-reading well mind-reading is the ability or the belief that we know what someone is thinking feeling and intending to do based upon their facial expressions the words they're saying the tone they're using and their body language so why do folks and I've seen this a lot of my clients they have borderline personality disorder or even borderline personality sort of traits and so why do these folks believe or why do they use mind-reading so they try to beat someone to the punch so in a lot of ways this is a protective factor and they try to present to prevent themselves from being rejected from being hurt from experiencing pain and all those other negative issues that make up that core content that drives that borderline personality disorder or other types of issues that drive your fear concern abandonment issues sense of emptiness and other types of factors as well and so we believe that if we can beat someone to the punch that we won't be hurt okay now most research has focused on borderline personality disorder and facial emotion recognition which we will talk about and I will discuss the cognitive distortion of mind-reading and how it can be a really big problem now research has found that those with more severe symptoms of borderline personality disorder were less accurate at detecting neutral faces intended to perceive them as negative now what this means is that neutral face would be like a plain face and they tend to perceive that as negative okay and they could sometimes receive that that negativity as hostile or other types of issues as well now those with severe borderline personality disorder symptoms were also more attuned to faces that indicated interpersonal rejection fear sadness disgust and anger so what does this mean well it means that those with borderline personality disorder are good at identifying negative emotions in other's faces but tend to miss read neutral emotions as negative so there's a tendency to perceive neutral faces as negative but identify negative faces this negative so what happens is that fills your bucket of negative more than is actually present so we got to be aware that that mind reading is skewing you to the negative okay so folks a borderline personality disorder we know are more highly attuned to those negative emotions and they notice them more often and this does not mean that the perception of negative emotions helps to understand another person's intent this actually adds to the drive to determine intent based upon another person's facial expression and we can add body language to that verbal tone words that are spoken as well so there's this tendency to mind-read to interpret intent based upon neutral faces and when people aren't even mad or upset or everything is nice and calm individuals of borderline personality disorder have a tendency to perceive the negative to go towards the negative so what happens with mine reading is if they tend to mind-read imply intent that that person is mad they're going to leave them they hate them the relationship is it's going to dissolve even though the individual may not actually be showing any signs of problems with the relationship so now this is where complexity and confusion comes in as those with borderline personality disorder are likely to take the negative information and kind of run with it right as we just talked about and this implies that negative intent but remember not everyone who is sad afraid disgusted or angry is out to harm you and that that's a hard thing for a lot of folks of borderline personality disorder to to learn and get used to so that this is that cognitive distortion component right that I mentioned just a moment ago and that leads to problems which is mind reading and causes this to be an intense trigger or emotional button to engage in that negative beliefs behaviors and patterns that reinforce your borderline personality disorder because a lot of my clients that have borderline personalities or a lot of times what they'll say as well if if I can beat you to the punch and if I know it's going to be negative then I won't be hurt as much as if I'm caught off guard but the problem is is a lot of those relationships don't have time to succeed so you end up with a lot of failed relationships that may have succeeded if not for mind-reading that you believed it was over that there was a sense of anger and disgust and other types of factors that you internalized that set off the borderline personality disorder reactions that caused caused you to engage negatively in your relationships okay so what can you do about mind-reading so first and foremost if you tend to mind-read you need to stop listen and observe think and calmly reason how to respond easy to say but hard to do right but you'd likely get into trouble when you take the negative perceptions you're interpreting whether it's real or false you draw quick conclusion and intent and then you react so what happens is you're taking in this negative information this negative perception this negative mind-reading and you're running with it and having a reaction that may not be genuine that may not be occurring in that relationship so you're not analyzing the data that's related to your relationship and that's why it's real important to slow down listen and observe listen observe to yourself as well as to the person you're interacting with think about it and commonly reason how to respond okay now when you try to calm calmly when you try to calmly think about the situation this will help you make better choices slowing down is the key and it's critical you have a good brain and can reason you may not think you do you may think that well I have this horrible borderline personality disorder brain and it's never gonna help me and it's against me and all this other stuff it's not your enemy your brain is not your enemy but when you're pushed right it can blur that borderline personality disorder it causes what's this BPD lens that I've mentioned some of my other videos as well and this BPD lens causes that this distortion which can sometimes encourage mind-reading it takes away your ability to accurately perceive those around you and recognize your own skills and ability to manage and control relationships okay so it tends to lead this mind reading as well as that BPD lens that I mentioned very briefly and it caused you to have this perspective leaning to very negative outcomes that leads to these negative outcomes that are unnecessary and hurtful so what I want you to do is I want you to try slowing down [Music] listen and observe to what is going on what's going on inside you alright what's going on outside what's going on with that other person you're interacting with I want you to think it through what are the possible outcomes what's the worst that could happen what's the best that could happen and what can you do to encourage the best thing to happen and sometimes that's tough right because you're borderline personality disorder that brain part of you is telling you mind readings right you know what's right right so they're gonna hurt you they're gonna leave you they're gonna Bandhan you so you're better off reacting and having a negative reaction and pushing them away or harming yourself or something like that so that you don't end up being as hurt but what I found and I think in working with some of my clients as well is we end up with that negative outcome a lot worse than if we believed we could have turned it into a positive so again just to reiterate stop listen and observe think and calmly reason how to respond please try it leave a comment let me know how it goes continue these skills continue it every day multiple times throughout the day this is a skill building process and over time you'll build that skill until it becomes automatic you can replace those maladaptive patterns with adaptive and helpful patterns it just takes time to do it so I hope that you've enjoyed this video and thank you very much for your time and attention I appreciate it and I wish you all the best thank you take care bye bye

Channel: Dr. Daniel Fox

Views: 132,809

Keywords: borderline, borderline personality disorder episode, bpd and stress, bpd symptoms, bpd treatment, daniel fox personality disorders, dr fox, dr fox personality, living with borderline personality disorder, self destructive, treatment for bpd, bpd, mental illness, mental health, mind reading, mindreading, borderline personality disorder, empath, bpd empath, bpd empathy, bpd and relationships, bpd relationships, emotional, personality disorder, dbt, dialectical behavior therapy

Id: G9ulQXg0-0s

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019