Hey @Faith-and-Hope @Former-Member @Former-Member @outlander and everyone else I may have missed, I have read a few of your postings here and there @Faith-and-Hope , and am so happy that you had a long holiday away. I don’t have much energy at the moment and may not be able to visit regularly but wanted to give you my support.
You have so much constraint and self control, if I was in your position I would not be that calm & able to share a space with him, I would bolt for the door, change my number and never want to see him ever again. I know the cubs complicate it enormously, and the financial side of things does as well, but you are so dignified in the way you’re handling it. And you’re not burying your head in the sand either.
Engage as many people as you can that speak legalese, it will be drawn out and draining.
I hesitate to comment sometimes on the presenting symptoms of WH, because my life experiences placed me with people at the far end of abusive who happened to also have NPD, when really people can present with the same brain part missing that makes them incredibly self-absorbed, but also can be quite harmless.
You have people like that chick that lied she had cancer Belle someone, and then the Trumps and Harvey Weinstein’s of the world, and my sib has a work colleague that has told some lies that had her and I in stiches they were so ridiculous – but yeah it is a continuum and yes, people with PD’s still have a personality, temperament and character. I think that generalising about personality disorders is as dangerous as generalising about schizophrenia, it is the children and people without options that people will disregard and look straight through.
I read this article on BPD that said if you had to have any mental illness in the world, it is the best one to have. The recovery is slow and arduous, but the people that stick with DBT, in x years %85 were completely recovered. BPD still has flexibility, where as NPD is rigid and has very little flexibility or ability to change. I swear my father had something in his head that was missing entirely. He didn’t develop right. It was structural.
Over summer my friend asked me to read ‘Fake’ by Stephanie Wood which I did, I am reading ‘She Said’ at the moment, and I have ordered Ronan Farrow’s book form the library. There were some passages in Fake that were hard to read, you can tell she is inexperienced with mental illness even if she is highly educated, she makes a lot of generalisations and I found some of it offensive, when really what she was dealing with was a capital A, a-hole, any diagnosis was secondary if you ask me.
I think its hard to come to terms with when you were so sincere and authentic in your feelings from the beginning. But we tend to assume that what we feel inside is the same as what our beloved feels and we’re pretty giddy when we fall for someone which does jack for our judgment.
But you’re not silly at all or gullible, just trusting and because you would never do that to someone else, it never crossed your mind that he could inflict that on you. The lies that some people tell are just unreal. Stephanie Wood does ask if they are lies at all, or more like delusions. She talks about a women with drug addiction she’s been reporting on that it comes out her childhood abuse story was all fabricated and untrue. I guess she figured she’d get more sympathy if she said she had a dark history of abuse, instead of simply having an addiction that she can’t stop which people generally don’t have much time for.
But I did read you wrote somewhere about your WH smirking at you, that says so much about him, and how his head and sense of self is wired…..I can relate to that but in my experience I have seen that sort of behaviour more with women who are pathologically self-focused. Especially when it comes to smirking about other women’s physical appearance in an uber competitive way.
But what they all have in common is a sense of superiority.
When their ego takes a hit, the claws come out, because their superiority has been undermined or revealed to be all in their heads when it isn’t constantly mirrored back to them.
I tend to have a different perspective on the women he is seeing. There is absolutely no reason why she could not be wired very similarly to him. That could be part of the attraction. She may very well be under his spell and in for a rude shock, but that is not always the case. I saw my lovely psychologist recently, and we were talking about this dynamic. And has seen instances in the community where it is actually both partners that lack empathy, are superior, controlling, entitled, arrogant, abusive and aggressive, they may not appear to be in public, but it’s amazing how far ‘image management’ can take people. Not forever, but they get away with it for a while.
People like your husband are constantly engaging in image management, even if they are not aware of it. Hence the 2 faces. Just because it is a women it doesn’t mean she can’t be all of these, and it is not always as simple as a perpetrator/victim situation – they can both be as bad as each other, because they are so similar in very basic ways when it comes to the organising structure of their personality, and they way they see themselves, and what the world owes to them.
Anyways I hope that you can get some rest and do some art here and there in-between disentangling yourself and creating your independent life. You’re too young to give up on life. Stay young at heart, and you can definitely be happy again. Like me, you will need counselling to ensure you don’t keep attracting the same type of self centred people to your life, but you can meet really lovely people that actually respect you, and don't want to hurt you, but just get to know you, and hang out. I hope your kin are on your side and supporting you as much as they can
Corny 
