Dependent and Borderline Relationship

The Dependent-Borderline Relationship

Let us take a closer look at the relationship between a dependent personality and a borderline personality (Borderline Personality Disorder).

The Beginning: Victim and Helper Roles

Since the borderline personality always emerges from the previous relationship as a victim, the two always meet through the victim-helper dynamic. The borderline personality needs protection and help from the “evil pursuers,” and the dependent personality is eager to provide protection and help.

Both possess strong fears of abandonment, which are rooted differently, but that plays no role.

The Initial Phase

At the beginning of the relationship, both compensate for their fears of abandonment through the symbiosis demanded by the borderline personality and through mutual clinging. The borderline personality makes it clear that they would never leave the dependent personality, and the dependent personality sends those signals anyway.

The “Perfect” Fit

As a utility object for the immediate gratification of the borderline personality’s needs, the dependent personality is ideally suited. They practically wait for the opportunity to satisfy the borderline personality’s needs.

In this relationship, the borderline personality can give free rein to their sadism, since the dependent personality endures this heroically, no matter how much they suffer. They rarely resist or defend themselves, regardless of how deeply they are hurt. They may even slip into masochism as a denial mechanism (psychological ego defence).

The Role Reversal

When it becomes too much for the dependent personality and they resist, the borderline personality may switch into masochism or play the victim, because then the dependent personality becomes the “perpetrator.”

Through the borderline personality’s need for power and out of the fear of being abandoned — signals that the borderline personality typically begins sending from around the eighth week — the dependent personality turns themselves into a subject (partly masochism).

Activation of Childhood Patterns

The borderline personality triggers the same feelings of guilt in the dependent personality that they know from childhood. To manage these feelings of guilt, the dependent personality turns themselves into a subject.

Exactly like a child caught in a parental divorce:

First stands in a loyalty conflict
Must choose one side or the other
Develops feelings of guilt through the separation
Has these massively intensified through the loyalty decision
Feels fear of losing the other parent

The Interplay

In the interplay of closeness and distance, both relive their childhood:

For the dependent personality: The deactivation of the fear of abandonment triggered by the person with Borderline through greater effort (the person with Borderline stays after all). This closes the circle for the dependent personality: “The person with Borderline needs me, because… therefore I am loved, because I am needed.”
For the borderline personality: They receive the love and recognition they seek but cannot sustain due to their disorder.

The person with Borderline can, because the other is dependent, fully live out the eternal interplay of closeness and distance and their ambivalence, which they know from childhood. In this way, through each reunion, they receive the perfect and absolute symbiosis anew.

The Power of the Person with Borderline

The borderline personality knows this and is confirmed in it when the dependent personality desperately tries to bring the borderline personality back.

In the dependent personality’s struggle, the borderline personality also experiences:

Confirmation of being loved
Confirmation of being worth something
The feelings of omnipotence (feelings of almighty power) they need

With every fight the dependent personality puts up for the relationship, the borderline personality gains more power and control over the dependent personality, which the borderline personality naturally exploits to the fullest after re-establishing the symbiosis.

What the Dependent Personality “Receives”

The dependent personality, on the other hand, finds in the borderline personality everything they may sacrifice themselves for.

They receive their guilt feelings through the devaluation and blame from the person with Borderline, which they need in order to try even harder or become better.

Overall, the dependent personality is perfectly suited for the permanent blame from the person with Borderline. All too gladly, through their personality structure, they plead guilty as charged.

From the borderline personality, the dependent personality receives the feeling of being needed, which for them in turn means “I am loved.”

The Denial

Since they are not abandoned by the person with Borderline in the interplay, it only confirms for them: “I just need to try harder, love more.” That this is the person with Borderline’s normality is something the dependent personality does not see.

They do not want to see it, and for this they use their well-functioning defence mechanism of denial. Nor do they see that they will very soon be dropped by the person with Borderline anyway.

The dependent personality needs a partner with whom quite a few things are not right, and the person with Borderline makes this clear from the very beginning.

The Limbic System

The alternation between closeness and distance (see the person with Borderline’s jumping behaviour) is so extreme for the dependent personality that they experience this distance — which the person with Borderline very often deliberately presents as a separation through their power manipulation — each time as a final separation.

For the dependent personality, this is a shock each and every time, and they must summon all their psychological resources not to break under it.

The underlying reason lies in the limbic system (where every person’s inner child resides), primarily in the amygdala, the emotional guardian of the human being. The limbic system knows no yesterday or tomorrow. It is timeless; it knows only emotional states, which in turn activate neural networks.

The Psychological Torment

For the dependent personality:

The already weak self-esteem falls even further
This creates immense pressure against the conscience through the ego
Two opposing strong energies emerge

The dependent personality experiences this as psychological torment, which is further intensified because the superego demands unconditional fulfilment from the ego.

The Cyclical Pattern

No sooner has the dependent personality, who seeks and can maintain constant closeness, somewhat recovered than the person with Borderline demands renewed symbiosis. Naturally, the dependent personality embraces this wholeheartedly.

In the first moment, this is an enormous relief for the dependent personality’s self and self-esteem. But through the closeness now emanating from the dependent personality again — which the person with Borderline can only tolerate briefly and for a limited time — and through the person with Borderline’s massive unrealistic demands and their impossibility of fulfilment, the person with Borderline switches back to distance.

The End

The consequence is that by the end of the relationship, the dependent personality has only a worn-out, rattling, barely functioning “regulatory system” at their disposal.

In the final separation — though one never knows which separation is truly the final one — this rattling “regulatory system” collapses completely, like a dilapidated wooden scaffold.

What we then see is, for example, depression and/or a descent into substance abuse.

The Conditioning

Ultimately, the dependent personality, due to their personality structure, does not comprehend when or that it is (definitively) over. They cannot, because over the course of the relationship they were practically trained (conditioned) by the person with Borderline to “fight more or fight again,” which corresponds to the dependent personality’s fundamental principle of “more effort.”

Since they do not act contrary to their nature and conditioning, they are in turn condemned for it. This is fatal, because it opens the door wide to the “borderline hatred” and its statements and actions.

For now the borderline personality’s paranoia is confirmed — that the remaining partner is “the evil pursuer” — and they can even, quite fashionably, portray them as a stalker.

Summary

In summary, we can say that in a borderline relationship, the dependent personality is completely left behind. At the end, depending on how long they endured the ordeal, they stand before a complete shambles. Not least because they had to focus entirely on the borderline personality in every area of their life, making them the centre of everything.

Psychologically, often physically, and all too often materially destroyed, what remains in the truest sense of the word is a heap of misery.