Addicted to an HPD?

Addicted to an HPD? Take a look at some of these points made in an article (cites below) and see if you see yourself... Truth or poppycock?


You tend to be overly orderly, somewhat inflexible, and often lacking in spontaneity. Always apprehensive lest something unexpected happen - an anxious sense of mastery over yourself and your environment that may, at any time, be endangered. The HPD is the polar opposite - has poor control over impulses and tends to say and do things that might better have been left unsaid and undone.

You are easily overwhelmed by your HPDs need for love

You are

usually, unremarkable, taciturn [habitually reserved and uncommunicative]... shy
almost overly well-adapted and thoughtful or respectful
pedestrian, pale but sturdy, the 'good guy' type
rarely dated because you feared rejection
seem to adopt a submissive attitude toward women

your own exhibitionistic and aggressive tendencies are so strongly suppressed that you yourself lack awareness of their existence.

Can't allow yourself to be aware of your resentful and angry feelings; such feelings, if you had them, would be profoundly dangerous and destructive. To experience your hostility could lead to harm, either to the self or to someone close and important. All anger (and much healthy assertiveness) has, therefore, been banished from the marketplace of consciousness to a dark storehouse where that which is "uncivilized" is kept.

You like to see yourself as a totally unique and absolutely incomparable creature who stands above and beyond all normal requirements.

You push to your mate responsibility in the relationship is to express all of the emotionality that exists in both of you. (and to bear the guilt when her hostility and aggression have gotten beyond her control).

You stand aloof, uniquely without feeling, and deplore her overemotional, exhibitionistic displays.

Your romances very frequently begins with the rescue of an unhappy maiden —from her miserable home life or from a disastrous involvement with a difficult, rejecting (but exciting) lover or boyfriend.

Your mate tends to need you in some way, and this lends you a sense of great importance;

You are the knight in her service, not fully loved for yourself, but willing and ready to save her.

The mission that you undertake is that of assuming responsibility for her existence and providing her with stability and security.

You vow to be her good parent

Eventually you, who have suppressed your own dependent, vulnerable feelings -- satisfying them vicariously by giving your mate the devoted maternal caring that you yourself actually desire -- feel more and more depleted.

While you still want to placate your HPD and to meet her never - ending demands, you experience yourself as running short of emotional provender [prōvidēre to look out for, provide; food; provisions] and having little to spare.

After a while -- having warmed yourself initially at the fires of your beloved's emotionality -- you find yourself unable to provide her with the constant validation that she so desperately requires.

Although you deny your own need for attention and affection, you actually want and need some of the emotional goodies for yourself.

But you cannot ask for fulfillment of, often cannot know about, your dependent needs and your wish to be the center of attention — the loved child, who is admired and cared for

One thing that you are aware of, and you have always "known", is that you can be self-contained.

You can take care of your rather limited needs handily enough, if only you can get rid of the incessant burden of having to deal with hers.

The symbiotic fusion, in which she was the good, needful child, you the perfect, boundlessly caretaking parent, gives way when, inevitably, you pull back in order to give some nurturance and attention to yourself.

You behavior is an almost unbearable disappointment to the HPD. Her profound sense of herself as an unlovable, thoroughly ineffective person has rendered her an emotional hemophiliac: she needs a stream of self-esteem-enhancing affirmation, from outside herself, on a fairly regular basis. You, having promised to be an unstinting and reliable provider, have now inexplicably refused to continue in your cherishing, caretaking function. She feels dismissed, ignored—as she has felt so many times previously in her life.

You, who once reveled in your expressive mate's open emotionality, now desire nothing more than to find some way to shut off the flow at its source. You, who rarely or never experiences anger, are appalled by the depth of hers; you are appalled, too, by the vicious, almost unbelievable cruelty of the things that she says. Her wild overstatements are viewed as disordered, "crazy," too devastating to merit your forgiveness, ever.

