Emotionally Off Balance

[GraceUnderPressure]

Hello, I'm 49 and have been married to my wife for 18 years. Daughter is 16 and son is 13.

The most sustained emotion I've felt over this time has probably been "off balance." You never know what kind of emergency could hit, which would require me to be the rescuer, appeaser, or comforter.

We have both done things that have damaged the relationship. On my part, the biggest issues have been secrecy, previous anger issues, not speaking up (interpreted as holding grudges), having a platonic relationship with a high school female friend where I vented about my relationship and sought advice, and hiding the fact that I joined the Covert Narcissism support group and had two sessions with Renee Swanson, host of a CN podcast. Renee said I had a "textbook case". Last month she discovered I bought "Stop Caretaking the Borderline/Narcissist" and had it delivered to a drop box. While I regret her finding out, and maybe shouldn't have been secretive, the book has been super-helpful and I defended the purchase as much as I could.

On her part, there has been emotional abuse, and overall I can only expect to be treated with calmness and respect when she is feeling OK. If tired, hungry, lonely, anxious, all bets are off. There have been hurtful words and declarative statements that I fear she still holds to, which just make me feel "less than". Things like:

"Your parents didn't really teach you social skills."
"I think you are autistic - at least that would explain your shortcomings in the relationship."
"You naturally have below-average empathy"
"I guess I'll be the REAL parent around here..."
"Well, I do most of the emotional labor around here..." (After kids mentioned me doing vast majority of chores)
"You don't want me to dress you or buy you clothes anymore..." (After I objected to her criticizing my clothes)
"Ballet is gay and effeminate, and it embarrasses me that you do it." (I have taken up dance as an adult, and if I'm honest, I love it. Definitely been part of my healing.) She wouldn't even let me tell my kids or her family that I took classes a few years ago. Two years ago I "came out."
"You should have more understanding of relationships at your age-all marriages are hard. If you had more male friends, perhaps you would know that."
"If you were three inches shorter, I wouldn't have married you." (Sober, matter-of-fact comment, in front of kids)

DARVO, playing victim, feeling "bulldozed" by her emotions when I bring things up has been common. Whatever it takes to regain control, and to feel dominant, when push comes to shove.

We had two years couples counseling, and are each in individual counseling now. She felt like couples counseling centered on me and my grievances too much. A couple times she just collapsed in tears, and we couldn't do much else that session. My counselor went through the DSM and OCPD was his first reaction, but I think BPD is more accurate. Anything that may cause pain, embarrassment, or abandonment results in strong reactions. My counselor doesn't think she is narcissistic, but that there are narcissistic dynamics at play. And I definitely have the personality that typically absorbs, appeases and enables that behavior. I want peace in the house for the kids at least, and I've bent over backwards trying to have peace.

Overall, things have been improving. She came to see my ballet performance a couple weeks ago - the first time she has watched me since 2004. But she is still WAY more interested in who I talk to at class, and how many men and women are there, than what movements I'm learning. But I think I'm getting some acceptance.

I am also getting much stronger - not being a rescuer in the drama triangle, reacting neutrally, letting her get to know friends from dance class, etc.

While her hormone treatments for menopause are helping, and we are each working on ourselves, I can't seem to shake some underlying thoughts and feelings. I'd love to hear from other men who dealt with this stuff at a similar age. It's crazy how many covert narc marriages seem to end at the 15-20 year point.

1. I am realizing effects of my enabling on my kids - my daughter exhibits BPD behaviors too often.
2. Deep down, I feel like being alone or in different relationship would suit me better. Can't stop daydreaming of being alone. I didn't date until I was 28 and met her.
3. We get along at a surface level, but don't have much in common. Several things that interest me are triggering to her, and off-limits.
4. Does she love the "real me," or just love the lifestyle I provide and how I make her feel most of the time?
5. I'm the only person she treats this way. I've joked "Just treat me like a co-worker, and we'd be fine!"
6. Can't really count on her for empathy if she is feeling bad about something.
7. As it says in the "Stop Caretaking" book - this isn't a normal relationship. I want a normal one.
8. Resentment at accommodations I've made. She also feels some too. But I feel like I take drastic means to avoid hurting her, such as getting off Facebook entirely (I had been messaging the friend on it.)
9. I can't totally "unsee" the contempt I've experienced.
10. The shaming for investigating narcissism and BPD, rather than curiosity. If I found out she was in an abuse support forum, my first reaction would be "Why? what have I done??"

