A "cycle" exists for you as an automatic default behavior. You keep doing what's natural and comfortable, due to deeply forged neuro-pathways in your brain that were once part of a reward system or 'payoff' for you, even if they only helped you survive trauma in that moment, or soothe yourself afterward.
There's a reflexive desire to used entrenched pathways, because it's much easier. Imagine skiing down a mountain on a few feet of fresh powder, as opposed to following the somewhat packed snow tracks of skiers who've made that descent ahead of you.
When you begin doing FEELING work, you build a network in your brain that supports less comfortable but healthier choices. Old neuro-pathways begin to reroute themselves, seeking payoffs more rewarding~ even if they require delayed gratification and a new-found level of patience you need, to wait for them to flourish. THIS IS GROWTH.
In my 30+ years of healing folks, only Feeling Work work has proven effective for helping clients grow emotional muscles, so they can make choices that are sound and healthy, resulting in far better and more satisfying outcomes. This is a developmental imperative, or someone remains stuck in a cycle of self-defeating behaviors that ensure unhappy, sometimes disastrous endings.
Bottom line, an emotionally developed, self-actualized adult can make decisions that behoove them, whereas a child cannot. A Borderline or someone with BPD traits is developmentally arrested at a very young age (generally around 3 years old). Their emotional growth has been stunted, due to having had to survive trauma to their developing sense of Self and worth during infancy.
Teaching these poor souls how to reparent and repair themselves is a growth process that with any luck, yields someone capable of independent thinking and circumspection. Mental analysis of feelings in the body does not provide this paradigm shift. Psychoanalysis is quite useless in this regard, for it addresses only an adult's intricate cerebral understanding of pain~ not that of the child's within.
Metaphorically, this ineffectual approach is akin to trying to teach post-graduate classes to a pre-schooler. They simply cannot hold or retain it, due to their young age and lack of emotional and cognitive development.