What we've learned through a destructive HPD relationship

All...

I decided to start a new thread to consolidate little golden nuggets of information that we learned through our experiences with significant other insanity.

These can be helpful insights into our own characters, reasons we think (or know) we made decisions in relation to the flawed HPD individuals in our lives, or something someone has taught us about relationships (or we've realized ourselves).

I suggest we put them in bold for easy recognition.

Trust your instinct! My psychologist said a human being's instinct is a protective defense mechanism in all of us and it is there for a reason! Usually it is right!

Makes sense to me. If I had trusted my instinct my relationship would have been over in 2 mos w/out a lot of damage as opposed to 11mos and sigficant damage.

Ask yourself "Why did I make the decisions I did?" in relation to accepting the abuse from these creatures? Why did I not trust my own judgement?

Probably because of gaslighting or one is just not prepared for the insanity of a person's mind with HPD.

Why did you love him/her and think this person was your soulmate?

It was because an HPD has no true self and thus rips mine and everyone elses off that they get involved with. Essentially I was not loving my partner but an idealized version of myself that they threw back at me.

Why did I ignore the lying?

I was simply blinded by love and the lies seemed so miniscule as to not be alarming. If I were only paying more attention I would have seen that though the lies did not seem that harmful the amount of them. The adding up of them as it were was indeed a huge red flag that this was a horrible and destructive relationship!

chron6988 wrote:
Trust your instinct! My psychologist said a human being's instinct is a protective defense mechanism in all of us and it is there for a reason! Usually it is right!
.

Exactly!
My older brother always warned me about people, that some people will have a bad vibe or a good one. I felt a bad vibe about the HPD when I first hanged out with her, but ignored it.
I'll definitely go with my gut when I evaluate people.

That was one really big question we always have - why does a seemly normal person, and usually stickler for telling the truth, get together with an HPD and suddenly just start allowing them to lie??? My brother tried for a while, to tell his HPD wife to stop lying when she'd lie in public. But it seemed that she'd get so upset with him when he did this that it just became easier to not say anything I think that's why alot of times he just stays away from her in a social setting because he can't deal with hearing her lie and not being able to say anything.

We have become irritated with ourselves because when she first really started showing her HPD behavior, we all kind of just went along with it because we just thought "that's just how she is". But when her lies started affecting our family in not so good ways, it made things very bad. They make it hard though, because you don't always know that they are lies until after the fact!! And of course the fact that we all know how and HPD reacts when they are out on the spot for lying!!!! It's easier to just not have her in our lives

I myself could never be with someone that I know lied constantly - it would be like your whole life with them is a lie!!

I have learned to lower my tolerance level and raise my awareness level - which use to be the opposite with my ex HPD's. I would tolerate control issues, lies (or spinning), excuses, devaluing, and selfishness. Now...
when they try to control things, I do WHAT I want
when they lie, I call them on it
when they give excuses, I walk away
when they devalue, I devalue right back
when they are selfish, I don't give