Borderline personality disorder (BPD) affects many areas of a person’s life, including their relationships. People with BPD may be sensitive to rejection and abandonment and are prone to splitting, rage, and impulsivity. If a person with BPD feels rejected or abandoned, they may end the relationship. However, this is usually followed by significant anxiety and regret and efforts to get back together.
Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder
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What Is BPD?
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental health condition where people struggle with self-image and emotion regulation.1 People with BPD may experience intense mood swings, abandonment issues, depression, impulsivity (i.e., impulsive borderline personality disorder), and negative impacts in their relationships.2 They’re also prone to self-harm behaviors and suicidal ideation.
How Someone With BPD Acts In Relationships
Relationships where one partner has BPD can be chaotic, intense, and inconsistent. The person with BPD tends to fear abandonment and at the same time fluctuates between idealizing (i.e., exaggerating a person’s positive qualities) and devaluing (i.e., exaggerating a person’s negative qualities) others.3
When a person with BPD perceives rejection, they may feel out of control and anxious, which can lead to behaviors like clinging or emotional manipulation. In extreme cases, physical, verbal, or emotional abuse may occur. This can make dating someone with BPD challenging.
It is important to remember that while having a relationship with a person with BPD can be challenging, they are not intentionally trying to hurt you. Rather, they lack the ability to understand and cope with their emotional pain, which causes them to act in ways that hurt others. Many people with BPD have suffered abuse themselves in childhood.4
At the same time, you have a right to protect yourself from harm. If you’re in a relationship with someone who shows signs and symptoms of BPD, it may be necessary to end the relationship or seek professional help.
Why Your Partner With BPD Might End Your Relationship
People with BPD may end a relationship for different reasons. For some, ending a toxic relationship may be a healthy step and a way to assert boundaries. For others with BPD, ending a relationship may be a response to the inner emotional turmoil that they experience because of their condition. People with BPD have a tendency to reason based on their emotions vs. logic, which can lead to impulsive actions.
Here are examples of emotional triggers for ending a relationship:
Fear of Abandonment
Fear of abandonment and abandonment issues are core symptoms of BPD that affect a person with BPD’s behavior in relationships.5 This fear is driven by an intense discomfort with being alone. This fear may be triggered by something that a partner does that is perceived as rejecting, like taking too long to return a phone call.
When a person with BPD feels like they are being abandoned, they may be driven to act in dysfunctional ways. This can result in extreme anger, also known as borderline rage, threats to harm one’s self, or ending the relationship altogether.
Splitting
BPD splitting is a defense mechanism sometimes used by people with BPD.6 It involves assigning either all-positive or all-negative qualities to a person. It is also sometimes referred to as black-or-white or all-or-nothing thinking. During splitting, the person is unable to integrate the positive and negative aspects of a person into a whole.
A person with BPD may engage in splitting when faced with intense feelings like anxiety, fear, and anger. Splitting is a way to protect from these feelings and is done unconsciously, which means that the person is not aware that they are engaging in this defense mechanism.
For example, someone with BPD may perceive their partner as terrible when they forget an anniversary, rather than trying to understand why they may have forgotten.
Extreme Jealousy
Another common feature of BPD that can harm relationships is extreme jealousy.7 People with BPD may become preoccupied with jealousy toward their partners. In some cases, this can have a delusional aspect to it if it isn’t based on facts. Because people with BPD are prone to splitting, they’re usually not responsive to reasoning from their partners. Often insecurity and self-doubt are at the roots of extreme jealousy.
BPD Rage
Rage is anger that is excessive given the situation and is hard to control. People with BPD may experience rage when they perceive rejection, neglect, or abandonment in a relationship.8 During rage, a person may say or do things that they later regret. This could lead to ending the relationship in the heat of the moment. BPD rage is often followed by significant regret and shame.
Help for BPD
Talk Therapy – Get help living with Borderline Personality Disorder from a licensed therapist. BetterHelp offers online therapy starting at $65 per week and is FSA/HSA eligible by most providers. Free Assessment
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What to Expect When Your BPD Partner Ends the Relationship
Because of the complex nature of BPD, when a person with BPD ends a relationship, it is usually not their intention to break up. In fact, breaking up may be a part of a borderline personality relationship cycle that people can find themselves in. Because people with BPD have a hard time understanding themselves and others, they may act impulsively out of fear, jealousy, or rage.
Once they realize what they have done, they may become overwhelmed with anxiety and seek to repair the relationship.9 This may result in efforts to contact the ex-partner and attempts to get back together. Because their anxiety is overwhelming, they may disregard the other person’s boundaries. In extreme cases this can lead to stalking or harassment.