Your reaction is to withdraw even further — and she then pursues you with her stream of endless woes, complaints, and accusations. Its an interactive cycle, in which the more she emotes, the less you listen, and the less you listen, the more strident and emotive she becomes.

If you did permit yourself really to listen to her, you fear, you could get swallowed up in her uncontrolled and uncontrollable affect. What you fear is not only her emotionality but also you own.

You, for a variety of personal reasons, have an especially strong propensity toward control both of yourself and your environment

For you, just as for the child who fears the dark, both the external world and the inner world of your own mind are places of danger. Only perpetual vigilance and unrelenting discipline can ensure that neither get out of hand.

You live in fear of an unspecified yet imminent disaster — the emergence of a barely controlled wild beast that is straining at the leash within. This beast is "principally an aggressive animal." Often a compliant, pleasant-seeming person, you are sitting on a tinderbox of unacknowledged, unprocessed, unimaginable (to yourself) rage. Like a ventriloquist, you often communicates that anger only through the medium of your more expressive, HPD mate.

You, an obsessional person, although you have chosen a radically different form of psychological defense from that of your HPD partner, have suffered from difficulties that are similar in kind. You, too, have been badly nurtured, and had problems getting your developmental needs duly recognized and met. In your earliest adaptation your way of dealing with your parents was to become unusually attuned and highly sensitive to what they (or one of them) was feeling. You developed methods of placating the parental authorities who may have demanded that you care for and comfort one or both of them — but avoided facing up to them directly or expressing your rage at never having gotten your own needs attended to.

Full of suppressed resentment yourself, you fear confronting the resentment of others. In adult life you tend to be authoritarian or else unduly submissive.... Faced with possible hostility, one either conquers or submits. In neither case can one achieve equality and mutual respect. Such a person can relate to someone else in a superior-to-inferior mode or inferior-to-superior mode but has great difficulty relating to another person as an equal

Since you are disconnected from your negative thoughts and feelings, you usually find it difficult to deal with situations that elicit your anger, which are inevitable in life. Frequently, rather than experience your hostile emotions and respond to the real challenge, you will alter you mental processes.

You may, for instance, deal with a disturbing situation by pretending to yourself that whatever upset you is actually unimportant (and therefore requires no reaction).

Or you may question your own manner of looking at the incident so strenuously and meticulously that it becomes impossible to deal with it in a direct fashion.

It is as if, when someone stepped on your toe, you were unable to respond with a straightforward "Get off!" but instead pondered the legitimacy of the other person's being there (even though you were suffering in the meantime).

Still another method for handling your anger might be that of thoroughly repressing it — failing to process the disturbing occurrence and thrusting it out of your conscious awareness completely. You might then react as if nothing whatsoever had happened — which would of course preclude you making the appropriately assertive or angry response that might bring you some satisfaction.

This head-in-the-sand strategy, like the other ones, is a device for stifling your recognition of the intense rage against which you are so anxiously defended. But alas, trying to control emotion by exerting control over your cognitive processes doesn't really result in the bad feelings going away. Anger, like nuclear waste, remains toxic. Unprocessed and undischarged , it simply remains where it is — but the threat of its emergence is constant.

While your HPD has no control, you have nothing but control; each of you seems, in a way, to have brought to the other a missing segment of his or her personality. Together you have what each of you entered into the relationship needing — access to emotionality, and the ability to set reasonable limits upon it. You ought to live happily ever after ... or so the observer would imagine.

[However, after the honeymoon period and oftentimes during conflict] Each of you moves in the direction of becoming as much unlike the partner as he or she possibly can — in technical terms, you polarize - on your side you become increasingly withdrawn, unavailable, and isolated.

Soon enough you criticize in her the expressions of open feeling (especially anger) which you have once criticized severely in yourself - so severely, in fact, that you have repudiated them completely.

The HPD, in turn, criticizes in you the independent strivings and self-sufficiency that in her view make intimacy impossible — her underlying reason for having disowned such needs and wishes entirely.

