Really Struggling right now!

I am in need of a lot of support. My relationship lasted two years and now broken up for two months.

You name it and it happened during our rollercoaster of a relationship. I was married for 11 years at the time, two young children. She was married and we just started flirting through work. One thing led to another and she divorced her husband without blinking and I divorced my sweet wife and went through torment from all the guilt.

She didn't allow me to mourn the loss of my marriage and family because she didn't seem to care about her marriage. She did a lot of HPD overall-controlling, manipulative, mind scrambling behaviors throughout the relationship and about once a month I would get $#%^ faced drunk and go into a rage because it would get so built up in me. "I'm not trying to control you, I just want you to be the best version of yourself." I heard this so many times. But back to the rages, they got bad, always worse with each occurrence, including threats of suicide and guns involved. This never happened once in my marriage, not even close. My ex-hpd would never take responsibility for making me feel the way I did and couldn't see why I went into rage mode like I did.....even when I gave her the timeline of the things she did to screw with my mind.

Screwing with my mind, that's what really has me down in the dumps. Before her, I was a confident, driven professional. Now, I have zero confidence and treat my work poorly. She made me question myself so much that I down even know which way is up. She was so methodical about twisting stories up and locking away statements I said 10 months ago and placing them in her vault and then using them against me with her own twist of what I allegedly said. She is a master manipulator and I saw her do it with other people.

She was so methodical with her plans, she wrecked my life and now I am struggling to pick the pieces up. Some days are just too hard. Oh and how gorgeous she is. Blonde, beautiful body, very good in bed, brought excitement to my life like I never had but 1,000 times more chaos. So vivid with our future plans, such a groomer, I am a mess. Please help

Hey crbynum23,

I moved your post to a more appropriate forum, but as your post was already approved in the HPD forum left a link behind, so for anyone with HPD, if my reply triggers you, suggest skipping this thread...

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So here is what I wanted to communicate to you, and I hope it helps.

You are not crazy. What you experienced really happened as you recall it. Your self-esteem really was meticulously picked apart.

It appears you eventually you started fighting back in spurts, but odds are you withheld the full onslaught of what you really wanted to say. I saw at the end of your post you are still praising her, her looks, sex, you woke up in life, and so on. Odds are you a decent human being who understands the value of treating others as you wished to be treated.

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So most of the posters on the HPD forum are people struggling with HPD, who are self-aware, and what I am about to write does not apply to them...

Some people only care about themselves. That is it. That is their entire world. Nobody else exists but me, myself, and I. The people closest to them get picked apart the way some can dissect a frog and feel nothing. It really sounds like you got involved with someone who thinks that way. There is only one solution, and I know this won't be an easy choice, to get out. To stop. To stop fighting her personality. To choose to take care of you.

Thank you for your response Xdude. I am at such a loss with my emotions. Fortunately, I have a lot of support from my family and even ex-wife. She has been an angel, she has stuck with me even through me leaving her for someone new, prettier, and younger.

You are also right, I still want to be with her, I would take her back in a heartbeat even though I know I shouldn't in any way. She has already demonized me to others and is working on smearing me I believe. I have a good heart and care greatly. I feel duped, conned, just like I am in a bad nightmare. I am in counseling and I see this is going to take a long time. I hate that my mind is so scrambled and self confidence is so low that I contemplate taking my life daily. Those close to me tell me I am a completely different person now. I am down 20 pounds. I am a complete mess. Used to be the best father and now can barely get myself off the couch to feed my kids. It's amazing how a person can affect you. I saw this and thought I would share as it is so accurate in my case:

The typical histrionic client:
will usually engage in interpersonal relationships that contain some “reward” for
involvement. The reward is usually the reinforcement of their negative beliefs
about themselves. Thus, they will choose relationships where they can use
emotional demonstrations, jealousy, charm and seduction as the means of pulling
individuals in. After they pull them in, they typically push them away.

100 views and 1 reply of support

Unless someone has been through what you've been through, they aren't going to relate, and even if they have, may not know what to write in reply.

Good to read you are in counseling. You are going to need that help to recover. You will recover, but it takes time.

