I thought this was supposed to be a support forum?

well i don't think anyone would choose to be hpd, and someone honestly looking for help os on the right track...sure, we all feel bitter because we've been used....but aren't we all used in one fashion or another????

rcd1390 wrote:we all feel bitter because we've been used....but aren't we all used in one fashion or another????

No.

This is my first post on this forum and I'm not sure in which camp I sit on the subject of this thread. I have come to this forum as I recognize some of the HPD symptoms in myself as well as in people I have had close relationships with (including my mother, sister and most recent long term girl friend). Having trawled through a great deal of the threads and posts across the forum I am in agreement that many of them are hostile towards people with HPD or those exhibiting HPD symptoms and in many cases I would suggest that these hostile feelings are entirely justified. I have, perhaps uniquely (although I am not trying to aggrandize myself) seen this PD from both sides and feel that this may allow me to provide some level of insight for those who have fallen victim to people with HPD and in the process perhaps help myself to change my own behaviour in the process.

I'm not sure whether anyone will respond to this post so I'm going to ramble on for a bit about my experiences from both ends of the disorder and hopefully this will stimulate some responses and let me feel like I have achieved something in being open and honest about my own situation.

My mother exhibits many signs of HPD, although not in a sexual sense. She needs to feed from her children and now grandchildren. Initially she focussed her needs on my father and placed the demands for love and attention upon him. She grew up as the only girl with five brothers and was herself the 'victim' of a mother who demanded love and emotional reliance from her. In turn I believe she placed emotional demands for love upon her brothers, partly because she was not having her needs met by her parents and partly because she had no emotional paradigm provided by her parents of what true love and acceptance was. I believe that this conditioning from her mother and her relative isolation caused by living in a remote village provided the blueprint for her HPD symptoms. Ultimately when her brothers had left home she transferred the emotional demands for love onto my father. She was at the time a very attractive woman and I know was romantically involved with at least one man. I think initially my father was able to meet the demands that my mother put upon him. However due to the isolation she felt at living in a small remote village and her lack of close and meaningful friendships her demands became greater and greater. Over this period my mother had two daughters and myself and this placed more burden on the relationship. Eventually my father totally withdrew emotional support and love from my mother. This was his coping mechanism with the increasing demands of her HPD. This all occurred in a time when divorce was not seen as an option and in the interests of the children they stayed in a loveless marriage. Of course my mother needed to feed her attention needs and thus the burden was placed upon her children. Throughout my childhood I grew up with my mother constantly trying to get an emotional response and attention from us. This was in the form of exaggerated illnesses, arguments with my father, violence towards us and then providing the nurturing bosom to run to afterwards. Instigating violence against us from my father and then playing the 'good cop' afterwards. It was pretty much standard throughout my childhood. Of course we were 'her' children not my fathers (emotionally not genetically) and therefore my father cut off all demonstrable love and affection for us. This ensured that she was our only source of love, acceptance and support. Looking back this is of course exactly what she wanted (needed). I remember her phrases from my childhood 'I'm just waiting to die now, my job is done, I've had my children and that's all I wanted...' 'I might as well kill myself' and of course the twisting of every conversation to ensure she was the victim

I'm sure that this is a situation a lot of people identify with and I am not trying to paint myself as a victim. I do not blame my mother, she was a product of her upbringing and environment. Unfortunately the environment she created for her growing children was almost identical to her own childhood and that's where I think many of my own HPD symptoms germinated and grew. I do not think that she was at the extreme range of HPD as she was not promiscuous and did not lie to get attention but she did manipulate people and situations subconsciously to feed her need for love, acceptance and reliance. Throughout my childhood I felt I was 'paying' for the love that she gave me and the (not so subtle) things she did and said confirmed this.

