Lack of Empathy?

[WhoaBaby]

Every few months my wife brings up the E word with a sidelong look at me in couples therapy and later sends me Brene Brown YouTube videos as if I have never heard of Empathy. I think it's a BPD thing, to justify her extreme emotions. Obviously, it's not her extreme moods that are the issue, it's my lack of empathy that's the problem we need to focus on!
I admit that I try to be the steady Eddie and not get sucked into her big swings of emotion, and she makes that into a fault. Do I need to meet her at the bottom of every pit of depression and get angry with her at other people in order to prove my love? Frankly, being empathic like she wants me to be, really feeling the extreme feelings that she has regularly is f-ing scary to me. Maybe I am more disengaged than I should be, I don't know. Is there a happy medium, to show her I care without joining the rollercoaster ride?

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[waverider]

Very common for pwBPD to throw this accusation around. It is emotional manipulation. What they are really saying is your are not validating my wants and needs. They do this because they know it works, as it makes others feel like they are failing and not trying hard enough. They are not even empathetic enough to know this accusation in itself is highly triggering.

PwBPD may have highly sensitive emotional sensors and can detect when other are acting/feeling "off". This is not the same as empathy, it is an early warning defensive system. They investigate further to first of all ensure they are not being accused or held accountable

Acting empathy can almost be a case of I am helping you deal with whatever in order to validate that my needs are real (like yours) and I expect you to "have my back" on demand also. It also helps to get you onboard their "team". Playing rescuer to make an impressions and gain credits, after establishing they are not being held responsible first.

Do pwBPD understand empathy? Some will argue this, but think about this: If someone is treating you bad and they have empathy and can truly understand and feel the harm they are doing, but still do it, then then must be doing it with full awareness of the consequences. This makes them truly a toxic person.. If you wish to be charitable and treat it as a case of "they know not what they do" then they must lack empathy to remain innocent.

Is there a "happy medium" no, There is a healthy medium, one that keeps you mentally healthy without feeling like you are being false or selling yourself out. She will always want 100% on board her crazy train and cheering the journey along. You can't meet that need, that's just the way it is.

Couples therapy is often about blame shifting and trying to get validation from the therapist that "someone else" is responsible for their woes and that she is in the right and should continue on as is and everyone else needs to step up. Its one of the reasons couples therapies are often futile when BPD is involved

[Cat Familiar]

I’ve been similarly accused of being unsympathetic, uncaring, unemotional simply due to being more of a *thinker* than a *feeler*. Frankly, having observed a few people with BPD, there’s no way I’d want to be their variety of a *feeler*.

My strategy is merely to say “Guilty as charged” with a smile. I separate myself from the chaos my husband creates as it’s not a comfortable place for me to reside. It seems people with BPD alleviate their own internal feelings of distress through generating extreme emotions that externalize their self-criticism and dissatisfaction onto others.

As far as empathy goes, I’m beginning to wonder if it may be impossible for people with BPD to experience true empathy. Looking up the definition of empathy I found this: “It's the ability to understand another person's thoughts and feelings in a situation from their point of view, rather than your own.”

I’ve previously been under the illusion that my husband feels empathy for me and others. Recently I’ve been questioning this assessment. Certainly he feels sympathy: “Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful.”

And he thinks he’s empathetic, but I really don’t see him truly imagining someone else’s situation from their point of view or experience. In addition, expressing sympathy gains him *points* for being a *nice person* so there’s a secondary gain for him out of doing that.

Whereas true empathy is a selfless act. It’s setting aside our self and truly understanding what someone else’s situation is.

