I have been working with people with borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid adaptations, and their mates, for over 40 years. One of the challenges all people with these personality disorders face is how to form intimate, safe, satisfying, long-term relationships.

My goal in this article is to describe a characteristic interpersonal challenge for each of these personality disorders and show how this issue impacts the couple’s relationship.

I will be describing each challenge from two points of view—from the point of view of my clients who have a personality disorder and what they have told me they were thinking and feeling, and from the point of view of their partners and what they have described of their experience in the situation. My clinical examples are derived from things my clients and their mates have told me.

Note: In this article I will be using the term “adaptation” as synonymous with the term “personality disorder.” I believe it is less pathologizing and has the advantage of acknowledging that most personality disorders arise out of the child’s attempts to adapt to his or her home environment.

My theoretical stance is based on the work of the well-known object relations personality theorist James F. Masterson combined with my knowledge of Gestalt therapy. Masterson has written many books on the diagnosis and treatment of disorders of the self. I was on the faculty of his training institute (Greenberg, 2004).

From Masterson’s point of view, one of the distinguishing features of all people who qualify for a personality disorder diagnosis is that they lack whole object relations. Their lack of whole object relations makes their sense of identity and their relationships with other people inherently unstable (Masterson, 1981).

Whole object relations (WOR) is the clinical name for the ability to see oneself and other people in a realistic, integrated, and stable way that includes both liked and disliked aspects of the person. Without WOR people can only see themselves and other people as either all-good or all-bad or switch back and forth between these equally unrealistic views.

A lack of WOR is one of the main causes of intimacy problems when one member of a........

© Psychology Today