Narcissitic Personality Disorder (Part 2)

[Gettingagrip]

Starting another thread for us survivors.

My youngest two are off on a rare overnight with their Dad today. They're out in the front garden waiting for him although he couldn't give a time - between 4 and 7 - they could be out there a while!

I know exactly what they will do tonight. He'll stick them in front of the tv watching dvds.
Their Nana will feed and get them ready for bed. Then he'll return them first thing in the morning and that'll be it for another 6 weeks or so.

Between 4 and 7 -- is he a fridge repair man? Really, to jerk the DCs around like that just to have dig at you will backfire when they get a bit older (unless he loses interest by then).

My first h did that.

I never deinied him access despite what that witch of a "mother" of mine tells people.

He was always late, sometime never bothered to turn up at all. Though he applied for full custody on many occasions, costing me £20 000 in legal fees to defend myself. All the same shit...you know terrible mother, alcoholic bully personality disorder blah blah blah blah.

Then one day in court he said, I'm sick of this, and we never saw or heard from him again. No christmas or birthday card. Nothing.

That's what makes H's behaviour since witch was back in our lives, all the more baffling. It's almost as though she has cast a spell on him, and he has turned into first h, behaving in exactly the same way, using the same script.

They merge into the same person in my dreams.

H saw the damage it did then....and now he's doing it....weirdly dd is now the same age ds was when it happened before. That probably is relevant.

Anyhoo...ds's opnion of his dad...."screw him" is what he says. Not very nice but completely understabable.

Ok, so he turned up at half 5 eventually and off they've gone. Kids are excited, they like staying at their Nana's - she spoils them.

The thing is Maths, I don't even think his vague time giving etc is to have a dig at me. Its just that he meets his own needs first. The kids have to fit in around his lifestyle and this has always been the case. He is completely self-serving, everything and every body come second to his needs.

It's such a shame that children are supposed to just go along with it, and a terrible message about themselves and their place in his heart that they absorb.

I see my DCs' pent-up anger at how they are treated when they get home, but woe betide me for calling his treatment of them by its name though, as this would be 'alienation of affection' on my part. He knows all the legalese but understands nothing of the reality of what makes a relationship and what kills one. Every weekend they spend at his, he alienates them a little bit more. 'Relationship' to him is a set of definitions on a page. He shows up at the right time (punctuality is one of the many bees he has in his bonnet) and drops them back at the right time, but in between there's a vacuum.

I hear what you are saying Maths and how confusing it must be for your dc to move from your loving empathy to their Dads superficial parenting. As children they must surely live in the hope still that their Dad will 'connect' with them; will be their role model and protector; someone who will love them unconditionally?

My ex parents his dc according to which theraputic model is currently in vogue with him. He sees his role as their 'teacher' and will go to great lengths in pursuing whatever principle he feels needs pursuing. It is all very clinical-parenting with him. It is an act, purely a part he is playing. Scratch the surface and there is nothing there that has not been memorised in a book somewhere along the line.
He had literally nothing to do with their early years. The excuse always being because I bf them as babies he was therefore redundant. I was always bitterly disappointed that he showed such little interest in his dc as newborns. It really was a big fat sign.

He brought her back much earlier than I expected. She has hlaf of the disney store with her.

She burst into tears and said that she didn't want to go there again because she missed home so much, and now she's going to miss daddy again. Poor little lamb.

She is also exhausted.

But the thing that really got me was when she said that daddy had put "so much effort into her new room but he had to sleep on a tiny little bed." She felt guilty. 5 year old should not be made to feel responsible for grown up decisions.

I told her that he chose to sleep on there and she musn't worry about it. Jeez...he's had long enough to get himself a bed fgs.

I've let them turn the living room into a "soft play" with all the cushions from the house, and sofas all over the floor.

That's odd. When my parents eventually decided to sleep in separate rooms, Dad chose a narrow single bed, less than 30 inches wide. It's the same one I slept on for the 2 years just gone - it's saggy in the middle and hasn't even got a proper mattress. I never understood why he didn't get a sensible one - still don't.

I saw him cry for the first time today.

I wanted to give him a great big hug....because that's what normal people do when someone is distressed. I didn't though. I have read to much and learned too much.

I really hope that the tears were genuine. But even if they were, I am never going back to where I was last summer, and neither are the kids.

Grace....do you think we'll have a rash of "tiny bed" posts? Wouldn't that be a thing?

Message withdrawn

Bang on Diving.

Only supermarket t shirts and tracky bums. ever.

He has a chip on his shoulder the size of a planet, and ludicrous political views....very extreme left, but with champagne in the fridge.

No cheap t shirts for my ex. He turned up with the dc wearing his best suit dropping the comment that he had to rush as he was off to the National Concert Hall...

