Another 'Could my wife have HPD?' for those who might know.

Hi, first post here, and please excuse the wall'o'text. Hopefully it's all relatively relevant. As my horribly cliched username indicates, once upon a time when my wife and I met I was the 'white knight' who heard her call for help and carried her out of her horrible existence (home life with her clinically insane mother, history of all flavours of abuse including eating disorders and self-abuse) and gave her what I hoped would be a happy, stable life. Not so much, I'm feeling tattered now to say the least.

For a while things were good, but a few months after she moved in with me, I caught her having an online relationship with someone she met on an MMORPG. She denied it, attempted to lie away the evidence even though it was pretty obvious what was going on, started being secretive and hiding her online conversations from me. Eventually I applied enough pressure (or more likely he got a real girlfriend) and she dropped it. That was the start.

The next one was a psychotic workmate of hers who believed the two of them were 'destined' to be together. She invited him over at every opportunity, especially on work nights when I would have to leave for work in the morning and they would be alone the next day. She would then spend the rest of the day sending me messages about how creepily he was behaving and how she wasn't sure she was safe alone with him. Within a couple of days she'd seemingly have forgotten the last time and would be insisting that we invite him over again. Our relationship started fracturing due to the strain of putting up with this guy, and eventually I got a phone call from her saying she was at his house, she'd felt she needed a friend and so she'd gone to him. Unsurprisingly he'd taken that as her wanting to move in with her, and she acted shocked and surprised that her 'true friend' actually wanted to have sex with her. As far as I know they didn't (and as far as I know she's never cheated on me, although she's made herself ample opportunity and all I have to go on is my trust of her and her vehement insistence that she's never cheated on me. She seems to need emotional support more than physical, at any rate).

Since then she's had other male 'admirers' along the same pattern. They confess their love and she immediately promotes them to her 'best friend'. From that point on they're in our lives constantly, they spend time at our house while I'm at work, she'll tell me stories about how they were hitting on her last time but she's sure they understand now that she's just their friend. When they're not at our house she'll spend all evening while I'm home and, as far as I can tell, all day when she gets the chance talking to them online. When I start pushing her to distance herself from her current 'friend' she will start being evasive, leading into outright deception and lying about whether she's been talking to them or when they're coming over. She's a good liar face-to-face but she's not very good at keeping out inconsistencies, and she tends to assume that I never talk to her friends, so she's tripped herself up a fair few times. When the lies break down my trust in her sufficiently for me to take it up with her, she claims that it's me that has trust issues, and puts the onus on me to 'deal with my issues' or she'll leave.

She's incredibly inconsistent with her arguments, often she'll make some grandiose claim and then when I reword it and feed it back to her with a "so you mean ..." she'll say "what, do you think I'm insane?" and then reiterate her original claim in different words. She'll imply with a statement that she's well aware of having been deceptive in the past, but then ten seconds later say she's never been anything less than completely honest with me. If I manage to trap her in her own words and force her to see that she's being inconsistent, she'll sit silent or play with the cat for several minutes and then continue as if she didn't hear my last couple of lines, you can almost see the mental reboot happening as she revises her own personal reality yet again.

Other descriptions on this site sound very familiar. She's a walking drama magnet, life is never quiet for even a single week without some emergency or drama breaking out. She will be caring and attentive when we're alone together but the moment we have company it's like I've turned invisible, nothing I can say or do will let me break into the conversation. If one of my friends ask me a question, even one on a topic that I'm well versed in and that she knows nothing about, she'll cut me off after two words and try to answer the question herself. She has an insane temper that she will use to control people, I've lost touch with a lot of friends (at least 10 off the top of my head) who just don't want to be around her. She's always enjoyed dressing provocatively, getting wolf whistles from cars and advances from randoms in the street; we've argued several times in the past about her dressing up like a street walker when she leaves the house, if I complain she turns it back on me saying that I'm jealous and possessive. Nothing is ever her fault, she always finds a way to blame everything on someone else (usually me). We've argued extensively over the last two months and when I go back over her side of the argument, it's comprised entirely of re-wordings of either 'me too, only more so', or 'no, YOU'. We're seeing a counsellor, we've had one individual session each (and she HATES counselling) and one joint session where she basically sat in the corner and said "no, you're wrong" every time I opened my mouth, but didn't add anything to the discussion beyond "if you don't trust me we can't have a relationship" and, flying in the face of the evidence, "I've given you no reason not to trust me".