My father's removal of affection and support only reinforced my own need for love and acceptance and pushed me further towards reliance on my mother. I could not hazard a guess at the number of times both my mother and father called me an attention seeker in my childhood. Looking back I can see that a child should not have to go looking for attention from his parents. But hey, hindsight is a cruel mistress. This culminated in me trying to kill myself at the age of seven. I threw myself out of an upstairs window. I'm sure now it was another way of getting attention as I am sure i was not conscious at that age of the implications of death. It did not work and my family never found out about this attempt. I have spoken to my mother about it since and she did not express any other sentiment than the expected response of turning it back to herself and claiming I was calling her a bad mother... by this stage the self pitying script she had written for herself was wearing a bit thin.

Anyway coming to the present I identify completely with the feelings expressed by those people on this forum who are 'victims' of people with HPD. The anger at the person's manipulative use of your feelings to achieve their own aims, the exasperation at their ability to twist the conversation to make them appear as the victim and perhaps most importantly their inability to look at themselves and see the damage they have caused to other people creates a huge amount of suffering and misery.

Of course now I am able to see it from the other side as well...

I am not trying to paint a rosy picture of the person with HPD or try and justify any of the anti-social elements that are exhibited by people with this disorder just try and share some of the experiences that led me to this forum. I am not an expert in any way, shape or form and although I exhibit certain facets in my character that are found within the disorder I do not exhibit them all and those that I do have I am addressing every day in an attempt to lead a normal life. Of course I am a master of covering up the truth about my character and people who know me would not recognise me from this post and would probably suggest that I do not have HPD. They may be right, there are certain elements of my personality that sit far better with narcissism. Whatever the case is I hope that any insight I can give receives some understanding.

I am not promiscuous and do not engage in predatory sexual activities. I do however flirt inordinately with people, both men and women in an attempt to get their attention and feed my need for acceptance and love (whatever that is taken to mean in this context). People talk about their need to fill the hole they feel inside, I don't agree with this entirely. From personal experience I see it more as living vicariously, never being able to 'touch' or experience reality without another person providing value to something (including myself). I know this sounds odd but it's almost as if the intrinsic value of a thing or a person is not really there unless someone else has made it real by seeing it with you (or for you). The example I would use is of the difference between reading a shakespeare play on your own and rationally understanding it and appreciating its structure and then seeing it on stage surrounded by people who experience the the structure and beauty and provide it with value. The difference between thinking and feeling. cont...

In my opinion and experience people with HPD can think and appreciate what they are doing but only fleetingly can they feel what they are doing. This links in with the idea of being able to express emotions but an inability to empathise.

I am able to understand objectively the skills, values and value that other people say I have and sometimes I can see them in myself. I am unable to subjectively feel them though and understand through that the value of myself. For this reason it is only through other people feeling them and feeding me their attention to them that I am able to be in touch with them myself and see that they are valued. I can't do it myself so I encourage people to highlight them and point them out to me. This is what I mean about vicarious living. The addiction seems to be related to this temporary respite that this attention brings from not being in touch with the true value of people and things particularly oneself. I apologise if this is rambling as much as it seems to be and is a bit of subject or obscure, I'm just going through the dirty laundry in my mind and trying to be honest and describe what I think is going on.

The addiction to attention develops to try and make this respite from one's own internal detachment more permanent. Of course this means that you have to demand more and more attention and love from whoever you are currently with to minimise the time you are exposed to this detachment. At which point the lies and the fabrication of emergencies start. At this point I should say that I don't think I have ever deliberately hurt someone to feed my addiction. Indirectly of course through jealous actions and trying to control people by trying to make them love me I have caused damage and pain. My HPD symptoms do not exhibit so much within a relationship setting as I try to feed my attention addiction in other ways. Showing off at work, 'holding court' with my friends where I dominate the conversation, gossiping, inventing stories, anythings that will ensure people think I'm lovable, good or encourages them to spend time with me. Again it's about 'feeling' that you are valued even if that feeling is second hand. Getting people to give you the feelings and emotional energy that you can't find yourself. It's not a two way street, although of course as an HPD you convince yourself that it is. After all they are getting the gossip, or the joke or the attention... of course within this the fact that the attention you are giving is not genuine slips the attention. The fact that it is fake is irrelevant you convince yourself that they still owe you for the investment you have made. It is a trade that is unfair but you can't see it because of your own detachment from the self. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly but there you go. I suppose my own example is that I have made my life into one long anecdote. I detached early and could only get what I needed through other people and the direct way to do that was by turning my life into stories that got people's attention. I no longer owned the experiences other than having a copyright on the stories. I wheeled them out for people to coo over and give value to and then I fed off that attention and lived the value of them vicariously through others... Then I packed them away again for the next unsuspecting person I could prostitute them to to get a bit of attention. I know what you are thinking now as well... isn't that what I'm doing now? I'm not sure but I don't think it is. This is the first time I've written all this down and I don't expect any responses. I am not the victim here and it is about taking responsibility for your own mental health.

