BPDRecovery.com: Forums

I've been thinking about many of us this morning. What struck me is how intelligent many/most of us are. Most of us write very well, and can articulate how we feel/what is going on. So you'd think that with all this intelligence, we could "beat" our BPD symptoms. It's amazing how stuck many of us get. We know intellectually what we need to do, it's just that for whatever reasons, we have trouble doing them.

I know I'm not a stupid person. Yet when I find myself in my "BPD behaviors", I can't get out of them. Whatever intelligence I have, flies out the window. I find this very interesting.

In my laywoman's assessment of my daughter and her bio-mom, I agree wholeheartedly with you on the significant intelligence factor, bordergirl. It's like the impulsiveness, trust/abandonment issues, and diminished self-worth skip right on past the 'smart' part of the mind!

Something else that I've come to believe -> contrary to what a lot of 'nons' may come to believe, folks with BPD tendencies also are apt to be much more sensitive and intuitive than folks who don't. This would be a good thing - and is, when embraced and tamed - except for the unfortunate irony that this could also be why people with BPD develop detrimental coping mechanisms to protect themselves from the extreme feelings.


~ jr

Ah, but it seems you are only referring to one variety of intelligence!
Verbal/communicative intelligence is all well and good, but it's not the only type of intelligence out there. And some of those others, I am sorely lacking.

Like the intelligence that some people call "common sense". Common sense isn't all that common, and I'm not very bright in that regard. I can get by, but there are a lot of gaps that other people don't understand. Street smarts are kinda the same way. I've got some really good skills, and then I have blocks of complete ignorance.

There's...building intelligence, fixing intelligence. I have a certain amount of problem solving skill, but I'm not very good at just getting in there and fixing something. I've got to have just the right part and just the right tool and all the instructions...XBF could make anything out of about anything. One time he had a minor wreck on his way to work and by the time he came home he had made his own headlight bracket, rewired to get past the damaged sections and made new clamps to hold the grille. He tries to compare his intelligence to my book learning, but you can't do that. I may be able to quote more Shakespeare than he can, but he doesn't even have to think about fixing a toilet or replacing a faucet.

You bring up a good point about the way we "intellectually" know what we need to do but we don't. There's more going on than just intellectual intelligence. A lot of the emotions that go along with my BPD are a lot more primal. Gut-level instead of Brain-level. Primal urges our ancestors acted on before we developed intellectual reasoning. Fear. Anger. I think those feelings and reactions bypass the more intellectual parts of the brain. If we aren't connected to the process, it isn't easy to manage ourselves.

I believe conscious control is a learned skill. Children in healthy environments are taught to understand and interface with their thoughts and emotions and actions. Children raised in unstable or abusive or otherwise unhealthy/incomplete environments don't learn as well how to do that. They can intellectually pick up some tips & tricks for gettign through life, but without that cognitive training that they missed out on, they find themselves out of control without knowing quite what happened.

And then they are me...

Being above average in intelligence isn't like being normal, but smarter. It means thinking different. And we may not have good role models or teachers for dealing with our own particular traits. (This kinda fits with what Minx says about different kinds of intelligence. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses.) We may be expected to fit into a role that just doesn't work for us. To be someone we are not. We are expected to be normal, think like everyone else, and if we try, then we lose something of ourselves.

So, high intelligence can actually contribute to developing BPD or BPD-like traits, it seems to me.

Plus, being "intelligent" doesn't make me better able to deal with emotional stuff. That's a different area.

Thanks Minx. I never thought of the other kinds of intelligence. I have always thought of communication/language skills as an indicator of intelligence. I, for instance, cannot fix anything. I am not creative enough to pursue artistic endeavors. But my communications skills are very high. So that's what I've always based intelligence on. My H can also fix/make anything. He's clever. He can see things that I can't.

Ellen and Minx, I guess you're right. We somehow cannot integrate our intelligence with our emotional reasoning. Once my emotions take hold, nothing can stop them. So it doesn't matter how intelligent I am. I just push that stuff away. I can see how it is a primal thing.

I guess I feel sorry for those who don't have innate intelligence and still have BPD. It must be more difficult for them to have any sense of introspection and understanding. I've met people like that. You can't make them understand anything. I know sometimes I don't "get" things either, but I think I have some degree of intelligence. I just find this topic very interesting.

