What do they mean by "shallow emotions"?

I'm having a hard time trying to pin this one down. It's obvious that I feel my emotions very strongly. But even when I think I'm doing well at improving my interactions with others, it seems I'm failing at eliminating this tendency. My therapist picked apart a recent email interaction I had with someone which I thought was fine and she explained that I had completely misread the situation which just leaves me at a loss. Since I can't control the emotions naturally, I'm trying to override them cognitively but I need help. I would love if people would give me examples of interactions they've had which display this tendency. Thanks!

Hey peds,

It's probably worth remembering that those diagnostic criteria are mostly about what others observe, not necessarily how you feel. While you are feeling your emotions strongly, from their point of view that's probably all a clinician really can do is, think in terms of what is observable to the clinician and any others they speak with who are involved.

From the point of view of others, I guess the main thing to realize there is that if someone is exhibiting frequently changing emotions, or over-reacting as compared with the norm, it can appear as 'acting', essentially leave the impression in others minds that the person is not taking situations seriously. But that's not quite right either, what I mean is...

I don't really have any great example, but you may be able to think of a situation where others didn't react much. In their minds it's may have been because the situation didn't warrant a strong emotional reaction; something to be saved for situations that do matter. It's because the norm is to react to different situations on a weighted scale that we can convey to each other that we value this over that; it conveys our 'depth' of character and beliefs to each other. The opposite way to say it is that if everything is equally worth of dramatic expression, than how can we know what the other person really takes seriously?

If you found yourself reacting strongly to a situation/s where most others did not, one way people may read that is that the person is over-dramatizing the situation to turn the attention toward themselves, or just generally making the situation about themselves when in others minds that's not what the situation was about.

Over time, sort of like the 'boy who cried wolf' story, eventually frequent dramatics can lead others to not take such dramatic expression seriously. It's important to realize that for others, reacting to a crisis or dramatic displays of emotion, is emotionally exhausting for most people. Fine once in a while but if it's frequent they are eventually going to grow weary. They may also perceive on some level that if any small thing can/does result in dramatic gestures, that the person making the gestures is probably not really reacting to the situation, but for other reasons that's really not a crisis.

Thanks xdude. That was really helpful. So then if I'm understanding currently... "Emotional extremity" is basically being perceived as "shallow emotions"?
Isn't it possible though to be a person who really does feel things deeply and not have a personality disorder? Where is the line drawn between" very expressive " and HPD? I realize there's probably no good answer to that question but that's annoying. The other thing that bothers me is the sense that in order to be perceived as normal I feel like I'm being asked to change my whole, well, personality! I like being expressive and I appreciate other people who are expressive too. Quiet people are boring! Surely there's a happy medium, I just haven't found it yet. The only way I can control the problem for the moment is to basically not socialize. I have a busy family life so it's not all that bad, and besides that I'm pretty much a pariah in my neighborhood anyway (we're moving in a few months). But see there I go being melodramatic again!
Anyway, thanks. I will work on trying to find balance...

pedsmommy wrote:Thanks xdude. That was really helpful. So then if I'm understanding currently... "Emotional extremity" is basically being perceived as "shallow emotions"?
Isn't it possible though to be a person who really does feel things deeply and not have a personality disorder? Where is the line drawn between" very expressive " and HPD? I realize there's probably no good answer to that question but that's annoying.

This is indeed an interesting question. Perhaps a metaphore to understand how HPDs (and BPDs) feel emotions is the following: HPDs feel emotions "1 kilometer wide (extreme intensity) but 1 centimeter deep (shallowness)".
The shallowness comes from the observation that, even if HPDs feel emotions very very intensely (maybe the intensity is order of magnitudes grater than what NONs feel), what causes such emotions may be not dramatic at all (xdude is right when he observes: "just try to see how the other people react to a given event"); and, most of the times, these emotions may last very few minutes, apparently contradicting the intensity exibithed by the HPD.

Another useful metaphore may be the following: the way an HPD feels emotions is equivalent to the way a flag moves when there's a very strong wind coming from random directions: the flag moves very intensely (intensity) but it continuously changes its direction (shallowness).

pedsmommy wrote:The other thing that bothers me is the sense that in order to be perceived as normal I feel like I'm being asked to change my whole, well, personality! I like being expressive and I appreciate other people who are expressive too. Quiet people are boring! Surely there's a happy medium, I just haven't found it yet. The only way I can control the problem for the moment is to basically not socialize. I have a busy family life so it's not all that bad, and besides that I'm pretty much a pariah in my neighborhood anyway (we're moving in a few months). But see there I go being melodramatic again!
Anyway, thanks. I will work on trying to find balance...

pedsmommy, you have to retain your expressivity, don't throw it away!!! It is so beautiful! I remember how my past HPD girlfriend was so expressive and clever, and i really, REALLY loved that! it is your "positive" hallmark!

So, where's the problem with HPD? The problem comes when you end up having BIG troubles in your life, or your life is certainly unsatisfying - for example you need to change frequently your job (because you get easily bored or fight with colleagues), or you continuously need to change partners/friends (need of attention, get bored), or you always end up having dynamics in your sentimental relationships where you continuously hurt badly your partners because of push-pull, empathyless destructive behaviours.