[WhoaBaby]

Thanks to you both for your comments (Cat familiar has responded to several of my posts in past). This is not the first time the my BPDw has turned the empathy tables on me, and it usually takes me by surprise, especially if we have been getting along better, as we have lately.
Searching the web, it appears possible to have several types of empathy, mostly these two: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy involves knowing how other people think and feel, like putting yourself in someone else's shoes, while emotional empathy involves feeling another person's emotions.
I have read that BPDs, because they are Olympic level emoters, are good at emotional empathy but suck at cognitive empathy, and that is both my experience and correlates with your comments. She wouldn't be shaming me like she did in couples session if she really had cognitive empathy.
I think she confuses emoting itself with empathy. Since she always has a strong emotional response to social interactions she thinks she is empathic.
I did not mention before, but our couples therapist is also her personal one and backs her up on this subject, having heard all her sad stories, and treats me like I'm the clueless one.
Taking your comments in, I am considering saying to my BPDw: "While I agree with your positions on empathy, I think that it may always be a challenge for us for this reason: since your emotional makeup is so much more intense than mine, I doubt if I can really match your emotions much of the time, and that will always seem insufficient to you. It will always feel like I am not being "truly" empathic, even if I am trying to be."
Or I can just say "Guilty as charged" and let the battle begin. Your thoughts?

[waverider]

Too much verbal gymnastics, she wont take all that in but only get get the tone she's right, you are wrong". If you gone to respond to that I would keep it very simple eg "I'm not as emotionally reactive as you, but that doesnt mean I can't appreciate some else's view of things" and leave it at that.

Good point about the 2 kinds of emotion. I once heard that some people are great at spotting the writing on the wall long before anyone else, but are completely clueless at deciphering it, and will always assume the worse by making up their own translation. I know this is true in my relationship. My wife can sense the littlest thing, and even if its something big and glaringly obvious, she still misinterprets it and goes chasing the wrong shadows with her own preconceived agendas getting bogged down with all sorts of paranoid imagining while the answer is right in front of her face in big bold letters. This again is because she cant objectively see the issue from my point of view but is simply looking for validation of her own imaginings

If you have a therapist who has jumped on the bandwagon of simply validating her distorted realities then, maybe its just a waste of time. This is not uncommon, it still gobsmacks me how often therapist will take the view that there must be some substance in the stories of a pwBPD thinking its no more than just a little dramatization

[livednlearned]

She wouldn't be shaming me like she did in couples session if she really had cognitive empathy.

It would take an exceptional counselor to handle BPD marital conflict. That this therapist is also her individual therapist, working on BPD traits (mostly likely focused on relationship beefs), suggests you are likely outnumbered.

Have you looked at High-Conflict Couple by Alan Fruzetti? The title is problematic because it makes it seem like you're part of the dynamic when most likely you're trying to stay steady, as you say. However, when one person has BPD and the relationship is dominated by those dynamics, it's very easy to become high-conflict as a way to defend your small scrap of sanity. Even if you're not a screamer, there are ways we become goaded into high-conflict.

She has bottomless need for validation and your needs for validation are (very likely) abnormally high, especially if a therapist is involved and taking her at face value.

Also, I think language matters.

Having BPD, why is she focused on you having more empathy? Probably, as waverider says, because she wants you to fuse or merge her needs for validation. However, she may also be right. Dialectics say two seemingly opposite things can both be true.

I would want to know if she is talking about empathy or emotional sensitivity. They are different.

Your wife may have high emotional sensitivity. You may have lower emotional sensitivity. That does not make you emotionally insensitive. Higher emotional sensitivity is not a better or worse thing. It means you two may have to work a bit to change how you communicate since there is a translation issue. Since she has BPD, she will have a harder time with this so you will likely work harder than her, or at least understand the assignment better.

If you are a person who shuts down or has a tendency to roll up into a ball when there is hot emotion or high conflict, that's a coping mechanism for emotional arousal. It might feel like withdrawal to your wife.

I do this in my relationship with my (non BPD) husband. It's a longstanding coping mechanism from childhood and it has served me well in many circumstances but when my husband is upset or stressed or overwhelmed, he feels I am slipping away when he needs me most. Could that be happening in your relationship?

Another possibility, since you mention you were getting along better, is that she needs a bit of chaos to make sure everything is ok. Without chaos, she may have to listen to what's happening deep inside and that can be scary if the echo coming back is emptiness and pain.

Is empathy the issue or is it simply this is a topic that gets both sides going. 

Thoughts?