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I've recently read a great book that teaches kindness and empathy. And naturally, this led me to reflect upon something following that train, and as much as I'd like to quantify a person's goodness, there is no well developed test out there for empathy.
In the DSM-IV criteria, my diagnosis has been more a label and a downhill struggle to rise above the criterion. BPD sufferers are most often too tense and too anxious to sense more than the negative feelings of others, although those they seem to sense very well; but if one includes an intense preoccupation with other's feelings, than one indeed finds that many BPD individuals have a great deal of what could be called empathy. They also tend to read faces very well. A heightened sensitivity in general, innate or acquired, also seems to be a hallmark of this disorder.
However one should never generalize with a disorder as heterogeneous as this one. There's too many subtypes; too much overlapping with avoidant (on one end of the spectrum) and histrionic (on the other) PD's for women and schizotypal and antisocial PD's for men; and too many very important possibilities of BPD as pertaining to the spectrum of affective disorders, as a temporolimbic dysfunction akin to epilepsy, as a developmental disorder akin to autism, as a form of chronic PTSD from severe culminated, intrapersonal traumas dating back to infancy; all radically different underlying causes, which do not necessarily cancel each other out, that could well mean that many people today who have been diagnosed with BPD do not have much more else in common than their diagnosis.
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