People with BPD oscillate between desiring closeness and angry withdrawal when they perceive that their needs aren’t being met.9 When a person with BPD ends a relationship, it is usually not the end, but rather a part of a cycle of dependence and withdrawal. This dynamic can be confusing for the person’s partner and may lead them to choose to end the relationship themselves.
BPD Workbook
Our workbook includes our best BPD worksheets to help you better understand and manage challenges of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), including triggers, emotions, and self-care.
When You Should Break Up With Your BPD Partner
Meeting with a marriage and couples counselor who can evaluate your relationship may shed light on whether you and your partner can work through your challenges. Even with good effort, some relationships are meant to end. If your relationship involves toxic behavior like abuse, violence, extreme manipulation tactics, control, or competition, it may be necessary to end the relationship.
Signs that you should end a BPD relationship include:
Physical Violence
Any form of physical violence is toxic in a relationship. Often there is a period of tension-building leading up to an incidence of violence, followed by a period of reconciliation and calm.10 This cycle of abuse can continue until one or both partners seeks treatment or ends the relationship.
Emotional or Verbal Abuse
Verbal and emotional abuse may not leave physical marks, but it can be just as damaging as physical abuse in relationships. These relationships may involve name-calling, put-downs, humiliation, and withdrawal of love and affection.
Controlling Behavior
Partners who are controlling may attempt to manage all areas of their partner’s life. They may make decisions for them, choose who they speak to and what they do, and limit their freedom and independence.
Manipulation
Manipulation is the use of harmful strategies to get one’s needs met, such as threatening, shaming, and gaslighting. We all use manipulation at times in our relationships, often unconsciously, but relationships that involve extreme and frequent manipulation are toxic.
Competition
Mild playful competition in a relationship can be healthy, but serious competition between partners can be damaging. If you feel like your partner is always trying to “one-up” you, then the relationship may be toxic.
How Therapy Can Help You Recover From a BPD Relationship
If you’re going through a breakup with someone with BPD, therapy can help you process the end of the relationship and work on moving forward. It can help you understand what role you played and learn tools to accept and cope with the relationship ending.
Types of therapy that can be helpful include:
To choose a therapist that specializes in relationship issues and BPD, consider searching an online therapist directory or asking for a referral from your primary care physician.
Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder
Brightside Health develops personalized plans that are unique to you and offers 1 on 1 support from start to finish. Brightside Health accepts United Healthcare, Anthem, Cigna, and Aetna. Appointments in as little as 24 hours.
Final Thoughts
Being in a relationship with a person with BPD can be challenging. In some cases you may be able to work through these challenges together with the help of a therapist, but if the relationship involves abuse or if your rights are disregarded, then it may be necessary to end the relationship for good.
BPD Partner Ends the Relationship Infographics
ChoosingTherapy.com strives to provide our readers with mental health content that is accurate and actionable. We have high standards for what can be cited within our articles. Acceptable sources include government agencies, universities and colleges, scholarly journals, industry and professional associations, and other high-integrity sources of mental health journalism. Learn more by reviewing our full editorial policy.
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National Institute of Mental Health. (2017). Borderline personality disorder. Retrieved from: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/borderline-personality-disorder
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American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA.
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Gunderson, J. G. (2007). Disturbed relationships as a phenotype for borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(11), 1637-1640. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17974925/
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de Aquino Ferreira, L. F., Pereira, F. H. Q., Benevides, A. M. L. N., & Melo, M. C. A. (2018). Borderline personality disorder and sexual abuse: A systematic review. Psychiatry Research, 262, 70-77. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29407572/
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Palihawadana, V., Broadbear, J. H., & Rao, S. (2019). Reviewing the clinical significance of ‘fear of abandonment’ in borderline personality disorder. Australasian Psychiatry, 27(1), 60-63. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30403145/
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American Psychological Association. (n.d.). APA dictionary of psychology: Splitting. Retrieved from: https://dictionary.apa.org/splitting
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Stone, M. H. (2006). Management of borderline personality disorder: A review of psychotherapeutic approaches. World Psychiatry, 5(1), 15-20. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1472266/
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Berenson, K. R., Downey, G., Rafaeli, E., Coifman, K. G., & Paquin, N. L. (2011). The rejection–rage contingency in borderline personality disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 120(3), 681-690. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21500875/
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Beeney, J. E., Hallquist, M. N., Scott, L. N., Ringwald, W. R., Stepp, S. D., Lazarus, S. A., … & Pilkonis, P. A. (2019). The emotional bank account and the four horsemen of the apocalypse in romantic relationships of people with borderline personality disorder: A dyadic observational study. Clinical Psychological Science, 7(5), 1063-1077. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32670673/
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Serrata, J. (2017). Cycles of abuse. In K. Nadal (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of psychology and gender (pp. 419-422). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc
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