Telling the HPD's Friends and Family

"Should I tell my ex's friends /family / current girlfriend about HPD?"

I've seen this question from at least 3-4 different posters in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I'd open up a new thread and try to address the question in more detail.

The biggest concern for you as you exit (or consider exiting) a relationship with an HPD is protecting your emotional health. Contacting the HPD's friends and family to inform them of the disorder is going to have several destructive results. First, it's going to stir up a lot of drama within the family. At best, the family is going to protect their little girl / boy; it's a response the HPD has conditioned in them for years. At worst, the family is going to respond with additional threats and drama of their own - and you'll unfortunately get a really clear picture of where the disorder came from.

Either way, the HPD him/herself is going to find out you contacted the family and will come back at you with increased drama... at a time when you are going to be extra vulnerable to it. If you were trying to maintain 'no contact' when you told the family, it is going to read as contact to the HPD and set you back significantly in your efforts to disconnect. Also, the HPD may use the opportunity to accuse you of stalking behaviors and gain a legal advantage.

You also need to consider why you want to inform the family so much. It's really common to HPD victims to want to be a "fixer" or "rescuer". The HPD is out of your life and I think it's pretty normal to want a new person to focus on, to fix and take care of. Instead of shifting your focus to the family or the new gf or whatever, this is a good time to shift some focus to yourself and work on any codependent tendencies you may have.

I think another reason for the desire to tell the HPD's friends/family is the desire to justify your reasons for leaving. You don't want to be the monster that deserted the poor sweet lil HPD. And there's going to be a lot of guilt tripping going on making you feel just exactly like a monster. The fix for that, however, is NOT to try to shift blame back on your ex for their behavior. Fair or not, they're always going to beat you at that game. Better to focus on what can make you feel more confident and less guilt-ridden about your decision. Once you feel strong about it yourself, I think you'll have less of a need to justify your position to other people -- who can never really understand what you've been through anyway.

And that's where this board comes in. Because we do understand what you've been through.

c

I agree with everything Caro says - it is solid advice (thanks Caro!).

I 'left' the board a couple of months back, but in the last 2 weeks have been back as my ex visited to wind up our 'affairs' - home, bank accounts etc. It made me realise how much progress I made. Six months ago I was oscillating between telling her family (who she is now with) about HPD - in order both to help her and to explain what happened so they would not see me as the bad guy - and e-mailing them all the secrets of her life I had found to expose her 'good girl' act and make her feel as miserable as me.

I am glad I did neither. There was enough pain between us both without adding in her mom, brother etc. Their opinions of me don't really matter, and to be honest if she needs their support then that is their issue. It's not mine any more.

Two days ago I called her home and spoke to her mom as she had left some things and I wanted to ask what to do with them. I talked briefly to her mom, and was glad that I had not done anything to make an 80 year old woman's life any harder. She has enough with her 43 year old daughter to 'look after'.

So, don't do it! You will heal quicker, reduce the amount of misery in the world and realise (in a while) you were a better person for not having given in to despair/dark thoughts.

It does get better. Just give it time.

I think I got lucky with my HPD mom and friends. My mom's family has a history of mental disorders (her older sister has schizophrenia, her aunts/uncles have NPD and bipolar). I initially didn't bring it up to my family at all, save to say that we weren't really talking anymore. Then I started asking my aunt and uncle (mom's brother) for "their side of the story" on issues that they had been demonized for by my mom for a long time. When I heard their side of the story, and combined it with my own experiences with her (she'd demonized me for a lot of the same things once I stopped talking to her), that was when I started realizing that it wasn't just me that noticed she had a PD. After I cut contact with her at new years, she wrote a series of emails to my aunt basically asking for their support in pressuring me to start talking to her again. When my aunt said, "it's not my business", mom pulled her drama and accused my aunt of not being a good friend or family member and making inferences to lies that me and my husband told my mom. (My mom lied, not me.) She tried to stir stuff up because she assumed I'd told my aunt and uncle the whole story about why I wasn't talking to her anymore. Because of that behavior, I was kind of forced to be more open about why I had cut contact (telling them that the behavior she exhibited toward my aunt was part of the reason why), in order to tell them what she was lying about, what she had lied about in the past, and setting the record straight. They told me that they'd known for awhile that she was "full of $#%^" but that they'd just kind of smiled and nodded in the past when she'd tell her stories and try to be the center of attention. My aunt said, "I thought you were brainwashed, but thank god that you see through it too."

