Can an HPD be unattractive?

I think it is funny we are programmed as humans to find the best
person we can to have a child with. There Health attractiveness
is a large part of this. Imagine bringing up a child with a HPD is this
going to give a child the best chance ? I doubt it.
Would we be content with the HPD person long term? no.
Our instincts however are hardwired to want these people.
We get emotionally attached.
I still love my HPD. I know it is wrong. I know they are no good.
Emotions are seprate from common sense logic and reason.
We can control behaviour but never emotions. Both are linked
however.

Musician924 wrote:Upon first meeting i would describe her as appearing wholesome and a picture of physical and mental health!. But after a relatively short time, she becomes imposing, ambiguous, unreliable and sly, the truth of her "self" comes out making her far less attractive (which is sad because she does have many qualities)!. I believe this to be the same in her relationship with men and or women.

My HPD is not unreliable. She sucks at relationships, but she's almost always more than willing to do favors for her friends. She tries really hard to be liked.

She has one best friend, and most of her other friends all seem to be aquaintences. She is very popular. Other than the few women that warned me to not persue her, everyone thought she was the sweetest woman in the world. Heck, she's even won over 2 of the women that warned me and turned them against me! She now has them believing that I'M the devil!

She is viewed as the poor little attractive girl who wants love more than anything but keeps running into jerks. Her current friendships are with "vicitimized" women who constantly remind her of how awful men are. I think she does this in order to reassure herself that it's the men that are bad and not her.

You can control your emotions, when you get good at it you will have 'self-mastery'.

Controling emotions for self-mastery, as I imagine you suggest, Digital, requires suppressing them, choking them.

To gain freedom, from them and their conditioning, however, it's necessary to fully know them (which does NOT mean to react on them) - to RELAX, ALLOW, and OBSERVE.

It is possible to control my emotions. I am being taught through my experience in Alanon and the 12 steps THIS time, that i can choose how i react. This has given me enormous freedom and emotional maturity in all areas. It gave me freedom WHILE living with the NPD. It gives me freedom not to drag my emotional problems into my job with me, which has been a problem in my past. But, it's resolving itself in time with practice and awareness.

I am not certain that it's so much suppression of the array of emotions for the NPD, mindful, as it is that they haven't developed them to their fullest, and therefore don't experience them as deeply as some of us. With exception to anger. This is what our therapist taught us about NPD in reconciliaton therapy.

I think it IS easier for the NPD to have mastery over certain emotions than we might, as they don't experience them as fully as we might. On the other hand, they have difficulty with self reporting, so i wonders if they can truly assess that without the aid of a partner to reflect back to them (and then only if they are open to feedback! ) and can report success in relationships of emotional mastery. At the same time, the 'benefit' of not experiencing the emotions as deeply as some of us might, is then snared by the problem of not having complete emotional development...it goes round and round and makes my heady spin!

Our experiences and paths may have been quite different, but I believe we're still saying quite the same thing, Jo..

I think the key is the distinction between the emotion and the reaction to it.

The insight meditation which I practice (yes, based on 2500-year old Buddhist teaching) teaches that the body is, more often than not, the origin of the emotions. Alexander Lowan (Narcissism..) bases his therapy on the same premise.

By the time our mind gets around it (the emotion), it's already weaving the habitual stories, justifications around it, feeding it with concepts and 'selfing'.
If we can let it develop as a sensation, in the body, heart, chest, without adding our conditioned thought processes to it, we let it evolve, without reacting to it, through our words or actions, sure, but even limiting our mental reactions to it!

I've experienced this recently through my on-going relationship with my N-friend-student. I can easily reason away why I don't need to let him condition me, the anger is useless, etc, and the whole thing subsides. But the 'anger' continues to well up, unexpectedly.
The other day I was making dinner. My mind went there, the feeling arose in my gut, and I experienced it as pain. Pain for myself, and sorrow for my own pain, and I let it arise, with a sense of compassion FOR THE ANGER and pain. It filled my body, I let the tears flow, and I felt a simultanous awareness of it, and release.
Believe me, the sense the peace and acceptance that followed was remarkable.

...and it was not 'just getting a good cry' (though this wisdom might be related). It was solely a bodily sensation, no thought processes involved, and the feeling of compassion for the emotion as something having a life of its own and a need to express itself, let it burn out quickly, completely, with solely positive, freeing consequences.

mindful wrote:...and it was not 'just getting a good cry' (though this wisdom might be related). It was solely a bodily sensation, no thought processes involved, and the feeling of compassion for the emotion as something having a life of its own and a need to express itself, let it burn out quickly, completely, with solely positive, freeing consequences.

I do not think that the key is in "controlling" emotions. I think that the solution is to convert it into something positive. Transforming anger, despair, disappointment into creativity, forgiveness, strength.

When we are happy, we want to cry out loud, share our joy and happiness. Not so much with negative emotions. Those are supposed to be subdued and suppressed.

Depending on our character, some of us are more extrovert than introvert. Feeling bad is somehow considered shameful.

It needs to come out though, otherwise it will make us sick. A great deal of Narcissistic control is about preventing us from ventilating our anger.

I used to hide in the bathroom, turn on the fan and the shower, cry in the towels. All marriages. Nobody cried. The narcissist, however, was the true first that showed literal disgust at me crying. The alcoholics did not. But, they thought tears were not okay...like, if i was in pain it meant that they hadn't done enough. Like, my own pain gets to be my own pain.

Our experiences and paths may have been quite different, but I believe we're still saying quite the same thing, Jo..

yes...i think we are, as well.