This article is part of a series on relationships with a partner who has a demanding personality structure. If you’re close to someone who can be intensely close and intensely pushing-away in the same breath, this is for you.

“I hate you — don’t leave me”

The title of Jerold Kreisman and Hal Straus’s classic book, I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me, captures the core of what it’s like to be close to someone organised at a borderline level, in four words. It isn’t a whim, and it isn’t manipulation in the everyday sense. It’s how the nervous system and psyche cope with an anxiety most of us can barely imagine unless we carry it ourselves: a fear of abandonment so overwhelming that closeness itself becomes a threat.

What “borderline” actually means

Worth separating two things right away, because everyday speech blurs them (we go further into this in a separate glossary article on personality organization levels):

A diagnosis — borderline personality disorder (BPD) — a specific set of criteria. The borderline organization level, in Kernberg’s and Nancy McWilliams’s sense — a broader psychic structure that many different people can have, not necessarily meeting BPD criteria.

This article talks mainly about the relational experience shared by both: a world organised around closeness and the fear of losing it.

Three mechanisms worth understanding

The partner’s experience: “walking on eggshells”

Paul Mason and Randi Kreger named it well in the title Stop Walking on Eggshells. Partners often describe a state of constant vigilance: weighing every word, anticipating what will set off the next storm, taking responsibility for the other person’s mood. Over time this leads to exhaustion, guilt, isolation, and losing touch with your own needs.

If that’s how you feel, it’s worth hearing something simple and often forgotten: caring for someone else doesn’t require giving up on yourself. On the contrary — the person who helps most in a crisis is the one who stays stable, not the one who dissolves into the crisis alongside them.

A tool for conversation: the SET method

Kreisman proposes a simple communication structure for moments of intense distress — SET: Support, Empathy, Truth. In three steps: (1) Support — “I care about you and I want this to work”; (2) Empathy — “I can see you feel rejected right now, and that hurts”; (3) Truth — calmly stating how things are and what you’ll do. The order matters: “truth” alone, without the first two steps, sounds like rejection and escalates conflict; support and empathy alone, without truth, blur boundaries.

Boundaries without punishment

A boundary isn’t a punishment or a threat. It’s information about what you will do, regardless of the other person’s reaction. “If you start shouting, I’ll leave the room for half an hour and we’ll come back to this once we’ve both calmed down” — that’s a boundary. “If you do that again, we’re done”, said in the heat of the moment, is usually part of the same storm, not a boundary.

Setting boundaries with someone who has a huge fear of abandonment can be hard precisely because, at first, the boundary itself may be experienced as abandonment. The key is consistency: predictable, calm, repeated. Over time, this is exactly what builds the safety that fear can’t imagine on its own.

There’s hope: this responds to treatment

This is important and true: borderline organization responds well to therapy. There are approaches designed specifically for these difficulties — dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mentalization-based treatment (MBT), transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), and short-term dynamic therapy (ISTDP), in which we work with the feelings, anxiety, and defenses underneath the symptoms. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry confirms real efficacy of psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder.²

For a couple, this means the dynamic that feels unbearable today isn’t a fixed trait like eye colour. It changes — especially when the person who’s struggling does their own work, and the partner stops trying to “fix” the other person and starts taking care of themselves and the relationship’s boundaries.

When to seek help — for yourself too

When you feel you’re losing touch with your own needs, friends, or peace of mind. When threats appear (toward you, or self-harm) — that’s always a signal to seek professional support, not to “handle it” alone. When the same cycle repeats and neither of you can get out of it on your own. Couples therapy can help, but often individual therapy is needed first — for the person with borderline difficulties, and separately for the partner, who also has a right to support.

Support in Lisbon & online

We offer therapy in English, in person in Lisbon and online across Portugal, for individuals and couples navigating these patterns.

1. Kreisman, J., & Straus, H. I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me (3rd ed., 2021).
2. Mason, P., & Kreger, R. Stop Walking on Eggshells.
3. Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
4. McWilliams, N. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis.
5. [1] Staebler, K., Helbing, E., Rosenbach, C., & Renneberg, B. (2011). Rejection sensitivity and borderline personality disorder. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 18(4), 275–283. doi.org/10.1002/cpp.705
6. [2] Cristea, I. A., Gentili, C., Cotet, C. D., Palomba, D., Barbui, C., & Cuijpers, P. (2017). Efficacy of Psychotherapies for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 74(4), 319–328. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.4287

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