4 Things to Say to Your Avoidant Borderline (5 Dynamics)

Speaker and Context

The speaker, Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a psychology professor, delivered an extended analysis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) with emphasis on avoidance behaviors, underlying dynamics, clinical manifestations, and practical guidance for partners. He notes that BPD diagnoses are roughly equally distributed across genders and uses female pronouns historically.

Core Descriptions

• Borderline behavior is characterized by abrupt swings between intense attachment and extreme rejection — “hot and cold” or intermittent reinforcement — described clinically as splitting, repetition compulsion, or diaphysis.
• These cycles are driven by unconscious dynamics rooted in early childhood and are experienced as corrosive, destructive, and emotionally devastating for intimate partners.

Three Relationship Phases with a Borderline Partner

1. Enmeshment: The partner functions as an external regulator for the borderline’s dysregulated emotions, internalizing and amplifying her turmoil.
2. Mirror-image Withdrawal: When the partner becomes less responsive or distant, the borderline perceives rejection and reacts with intensified dysregulation (avoidance, anger, acting out).
3. Transactional Plateau: The couple settles into a regulatory equilibrium characterized by one of three borderline responses: re-idealization with a new fantasy, nostalgic attempts to reconnect with former partners, or descent into promiscuity.

Practical Guidance for Partners — Four Sentences

To reduce abandonment anxiety and avoid provoking engulfment, the speaker recommends partners repeatedly (day and night) say only four sentences:

1. “I’m always here for you — I’m a rock, a stable presence, I’m not going away.” (Assuage abandonment anxiety)
2. “You are and you will always be dear to me.” (Provide a holding/containing environment)
3. “I do place boundaries — you’re right about this — but I place boundaries for my protection and to be strong enough for both of us.” (Explain boundaries as necessary for both partners)
4. “I will accept and respect any decision you make.” (Respect autonomy: separation, break-up, divorce)

These combined statements aim to convey stability, love, boundaries, and respect without triggering more anxiety.

Avoidance, Acting-Out, and Psychopathic Self-States

• Avoidance often coincides with decompensation and acting-out: reckless behaviors, promiscuity, shopaholism, substance abuse, workaholism, or any impulsive acts that protect the borderline from overwhelming emotions.
• During acting-out the borderline may be “out of her mind” and dominated by a psychopathic self-state that forgets the partner and behaves predatory or reckless.

Five Core Psychodynamic Processes Underlying Avoidance

1. Object (introject) inconstancy: inability to maintain stable internal representations of others — “out of sight, out of mind” — provoking abandonment anxiety.
2. Failure to bond / use of others as transitional/comfort objects: Borderlines treat people like soothing objects (like a child’s teddy) rather than stable relational partners.
3. Identity disturbance: lack of a coherent core identity, leading to abrupt, contradictory changes in values, beliefs, and behavior.
4. Pervasive dissociation: episodes of depersonalization, derealization, amnesia and ‘‘observing’’ oneself, especially during acting-out; low tolerance for loneliness.
5. The bad object: a pervasive internalized sense of being toxic, unworthy, or corrupt; punitive introjects that compel avoidance, self-punishment and degradation (e.g., promiscuity as punishment).

These processes interact and reinforce one another, producing compulsive attention-seeking and predatory/psychopathic acting-out.

Behavioral and Clinical Outcomes

• Compulsive attention-seeking: sexual conquests, people-pleasing, forced altruism, and compulsive charm as attempts to obtain reassurance and external regulation.
• Predatory acting-out: abrupt shifts to psychopathic behaviors (promiscuity, substance abuse, financial depletion) during dissociative/psychopathic states.
• Development of comorbid conditions: addictions (including sex and substances), depressive disorders, and anxiety disorders driven by the internal bad object and chronic instability.

How Love and Boundaries Can Backfire

• Genuine, unconditional love and intimacy can paradoxically increase borderline partner’s engagement anxiety because love challenges the bad object’s narrative. The borderline may withdraw or act out to reaffirm the bad object’s truth.
• Conversely, lack of boundaries or an overly enmeshed partner can worsen the borderline’s fears and chaotic dynamics.

Metaphors and Illustrations

• The speaker uses vivid metaphors: the borderline as a vortex or black hole; identity compared to fleeting snowflakes that the person cannot capture; and people used as comfort objects like a child’s teddy bear.

Clinical Implications and Tone

• The speaker emphasizes that many behaviors are unconscious and driven by early developmental wounds. He frames borderline behaviors as both involuntary (the person “cannot help it”) and deeply destructive to relationships.
• He repeatedly stresses the importance of understanding the underlying processes to cope effectively and to set firm boundaries while offering consistent containing statements.

Recommended Coping Strategy (Concise)

Continually and calmly offer the four scripted sentences (stability, affection, boundaries, respect for autonomy) while maintaining personal boundaries and awareness of acting-out signs; understand the five dynamics to contextualize avoidant and acting-out behaviors.

Notable Caveats

• The speaker at times uses strong, pejorative language (e.g., “psychopathic self-state,” “bad object,” “venomous emanation”) reflecting a clinical and dramatic rhetorical style rather than neutral phrasing.
• The talk focuses on partner coping and psychodynamic explanation rather than detailed treatment approaches (e.g., DBT) or step-by-step clinical interventions.

Summary Conclusion

The lecture offers a psychodynamic model explaining why borderlines vacillate between proximity and avoidance, articulates five interacting internal processes that produce avoidance and acting-out, and prescribes a concise, repetitive verbal strategy combined with firm boundaries as a pragmatic way for partners to reduce abandonment and engulfment anxieties and to better manage the relationship’s volatility.