NPD / Abusive partner - Recovery thread

[IseeGraceAhead]

These threads were started last year by therealme though I gather there were excellent predecessors.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a diagnosable condition on the continuum of Personality Disorders. Few Narcissists are diagnosed, however: a person must either present themselves for treatment or be sectioned to ensure diagnosis. Narcissists are very clever, they generally avoid compulsory referral. Narcissists believe They Are Right & Everybody Else Is Wrong; they will never seek treatment as they find themselves perfectly fine!

Common misconceptions:

[1] You can't call someone NPD if they haven't a diagnosis. Diagnosis is unlikely for the reasons above. Even Narcissists agree it's reasonable to determine a personality type as NPD (see links in first post). If you are in a relationship with a Narc, you don't need to be a clinician to know.

[2] He's got Aspergers or BPD, or is just a bit shit at dealing with people. Really? The obvious question is: why would you want to devote your life to someone like this? On a more technical note: emerging evidence, via biopsychology, suggests that Asperger and NPD brains exhibit similar differences from the average brain. And BPD is the baseline for all other Personality Disorders.

[3] S/He isn't "bad", they're just very hurt. Yes, they are very hurt. The more insight you gain into this spectrum, the more pain you feel for the sufferer. If you have a Narc parent, it's almost a given that you've gained tremendous insight - it was a necessity for your survival. The important thing is, YOU are not the same or you wouldn't be reading this. And understanding does NOT mean you can fix it.

[4] S/He just needs loving care. Yes, they do. They need it like a junkie needs heroin. You can keep on giving, they'll keep on taking and it will never be enough to satisfy them. Never. They'll suck you dry (emotional 'vampire') and then they'll rip you to shreds, just because you 'ran dry'.

[5] I get that s/he's abusive, but why say they've got a Personality Disorder? There's a spectrum of disorders: some are more 'needy'; some more 'domineering'; some are just fucking strange. At bottom, they're no more or less than deviations from the average. Nobody would choose a disordered realtionship unless they suffer from a need to be their partner's therapist. If this is you, try reading some of the links below.

You know UA i might even get a t shirt with that printed on it LOL!!!

my N coloured his hair then used the leftovers to colour his chest hair, wore a hairpiece ( thankfully a good one ) had a face lift and spent a fortune on clothes and cars. He spent at least an hour every morning in the bathroom and also shouted at 'people' whilst showering. He was always asking me if he was handsome then saying he knew he was.

Excellent.Many thanks,Grace.

I'm still working at removing the left-over sticky bits of infestation from inside my brain.

Like a really gluey sicking plaster,(put ,hopelessly,over an already deep wound,not quite healed).

I thought it was " a good thing" at the start.

Once I realized it was really not what I needed, it was very difficult and painful to slowly peel off.

I have discarded the shriveled,dirty,useless piece of filth.

No use or desire for such an item.

But am left with a messy,stubborn ghostly outline of what has gone.

Very irritating

I've tried picking at it,but it's taking ages to shift...

Guess I'll be posting on here a bit....

There's no point in going for marriage counselling is there?

I'm afraid not, namechange. He will either manipulate the counsellor into labelling YOU as 'a problem' or, if the counsellor's any good, they will refuse couple counselling. So it can't help you either way :(
Counselling for yourself can help, though! You could tell him you're seeking therapy because you "realise you've got a problem" (just don't mention that he IS the problem ... ) and find yourself a therapist who genuinely gets it.

fbc - my god, poor you! Well done that police officer. You must feel like you're well and truly 'through the looking glass', now an objective person has described your predicament to you - and he's due home in a paddy. Would it be impossible for you to just chuck him out, or make yourself & DCs absent for a time while you get your head together?

PM :) Congrats on getting your cruddy old 'plaster' off! Just like physical wounds, the emotional sort need plenty of tlc, fresh air and time to heal ....

Patienceobtainsallthings Since I left all sorts of untruths have been told by both the ex and his mother, it's has though that past has been rewritten. Sometimes I feel as though I am the one who is crazy and trapped in some sort of weirdness. So that my daughter does eventually know the truth about certain things I have started to keep a journal for her to read when she is older, nothing nasty or heavy going, just the true version of things that have affected her.

thenamehaschanged we have to laugh don't we! My ex used to threaten regularly to shave all of his hair off. He would scrape it back off his face to show me how it would look, which was terrible! He might have thought himself handsome but trust me, he isn't. A shaved head would have looked hideous. I was occasionally tempted to tell him to go for it though
He also had a thing about spots, detested the thought of having spots/blackheads and would shove his back in my face very night and demand I check and get rid of any he had.

