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19 - How and Why Emptiness Manifests in Everyday Life

Borderline Personality Disorder and Beyond

from Part V - Perspectives on Borderline and Narcissistic Personality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2025

By
Nancy Nyquist Potter
Edited by
Konrad Banicki  and
Peter Zachar
Konrad Banicki
Affiliation:
Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Peter Zachar
Affiliation:
Auburn University, Montgomery
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Summary

A significant number of people diagnosed with BPD experience emptiness. Service-users report that feelings of emptiness are intolerable, terrifying, and debilitating, and research shows that it is contributory to self-harming and suicidal behaviors including completion of suicide. Yet this criterion seems to be the least investigated of any of the nine criteria. This chapter examines what ‘emptiness’ is and whether current research reflects necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept. I describe prevailing thinking on the development of BPD and emptiness. The chapter then turns to experiences of emptiness that are found in other diagnoses, everyday life, and cross-culturally. I suggest that not all experiences of emptiness are signs of pathology. The second half of the chapter focuses on treatment possibilities, focusing on people diagnosed with BPD. I set out the main ideas in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and then work with one of the core methods in DBT for skill-building—mindfulness—to argue that some service-users may benefit from practicing Buddhist meditation. I conclude by discussing and responding to critics of such a position, after which I emphasize that Buddhist meditation is not for everyone and is only one option for treatment of feelings of emptiness.

Keywords

borderline personality disorderemptinesslonelinessfeelings of desperationtransdiagnosticdialectical behavioral therapyLinehanBuddhist meditationchanges in brain patterns and structure

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Conceptualizing Personality Disorder
Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychological Science, and Psychiatry
 , pp. 335 - 351
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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