The sad thing is, many HPD's refuse to believe there is anything wrong with them and will aggressively defend their ego against any perceived threat.

For example: After 7 years of bliss as far as I could tell, my HPD ex-wife.... (who enjoyed staying home with the kids and ignoring most of the real chores while I worked).... starts having frequent emotional breakdowns. One night she wakes me up at 4am because she's crying in the fetal position. I ask her what's wrong. She tells me "I hate my brain! I feel like I'm going crazy! I need help!" This of course scares the $hit out of me because I had never witnessed someone going bat$hit crazy like this before. I try to be as supportive as possible and suggest she see a therapist. A few days later the counselor suggests she start taking anti-depressants. Of course she doesn't like this idea at all. Shortly afterwards she opts to blame me instead.... "you're the one who should be on anti-depressants!" she says. Then a few days later she says "I did some soul searching on why I've been so unhappy, and it's you."

(Looking back on it, that was the exact moment I began riding the WTF bus. )

Anyway within a matter of days, she completely nukes our marriage. The lie factory goes into full production. She tells everyone she knows that she's afraid of me. She then takes our children out of our house, moves to a different county, and files for divorce.....

Her list of lies was absolutely mind-boggling to me and my family (147 by my count). She wanted to make sure everyone in her fan club would side with her, so she could live out the rest of her life knowing that everyone else believed she was justified in making such a rash decision. I tried getting custody of my children but her smear campaign was just too much. Even though a PhD shrink reported she had a marked elevation on the histrionic scale (I paid for the evals on both of us), the custody evaluation FOC knothead felt bad for her and labeled me as abusive and controlling based on zero evidence whatsoever. The judge actually threatened me to give up my rights to my children or else get left with supervised visitation with my kids.... I was scared and completely devastated by the whole mess. It was hell on earth.

It took me a very long time to recover, but it definitely taught me some very important life lessons. There are delusional people everywhere, and like I said above, just because other people have negative opinions of me doesn't mean I have to accept them as truth. I think people like my ex-wife get to enjoy the benefits of learning this same lesson way before everybody else, but in their case it's akin to a completely oblivious driver going the wrong way on the interstate and calling 911 to complain about all the other drivers.