I've had a lot of times when I really started to doubt myself, but luckily my mates have seen a lot of this going on (especially one who's our housemate and has seen the whole thing close up for months at a time) and they're constantly telling me that it's not all in my head. I'm also reticent to just declare that she has HPD because it seems all to easy to just put her in a nice safe box with "yes, dear, there's really something wrong with you" written on it. It's just that virtually every account I've read on this forum from HPD sufferers is so incredibly familiar. It's like she has two people trapped inside of her, the beautiful young woman I married and the manipulative slutty bitch who just wants to screw with my head and break as many hearts as she can (I truly pity the guys she's dragged into the mess, they're generally unstable to start with and the end up pretty f**ked up by the time she's done with them). How do I get her to seek help and how can I support her if she does so? Is there any chance of her working through these issues and being able to save our relationship? When she wants to be, she can be the sweetest, most genuinely caring person I know.

Sure sounds like HPD to me.

Well, I just got off the phone to her, she called wanting to get my assurance that I was committed to working things through (she starts her first new job in months on Monday, we have our counselling session on Monday, she sees her two options as quitting the job or skipping the session. Isn't even willing to mention to her new employer that an extra half hour on lunch break would potentially help heal her marriage). I told her that first, she'd have to agree to ditch any friend who made serious attempts to push his way into our lives. I know that still leaves us with her fan club but if they get the boot once they get too friendly I think I can handle that. The second part was that in order for us to continue, she would have to get therapy. That's when she blew a fuse, claimed that there was nothing at all wrong with her and how dare I? I stood my ground, told her that I felt she needed it, that her behaviour isn't new to our current relationship stress, and that therapy would remain a condition of our continued relationship. She threw some hysterics and we ended the conversation.

How do I get her to accept that she needs help? Whether or not she actually has HPD, I know she has a lot of deep seated buried trauma that she needs help to work through. That's the only reason I can see to be so vehement about not getting counselling; if you're not suppressing anything major, a therapist can't 'do' anything to you.

It seems like she's very happy to talk in grandiose, generic terms about her compromises and sacrifices, but the moment anything specific is actually *asked* of her she throws a screaming blue fit. She's also very fond of appeal-to-authority arguments - "I told all my friends what you said and they think you're f**king insane and wrong" (God knows what she's told them about what's happening). Anything specific regarding how her behaviour needs to change is first accepted with "oh that's totally reasonable", then subsequently rejected with "how dare you ask me that?!"

This forum doesn't quite seem to be the lively place it once was, judging by posting dates. Is there another one somewhere? Or have most of the posters here simply managed to resolve their problems and move on?

Many have moved on.

TK......... You cannot fix her.

Psychciatry cannot fix her.


It is her personality.


She will not change...........


Mine is typical. She has seduced half the guys in the world now.out of her need for new "love".


They are 4 year olds, with grown up bodies.


and semi grown up social skils...........

but on the inside they are stupid, selfish, bratty children.

I fear that you may be right (if I didn't I wouldn't have posted my spiel in the first place) but I'm still hopeful (or maybe in denial). It'll all come down to whether she is willing to accept therapy in order to keep her relationship with me. I've read that psychotherapy can help substantially, and if she will commit to improving the situation I can cope in the meantime. I'm just unwilling to accept this sort of behaviour from my life partner.

I know I can't fix her, if I could we'd be happily together. I know therapy can't fix her. What I hope is that therapy can show her how to fix herself, if she wants badly enough to do so. I have to hold out that hope for now, maybe it's me being co-dependant but I still feel responsible for her wellbeing and I feel very protective towards her. I don't want her to suffer, even if she's bringing it on herself. Like your analogy of the 4-year-old in a grown up body - if you see a small child about to fall off a cliff, you have to try to save them.

