Why BPD sufferers may avoid mirrors

I still have an acute aversion to hearing or speaking my own name. I dread it when, say, I have to ring the doctor's surgery for an appointment and the receptionist asks who's calling. I can barely get out the words and sometimes feel my face flush. I have a similar response to my own reflection and will avoid looking in a mirror at all costs. I was intrigued, therefore, when I read some research casting light upon this, it seems, not altogether unheard of phenomenon.

The study I refer to was carried out by Winter et al. (2015) and involved setting up a situation in which people with BPD could freely choose to sit facing a mirror or not. The same choice was also presented to people without BPD (you can read about the experimental design here, but suffice to say here that no participants knew the study's purpose).

It was found that those with BPD were:

significantly less likely to sit facing the mirror than non-BPD individuals. significantly more likely to have consciously made the choice not to have sat facing the mirror than non-BPD individuals.

From these findings, it was inferred that those with BPD had a tendency to avoid self awareness (as seeing oneself in a mirror makes one more self aware) to a significantly greater degree than non-BPD individuals.

Why should this be?

The researchers, based on this and similar research, suggest this avoidance of becoming self aware is a mechanism to cope with anxious anticipation of social rejection. Indeed, other research has shown that shifting one's attention from self to others can be a helpful way to calm this anxiety.

To explain further, the authors of the study note that diverting focus of attention away from the self can help reduce self deprecating feelings, including feelings of shame which are all too common amongst those with BPD. They further draw attention to the fact that other research has concluded that 'people who feel socially excluded are averse to attention to the self' because 'self awareness initiates self evaluation' And, again, feelings of social alienation and negative self evaluation are very frequent amongst BPD sufferers.

In sum then, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that BPD sufferers are more likely to avoid being confronted by a reflection of themselves in a mirror as being so confronted would increase self awareness which in turn would aggravate feelings of shame and general negative self evaluation which would, in its turn, increase anxiety about being socially rejected.

I assume that my aversion to hearing my own name may be similarly accounted for.