What was once unacceptable within the self is now what is so intolerable and unacceptable in the partner.

Excerpts from
Scarf, Maggie, 1986 article in the Atlantic - Intimate Partners
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/is ... /scarf.htm
Scarf cites two sources she draws heavily from and quotes extensively from, listed below. I have slightly altered the language and quotes to make them first person, to abbreviate to HPD, added the formatting, made other very minor changes, etc

The Hysterical Marriage
Jürg Willi.
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Psyche. XXVI, 1972: Pp. 326-356.
Willi describes the hysterical marriage as a bond into which the hysterical woman and the 'hysterophile' man enter hoping to be cured of their neurotic disturbances. This unconscious arrangement results, however, in the partners' becoming fixated in their neuroses. The typical course of a hysterical marriage is an interactive cycle in which each partner depends on the resistances of the other for the maintenance of his or her own defensive structures. Any effort by one partner to disrupt the interactive ritual is immediately neutralized by the other. For therapy to be successful, it is imperative that the common denominator of the dovetailing neuroses (the 'collusion') be identified and worked through.

The Art of Psychotherapy
Anthony Storr
(Methuen: 1980, Routledge: 2 edition 1990)

Well nearly all of this certainly applies to me.

wisdom wrote:
You live in fear of an unspecified yet imminent disaster — the emergence of a barely controlled wild beast that is straining at the leash within. This beast is "principally an aggressive animal." Often a compliant, pleasant-seeming person, you are sitting on a tinderbox of unacknowledged, unprocessed, unimaginable (to yourself) rage. Like a ventriloquist, you often communicates that anger only through the medium of your more expressive, HPD mate.

I think the woman I dated woke up the beast. Instead of lulling it back to sleep I have decided to embrace and love the "animal within" and incorporate it into my psyche. This is not an easy process and I am not sure I am going to be wholly successful.

wisdom wrote:You, an obsessional person, although you have chosen a radically different form of psychological defense from that of your HPD partner, have suffered from difficulties that are similar in kind. You, too, have been badly nurtured, and had problems getting your developmental needs duly recognized and met. In your earliest adaptation your way of dealing with your parents was to become unusually attuned and highly sensitive to what they (or one of them) was feeling. You developed methods of placating the parental authorities who may have demanded that you care for and comfort one or both of them — but avoided facing up to them directly or expressing your rage at never having gotten your own needs attended to.

I have suspected this and I think, in part, is the reason I love reading the HPD forum. There is something tragically familiar about it all that goes way beyond the two women I have dated who exhibit symptoms of HPD. I don't know if it is because of a Cluster B parent (I am recognizing just how dramatically my needs were not met in childhood), or if somehow the defense mechanisms of HPD are somehow repressed in me, e.g., I am ashamed by my sexuality, aggression, exhibitionism as opposed to actively acting out.

Thanks for a great and helpful post!

Wow, that's an incredibly valuable post. I think it should be required reading for all new arrivals on this forum, as soon as (but probably not before) they managed to get past the worst of the gaslighting.

Thanks for the post.

an interesting read, but only a few points apply to me. i was in a relationship with a woman who might have the disorder or not, but exhibited a lot of the related behaviors.

- i would never stop to care for her or comfort her when she was in the "weak and fragile" part of the cycle. even at the end when things got rough between us
- only on one subject i stopped opposition, the sexual "$#%^ tests" which were about telling me more and more of her former sexual relationships, who she'd hook up with while his friend praised the beauty of her butt, etc. i thought she would not understand ever, so i dismissed it. regarding courtesy and respectful treatment i first set boundaries in the "hey let's talk, i like you but please don't repeat that behavior again, it's unkind" way. then i got more and more pissed with time and got angrier in my reactions. i didn't give in. even so, i did not detach from her except for the moments i was thinking about leaving the relationship
- when she stepped on my toe (slapped me in the face) i insisted on an excuse from her side, when she tried testing me again with little "playful" slaps on my cheek i told her calmly to stop and did not make an issue out of it
- when she would neglect me sexually and i felt like being hired from some sort of escort agency i asked her to do something for me, too. she did, frowning.
- etc... see, i think there is just no way to make it work with such a person, unless yes: you become the caring parent, exciting lover, best friend, and many more things at once... i think people like these need a boyfriend the mixture of the dalai lama and brad pitt. and that simply does not exist in my humble opinion.

