The Push-Pull Dynamic in BPD Relationships: A Therapist's Guide
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
The push-pull dynamic in BPD relationships is driven by two simultaneous, contradictory fears: the terror of abandonment AND the terror of engulfment. The person with BPD desperately craves closeness and is simultaneously terrified of it — creating a cycle of pulling their partner close, then pushing them away. For the non-BPD partner, this erodes your sense of reality over time.
“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind — / As if my Brain had split — / I tried to match it — Seam by Seam — / But could not make them fit.”
Emily Dickinson, poet
Recovery from this kind of relational pattern is possible — and you don’t have to navigate it alone. I offer individual therapy for driven women healing from narcissistic and relational trauma, as well as self-paced recovery courses designed specifically for what you’re going through. You can schedule a free consultation to explore what might help.
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Q: Is BPD a permanent diagnosis?
A: No — and this is one of the most important things to understand. Research shows that with appropriate treatment, particularly Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and trauma-informed approaches, many people with BPD experience significant symptom reduction over time. Some no longer meet diagnostic criteria within a few years of treatment. BPD is not a life sentence. It’s a set of patterns that, with consistent therapeutic work, can genuinely change.
Q: How do I set boundaries with someone who has BPD without feeling cruel?
A: Boundaries with someone who has BPD are essential — and also genuinely difficult, because the person may experience your boundary as abandonment. This is not a reason to avoid boundaries. It’s a reason to hold them with compassion and clarity. State what you need, mean what you say, and resist the urge to over-explain or apologize for having limits. A good therapist can help you navigate this with both firmness and kindness.
Q: Can a relationship with someone who has BPD work?
A: Yes — but it requires specific conditions: the person with BPD must be actively engaged in treatment, both partners need strong individual therapeutic support, and both must commit to learning the patterns and practicing different responses. Relationships with untreated BPD are extraordinarily painful. Relationships with treated BPD can be deeply meaningful. Treatment status is the variable that matters most.
Q: Is BPD hereditary? Am I at risk because my parent has it?
A: The research suggests a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors. Having a parent with BPD doesn’t mean you’ll develop it, but it does mean you likely grew up in an invalidating environment that may have affected your emotional regulation and attachment patterns. Getting support for yourself — regardless of whether you meet BPD criteria — is a wise and proactive choice.
Q: Why is there so much stigma around BPD?
A: The stigma stems from decades of clinical literature that framed BPD patients — predominantly women — as manipulative, untreatable, and difficult. This framing reflects more about the biases of the mental health system than about the condition itself. Modern research increasingly understands BPD as a complex trauma response, which shifts the narrative from ‘difficult patient’ to ‘deeply wounded person.’ The stigma is changing, but not fast enough.
Both/And: You Can Struggle With Regulation and Still Deserve Compassion
Borderline personality disorder is one of the most stigmatized diagnoses in mental health — and one of the most misunderstood. The driven women I work with who carry this diagnosis, or whose loved ones do, often feel trapped between oversimplified narratives: the clinical literature that pathologizes, the internet that demonizes, and the lived reality that is far more complex than either allows. Both/And means we refuse to simplify what isn’t simple.
Leila is a creative director whose mother was diagnosed with BPD when Leila was in her twenties. The diagnosis explained everything and nothing simultaneously. Yes, it named the pattern — the volatility, the idealization and devaluation, the fear of abandonment that manifested as rage. But it didn’t address what Leila needed most: permission to love her mother and be hurt by her at the same time. Permission to set boundaries without feeling like a monster. Permission to grieve a relationship that exists but doesn’t function the way she needs it to.
Both/And means Leila can hold compassion for her mother’s suffering and still prioritize her own safety. She can understand the neurobiological underpinnings of BPD and still hold her mother accountable for behavior. She can love someone with a personality disorder and set boundaries that the person with the disorder experiences as rejection. None of these truths cancel the others. All of them are necessary.
The Systemic Lens: Why BPD Is a Gendered, Racialized, and Misunderstood Diagnosis
Few diagnoses in mental health carry as much stigma as borderline personality disorder — and that stigma is not accidental. It’s rooted in a clinical tradition that has historically pathologized women’s emotional intensity, dismissed their distress as manipulation, and treated their attachment needs as pathology rather than adaptation. The very name “borderline” originated from a mid-20th century concept that these patients existed on the border between neurosis and psychosis — a framing long since abandoned clinically but still lingering in cultural attitudes.