Consequently, the goal of therapy when treating HPD should be to transform the "disorder" into a personality "style", i.e., preserve your "positive" peculiarities (especially the socialness) while reducing/eliminating the destructive behaviours (i.e., those that end up hurting you and the people that love you).

-- Thu Jul 23, 2015 3:56 pm --

PS: pedsmommy, just out of curiosity, did you talk about your parents and your relationship with them? Usually HPDs had some kind of problems with their parents, so your experience would add valuable information to the forum!

I love these responses. Thanks. It's funny I'm thinking back now on all the times in my life (I'm 41 so it's a bit of a good reflection) when I know I've overreacted based on my friends reactions to my reaction! It's playing through my mind like a movie...
And I love the idea of turning my personality into a style rather than a disorder.
As for my parents. You might want to give me a sentence limit...
We were from the outside the perfect family. Yeah. One of those. I was always a rebellious strong willed child. My parents were rather strict and not especially tuned into any of our emotional needs. My sister responded by becoming bulimic. My younger brother actually came through fairly unscarred. I remember being miserable without anyone to talk to by the age of 10. I think my mother would probably fit the definition of HPD except that I can't say that her behavior ever really got her into trouble, at least none that I'm aware of to this day. She is an extremely fake person in social situations. It's painful to me to watch. I had a very hard time forming close friendships by age 10. I was obsessed with my looks. I had horrible self esteem. I thought a lot about suicide and acted on it a couple times. At 16 I met my first boyfriend, and from there I hopped from boy to boy until I met my husband, which was also off and on until we finally got married. There was no abuse, none. Just no emotional bond. No attempt to understand anything I was going through. As a teen they criticized my weight, and I was never social enough for my mom, but besides that I can't say I was put down or ignored.
There you have it!

Fr4nz83 wrote:...and, most of the times, these emotions may last very few minutes, apparently contradicting the intensity exibithed by the HPD...

I agree with this too, because others typically don't switch their emotional state so quickly. In fact it might even be fair to say that often the more intensely NONs feel something, the longer their state of mind/feelings will tend to remain in the same state. Seeing someone rapidly shift emotions raises the question of how serious was the other person's feelings to begin with?

pedsmommy wrote:Thanks xdude. That was really helpful. So then if I'm understanding currently... "Emotional extremity" is basically being perceived as "shallow emotions"?
Isn't it possible though to be a person who really does feel things deeply and not have a personality disorder? Where is the line drawn between" very expressive " and HPD? I realize there's probably no good answer to that question but that's annoying....

This is two good questions. I don't have a great answer to either, but some thoughts (in backwards order).

Being expressive isn't a bad thing in and of itself, and in some contexts is a positive trait, but I think the main thing in all communications is that there are at least two people involved. So I guess at the point that the other person stops listening, shuts down, feels their own points to express are drowned out, etc., is the point at which expressiveness goes from a positive to a negative. After all, if we all lived on deserted islands, without others to be on the receiving end of an expression, there wouldn't much point to being expressive.

As to the first question, this might be a reverse misunderstanding on the part of someone with HPD. A confusing of the outward expression they see, with how deeply others really feel. In other words,just because they are not expressing their emotions loudly doesn't mean they don't feel deeply.

People may hide the depth of their emotions for various reasons, including that in their mind their deeper emotions are something they share with trusted friends, lovers, etc., and not with anyone. They may also be conscience that frequent extreme expression can be draining on others. Let me give a bad example:

Perhaps you know someone who is the 'comedian'. They make jokes, often, near always. It's funny, up to a point. Sometimes people laugh, for a while, but it doesn't mean they want to laugh perpetually. They may have other things on their mind, or they've heard the jokes and the same jokes stop being funny. Expression can go overboard, and impinge on others own thoughts and feelings too.

So that brings up a good point. I am terrible at reading other people's emotions. Maybe that's just an extension of being too focused on my own, I don't know. I have a friend who's incredibly tuned into this and one time we were discussing a stressful event with someone else and I was asking her what I thought were sensitive questions about it but afterwards my friend said to me (in a kind way) "Couldn't you see she just did not want to talk about it?" And I was totally stumped. I hadn't gotten that at all.
Another reason I've backed off socially. I'm just not aware of when I'm offending people apparently.
I had another thought with regards to my parents. If you talk to my sister, she could give you a dissertation on all the awful things my parents did to us as kids. I'm not sure how much she exaggerates vs how much I've blocked out but I think the bottom line is that they were very very critical. They still are actually. But the same critical comment which will totally undo my sister, I won't even recognize it as an insult until she explains to me how offensive it is, what the underlying intent was. It's as if I developed a barrier to the criticisms to such an extent that I don't even read them as insults. It's like my inability to read emotions started there as a form of self protection but then extended into every aspect of my life.

It's early, but some misc thoughts -

That could be a reason. Lots written by lots of people on how kids have their own innate personality traits and can turn out quite different despite similar environments. Then again that's complicated by parents may treat their kids differently for many different reasons, including that the kids just react different to similar situations.