[square]

Sorry to hear you are going through these difficulties.

I think that "emotion" you describe feeling is hypervigilance. Being in that state long term carries real physical and emotional consequences.

There is a lot of nuance in considering a diagnosis for a spouse, whether it's a personality disorder or autism.

There is a difference between considering such a diagnosis as a way to dismiss and belittle the needs of another, or as a good faith effort to try to understand and possibly improve the dynamics for both of you.

It's unfortunate that she found out about the book.

The statements you shared from her do seem to suggest she is blaming dynamics on you rather than trying to learn better communication and coping methods. I don't have any idea if you do or don't have autism, but if you do, the benefit of her having identified this would be to better understand your triggers, solve recurring problems, adjust expectations on both ends, and communicate better on both ends.

I don't know you, but from your post, including your self introspection, you come across as having empathy. For personality disordered people, things are very imbalanced, and they genuinely experience anything less than completely meeting all their needs as a lack of empathy. Does your wife show concern about the amount of empathy she shows you?

My personal opinion is that there is zero good that can come of a spouse knowing you suspect a personality disorder. You will want to take every step to hide your presence here. Your wife is allowed to research autism and learn positive strategies. You are allowed to do the same for PD. You are in the bind where you must keep it to yourself but you've been trained that "secrets" are a shortcoming and betrayal.

I plan to respond to your mumbered points but must step away for a while.

[square]

Ok, went through your numbered items now.

I have to say, as a person who isn't prone to jealousy or control, I think sharing the details of your marriage with a female friend is something to avoid. I totally get needing support, but this is fraught. Better to get support here from Internet strangers, or a family member - removing the potential for emotional affair or similar.

Stick around, read through the posts and Toolbox, feel free to share more if you feel comfortable doing so.

[notrightinthehead]

Welcome! You have found a supportive and informative space. Congratulations on finding the 'Stop caretaking' book, it helped me so much. It's important to realize how much one contributes to the misery one finds herself in. We enable our partners, we lie, we avoid conflict, we don't stand up for ourselves we don't enforce boundaries and help them become stronger and more dictatorial. So - well done for not giving up on dancing!

It's good that you found support for yourself with your own therapist. If you want to improve your situation give up any hope that you can change her. The earlier you abandon that hope, the faster you will see clearly. You can however change yourself. Change how you behave, change how you take care of yourself, change how you role model healthy behaviour for your kids. Have you checked out the Toolbox? Implement the strategies described there, learn to implement boundaries. You don't have to stick around when you are being put down, you can get up and leave, for example.

You are not alone, others have walked that path before you, I am glad you have found us.

[Abigail.2025]

From what you have written, I can understand how you feel! I really do!
What I'm going to tell you is based on this article:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/5-types-of-people-who-can-ruin-your-life/202003/4-tips-for-living-with-a-high-conflict-person
1.   Forget about trying to give them insight into themselves.
2.   Forget about the past; focus on your future choices.
3.   Forget about emotional confrontations.
4.   Forget about telling them they have a high conflict personality.
I have plenty of self-help books scattered around the house. I don't hide them. When my husband asks, I just say, "Hey, I grew up in a dysfunctional family—I picked up a few fleas I need to shake off." He gets that because I'm claiming to have the problem or am the problem.
What he wouldn't get is the truth: I'm reading these books to cope with him, his family, and especially his children and his mother.
But, saying that would launch World War III.
I understand hypervigilance.
I live with it daily.
My PD-husband has a mother who could give a masterclass in passive-aggressive cruelty. She has exactly three reasons for flying a thousand miles to visit us:
1.   To torment her daughter-in-law (me).
2.   To chase after grandkids who actively avoid her and want NOTHING to with her!
3.   And again—for emphasis—to torment her daughter-in-law (me).
Sometimes, having a debilitating illness comes in handy. It's one of the few defenses I have left against PD in-laws and PD Husband.
Back to you, you have to be covert and passive in your presentation, hiding things (like your books) in plain sight.
These people think they are perfect, so – to survive- humor them – they ARE PERFECT!
The tool box on this site is very helpful.

[GraceUnderPressure]

Ok, went through your numbered items now.

