Browsing by Author "Suomalainen, Esko"

Borderline personality disorder is a mental disorder which is associated with high levels of subjective suffering and severe decline in everyday functioning. It is considered quite difficult to treat and it has been linked to substantially increased risks of self-injurious behaviour and morbidity due to suicides. The psychopathology and core symptomology of borderline personality disorder can be conceptualized through the feelings of chronic shame and having a shameful self-image. Shame is a highly aversive affect, which has many different unadaptive behavioural and cognitive consequences. Borderline personality disorder has been linked to many abnormalities in emotional processing of shame and in susceptibilies to experiencing affects of shame. Self-compassion is a theme adopted to western psychology from Buddhist traditions. Self-compassion has recently seen an increase of attention in the field of modern psychology. It has been linked to many positive psychological correlates and to reduced general psychopathology. Self-compassion constitutes of an attitude to oneself in which one accepts his/herself subjective difficulties with mindfulness and as an essential part of the common human experience. Self-compassionate attitude toward oneself, also includes the desire to alleviate ones subjective suffering. Based on intuition self-compassion seems to target the main difficulties behind the problems that are faced by people with borderline personality disorder and chronic feelings shame. The objective of this paper was to examine the empirical and theoretical data of the role of shame in explaining the symptomology of borderline personality disorder and the applicability of self-compassion in treatment of psychopathology stemming from intense feelings of shame. Randomized controlled trials, pilot studies of self-compassion based interventions, meta-analyses and systematic reviews were searched from common psychological databases and Google Scholar. Additionally articles were included in this paper after manual scanning of the lists of reference of the selected literature. Even though the information obtained from research on the applicability of self-compassion in treatment of borderline personality disorder and transdiagnostic shame has its limitations, self-compassion may have its unique additional offerings to the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Future research on the mechanisms of change in self-compassion and their neural substrates would be highly useful in order to understand the potential mediating effect of transdiagnostic shame in reduced psychopathology associated with developing a self-compassionate attitude.