For driven women navigating BPD — whether in themselves or in a family member — the systemic dimensions matter enormously. BPD is disproportionately diagnosed in women, in part because the diagnostic criteria overlap heavily with behaviors that are culturally coded as feminine and therefore pathologized: emotional reactivity, fear of abandonment, relationship instability. The same behaviors in men are more likely to be attributed to other conditions or overlooked entirely. Meanwhile, the research linking BPD to childhood trauma — particularly emotional neglect and invalidating environments — suggests that many cases represent complex trauma responses being classified as personality deficits.
In my clinical work, I hold the systemic lens because it matters for treatment and compassion. Understanding that BPD exists within a web of gendered diagnosis, inadequate trauma-informed care, and deep cultural misunderstanding allows for a more complete and more human approach — one that neither minimizes the real challenges of the condition nor reduces the person to the diagnosis.
Too Close, Too Far — There Is No Safe Zone
THE PUSH-PULL DYNAMIC
Push-Pull Dynamic: A relational pattern characterized by oscillation between desperate closeness and sudden withdrawal. The person driving it simultaneously craves intimacy and fears it — so they pull their partner in to soothe abandonment panic, then push them away when closeness triggers engulfment panic. In kitchen table terms: you are never quite close enough, never quite far enough, and the goalposts never stop moving — because they’re not actually about you.
FEAR OF ENGULFMENT
Fear of Engulfment: The less-discussed counterpart to the BPD fear of abandonment. Because the person with BPD has a fragile or unstable sense of self, extreme closeness can feel like being consumed — as if they will lose themselves entirely inside the relationship. The more intimate things become, the more they panic that you now have the power to destroy them. So they push you away as an act of self-preservation. In plain terms: the closeness that was supposed to save them starts to feel like a threat to their very existence.
Let me tell you about Michael (name and details changed for confidentiality). He was thirty-four, a software engineer in Miami, and he came to therapy because he felt like he was failing his fiancée, Elena.
“I can’t find the right distance,” he told me, looking exhausted. “If I go out with my friends on a Friday night, she texts me constantly, crying, saying I don’t care about her and I’m abandoning her. So the next weekend, I stay home and plan a romantic dinner just for us. And halfway through the dinner, she picks a fight, tells me I’m suffocating her, and locks herself in the bedroom. I’m either too far away or too close. There’s no safe zone.”
Michael was trapped between the two core terrors of BPD: the fear of abandonment and the fear of engulfment.
The Fear of Abandonment: This is the most well-known feature of BPD. It’s a profound, existential terror of being left alone. To the borderline brain, abandonment doesn’t just mean sadness — it means annihilation. To soothe this terror, they pull you in close.
The Fear of Engulfment: Because the borderline individual lacks a cohesive sense of self, extreme closeness feels like being consumed. They fear that if they merge with you entirely, they will cease to exist — or that you will discover how “flawed” they are and destroy them. To soothe this terror, they push you away.
The push-pull dynamic is the borderline individual’s desperate, impossible attempt to find a safe distance between these two terrors.
The Pull: The Desperate Need for a Savior
The cycle almost always begins with the Pull.
When the borderline partner is feeling empty, dysregulated, or terrified of abandonment, they will pull you toward them with incredible intensity. This is often accompanied by the defense mechanism of splitting — specifically, splitting you “all-good.”
During the Pull phase, you’re idealized. You’re the Savior. They may demand constant communication, mirror your interests and opinions to create a sense of perfect alignment, share their deepest traumas very early in the relationship to fast-track intimacy, and tell you that you’re the only person who has ever understood them.
For the non-BPD partner, the Pull feels incredible. It feels like profound, soulmate-level love. You feel essential, adored, and deeply seen.
But the Pull isn’t about you. It’s about their need to use you as an emotional anchor to soothe their abandonment terror.
The Panic: When Closeness Becomes Dangerous
- Linehan, Marsha M. Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Guilford Press, 1993.
- Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory. W. W. Norton, 2011.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.
- Fonagy, Peter. Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. Other Press, 2002.
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 1992.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Attachment anxiety correlates with BPD traits at r = 0.48 (PMID: 31918217)
- Pooled current GAD prevalence in BPD outpatient/community samples: 30.6% (95% CI: 21.9%-41.1%) (PMID: 37392720)
- Pooled EMA compliance rate across 18 BPD studies: 79% (PMID: 36920466)
- AAPs induce small but significant improvement in psychosocial functioning (significant combined GAF p-values); N=1012 patients in 6 RCTs (PMID: 39309544)
- Largest neuropsychological deficits in BPD: long-term spatial memory and inhibition domains (PMID: 39173987)
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery. (PMID: 9384857) (PMID: 9384857)
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