I've set my boundaries, though. If she's not willing to undergo therapy and work on first acknowledging her problem, and then recovering from it, I'm not going to let myself to stay in the world of pain that being her partner can be.

Well, I've just spent an hour talking it through with her online. She refuses to get counselling because she says it's pointless, and she has no baggage and no issues to work through, and it's a waste of time and money, and it's pointless, and she has no baggage and no issues. Flat out denial, with no solid reasons but a boatload of force behind the refusal. By the looks of things she's (currently) willing to lose the relationship in order to avoid counselling, which indicates to me just how much she needs it in the first place. When I mentioned this to her she took 5 to think about it then came back with "You are delusional." I guess we'll see how she feels after a couple of weeks or months apart.

It's kind of scary realising how OK I am with it. I want her back, the her that I was with when we first got together, but I don't want to be with who she's become. If she's really willing to put in the effort to save the relationship (and match some actions with her words "I've been trying so damn hard" every time I say I've been trying hard) then I will be with her every step of the way, but if she isn't then I can't in all good conscience stay with her. I'm not going to torture myself trying to live with the way she currently acts.

If she's really willing to put in the effort to save the relationship (and match some actions with her words "I've been trying so damn hard" every time I say I've been trying hard) then I will be with her every step of the way, but if she isn't then I can't in all good conscience stay with her. I'm not going to torture myself trying to live with the way she currently acts.

Be very careful if she accepts your support in her "treatment". This is just another way HPD's snare us. When they sense that we may end it all with them, they resort to complying with our suggestions. But the very second they feel secure enough that we're in their grasp again, the cycle starts over. It's a terrible roller coaster ride. My final question to myself a few months ago was "How many times are you going to go around this mountain?".

At the present I'm strategically planning my complete separation and departure from this abusive psycho that not only did I marry, but also had two children from him.

Good Luck!

Oh, I don't think there'll be too much trouble with her accepting treatment as a means to string me along. Also, the more I look at it, I'm not convinced she has HPD (although she definitely has some strong histrionic traits, then again many people do).

She came home yesterday, we talked through how we felt we could resolve issues. We discussed the need for boundaries, how to set them, and what action to take when a boundary is crossed (her friend propositions her, for example) and seemed to agree. Then a big fight over my suggestion that just maaaaybe (based on an account of a time her first boyfriend was crazy jealous of a 'very good friend' who she later dated) these issues weren't brand new to our relationship, which she hotly denied and lambasted me for even suggesting. An hour or so later she came over wanting to talk it through, we ended up moving rapidly from "here's a hug, are you OK?" to the first good bedroom action we've seen for months (I can see you all going 'woah, I did NOT see that coming') followed by her declaration that everything was all OK again and that we had no more relationship problems.

We kept our appointment for couples counselling today and apparently the therapist suggested that her rocky relationship with her psychotic mother might be playing a part in our troubles. She turned this into "he said it's all my fault" and now I'll be surprised (pleasantly) if she's even willing to come to our next session. I hope she does, as the only real alternative now is long-term separation.

Good luck with your ex! And to answer your final question to yourself, "Never again."

After we signed seperation papers.............mine ripped my clothes off............and we uh.you know..........

In fact she was real nice whenever she thought I might leave her...............

Until the day I packed up............


Then it was all out war.........

My experience is the same: she'll be on her VERY best behavior as long as you are threatening to leave. they are especially well behaved in counseling -- in fact I think they love it (it's an audience!) Check out the below link on the behavior of a histrionic in counseling.

What really stands out to me in your description is that she is still blaming you for everything, even while on her best behavior in counseling. The HPD can not truly take responsibility for their behavior- everything is something that is happening TO THEM. Also her total unwillingness to do anything specific, that is very familiar to me as well. I once made a list for mine of what he'd need to do to stay, which was a total mistake.


http://books.google.com/books?id=N4SSNA ... #PPA137,M1