For whatever it's worth, the pattern you have gone through is not specific to HPD. People in relationships with other cluster B personality types often go through a similar pattern of -

a.) It starts with extreme idealization, a huge self-esteem boost.

b.) Then the devaluation begins, slowly at first. Odds are you were very careful to avoid hurting her self-esteem, and odds are it wasn't even entirely clear she was picking at yours, at first. Could just be something she said was just a joke, don't take it so seriously, or some situation where she put you second to appease someone else, a situation that felt wrong, but was not clearly abusive.

c.) Then the devaluation ramps up, but again, odds are you were careful to avoid hurting her. You may have also not been entirely honest, and held back much, but in this pattern, we think we are doing what is for the best by holding back. We reason that the relationship matters more than being right, so why say everything we are really thinking, until it comes out in a big blow out.

d.) At this point it is unclear who the abusive one is, but yes she really did test you, push you, until you turned into that guy you never wanted to be. Problem is now guilt has set in, so you are questioning what really happened?

e.) By the end of it, the problem is you are so depressed you don't have the strength to just leave, and maybe you isolated yourself too, so leaving means feeling alone, a feeling that is about as awful as staying and putting up with another round. Besides, you probably do recall some very good times, and just maybe there is another round of good times to be had?

It's hard to get out and stop the merry-go-round, even if intellectually you know you must.

Here is the good news. You have taken the first steps to breaking the pattern. You now have an opportunity to learn more about yourself then you probably ever have before (what attracted you to this relationship, why you hung in there, why you needed this to happen even though it hurts like hell, and more).

Keep writing as you need.

Thank you for responding Xdude.

It's really hard to pinpoint how she would pick at my self-esteem, it was multifaceted. She would do a lot of game playing with pulling in and pushing away. She would tell me the most vivid loving things with marriage, kids, family, how I make her feel like no one else has. Then turn around and play some game to see how I would respond like not calling me the next morning to see if I would first. Then she was a master at twisting the things I would say and get the wrong meaning, or recall old conversations to the exact sentence and add in a couple false things and try to make me sounds like I was this asshole. I would constantly tell her, there is no way I said that and she would describe the day, the month, the setting, and I started feeling like I was going crazy and what if I was saying these harsh comments, etc. She made me question myself like no other.

I may as well give you a nutshell of our last blow up, leading to our break up and we haven't talked in a month now as I'll explain more.

The weekend before St. Patrick's Day I discovered on her phone that she had planned this trip with her friend to go partying in the big city (We live in a small town 4 hours away from here). She's not a big drinker but I do see that she already had a plan to purchase $10 all you can drink bracelets and they went back and forth how excited they were. Of course, I confront her and she of course said she was about to tell me and was waiting to tell me in person (lie). I let her know it was upsetting that I find out her plans this way. Then Thursday rolls around and she texts me at work she needs to talk to me. I let her know I can't talk as I am in an important meeting and to just text me. She of course builds up the suspense and I tell her that she is making my anxiety go up at this point. She proceeds to tell me she had just gotten a call about a job she really wanted and the only one she applied for in the same big city. After I get out of the meeting I call her and we talk. I even suggest she tour the facility. Keep in mind she said she applied to this job.

Friday rolls around, she goes to the big city with her two friends (in my guestimate they are HPD as well) also sleep around, attention seekers, beautiful, you name it. I don't trust them. Anyway, my anxiety is up, I have the day off and I'm thinking to myself- she's 27 ( 9 years younger than me), not married, no kids, hates her job, wait a minute, she's going over there to test out the big city lifestyle, this was all planned! By the way, I never had near the amount of paranoia I have now until I met her. So she texts me how the "interview" went and it's nothing but positives, no negatives. I call her and she is just acting kind of strange, not really reassuring me and keeps saying let's talk about it when I get back home after the weekend. I let her know that isn't really fair because she is essentially telling me-let me have fun and you stay home and worry. She has to go, we hang up. We talk that night and she is still acting funny and finally tells me her anxiety is up to because she doesn't know what decision to make. I'm freaking out by now because I have very little emotional control anymore in the last 6 months and it's up with me saying ###$ this $#%^ or something and hanging up. I call her 10 minutes later and she has her ringer off, turns it off the rest of the night. I turn mine off as I learned one-upmanship from her awhile ago.

