Chronic relationship instability isn’t just bad luck or a string of unfortunate breakups, it’s a lived reality for many people wrestling with chronic interpersonal instability. When every friendship, romance, or workplace bond feels like a rollercoaster, relational instability can become its own identity.
For some, especially those navigating borderline personality disorder or similar patterns, repetition compulsion keeps pulling them back into familiar chaos. Interpersonal instability isn’t a flaw, it’s a survival pattern that eventually starts working against the person it once protected.
KEY POINTS
- Chronic interpersonal instability is a hallmark of severe personality disorder.
- Patients may select bad objects but characteristically spoil good ones.
- Treatment must address paradox and contradiction, not just encourage better object choice.
Making Sense of Chronic Relationship Instability
A significant minority of patients seen in consultation for psychotherapy present with chronic relational instability: a longstanding pattern of chaotic, tumultuous interpersonal relationships.
Many of these patients meet criteria for a Cluster B personality disorder, such as borderline personality disorder, or report a diagnosis of complex posttraumatic stress disorder.
Often, the relational histories of these patients are so dramatic that the therapist has a sense that the patient is the unluckiest person alive for having been involved with so many bad others.
Some may even come to believe that the successful treatment of these patients merely involves helping the patient select better objects.
Indeed, much self-help and pop psychology material on these subjects makes such a claim: what is needed for these patients is simply more supportive and validating others.
I submit that this approach is overly simplistic, clinically unhelpful, and conceptually unsound. At best, it is a partial truism; at worst, it reinforces the very problems that keep the patient ill.
Related: Borderline Personality Disorder And The Pain Paradox
Selection of Bad Objects
It is generally accepted that patients with difficult or traumatic childhoods tend to unconsciously recreate these early dynamics in adult life.
This phenomenon is captured by Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion—the drive to re-enact unresolved conflicts with new partners who resemble early objects.
In practice, it may manifest as repeatedly choosing individuals who echo aspects of past figures, thereby offering another chance, however doomed, to master longstanding conflicts.
Yet it is highly implausible—indeed, statistically impossible—for these individuals to always select bad objects, or to select them to the exclusion of healthier objects, even most of the time.
Let us assume that the overall prevalence of personality disorder in the general population is about 10–15%, but that severe disorders (borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, and related conditions) occur in roughly 5–8%.
If a person with a severe personality disorder selects a partner at random, their chance of pairing with another person with a severe disorder is therefore about 5–8%.
The proportion of couples in which both partners have a severe personality disorder would then be less than 1% in the general population.
Studies of assortative mating in psychiatric illnesses (“like seeks like”) suggest that baseline odds may double or triple. Even granting this effect, the probability rises only into the 10–24% range—higher than chance, but still far from inevitability.
Even if baseline odds quadruple, such pairings would remain an uncommon minority, underscoring the fallacy of assuming that patients invariably end up with similarly disturbed partners.
In other words, while some patients do appear drawn repeatedly to partners who mirror early “bad objects,” it is neither a universal law nor a destiny.
Statistical reality tempers theoretical expectation: repetition compulsion increases the odds of maladaptive pairings, but it cannot account for every relationship choice, nor does it preclude the possibility of healthier bonds.
Destruction of Good Objects
If the exclusive focus is placed on the patient’s “bad object selection,” the equally important phenomenon of the destruction of good objects is overlooked.
Clinical experience reveals that even when healthier, more stable, and genuinely supportive others enter the patient’s life, these relationships are often spoiled, degraded, or ultimately destroyed.
This destructive process is not incidental—it is intrinsic to the patient’s psychiatric condition. Indeed, it is not an uncommon occurrence in psychotherapy.
Patients with borderline and related personality disorders often live in a world organized around paradox.
They yearn desperately for closeness yet experience intimacy as a threat; they idealize others while simultaneously searching for signs of betrayal; they seek security in dependence but recoil from it as humiliation.
This contradictory stance ensures that when a “good object” appears, the relationship is simultaneously clung to and attacked.
The patient’s contradictory needs—both to preserve the good other and to destroy them—cannot be reconciled, leaving the individual trapped in self-defeating cycles.
Ordinary human imperfections are magnified into proof of betrayal, while acts of genuine care are reinterpreted as dangerous intrusions.
What results is not only the loss of good objects but the reinforcement of the very paradox that defines the patient’s inner life: the more they strive for connection, the more they enact its destruction.
This process is familiar in the psychoanalytic literature: Klein described it as the destruction of good objects; Winnicott spoke of the patient’s inability to sustain continuity of holding relationships; Kernberg emphasized the predominance of splitting and the associated attacks on integration.
Across these perspectives, the central observation is that good objects are not merely absent from these patients’ lives—they are actively spoiled.
Gunderson, the father of the borderline diagnosis, underscored this point by showing that interpersonal dysfunction is the most distinctive clinical marker of the disorder.
His work consistently highlighted the patient’s own contributions in generating and perpetuating relational chaos.
Clinical Implications
For the therapist, this means that treatment cannot be reduced to encouraging the patient to “pick better partners.”
If the patient cannot tolerate goodness without devaluing it, then no matter how carefully selected, new partners will eventually be contaminated by the same destructive processes.
Treatment must therefore focus on the paradox at the heart of the disorder: the patient simultaneously longs for connection and fears it, idealizes others while expecting betrayal, and seeks dependence yet experiences it as annihilation.
These contradictions are not incidental but central to the patient’s disorder.
Working through them requires more than supportive guidance; it requires a therapeutic process in which the patient’s contradictory impulses are brought into conscious awareness and tolerated within the safety of the therapeutic relationship.
The therapist’s task is to help the patient sustain ambivalence—to hold together good and bad qualities in the same person—rather than collapsing into splitting and destruction.
Only by confronting and gradually working through these paradoxes can the patient begin to preserve good objects, tolerate intimacy without annihilation, and build relationships that endure beyond the cycle of repetition and destruction.
For further discussion of these topics, readers are directed to my recent paper, “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Interpersonal Aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder,” published in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic.
Author’s Note: This post reflects my thinking at the time it was written. As my clinical experience and scholarly work have developed, some of my views have evolved. I have left the post unchanged to preserve the historical record.
Written by Mark L. Ruffalo LCSW
Originally Appeared on Psychology Today
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