So I was lucky in that I could talk to my/her family about it and they had already caught on. And a few of her friends (one of whom was like a mom to me through the years, but who disappeared from my life for about ten years) have told me the same thing. The "second mom" came right out and said that the reason she left was because she couldn't take my mom's manipulations and histrionics anymore. My mom had flipped the story for years to make it seem like the reason she didn't want to be around was that she couldn't handle the truth, couldn't face reality, and wanted to live in a world where she could just take vicodin and drink herself into a stupor with an abusive man. I believed it for years until the veil of my mom's manipulations got lifted, and then I started realizing that I couldn't believe anything my mom said to me.

the most jarring thing to me was that after my "second mom" told me that she'd left because of my mom, I started wondering if my dad did the same thing. They got divorced when I was 7 and he never really spent a lot of time with me. Mom always had this elaborate story that he didn't want children and couldn't deal with them and that when I got older, maybe he'd want a relationship with me. Now I wonder if that was the truth, or if it was HER he didn't want to be around, or maybe a combination of the two. All I know is, I lived with my mom until I was 26 (off and on), and two months after I went away to grad school, my dad really started reaching out to me (emails, christmas present, birthday present). He died two months later. I initially thought it was like a transcendent experience where he knew on a higher level that he was going to die and was reaching out beforehand. Now, I wonder if it was that he knew I wasn't under my mom's thumb anymore and was reaching out to see if he could have a relationship with me without her. Of course, I'll never really know, and I think that'll haunt me forever.

So I guess you CAN talk to friends and family about the crazy, if you get lucky. Thankfully my family (or some of them) already knew beforehand, so they were willing to accept my decision with open arms. (They still want me to work it out with her, but they understand).

Thanks Taylorpie, sometimes I forget that some of us have HPDs within the family... so that makes your situation a little different. I'm really glad your aunt and others were so supportive of you. I also think it was really good how your aunt maintained firm boundaries on what she was not going to get involved in. Other than that, some of my same comments apply on not trying to get the family involved in "fixing" the HPD, etc. -- c

Oh absolutely. In particular, this part is true for me:

caro81VA wrote:I think another reason for the desire to tell the HPD's friends/family is the desire to justify your reasons for leaving. You don't want to be the monster that deserted the poor sweet lil HPD. And there's going to be a lot of guilt tripping going on making you feel just exactly like a monster. The fix for that, however, is NOT to try to shift blame back on your ex for their behavior. Fair or not, they're always going to beat you at that game. Better to focus on what can make you feel more confident and less guilt-ridden about your decision. Once you feel strong about it yourself, I think you'll have less of a need to justify your position to other people -- who can never really understand what you've been through anyway.

I agree with everybody, I started my own thread with this very question about 'telling the parents', I was full of good intentions, trying to help etc etc - but I have come to the conclusion it would be a very bad idea. It really is none of my business and can only make things worse. I did involve my X's friend in a small way and tried to explain the HPD thing to her, which I now very much regret. It cut no ice or made a hoot of difference. So I would say - don't even think about it.

I agree with Caro on what she says. However, I think there is a more deep and fundamental issue that partners/ex-partners of any disordered individual need to ask themselves -

What is the normal's real need in trying to tell the HPD's friends and family?

On the surface, it does seem that normals want to help the HPD (fixer/rescuer) or they themselves don't want to be portrayed as a monster.

But if the normal really delves deeper into himself (or herself), he will realize that the real deep need is the need to be in control - control of a situation he had until the relationship started to break up. The need to be in control is at the root of both dependency and co-dependency. This is a very familiar situation for both PDs as well as normals who get into relationships with PDs. And it is this familiar situation that the normal is trying to keep a hold on, even when the relationship is over. It is also a denial mechanism of the reality - the reality of failure, loss or even guilt - all of which seem to be about the current situation, but actually stems from the normal's childhood template of responding to such a situation of being in control.

In this state, the normal has "temporarily" regressed to his childhood narcissistic state, is now in denial of reality and has adopted a "false" mask to avoid the pain of loss, failure, grief or guilt. It is this false mask that is now disguising the need for control as "trying to help" or "trying to look good" (not a monster) and all other excuses. This is a temporary state and the normal will usually be able to come back to his adult mode, once he accepts reality and faces the loss, failure, grief or guilt.

It is important, however, not to get stuck in this state, because unless a normal accepts the reality of this loss, it can drag on for years. To get out of this state the normal needs to:

1. Start facing the reality of the loss in the current PD relationship
2. Start delving deeper into his own unmet needs from childhood, face them and understand why he was pre-disposed to a relationship with a PD and start to resolve those unmet needs
3. Take time off to realistically evaluate his own self and his needs from life and relationships and prepare for the future, so that he can invest in relationships that are "proper" for him and will meet his adult needs

The important thing to realize is that when you want to help someone, you need to understand your primary motive. It is perfectly fine for Scarlett to want to help her sister or TK to help his wife, since its in their own best interests as well.

However, if you are out of your relationship, and your PD partner wants to have nothing to do with you, you need to question your motive of wanting to help that person - why are you imposing your help on that person and what is your primary motive?

Excellent post newtohpd. I think part of the desire to fix or rescue the HP SO is as means of avoiding one's own feelings of rejection, taking responsibility for your part in the relationship. It's much easier to externalise and blame everything on the other person, particularly if they apparently have a PD. I suppose it's like the denial stage of grief where it's easier to be angry than to accept the loss. Some people seem to get stuck there for an awfully long time.