He doesn't know when he can take the dc for another overnight as it's 'so awkward what with being at his Mums and all'.

Off he goes swanning around town living life to the full. I, meanwhile, am tied to the house. Haven't got the price of a loaf of bread till Thursday. Can see no way out of the next few years rearing his children and nights in front of the tv with a cheap bottle of wine.

I am feeling very sorry for myself tonight

That's interesting about clothes.My x had been wearing the same fleece and crap jeans and hardly shaving for the 3 weeks preceding this (final) episode.When in "lovely" mode he wears beautiful shirts and always smells delicious.
That wd be my dread - him coming to the door looking fab just before/after baby born.That wd be hard to resist.
I will though.
Funnily enough,as he stormed off last week with all his shirts on hangers,having berated me for pushing his buttons etc. his parting shot was how I had forced him to go back and live in his "shitty caravan"...
Poor man....

My dc's keep asking when he will come back and be lovely again.I have told them he wont be coming back
"but he'll soon be nice and lovely again mum,he's brilliant when he's not being silly"
That's hard,but it also shows how normal the whole coming and going and unsustainable good times are to them.Can't be healthy.Can't continue.
I feel sorry for myself too,trm.
Don't know what I'd do without mn.I read and re-read this and other threads to distract myself from txting him and getting stuck in hoping it can all be made better with love.
I will break free.
So many of you are inspiring me with your strength and bravery.

Mine used to were utter rags while we were together. He bought stuff from the cheapest clearance bins ans looked like a tramp. Divingintoeternity, many thanks for your insight into this. Interestingly, now that his mother is now providing the money for his clothing, plus vouchers for a catalogue (that he uses partly to get Christmas pressies for the DCs) he has accumulated a whole new wardrobe of fancy outfits.

He demanded our bed upon divorce (I had hoped to ceremonially burn it [dammit]), and though I still have it, I will have to hand it over when the house is sold. The bed was actually his parents' bed originally (Oedipus? Anyone?) and it gave me the creeps to sleep there. I never minded when it got the odd scratch and ding over the years. I have another bed all ready for myself now, having got a nice old wood bed frame and stripped and refinished it, so the old one can go into storage pending the house sale.

PM, you're right about the DCs being better off with consistency and security. Stay strong, make plans for the baby, keep your head up, get legal advice. Don't text him. Register the birth without him. What's wrong with him cannot be made better with love.

ehem, 'wear' rags, 'and' looked like a tramp

TRM, I used to feel like that. The injustice of the situation bothered me. I felt like he was stealing from me. I still think that, but it bothers me less now than it used to.

My x got to drive around in new cars while I was praying that my lone parent allowance would be granted. But in time, that injustice has begun to bother me far less, because I no longer view us as being comparable in anyway. My subconscious has disconnected me from him so there's no reason why we should be comparable. He has been relegated (almost!) to a random person.

I guess it's part of slipping out of somebody's hold.. at first you say to yourself, he's got x,y &z and I've got nothing. Then that thought evolves into it, wish I had more money±!! It's a simpler wish. does that make sense?? I used to be chewed up over my x's wealth! Remember, I used to mention his porsche in every post on RC!!

Showing up in a suit and telling you he is off to the nch is so insufferably pompous!! But on the plus side, enjoy the peace now for the next few weeks. It must be nice to know he won't be showing up for a couple of weeks.

He turned up this morning to take the youngest two out for a few hours.

Whilst here he asked ds 1 to take photos of his tattoos on his mobile phone. So he's gone from trying on clothes and having me take a picture - to now having his body art photographed on his phone.

What the hell is this all about??

TRM...he really does beggar belief doesn't he? Has he ever had any kind of help?

Divingintoeternity....Yes, thank you for your insight...I was too wrapped up in the emotion of yesterday to take it in properly. I can't help but feel sorry for him. I feel as though the way that he has made, and is still making me feel, is an indication of how he must have felt as a little boy. I mentioned before that he has no childhood memories at all, which I now know is a sign of bad stuff.

How can you not feel sorry? Sometimes he looks like a little boy lost. So many photo's of him looking like that. But I am not sacrificing myself in that sorrow anymore.....and neither are my children.

Even this morning he is accusing me of shutting down his email accounts, and being a liar. I am not a liar, nor am I immature and vindictive to do something so childishly petty. His acusations suggest that he would do that to me though I think.