Wisdom,
Looks like you took a page out of Codependent No More. Was a real eye-opener for me. Helped me understand that some of my "good" traits actually worked against me in my relationship with the HPD in my life. It has helped me from "falling for" other HPD's I've encountered. Recovery is a slow, ongoing process best taken one day at a time, one step at a time.

mabpac wrote:Wisdom,
Looks like you took a page out of Codependent No More.

The material was from a 1986 article in The Atlantic titled "Intimate Partners" by Maggie Scarf, however she quoted extensively from a 1972 article titled "The Hysterical Marriage" by Jürg Willi (The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Psyche. XXVI, 1972: Pp. 326-356.)

The Atlantic article was one step more "generalized" vs the journal article. The journal article is available electronically by paid subscription but I'm not a subscriber and its only one of a few articles I'd be interested in. They do have it at our local medical university library but I haven't had time to be in that area and fetch it out. It's pretty wild to me to see something as old as 1972, out of Germany no less, be so spot on target describing "the tango" between the HPD and the Non, especially as also related here by so many first person accounts.

I'm also finding some other very cool book chapters and articles on HPD that I hope to chase down sometime when things aren't so busy. This is a challenging area - hard to gain real wisdom but with effort, perhaps we can inch forward.

Wish we had more direct interaction (and ongoing dialogue) with true HPDs, seems like we only have half the story sometimes...

That was an extremely helpful read. I don't see in myself the more polar opposite aspects of an HPD and the co-dependency, but a lot of it rang true. Thankfully I've been able to re-assert my sense of self and not put up with the BS. I just hope it leads to a better place for both of us, together or apart.

I was very moved by this passage, it remains hung in my mind, so I wanted to share it here. It’s from the book Hystera (Bollas, C 1999). His exact, original text follows below. Here, I make a very crude attempt to reformulate his text into the common language used on this forum. Any and all feedback, corrections, etc. are most welcome!

In interpersonal relationships, Non’s are exceptionally similar to “therapists”, and HPD mates can at least occasionally be thought of as “the patient.” Of course this analogy only goes so far and there are some huge differences! Therapists are paid for their efforts (win or loose) and punch out at the end of a workday, hopefully to a stunningly beautiful intimate relationship with a non disordered mate, and plenty of “just not thinking about work” time. Non’s typically endure their relationship with the HPD on an exclusive, ongoing, 24/7, inside the pair-bond basis. Or, they are suffering the major aftereffects of a failed relationship with an HPD and want answers, or are seeking some satisfying closure.

Even with some dissimilarity, its well worth looking into the parallels between the Non / HPD mate and therapist / HPD patient. Key areas to focus on include some of the hottest, most important areas in psychoanalysis: transference / projection, and countertransference / projective identification (Roughly... countertransference - how the Non feels inside himself, during interaction with his HPD mate; projective identification - how the HPD unconsciously maneuvers the Non into acting and feeling a certain way, then consciously spots that,and calls him out for it).

BTW, this starts out slow, and builds to a major point so persist through to the end. As many others have noted on this Forum Bollas is exceptionally smart. He wrote for a clinical audience, which is actually very refreshing vs. the raft of inane self help books. His writing style and vocabulary very much reflect his extensive background and thought process. Much however is accessible with effort.

All credit to Dr. Bollas here. All errors in this crude translation attempt are mine.

