The Biosocial Theory of Emotional and Behavioural Dysregulation
Probably most of us who are diagnosed with BPD often find ourselves wondering âWhy do I have so much trouble controlling my emotions and my actions?â Essentially what weâre asking is why we have BPD in the first place, why this disorder works the way it does. And to be honest, no one really knows for sure. Â There are a number of theories, and the theory that DBT uses as its basis for treatment is called the Biosocial Theory.Â
Iâve referenced it in posts before but never by its name. Â As its name suggests, this theory presents two factors having equal weight in causing the development of BPD, and these two factors interact with each other in a particular way that, without this interaction, BPD would not result. Essentially, the two factors reinforce and amplify each other. Â As you can probably guess from the name, the two factors in question are a biological factor and a social factor.
1. Firstly, emotional vulnerability has a biological factor.  Itâs simply how some of us are born.  We have a genetic predisposition to being emotionally vulnerable. This means we are more sensitive to emotional stimuli; we can detect subtle emotional information in our environment that others wouldnât even notice. This contributing factor to BPD is usually present at a young age, sometimes as young as early elementary school, where some of us (including myself) had a reputation for being more âsensitiveâ or more emotional than our peers. But at that point, we did not yet have BPD.
Because people with BPD are more biologically sensitive to emotional stimuli, we experience emotions much more often than others. Sometimes we experience emotions that hit us with no warning at all, they just come over us and we have to deal with them even though we may have no idea whatsoever what caused this emotional response.
Not only do we biologically experience emotions more frequently than people who donât have BPD, but we also experience these emotions far more intensely. Not only are our emotions more intense, but our emotions hit us faster than other people and they stick around for longer. These are just biological facts about how we experience emotion. An average emotion for people who have BPD would be a completely extreme and rare emotion for someone who doesnât have BPD. This makes it very hard for people who donât have BPD to understand how we feel and why we might respond in a much different way or in a more extreme way than they were anticipating.Â
So the biological element that contributes to the unique form of emotional dysregulation experienced by people that have Borderline Personality Disorder can be summed up with these points:
Some people have a biological predisposition to BPD
Our biology makes us more emotionally vulnerable than others
Because we are more sensitive to emotional stimuli, we can detect subtle emotional information that other people who do not have the same sensitivity canât
Our emotions are more intense as a result of our biology
Our biological vulnerability to emotions causes our emotions to have a faster onset and a longer duration
Because of our sensitivity to emotional stimuli, we can experience rapid mood swings.
Just as our emotions have a biological basis, the impulsivity that people with BPD experience is also rooted in biology. Regulating actions and behaviour is typically harder for people who have BPD than it is for people who donât. This means we find it very, very hard to restrain ourselves from acting on impulsive urges. This can get us into trouble and sometimes our behaviour can be completely unpredictable and seem to be very out-of-character.
Because of this biological impairment to regulating impulsivity, itâs also very hard to act effectivelyâmeaning, acting with both long term and short term goals in mind. Our moods (our emotions and how frequently they change) get in the way of our ability to organize any sort of plan that we can follow regarding how we intend to go about achieving our goals. Sometimes our biological impairment is so extreme that we have no ability to control behaviours that are linked to our moods at all. We just lack the biological ability to self-regulate, both when it comes to emotions and when it comes to impulses.
2. The other factor that influences the development of BPD and causes emotional and behavioural dysregulation is the social factor.
An invalidating social environment can make it just as hard to regulate emotions as the biological predisposition, and when they combine, it almost inevitably results BPD-like emotional dysregulation, and could be the cause of the disorder itself.
An invalidating social environment is one that doesnât understand or accept your emotions. It does so in the following ways:
It tells you your emotions are invalid, weird, wrong, or bad
It ignores your emotional reactions and does nothing to help you or indicate that your distress is worthy of concern and care
It says things that belittle you, insult you, and berate you for having strong emotional responses
It tries to force you to conform to ânormalâ emotional responses and makes you feel bad when you canât do it
Often this manifests as bullying during childhood by your peers, or as emotional and verbal abuse from adults in your life. A social environment that consistently invalidates your emotional expression is a big problem during crucial developmental years such as adolescence, when youâre trying to learn how to regulate emotions and actions.
A social environment like this can teach you to invalidate yourself, to second guess all of your emotional responses and to feel guilt for having emotions that are âtoo intenseâ or âtoo inappropriateâ or âtoo abnormal.â This leads to emotional dysregulation because we are constantly trying to force our emotions to conform to a mode of expression that does not come naturally to us due to our biology.
Social environments can cause other regulation problems by reinforcing out-of-control emotions and actions, which will make it hard to get in control and learn different ways of dealing with extremely intense emotions. Environments may be full of people who command you to change but offer no information or coaching regarding what needs to change or how to go about making that change. This can make people resentful towards change.
As BPD develops, people in your social environment will most likely lack any sort of education about whatâs going on with you psychologically or what to do to help you: they may not understand the intensity and duration of your emotions; they may not understand you donât yet have any tools to control those intense emotions and the urges that accompany them; they may not know how to validate you or understand why validation is necessary; they may know how to validate you but fear that validation is the equivalent of condoning these intense emotions and the behaviours that accompany them; they may fear if they validate you that you will become more emotional instead of less, etc.
There is a constant transaction between the person and the social environment:
biology and the social environment influence the person
the person reciprocates and influences their social environment
the social environment reciprocates and influences the personÂ
And so on and so on, reinforcing and amplifying each other until we have a situation that is spiraling towards the destination of a BPD diagnosis. This is not to blame the person who is in the process of developing BPDâdue to biological and social reasons, thereâs not much a person can do to avoid developing BPD without early intervention mental health programs, which are few and far between, not to mention financially inaccessible for most people.Â
Thereâs not necessarily something inherently wrong with you for having a biological predisposition to heightened emotions, nor to growing up in an invalidating environment you had no control over that tipped your emotional sensitivity into emotional dysregulation. Marsha calls people in this situation a âtulip in a rose garden.â
Further Reading: What is BPD?, What Causes BPD (Masterpost), Do I have BPD (Masterpost), What Age Does BPD Develop?, What is BPD Like Between Childhood and Adolescence?, and always check our FAQ for any further questions about BPD
TL;DR: The Biosocial Theory postulates that there are two factors that significantly contribute to the development of BPD. Some people are naturally genetically predisposed to developing BPD and are inherently more emotionally sensitive which can be expressed in a variety of ways. The second factor is that some people are just a poor fit with their social environment which invalidates their already atypical emotional expression. Unfortunately that âpoor fitâ can exacerbate a possible biological predisposition to BPD that results in the development of the full disorder. Marsha calls someone in this situation a âtulip in a rose garden.â
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