His mother dyes her hair. She is 73 years old and has a head full of dark brunette hair. She reminds me of Betty Davies in the film Baby Jane! And her obsession is food, food she buys, food she cooks and food she eats. Every time we saw her we would get a run down on every meal her and her husband had eaten since we previously saw them.

Merrywidow my ex had his own bathroom and no one was allowed in it. He had to have his own toilet and no one else was allowed to use it. We used to go to a holiday park each year for our holiday and he would pay extra to have a caravan with an ensuite so he could have his own toilet. Weird or what!

pinemartina that's a good post. I can relate to what you say. It's been six months since I 'escaped' but I feel drained. I haven't bounce back as I did after my divorce from my exH. Recovery from this is a slow struggle. It feels as if everything I am had been stolen and I am having to find it again but I have forgotten the person I was before so I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for. The relationship has definitely changed me.

I find this site useful, it has a very good support forum www.narcissismfree.com/site-map.php

Grace: we seperated beginning of this year, thankgod. Unfortunately his contact with dcs are his lifeline to maintaining some form of relationship with me and he uses this to have control over me. Or should I say used to. The scary day - the policestation day - has changed all that.
I caught myself feeling elated today thinking: he's gone! he's gone! he's gone! It's taken 6 months for me to realise that I don't have to be subserviant, appeasing, exhaustingly understanding, to a man who I no longer live with.

Thank you so much for this. I left my NCP 2.5years ago. The birth of DS was the trigger. I stayed with him for nearly a year after DS's birth, but had to leave. The hardest thing was I felt I couldn't tell people what the problem was and most people thought that I was having an affair or being over emotional.

After 6 weeks separation I agreed to couple counselling with him. The counsellor spotted him immediately and told him that he should continue counselling (he only went into counselling to get back with me) and that it would probably last for years and may never work. She told me not to go back, no matter what he said, as it would only get worse. I already knew this but it was so good to hear it from someone else.

He still sees DS (who loves him dearly), but I am in no doubt that this will end in the next few years when DS becomes more of a person in his own right (he abandonned his daughter at 5 cos of 'her mother'.

I am getting better. It's sometimes hard to get him out of my head and I still can't even consider a new relationship, but I have never regretted leaving him. Not even for one minute.

BTW, these men deliberately choose highly intelligently women in the belief that it impresses others and that we can "make them better".

Dione, can you CAT me with the name of the counsellor you saw? Where is he/she based? I would like to get in contact. x

Unlikelyamazonian, I can't remember her name. She was a counsellor at Relate in Belfast.

Just one more question (before I start researching divorce)

Once narcissim is triggered in them, is there any possibility of going back to how it used to be?

What I mean is H wasn't a narcissist when I married him 7 years ago. Nor was he for the 6 years we were together before we got married.

It all started 5 years ago when he left his job to become self employed and we'd just had DC1. I've spent the last 5 years putting it all down to stress but I now know that it's a personality disorder

Have also realised that this 'putting the kids on a pedestal' I mentioned earlier is actually more chillingly called idealising. His kids are perfection to him at the moment but that's because they are so young and innocent.

Nah who am I trying to kid? He was a narcissist for all the time we've been together, just a far more subtle one that's all. I over looked occasional arrogance and ignorance as just being male. I overlooked his long drawn out silences as just 'him' and 'his moods' (he once didn't talk to me for 3 months because he felt I wasn't supporting him enough and was too into our baby)

I've been so blinkered and so blind. Even now thinking there's still a chance he might turn into a nice person one day

I've just realised as well this is a thread for brave and strong survivors not current sufferers! Maybe I should start a different thread as I don't want to bring you all down!

You're doing incredibly well to have realised this by yourself. It feels - well, horrifying, doesn't it?

Being able to read about the condition, the 'scripts', the similarities in the ways NPDs 'consition' you - as you've just desribed - helps all, I think, to grasp what's happened to us. Somebody likened it, on another thread today, to tentacles getting into your mind: stealing your personality and replacing it with their own craziness. Not far off, imo.

It takes ages to get the bloody tentacles out, then start putting yourself back in what now feels like an empty space where your personality used to be. You're not in the wrong place, my love ... we all know!!

Narcissists are fundamentally empty inside. With my second H, I put his taciturnity down to being 'deep' and so forth. He isn't deep, he's empty. Nothing in there but cliches, rules & regulations, rocks and wind.