I go to bed, wake up to numerous texts and vm's from her. It's St. Patrick's Day and I can hear in her messages she already sounds tipsy, it's like 11 AM. I also had this tablet of hers and kept track of her cell phone photos backing up on her drive and see all these posing pictures with her and her friends and of course guys in the background in a house. I never saw any indication she is cheating but my anxiety is sky high from everything. I finally call her and ya, she is tipsy, I tell her I am not talking to her in this state and hang up. I then lose my $#%^, call her and let her know I'm going to get drunk (one-upmanship) and proceed to get $#%^ faced drunk. Basically got in an argument with her brother later that night, sent crazy texts, etc., it was one of my rages she puts me in monthly.

She texts my family to intervene, they do the next day, they tell me to never contact her again and text her the same. They pack up all her $#%^ in my house and drop it off at hers. Keep in mind I'm 36 and they are freaked out by what I have turned into in this relationship. She calls me the next morning seeming to want to work on things, we argue because she fails to see the cause and affect.

Since then, I found out that job was not even an interview, they saw her resume on Indeed, were interested, and later had her fill out an application for the actual job, and set up an actual interview two weeks later. I met her at her work twice after this because she blocked my number. She said she did this because she promised my family. She then proceeds to tell me she never intended to move to the big city or take the job that she just wanted to see how I reacted to the whole situation and I failed miserably. Anyway, this is one example of many. She was such a game player. My goodness, according to her, she couldn't go anywhere without some guy telling her how beautiful she is. Everyone I talked to assure me that she made these up to make me jealous. Which I agree, mind games. Mind ###$! I literally feel like my brain is completely in pieces. It's amazing how addicted to her I still am!!! She still consumes me two months later, NC, and she has probably moved completely on from me. We were very close, my children love her, she was practically living with me for two years. This is all a bad dream.

This is also one of the better articles I have read that accurately describes she and I. I definitely have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies and she is of course has HPD.

http://antrodichirone.com/index.php/en/ ... p-balance/

crbynum23 wrote:Thank you for responding Xdude.

It's really hard to pinpoint how she would pick at my self-esteem, it was multifaceted.... This is all a bad dream.

I quoted your first point and last because...

I know, you are still at a point of trying to figure out all the ways she did this or that, and keeps doing this or that, while what you need to do is to put aside her wants/needs, because it is part of healing, we all (NONS) go through that is what happened and trying to figure it out, and no doubt your memory is very good. She is not questioning her part though. But eventually you will reach the point of you don't need to dissect her dissection either. What mattered is she was trying to dissect you, and she did, and the specifics don't matter.

What matters is she dissected you to empower herself, and she doesn't care about you, or anyone else but her. And you loved her, and still do.

It is time though to embrace you. To put you first, and think about nobody else. I know that sounds imbalanced, and it is, but it is to regain balance in your life, an imbalance that occurs because you put someone else first and you a distant second. Balance is in the middle and you need to find your balance where you matter equally to others. Then you won't fall for this pattern again, and you will know you.

aka you might piss others off, and she would have never gotten with you if you had this balance, but hopefully you also now see, it was a mistake to placate her to begin with.

The short version...

Nothing she wants or needs matters more than what you wanted or need. Absolutely nothing. Her human experience does not matter more than yours and her human experience is not more special than yours, she does not need special protection while she abused you and picked apart your self-esteem, she was just being cruel to you for her own benefit.

Thank you Xdude, that's the ironic thing about all of this. I was her boss and she said what attracted her to me was that I was so confident, stable, treated my employees with respect, and was a good family man. She ironically, tore apart each one of those characteristics and mowed them down, helped to create a worse version of me and caused me to lose my identity completely.

She has very few stability factors right now. Quit her job in order to move without another job lined up, will be couch surfing for the time being, an unsupportive unhealthy family, two unhealthy friends but also clings to male friends because of HPD (she drives away normal girls because of her false confidence and seductiveness), and has no money. On the contrary, I actually have all of those stability factors including two young kids, and for some reason am only focusing on the one thing I don't have and that's her. I hate to admit but I was/am more addicted to the sex because it was so intense. I miss that more than her. I have to get out of the self harm ideation, I'm my own worst critic and definitely regret the drunken tirades and the harsh words and actions. But she does forget the cause to the affect and I do at times too. As mentioned before, in 13 years of marriage I never did this, not even once. My wife never broke me down or tore me apart. What a huge mistake I made