Personal and Parents’ Life Stories in Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder

Patients suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) display disturbances in understanding both their own and other people’s mind. We examined whether impaired self- and other understanding would also be evident when patients with BPD described their own and their parents’ life stories. Thirty patients with BPD and thirty matched control participants described and answered questions about their personal life stories and their parents’ life stories and completed measures of identity disturbance, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Compared to the control group, patients with BPD described both their personal and their parents’ life stories more negatively and with fewer themes of agency and communion fulfillment. Patients and controls reasoned about their personal life stories in equally complex ways, but patients displayed less complexity, when reasoning about their parents’ life stories and showed more self-other confusion when reflecting on parents’ life stories. Personal and parents’ life stories were related such that less complexity in reasoning, more negative, less agency and communion fulfillment in personal life stories was related to describing parents’ life stories as less complex, more negative, with less agency and communion fulfillment themes. Patients differed from controls on identity disturbance, alexithymia, and empathy and overall these measures showed moderate relations with characteristics of personal and parents’ life stories, suggesting that life stories capture related, but distinct aspects of self- and other understanding.