Even though I am (more or less) convinced XH is not a narcissist, so many things resonate in this thread, it's amazing. The tiny bed thing, yes, he did that (he shared a room with DS4 in which the child had a double bed while his dad squeezed onto a child sized bed with a manky old mattress that the neighbours had been going to throw out). Wearing ghastly old clothes, refusing to let me buy him any decent ones even for going out in, so I was always faintly embarrassed at being out in his company, even though I'm not a snappy dresser myself. Accusing me of weird stuff and calling me a liar - in our case the weird stuff was me hiding his credit card, which turned out to have fallen out of his trouser pocket and dropped behind the bed on one occasion, under a chair on another. I eventually got sick of cancelling my card because of the number of times he'd lost his, and took him off the account. Of course I had planned this all along. Why should I bother to hide the thing when I could just pick up the phone and have his name taken off it any time I chose? Because he would rather do things in a twisty way and lie about it, so he assumed I would, of course.

Oh, and he does make a point of recounting to me any interaction he's had with anyone female, presumably in the hope that I'll feel jealous, because if he heard about my interaction with anyone male he would get all thingy about it.

And Saddest, I'm sorry for the little boy he was too, but that boy is long gone. I did say to him the other day that he did a better job bringing up his boys than his dad did to him; he has at least enough empathy and kindness not to have fecked them up the same way. I left it at that, but the fact is he couldn't be trusted to look after DS4 any more as he was getting steadily weirder. It is a difficult balancing act to encourage them to think of him kindly, to treat him with decent human respect, but not to take everything he says to heart as not all of it makes any kind of sense.

No I don't know whether h has npd, or whether he is a straight down the line abuser, the one in all the books.

I am not qualified to make that judgement. But it doesn't matter, if this thread helps to get your head round how weird it all is.

The books all say though that it only gets worse. He had started getting physical with my son....which is why it reached a point of no return. I wonder how long it would have taken for him to get violent with me.

I have just been "told off" for using facebook. Someone is passing what I say, on to him. Do you know what...I couldn't give a flying fuck.

Quite right. It's your cyberspace, you post what you jolly well like in it.

Actually, you know, that's another thing about XH. He was far more concerned about other people knowing what was happening than about the fact our marriage was in serious trouble. He asked me out for a drink to talk about things, once, but when it came to the designated evening he backed down because he said I would use it to create a scene in public (mm, because that's such fun, isn't it?). He threw a massive strop when he rang my work and the colleague who answered appeared to be laughing, which of course meant that he was laughing AT HIM and indeed the whole office was laughing themselves sick about our divorce (because divorce is usually a cause of hilarity in the office, isn't it?). When I was still interested in saving what I perceived to be a marriage I said we really needed to go to Relate, but he said the first time I set foot in one of those places it was all over. (Once I decided it really was all over, of course, he thought counselling would be a good idea. But it wasn't. The counsellor was fat, you see, and had previously been divorced (although now happily married). No wonder she was totally biased in my favour. Her job was supposed to be to put people back together ffs! But she wouldn't do it! And she had a big bag of Minstrels in her handbag. Shame.)

omg i read through this thread yesterday with open jaw and scales falling from my yeyes. I thought my exh was asp but I also think he is NPD combo.

One of the many things which stuck out for me is that the dcs of an NPD will be in constant conflict - my dcs really fight alot.
To extreme in fact.

With my ds1 I can also see quite strong traits similar to his dad.

If anyone can explain why the dcs of NPD are in constant conflict I would be very grateful and also how you can break the cycle with your own dcs.

As I used to constantly say to exh - it's all about you.

I think the serious fighting and hostility among DCs stems from their insecurity. Which in turn comes from DCs' acute sensitivity to the fact that they are not really loved for themselves, and also from the N habit of playing favourites, making it clear there's a finite amount of 'love' to go around and making the children and spouse compete unconsciously for their affection. How could children be anything other than insecure in such an environment?

Now that you mention this, exH talked about his childhood to some extent (and everything he mentioned was told as some sort of funny incident, minimised) -- one of the things he said was that he and his brothers (three of them one after another with sisters and another brother at either end of the family, these three brothers were in the middle) used to have such raging physical and verbal fights that my exMIL used to send them to have cold showers. They fought a continuous war with each other for years, and ex and one particular brother never got on, even after they were 'adults'. Ex tried to score points against this particular brother by running to his mother and telling tales on the bro when he found a box of condoms under the brother's bed. FGS, they were both in their 20s. Ex was an extremely prissy prig about things like that though.

Mine are fighting less and less.

Ds and I watched wifeswap over the weekend, he wanted to, and as it turned out, it was a serendipitous event.

Both of the families used endless defining tactics....telling each other what they think and what they were feeling etc. Ds said.....that's what daddy does isn't it.

HALLELUJA!

He could see just how wrong it is. I may have to re assess my feelings on reality TV!!

He and his brothers, although they see very little of one another, fight terribly. The late drug addict brother was especially nasty and defining.

I think that that is why my h and I never socialised and why he doesn't like me having other human beings in my life. He might let the performing monkey routine slip.

I have a very naughty friend on facebook who is posting deliberately inflammatory remarks, that say nothing really. It is lots of fun to get back the control!!!!