Rough, reformulated/translated excerpt from Bollas, 1999 wrote:Non’s when they interrelate with HPDs find themselves in unconscious communication with their mate. With the rare exception of the acting-out malignant HPD, the Non finds that in her reveries he is moved by particular mental contents narrated by her, and when he echoes and “mirrors” them back to her, the HPD will respond by the production of further connective material. This collaboration is enormously important, as the HPD is a creatively contributing psychic partner to the Non, even if she is characterologically resistant (holds tightly to child like personality features.) That is, even though the HPD is motivated to remain a child who will never join the maturational process, in self reflective, thoughtful analysis she is an unconscious contributor to her maturation process itself and in this way provides material that contributes to the Non’s effectiveness in helping her. In his emotional reaction to her, the Non, attempting to help her reflect, will feel nourished by her, her delight in her progress. When the Non is really listening and reflecting well back to HPD, things will resonate, and there will be anticipation that current and future dialogue with her will expand. This will result in the occasional inspired idea occurring in the Non, that he can communicate back to her, that enables her to greatly move forward.

Non’s interrelating with mates with borderline personality disorder (BPD) do not feel this way. BPDs can make manifest sense, such as describing events of the day before. But as Wilfred Bion’s theory allows, they have not subjected these experiences to a type of inner reverie [Old French resver - to behave wildly; see rave], transforming them from beta (the undigested) into alpha (the digested). It is as if the unconscious in the BPD has refused to engage the object world, even if it can record or photograph it. Indeed, instead of conveying knowledge about life or the self, BPD narratives seem to convey anti-knowledge, or what Bion terms -K. They reflect psychotic levels of thinking, which aim to break the link between psyche and reality, so that the mind can evade emotionally unacceptable recognitions. In his own mind, when dealing with a BPD mate, the Non feels somewhat suffused with anxiety; as though the BPD, whilst not manifestly attacking the analytical process, is nonetheless engaged in insidiously destroying meaning. As discussed in earlier chapters, the BPD then very often bursts into intense prolonged rage where little that is said makes even manifest sense, and in this moment the BPD has conjured the unconscious primary object, which is the state of mental turbulence itself.

Nons internal reactions to interactions with various mates (normal, HPD, BPD, etc.) of course vary, according to other character aspects of the specific mate, and according to the particular character of the Non. But there are striking similarities in Nons internal reactions to interactions with BPD mates that allow us to make important distinctions of a diagnostic type with the HPD. The Non dreads the borderline. He looks forward to seeing the HPD. The Non’s affective life with the BPD is a spectrum of anxiety: from low-level vigilance to outright terror. The Non is fondly protective of the HPD. The BPD totally lacks charm, humor and reparative grace, whilst the HPD is well possessed of all three qualities.

The BPD’s attack on links is a psychotic process that eliminates meaning, even if the BPD has a lot to talk about. Repression would seem to eliminate a link, but it is specific: it removes from consciousness a specific sexual mental content. Furthermore, as repression is intended to fail, derivatives of the missing link are always returning to consciousness in displaced form, both in the mates narratives and, crucially, in the Non’s inner associations as well. HPDs are unconsciously devoted to communicating themselves to the Non, whereas BPDs seek malignant misunderstanding, because it is in the chaos of misalliance that they constitute the object of desire.

[this next paragraph really hit me – HPD and BPD are more or less equal levels of psychiatric disorder, but they have radical different degrees of “likeability”…]

If an HPD commits suicide in a psychiatric hospital, the staff grieve deeply. All seem to know that the HPD has made a mistake, quite literally, since the HPD has not understood what death is, and imagines being able to attend her own funeral. It seems such a terrible waste. Sadly, in a very different way, if the BPD commits suicide the clinical community has to deal with a very particular sense of guilt resulting from an uncomfortable sense of relief. The BPD suicide does not seem a waste of a life; on the contrary, one wonders how this person managed to live as long as she did.