NO! Stay,please.
I certainly don't feel brave and strong,and although I
I really appreciate the validation that I feel when I read about the realisation stage you are at,tnhc.

You sound brave and strong,it's a difficult point to reach.

I felt very strong and empowered,having recognised him for what he was,and taking action.

Moving on can be harder.For me,it feels more difficult to get my head round it all now,5 months on,than it was the week after he left.

I fear that I am boring everyone to tears with my constant repetitive angry,self pitying outpourings.

Prepare to be bored...

I was just thinking about X#2's rules. He's very proud of them. He divides his life into three equal parts: [1] Work & money [2] Leisure [3] Social & family. He tells this as though it's perfectly reasonable (with emphasis on the 'perfect', heh.) Every Sunday morning, he spends four hours on the phone to friends & family. That meant his relationship duties were done for the day, so it wasn't necessary to give me any attention.

He worked in a very sociable industry (he's left it now, wisely) and got into dreadful trouble as he was incapable of doing work, social and leisure all at once: he blabbed trade secrets at parties, thinking he was in 'friend' mode, and got the sack more than once for it. When he drank, he underwent a complete personality change and later had no recollection of what he'd done. He committed cheap, nasty thefts & frauds when he was out, his "work & money" head being excluded from Leisure, and deliberate, calculated frauds at work.

He's a shy-looking guy with a sweet face and a rare, beautiful smile. Inside, he's all grim, mean-minded and ... empty.
Shudder.

Thank you

Grace - My mind feels like it's in freefall. I'm whizzing through the last 13 years of my life piecing together all those situations and dramas and realising all the signs were there.

I didn't realise they were 'signs' of this though. And since things have been unbearably awful these last 5 years, I have been conditioned to excuse it all away as the 'understandable' stress he's under. And also for having played my part in letting him down and not supporting him enough. God I feel sick. I'm not doing a great job with the kids at the moment or in eating properly. I'm on AD's and still feel totally empty.

Thanks PM I'm certainly not bored to tears reading yours and everybodies input. I'm learning a lot.

x posts there Grace. Yes rules and regulations - a 'logical' approach seems to be a big thing with them doesn't it?

thenamehaschanged my mind feels like it's in free fall too and I have been left for six months!

And to think, for a long time I thought it was all down to his star sign!

I was just reading about Hervey Cleckley's work on 'psychopathy' here. I was struck by this: the inability of this personality type to "understand the meaning of life as lived by ordinary people" J's father gave him those rules, as a specific response to J saying he couldn't figure out how people make their lives work. He clung to them as a framework for the chaos he perceived life to be.

I'd feel sorry for him (I did, that's how I got into such a mess!) - but, between them, my Narc boss and J managed to leave me in a state where I'm struggling to grasp the meaning of life!
:(

Lol, TFM, if you can identify an astrological configuration that leads to NPD, you'll make a forune.

Dear all, and especially Grace and Pinemartina, I have a feeling your expert advice is needed here.

I just realised that it must be almost exactly a year, to the week, that I first read the last NPD thread. Like other posters have said it was like a lightbulb moment. I always found it hard to talk to anybody about XP because his behaviours were SO strange, so inexplicable, and then I came on the thread and it was like I'd walked into a room full of people discussing him!

Absolutely unreal. Anyway, I moved out in December of last year and have been living happily alone with DS ever since. In the interim, XP cried for about 2 weeks, told everyone who would listen that he was distraught, etc etc. Slept with his best friend's sister and was miraculously his old self again. Broke up with her, was texting me at midnight saying "My lifes gone upside down again" [sic]. Joined facebook (which he always said he'd never do) and tried to add everyone female from mine then proceeded to live his life ON facebook.

He met his new girlfriend soon after this, and less than 12 hours after they met was proclaiming that she was the one and he loved her, on facebook. Icky photos of them naked in bed together (!) constantly having conversations on there, anything from gushy declarations of undying love to their shopping lists. It's bizarre. She has a DD from previous relationship, so I said to my friend, I give him 6 months, she'll be pregnant.

Well I was wrong... six weeks in, and they were announcing the imminent arrival of their bundle of joy! He's still proclaiming undying love for her, and lambasting everybody (but nobody in particular) on facebook for "not knowing what love really is"

Further to this, somebody I know was speaking to him on facebook the other day and he told her he's still in love with me so I'm not sure WHAT is going through his head at the moment.

I reckon if you wrote a narcissist into a soap opera, people would complain about it being unrealistic!

Just marking my place.

Not ready to say much yet - unlike me, huh?