By the way I noticed you had written earlier that it feels like you are being asked to change your whole personality. I think that would never work even if you tried, but then I'm a believer in innate personality traits. Also just a personal opinion (not fact), I think the line between what is normal and what is perceived as a PD is a big murky grey one. There is nothing particularly abnormal about any of the criteria for a PD. It's more about extremes.

One thing that seems to happen with some people is that they can get it into their mind "I refuse to change" or "I'm done changing"

It's a very odd thought in many ways but it can seem to make such absolute sense. It's odd because can you imagine a 2 year old believing "I refuse to change", or 5, or whatever younger age? Oddly though some people can seemingly just get stuck at some emotional/mental age and decide that's it, they are done changing. Maybe it's the age of sexual awakening, or something else. Sadly it can happen later in life too. 'I'm done changing'.

It must be very difficult to have recently become aware of these new insights, and unfortunately you probably are hearing mostly negatives at this point. I'll go back to my previous poor analogy -

Suppose someone tells that hypothetical comedian type 'your jokes go on and on and eventually become tiring'. His/her response could be to entirely stop telling jokes (one extreme), or 'that's who I am I refuse to change' (another extreme), but those aren't the only options of course. There is also the option to continue to tell jokes, but to incorporate some progressive changes, such as slowing down a bit, becoming more aware of what others are feeling, re-considering the jokes (ask self how funny is this if turned around?), and so on. Of course it could end up being the comedian becomes a more 'serious' person, and because of that ends up telling a lot less jokes. It could also be that people end up liking him/her more deeply (and maybe liking self more) for his/her new found depth and breadth of personality than they ever did (or really could) for just telling jokes.

xdude: personally I like the comedian analogy, even if it is inevitably simplistic.

pedsmommy: I'll give you some thoughts on what you said about the relationship with your parents later during the day (now I'm working). Anyway, i just wanted to say that what you said is really interesting, since many of the patterns you described are strikingly similar to what my ex HPD girlfriend experienced.

As I promised, here I am

pedsmommy wrote:[...] And I love the idea of turning my personality into a style rather than a disorder.

Have a look at this simple, yet interesting material:
http://maretwebproject.com/users/docs/histrionic.pdf

Here you can understand better the concept of turning a disorder into a healthy style.

So, as I said your story has strikingly similarities to the one of my ex (note: she's now 33 y/o)...let's see

pedsmommy wrote:As for my parents. You might want to give me a sentence limit...
We were from the outside the perfect family. Yeah. One of those. I was always a rebellious strong willed child.

Like my ex: she was also very expressive and creative.

pedsmommy wrote:My parents were rather strict and not especially tuned into any of our emotional needs.

In the case of my ex, their parents divorced when she was 7. She described her mother as
hyper-critical, a little bit rigid and extremely focused on her issues than those of her children (she has a sister), while she considered her father basically as "loving" and "uncaring" at the same time - turns out that probably the relationship with the father defined her hate/love relationships with men and her "borderline" side, i.e., fear of abandonment issues). She didn't report me any episode of sexual abuse.

pedsmommy wrote:My sister responded by becoming bulimic. My younger brother actually came through fairly unscarred.

My ex has hate/love relationships with her sister and her mother. She hasn't seen her father for 3 years (and continue to not see him). To be honest, I think she has/had hate-love relationships with all the people which are/were very close to her.

pedsmommy wrote:I remember being miserable without anyone to talk to by the age of 10. I think my mother would probably fit the definition of HPD except that I can't say that her behavior ever really got her into trouble, at least none that I'm aware of to this day. She is an extremely fake person in social situations. It's painful to me to watch. I had a very hard time forming close friendships by age 10. I was obsessed with my looks. I had horrible self esteem. I thought a lot about suicide and acted on it a couple times. At 16 I met my first boyfriend, and from there I hopped from boy to boy until I met my husband, which was also off and on until we finally got married. There was no abuse, none. Just no emotional bond. No attempt to understand anything I was going through. As a teen they criticized my weight, and I was never social enough for my mom, but besides that I can't say I was put down or ignored.
There you have it!

So, my ex had serious problems with epilepsy between 14-18 years, she had multiple seizures per day and she was therefore forced to take strong drugs for the nervous system in order to reduce the amount of seizures. Due to these drugs, she became fat and had problems to socialize (she said me that people tended to avoid inviting her out because of the fear of seizures).
She also tried to suicide at age 16 (she wanted to jump off the balcony but her sister stopped her).

When she got 18 years old, she stopped taking drugs unilaterally; seemingly, this had the effect of greatly reducing the amount of seizures AND became also very slim and attractive by the age of 19. She told me that at that age she observed that many males were observing her, but she wasn't initially able to understand why (i.e., they were attracted by her)...this, just to give an idea of what she endured during her adolescence.

As you can see there are very interesting similarities...
Just out of curiosity...do you have any borderline trait? Mine has 7 out of 9 (according to DSM-IV: http://maretwebproject.com/users/docs/borderline.pdf); you seem a "purer" breed of histrionic .