I have to say, as a person who isn't prone to jealousy or control, I think sharing the details of your marriage with a female friend is something to avoid. I totally get needing support, but this is fraught. Better to get support here from Internet strangers, or a family member - removing the potential for emotional affair or similar.

Stick around, read through the posts and Toolbox, feel free to share more if you feel comfortable doing so.

Yes, I should not have opened up that much to a friend. It started out with mental health and "Out of the FOG" type discussion, and got into marriage stuff. Appreciate your feedback, and I do see some effort on her part to have empathy, sit with emotions rather than react, and improve the relationship.

[MaxedOut]

This sounds very tough and focus-the-bat a part tingled my spider-sense as potentially worth exploring when someone is in an emotionally abusive relationship. I had a counselor years ago who seemed to dismiss me talking about a destructive habit that was also probably harming my relationship. She said something like "that sounds like a coping mechanism and we will grab on to whatever life preservers we need." Anyway, some of your contributors/accountability items may benefit from a little bit of a dig as PDs are really good at spinning things. Several matched things I "owned" and had frequently pointed out to me. Part of coming Out of the FOG was assessing those outside of her framework.


secrecy - I am not a secretive person (more TMI frankly). But I learned to be in relationship with someone with PD. Managing reactions, having needs, protecting myself from abuse - yeah, those led to some secrecy.

Anger: As for anger, me occasionally expressing anger would elicit immediate "punch back twice as hard" reactions and typically be brought up over and over again. It was usually pretty mild and rare, but many PDs feel entitled to vent anger out pretty liberally but do not feel others are entitled to anything like that to them,



Not speaking up (interpreted as holding grudges): This has been a pattern before with me some. But the reasons were different when I was younger with other relationships. With the PD, I learned speaking up was something I regretted about 90% of the time. No matter how gently framed, accompanied with acknowledgement of my part, behavior focused, etc. it led to anger, defensiveness, lashing out, or victim positioning. I either had to deal with emotional abuse and anger or ended up being the one tending to her hurt/shame spiral and direct or indirect implications that she "can't handle my shit."

Having a platonic relationship with a high school female friend where I vented about my relationship and sought advice: Stuff like this was often narrative control, image management, jealousy. Yes, we should be respectful about how we talk about spouses and about whether there are non-platonic undercurrents. While my SO would probably characterize it as venting, in reality, it was usually the most compassionate and limited presentation of things I could make in order to get support/advice. We all need people we can turn to on the rough stuff and doubly so when being in an abusive relationship. That is actually where the damaging secrecy often lies - us suffering and pretending to others.

Hiding the fact that I joined the Covert Narcissism support group:  you spouse sounds like she is not an emotionally safe person to discuss PD or abuse with. You have the right to find support you need (and to provide some info to not feel secretive but not invite conflict "I am struggling with some things and have decided to try out a support group. It takes place Wednesday at 7 each week so I'd like to make a game plan for how well handle dinners.") And, yeah, I remember the fear of my PD stumbling across an open kindle book, or a therapist message, or this website, or Reddit posts, or hearing a session with my counselor. We should not feel we need to hide accessing support resources. The fact that I never would have ordered a hard copy of many of the books I read and needed, is telling. I was afraid. Not "I'm a sneaky person." or "I love to disparage my spouse."


Last month she discovered I bought "Stop Caretaking the Borderline/Narcissist": Good on you. And she pretty much reacted the way someone with an PD would. She does not get to control the books you buy. And if she was accusatory and hostile, she is not owed a justification that satisfies her or the right to control your thoughts.

Some helpful questions for me in sorting through "my part of things":
- Is this how other people I am close to would characterize me?
- Has this come up as a pattern for me?
- What comes up before the action? What are the fears/emotions? What story am I telling myself?
- If this is something that comes up in other areas, is the lead in similar? For example, being reluctant to raise issues in other relationships has a totally different set of motivators and is a good thing to focus growth on. In my relationship with my PD is was emotional safety and was a protective thing. For most things, changing that would have been a bad thing, resulting in abuse or a leverage point for manipulation/control.
- If I am motivated to change, what is the motivator? It was often to prevent reactions, prove I wasn't how she was characterizing her, prove I loved and cared about her. So not about me feeling positive about emotional growth or feeling it really was objectively bad and I needed to repair for my own sense of self. Or because of a general belief or cultural value - yes, being open and honest is a great goal in relationships. Healthy relationships where partners maintain emotional safety, respect, kindness, and a desire to meet their partners needs with mutuality.
- How do pieces of this fit with my values? And if they run counter, what considerations outweighed behaving in alignment with my values (often one of the letters of FOG).
- What aspects of the issue build or corrode self respect? Sometimes "fixing the issue" was worse for self-respect because I knew I was doing something to placate. Ironically things she tended to accuse me of being "a coward" about were often ones I had to muster up courage to do as they ran counter to her framework and desire for control and mirroring.