I tend to handle things far better on an intellectual level than on an emotional level. My thoughts can sometimes get the better of me, particularly with "circular reasoning" but they are still far easier to manage than my emotional responses. If I could "fix" myself by intellectualizing my mental health issues, I would not be mental! LOL

BG

Interesting indeed, I wanted to comment here but mainly about what I have discovered about academically gifted children. My daughter is on a register at school as a gifted and talented child. The problem is that although she may be incredibly smart and in the top of her class for Literacy, numeracy and science as well as a pretty talented musician and artist, where she does lack is in emotional and social skills. Some of this is down to bullying, the "brainy" kid isn't generally the most popular.

There were some issues at school where she got to a point where she was acting out at school, losing her temper and being pretty badly behaved, some of that down to the bullying of previous years, but mostly due to her coming to realise that the "bright" kid needs to fit in socially, to not be held above her peers academically. So she put her head down, stopped asking for the extra work her brain needed and became incredibly bored which then lead to her behaving inappropriately in class. So she met something else which was adult disapproval. Both the adult and peer disapproval also began to diminish her self esteem, and that very human ideal to need "to belong" left her feeling like an island accepted neither way.

Adults also put pressure on her. She describes being able to do the work in her head, but when it comes to writing things down, her pen doesn't work fast enough, her physical capabilities don't match her intellectual ones. She finds this incredibly frustrating. Nearly every parents evening I go to there will be a comment about how she isn't working in the classroom, that her hand writing is untidy and that she seems distracted. How many times have I heard that she is more capable than her work demonstrates? I wonder what she is distracted by though, I believe, and she can quite eloquently tell me it is usually the topic at hand.

There is another side to this also I have discovered, if a child that can read well, where does he / she go when they run out of age appropriate material, the library and read more books. Just because she can read something and absorb it does it make her emotionally ready to discover for example that the sun is not only a star but that stars eventually die. That if the sun dies that the very planet she lives on will cease to exist. She takes this information and discovers that her existence in this universe is pretty insignificant, that she has very little control over the world around her. She picks up on things so easily that her mind will take her places that she just isn't emotionally ready to cope with. She battles with a lot of whys, never quite content to "just be."

Why I am talking about my daughter is this, I see a lot of me in her. How my mind works, how my mind could wander beyond what I was emotionally able to cope with as a child. That socially I was an outcast. Being "different" and being an adult is something I have needed to come to terms with, I can also seek out like minded adults to spend my time with. Being "different" and a child is incredibly difficult as conforming to the "norm", fitting in, is a major requirement of ones peers. Fortunately I have some understanding, fortunately as a parent that understands I can do my best to help her feel accepted and loved for who she is, whilst gently trying to guide those emotional and social develoments. Parenting an intellectually gifted child though is a challenge. A challenge that my parents weren't placed to cope with nor willing to adapt for. I was the problem!

I can see how that can be difficult for you Tracy. I was one of those kids whose reading skills were way advance for my age. However, my math and science skills were in the toilet. I didn't fit in properly because my "talents" were not on an even keel. It caused me a lot of problems in school. I was always in the smartest classes, but got made fun of because of my poor math and science skills. I basically only did well in what I liked.

It's also hard to be on an emotional level with your intellectual skills. I think I learned at age 4 about death, and it freaked me out beyond belief. That's when all my anxiety problems started I think. I know that now, at age 57, I'm not the smartest banana in the bunch, but I'm not stupid either. People would probably say I'm smarter than I give myself credit for. It's all mainly in the way I learn and absorb things. We all do that differently.

Having BPD is difficult and I have a lot of trouble absorbing abstract themes/ideas. That's where my problem stems. I read a lot here on the Board and a lot of it is stuff I can't wrap my head around. I don't know if it's due to my age or just the way I learn. Some of the stuff I can't even finish reading - I have to stop because it makes no sense to me. It's not a reflection on what the person is saying - I just can't understand it.

So it's hard for me to use some recovery skills because I can't wrap my head around those ideas and how to use them. I struggle. My T may have to repeat things a few times, in different ways, before I understand what he's getting at. And when I'm anxious, it makes it even harder. So my "intelligence" sometimes has no bearing on my recovery.