Sounds as if you’ve gone through a lot. Very painful stuff.

Thanks for your comment.

After dating him, I found, who I thought was a “nice Southern guy.” After one month of “idealizing” me, he turned out to be someone with BPD and NPD- double whammy. It was a horrifying rollercoaster, but I only dated him for a couple of months, because I could not take it for very long. He was highly reactive and would get very upset with me for ridiculous reasons (e.g. because I said I didn’t like a song he liked on the radio). He would snap on me behind closed doors and smile in public. Once, in front of all of my friends he began sobbing uncontrollably and ripped his shirt off in anger and told me he hated me. I don’t even remember why. One day he would tell me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and that he wanted to get married and have kids with me (pretty quick to be saying such things), and then two hours later (for God knows what reason), he’d yell obscenities at me and tell me he hated me and that we needed to break up. He drank excessively, and constantly thought I was lying to him and cheating on him. He would stare at himself admiringly in the mirror sometimes, and thought he knew everything there was to know about every subject. I was always walking on eggshells and was terrified of him. I never knew which emotion was going to come out of him. I did stand up to him one day and told him to leave my house and to get psychiatric help. He was losing touch with reality on a regular basis. This was my first encounter with BPD, but the sheer lack of empathy, callousness, and self-love he always seemed to display was very indicative of NPD as well. After I broke up with him, he would call me and tell me that he could not survive without me, that he was taking classes for anger management, and that he would die if I would not take him back (of course I didn’t!). One of the main reasons I thought he was BPD was because he was VERY emotional. It’s okay for men to cry, but this was truly overboard, and he was a drama king.

I do have issues of my own. As I said before, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (screened for BPD, but two separate doctors said no). I am stable on my medications, and have gone through intensive CBT and therapy for codependency (since my therapist knows about the two guys I dated with PDs). My theory is that I simply had bad luck in finding these guys. I had a pretty normal childhood. Today, I am in a relationship with a guy who is loving, emotionally available, stable, respectful, and he treats me as an equal in the relationship. There’s a balance. We have arguments just like any other couple, but they are over regular, everyday issues.

B., finding a man who turned out to have NPD is NOT your fault (it might have been bad luck in your case as well), but now that you know he has it, is it worth it to stay with him- and go to couple’s therapy? Think about it…he may be your husband, but a narcissist does not change- EVER. Why? Because he does not WANT to change. He believes that he is PERFECT in every way (though, in order to preserve the relationship, he may tell you he is not). Are you able to talk to him at all about your feelings and emotions, or does he give you the brush-off and tell you to just “talk to your therapist about it”? It’s really not too late for you to get out if he’s not treating you with love and respect. If you decide to leave, I recommend that you run! Men with NPD have a tendency to stalk, harass, or desperately try to win exes back with manipulative measures. I know that it would be so hard to do this, but trust me, you have to take care of yourself. Don’t voluntarily stay in an emotional cage (IF this is how you feel). You deserve trust, love, intimacy, and respect in your relationship. If you aren’t getting these things, it’s time to go. Don’t try to fix him. You can’t. You can only fix you. Work on building your self-esteem and discovering what’s important to you in a relationship, and then you will find exactly how to best handle your individual situation. There is a grief process, but there is also a light at the end of the tunnel. Good luck, friend!

BTW, Wasn’t Sam Vaknin recently diagnosed a psychopath, after proclaiming that he was one? Here is the link I found.

http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/wilddocs/2009/psychopath/index.html

I would be very careful about reading anything a self-proclaimed psychopath writes, and taking it seriously. He is a sadistic internet predator.

Clearly your calling out for help is an indicator that things are not all well.

To the others: I have been searching endlessly for a definitive text on the differences between NPD and BPD… as I feel I have encountered someone who has traits of both. But, he may be co-morbid.

“Ass”-like and narcissistic behavior is absolutely part of borderline personality disorder, at least for some people, and a history of abusing one’s partner is a potential sign of BPD, not a sign that someone doesn’t have it.

(And just for the record, my husband was diagnosed by a rather well respected hospital. He isn’t self-dxed)

More men with BPD are misdiagnosed with APD or simply written off as criminal (or maybe just “asses”), so that the actual numbers of men and women with BPD are more nearly equal (Makes sense if you buy into the school of thought that most spousal abusers have BPD, which is borne out by quite a bit of study now and goes a long way in explaining why anti-abuser treatment has been so hopeless. 95% of the men who chose to go to the same treatment place as my husband [the only place that will accept abusers without a court order in our area] re-abuse, no matter how hard they try to keep up with therapy, and even though they are in treatment by choice. The therapy pushes things like feeling bad for what you did, admitting it every week, in detail, and trying hard not to do it again. Obviously not very useful for the BPD-abuser)

More women are misdiagnosed with BPD when they actually suffer from another mental disorder or none at all. There’s a long history of psychiatrists diagnosing all female patients who don’t get better relatively quickly with Borderline, as well as teenaged females who claim sexual abuse without proof, lesbians and women who seem “masculine” and other women who fail to fit stereotypes. Again, so that the ratio of men to women with BPD is much more even.

More women are likely to seek support, esspecially public support and esspecially support to keep their marriages together, since in this society the woman is blamed when the marriage breaks up. Even if it’s because he hit her, it must be her fault in choosing the guy or provoking him in the first place. If the problems are less severe, it’s definitely her fault for not trying to keep the marriage hard enough. So they try harder and end up in more support groups.

I doubt that it’s just because many of those guys are asses for no reason. Generally when someone is chronically an ass and chronically mistreats the people they love, something is wrong with them.

Bon

I looked into NPD as a possible explanation for my wife’s behavior, whom I now believe has BPD, as you know.

Most people seem to argue that that there is a core of self-loathing that is masked by the narcissist, that the display of superiority is a means for denying their fundamental feelings of inferiority, and that the self-loathing itself is responsible for their need for others to idolize them and their desire to destroy the esteem of others, which is seen as a competitive threat.

What do you think? I still struggle to understand the differences between these 2 disorders (although I do think that the narcissistic behaviors seen in many BPs is fundamentally different from actual NPD).

Best wishes,
John