Anyway, I say this not to vent on my ex or say we are the victims or have no flaws. I worked through plenty but the types of things you mentioned were often just ways to limit harm, self-protection, or simple operant conditioning where I'd learned better and worse outcomes tended to happen in that relationship. Like, if bringing things up that bothered me tended to help, I would have or would have continued to. Mostly it created more problems and sometimes spurred really bad situations.

Going through some of this helped me unlock perspective on what was underlying the "you need to ————." In a healthy relationship. that impulse will have healthy roots or the person will be able to acknowledge root fears and beliefs. With PDs, it is more likely about control, fear, insecurity and there is not a desire to create connection, safety, and mutuality with their partner in order to work through something.

Take the book example... if you or I saw our partner order that we would probably feel concern. We'd want to know if it had something to do with us. We'd want to know more. We'd want to find out what led our partner to feel burdened or what needs were not being met. I had a "penny drop" moment the first time I explicitly talked to my ex about abusive behaviors, how stuff made me feel (including fear and not feeling safe in our home). If I had a partner that came to me with even a bit of that I would feel a flood of concern and horror, honestly. I would want to pile on love and reassurance, figure out where we maybe had disconnections in how we were interpreting things, find out what behaviors felt that way and what wouldn't etc.

Which leads to another, maybe the most important, critical question: If I had a partner who took the actions I did, how would I react? If a friend took those actions when they were in a relationship that's similar, how would I view the situation (it's often super clear when we think of someone we love in our shoes, but we struggle to care for ourselves or offer understanding in the same way. Especially when we have been steeped in the PD's worldview for years (mistaking what we know about how they may see things and judging ourselves by that ruler instead of a non-disordered lens).

You also mention your PD doesn't treat others the same. Boy does that also resonate. A couple good inquiry questions when that is the case:
- Why not? If it's an ok way to treat people why is it behind closed doors and only for the ones they love most?
- If it's an ok wasn't me and her and maybe a charged issue, would she think about this differently?
- How would she expect me to treat her if the tables were reversed? If you found out she was struggling and talking to an old friend about stuff, what would you think? I imagine you chose the old friend because you did not want to "air your business" to mutual friends or family for worry of perceptions of your spouse or interference. And with history that person felt safe and knows you. Not, because you were tomcatting for sympathy from another woman... but to Square's point, there are wiser picks. So the answer may be you'd have taken issue had the tables been reversed. Or issue with some people and not others based on trust factors and their prior stuff.

Sometimes we realize "yeah, that wasn't ok" but in the reality melting FOG of PD traits we need to ground ourselves in thinking through these things. I let go of a list of "my contributions to the problem" as defined by my ex but came up with a list about as longer or longer of genuine contributors and relationship areas to work on within and after the relationship. So if it feels itchy to not "take accountability" just dig a bit deeper into what led to that thing and you'll usually find one.

Granted I may be overcorrecting my views at this point after years of shrinking, bending over backwards, putting compassion and understanding for her ahead of that for myself, and trying to prove myself. But sometimes the oendulum needs to swing a bit too much the other way to shake us loose for what is likely still a very fair or even tilted towards other understanding of things.

[zad7242]

I am 43 been married for only 4 years. I won't get into my situation since I've posted before, but we are a blended family with 6 kids. Secrecy "aka" lying became a huge issue for me. I had a thread on here about it. Was trying to keep the peace and avoid triggers. Doesn't end well. I do keep my healthy support people a secret and other resources like this site. My wife admits to having BPD (doesn't think it's a problem for anyone else). I told her I read Stop Walking on Eggshells and recommended to other family of ours and she got real angry, even though she admits she has the disorder.

My wife has said almost all the same statements in one form or another (she does do a vast majority of the chores, makes it sound like I do nothing, plus I am the only one working.) Tells me I offer nothing to the relationship. Autism, dysfunction with my parents made me this way, tells me I have no friends etc, etc. Basically same stuff you are hearing.