To conclude I'm not sure whether I agree with the assertion that HPDs can't change. I would, of course like to think they can but my experiences with my mother and others suggest they can't due to their inability to 'feel' that there's a problem as opposed to 'think' there might be one. As for me, well I think that I'm making progress, I have friends who are honest with me and are helping me to relearn how to feel. The hardest part is empathising with myself. I know it sounds stupid but in my past whenever I spoke about trying to kill myself as a kid I laughed, at how stupid I was and what an idiotic thing it was to do. If that had been another child I would have been distraught and been upset about what had led the child to do such a thing but because it was me I wasn't able to feel any empathy. Now I'm starting to take back my experiences and learn to own them and the emotions that went with them. It's a slow and hard process but hopefully the ability to be emotionally self reliant and not need to force others to provide for me emotionally will lead to the peace that I have never had.

Sorry for the length of these posts. I hope that people have found them useful, or if not then just entertaining. Good luck to everyone on either side of this problem and thanks for reading and giving me the opportunity to contribute.

I understand some of what you've posted here. As the adult child of a mother diagnosed with NPD, I have experience with the work it takes to 'fill in the gaps' and 'relearn the missing pieces'.

Thanks for taking the time to post. It was long, but I don't mind reading a long post that has value, and yours had value.

Tell me, do your siblings struggle with, or recognize, HPD traits in themselves as well?

Lifesong

Thanks for your comments LifeSong, I understand exactly what you mean about filling in the gaps and relearning the missing pieces. I don't know about you but sometimes for me it feels like you're not relearning things but actually finding parts of yourself and your life for the first time! It's difficult but it makes it worth while. People on this forum and the general psychology community see HPDs as children and I think in many ways they are right. It's as if feelings are frozen at the age of 7/8 whereas the thoughts have matured as normal... You have the knowledge and insight to have the thoughts but not the capacity for the accompanying feelings and empathy.

With regard to my sisters, they gone is surprisingly different directions. My eldest sister studied psychology and went into mental health social care. She has not developed HPD symptoms but her coping strategy is focused around maintaining absolute control of every aspect of her life... She can account for every penny she has ever spent! However, she is happy and has managed to build a lot of meaningful friendships and relationships. My other sister is very like me in that she has developed certain HPD characteristics, again not with regard to promiscuity but with regard to making herself emotionally reliant upon people. At the moment she is in a relationship with a man who is working through this with her in a patient way. He refuses to 'feed' her but continues to stay with her. I think she has developed enough insight to recognise this and is trying hard to be able to find value within herself and not push that burden onto others. She is now doing things that are for her and not just to gain the approval and love of others. I'm really proud of her.

It always reminds me of the Philip Larkin poem, This Be The Verse

They ###$ you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were ###$ up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Take care LifeSong! and thanks for the reply and support

Welcome PtheD,


It sounds to me like you're already making progress. I think it's possible to learn, and live a better life. Especially if there is
understanding, and the desire to improve......


My poor EX however, not much hope, she was an orphan and is as disturbed as "Sybil", and nearly destroyed me. She nearly destroyed the only man who ever really loved her........