Given that Bollas is speaking to highly skilled clinicians, who are trained and supervised to maintain excellent boundaries between themselves and their patients, is it any wonder why Nons become addicted to an HPD? HPD itself, at its very core, is on one level a paradox - it has extreemly likable/lovable features, yet it is none the less a debilitating disorder, on par with BPD in severity and interpersonal disruptiveness.

Original text - excerpt from Bollas, 1999 wrote:Psychoanalysts at work with hysterics find themselves in unconscious communication with their analysands. With the rare exception of the acting-out malignant hysteric, the psychoanalyst finds that in his or her reveries he or she is moved by particular mental contents narrated by the patient, and when the analyst echoes them, the patient will respond by the production of further material. This collaboration is enormously important in the outcome of such an analysis, as the analysand is a creatively contributing psychic partner to the psychoanalysis, even if he or she is characterologically resistant. That is, even though the hysteric is motivated to remain a child who will never join the maturational process, in psychoanalysis he or she is an unconscious contributor to the analytical process itself and in this way provides material that contributes to the analyst’s effectiveness. In the countertransference, the psychoanalyst feels nourished by the patient, interested in the sessions, and senses that this session and others to follow are moving in lines of thought that will result in the occasional inspired idea occurring in the analyst that can lead to interpretation.

Psychoanalysts working with borderline patients do not feel this way. Borderline analysands can make manifest sense, such as describing events of the day before. But as Bion’s theory allows, they have not subjected these experiences to a type of inner reverie [Old French resverie wildness, from resver to behave wildly, of uncertain origin; see rave], transforming them from beta (the undigested) into alpha (the digested). lt is as if the unconscious has refused to engage the object world, even if it can record or photograph it. Indeed, instead of conveying knowledge about life or the self, borderline narratives seem to convey anti-knowledge, or what Bion terms -K. They reflect psychotic levels of thinking, which aim to break the link between psyche and reality, so that the mind can evade emotionally unacceptable recognitions. In the countertransference, the psychoanalyst feels somewhat suffused with anxiety; as though the patient, whilst not manifestly attacking the analytical process, is nonetheless engaged in insidiously destroying meaning. As discussed in earlier chapters, the borderline then very often bursts into intense prolonged rage where little that is said makes even manifest sense, and in this moment the borderline has conjured the unconscious primary object, which is the state of mental turbulence itself.

Psychoanalysts’ countertransferences with all patients of course vary, according to other character aspects of the patient, and according to the particular character of the psychoanalyst. But there are striking similarities in the countertransferences of analysts working with borderline patients that allow us to make important distinctions of a diagnostic type with the hysteric. The analyst dreads the borderline. He or she looks forward to seeing the hysteric. The analyst’s affective life with the borderline is a spectrum of anxiety: from low-level vigilance to outright terror. The analyst is fondly protective of the hysteric. The borderline totally lacks charm, humor and reparative grace, whilst the hysteric is well possessed of all three qualities.

The borderline’s attack on links is a psychotic process that eliminates meaning, even if the borderline has a lot to talk about. Repression would seem to eliminate a link, but it is specific: it removes from consciousness a specific sexual mental content. Furthermore, as repression is intended to fail, derivatives of the missing link are always returning to consciousness in displaced form, both in the patient’s narratives and, crucially, in the psychoanalyst’s inner associations as well. Hysterics are unconsciously devoted to communicating themselves to the other, whereas borderlines seek malignant misunderstanding, because it is in the chaos of misalliance that they constitute the object of desire.

If an hysteric commits suicide in a psychiatric hospital, the staff grieve deeply. All seem to know that the hysteric has made a mistake, quite literally, since the hysteric has not understood what death is, and imagines being able to attend his or her own funeral. It seems such a terrible waste. Sadly, in a very different way, if the borderline commits suicide the clinical community has to deal with a very particular sense of guilt resulting from an uncomfortable sense of relief. The borderline suicide does not seem a waste of a life; on the contrary, one wonders how this person managed to live as long as he or she did.