Eating disorder and more - need a shoulder ......

@Faith-and-Hope.

I’m so relieved and happy for you @Faith-and-Hope .

It’s not total freedom and independence, but it is a very important step and one that is recognised by the law.

It may make your ex meaner and nastier and he could try and rub his current relationship in your face, they’re weak like that, because the divorce going through frees him up to marry the women he is with. He’s lost control of the family he has had for half his life, and he will try and regain some control somehow, my guess would be via money or flaunting his new life.

There’s nothing you can do about that, you’re completely powerless and that is why eventually once the financials are through, you need zero contact and zero daily reminders ie cancel numbers, real life and online triggers.

He no longer has power over you and he can’t control you day-to-day. That in itself will be a big adjustment and take some time getting used to. You will feel lost for a long time, your nervous system is used to drama and unpredictability, which is completely normal stepping out of a NPD relationship. I felt like I was leaving a cult, maybe because it started from baby years and is all that I knew.

If he can do this to you after 30 years he can do the same to her. Bizarre that she hasn’t drawn that logic herself. He will never change, I promise you that. Doctors gave up on my father, even professionals were totally out of their depth with his narcissistic personality disorder and not willing to risk their own health/safety trying to treat the untreatable. I think that psychiaitrist's would be very reluctant to give that diagnosis out because in my father's case they would have been able to sense how aggressive he was. You could tell just by looking at him.

A new chapter of is gradually opening up for you, not one where you are caring for someone that has never appreciated you.

Corny

It is very different for me @Corny . He was working 7 day weeks for the fist 25 years of our marriage, so guess who was left holding all the babies .... ??! I was effectively a single mum, and because I kept him informed of our life and what our children were doing, and the fact that we had to work in tandem made it feel like we were a team. In hindsight, this was how he could live two lives - one with his birth family in the the environment of our family business, and the other by proxy through me ..... taking all the credit (fuel) for being both a highly successful businessman and a titallly committed, dedicated family man.

Thriwn into the mix he pitted me against family members who I can now recognise as NPD as well, and of course I discussed my challenges and strategies, and distress, in dealing it with it all (you guessed it) with him ..... more fuel, I can understand in hindsight. In this capacity he was alternating between throwing me under a bus, and rescuing me ..... the basis fir trauma-bonding, of course.

The upending of all of this came when we sold our main business and he began to work from home. His true abusive nature began to emerge, but it was passive-aggressive, and gas-lighting ..... also really hard to define and recognise, particularly with top-ups of love-bombing and elaborate holidays and gifts ......

It was the switching of his addictions to new forms, and the invasiveness of them, along with serious emotional deregulation that appeared to represent a personality change. Little did I know !!! So that sent me running to doctors and support services trying to find support and intervention, and that was clearly in the realm of narc injury, because then it really turned toxic ..... more than I knew, because now all the financial damage he brought on behind my back is showing up.

This "brand" is what I refer to as the smiling assassin ..... they appear introvert, charming, self-depricating, empathetic, etc, until the mask drops, and gets raised again for strangers and those they need to use. Their abuse is just as sly and leaves you questioning whether you imagined it ..... again, only until they fully unmask as mine has.

Everyone we know is floored.

@Corny I have seen him charming doctors and counsellors, and acting as though he was there to listen and learn ..... passive, seemingly genuine and caring. It's only if you witness his rages that you get to see the aggressive flip-side. He would be more likely to play the counsellor back to the counsellor, and if stifled in that effort, turn lawyer-like and argue trivia around in circles to distract from the real issues.

It's hard to say what is authentic and what is a simulation @Faith-and-Hope with your ex-husbands demeanour in public and with health professionals. Some people figure out that they are narcissistic. At the same time they figure out that pathological self-centredness is not socially acceptable, so they adjust their behaviour, but it takes a lot of concentration and effort. They simulate empathy, it isn't real. They lose track of their lies and it does break through the cracks if you spend enough time with them.

Your ex still has a personality and a character, and there is no excuse to be an abusive person. I have read a little about the genetics of NPD in twin studies etc and like most mental illnesses it can run in families.

My father was more the attention seeking type. Attention seeking took up a lot of his energy, he completely fabricated %99 of his personal biography. If he read about someone in the papers, heard someone else's story he would adopt it as his own, especially if it was a tragic story that gave that person a lot of sympathy from others. He would change some details but they very quickly became dynamic delusions. The maintenance of his lies was what revealed how ill and dangerous he truly was. The problem was that he reached out to the medical system as part of creating this fake biography and eventually it became embroiled in his narcissistic delusions as well. His most violent rages were someone catching him out on rubbish lies. He looked down his nose at anyone with a mental illness, and yet sought medical treatment because there is a lot of fuss and attention to be had on a ward. What chance his 3 small children ever had of being seen was pretty much 0.00.

You're not mad or silly, there are thousands of people that have come before you, that have been left bewildered by this condition if the person is manipulative and abusive, not everyone with NPD would be.

There will probably be a lot of unanswered questions that you will never get answers for.

25 years is a long time as a single parent while he gallivants around on the other side of the world......you deserve so much more @Faith-and-Hope. He wasn't who you thought he was.

C.

He underwent a weight-loss program "supervised" by a doctor @Corny ..... so although it wasn't illness, it was using the medical system for attention and validation - only the do or didn't know he was fudging his program, lying and omitting info that would have shown up a serious eating disorder, and hiding the most telling behaviour that was co-exisiting with it all.

He is gallivanting on the other side of the world now, but when he travelled previously we almost always went with him ..... h needed someone to keep his daily life supported and in order ..... didn't recognise it as servitude because he used work commitment as his reason to be absent-while-present and worked so many hours that I was holding him up as a supportive wife. Would seriously love to go back and drop him in his butt ..... that's for sure, but I think he is going to do that to himself as the delusional web he has created comes under scrutiny and begins to unravel under legal investigations ...... I am still trapped in the web until that happens.

The medical establishment is very black and white when it comes to tackling weight loss, and it wouldn't have even crossed their mind that a person may have an undiagnosed mental illness. I guess we don't mean to, but we have a tendency to project our own experiences onto people and if I had been his nurse or dietitian I would have assumed some sort of childhood neglect and child abuse in his history, or weight gain from psych meds. It always shocks me that people aren't given therapy or a psychologist. I've known people that have had weight loss surgery that had a history of eating disorders in adolescence and the doctor never did a thorough psych assessment of their past and present. It really angered me that they accepted the money and did the surgery. The government is going to create a lot of eating disorders and have people swing the other way if they don't give people comprehensive support and look into their past.

Your husbands lack of remorse for hurting you like this is very telling. To be that unemotional and mean after 30 years is the most revealing part.

Actions speak louder than words, people can smooth talk you but it is their behaviour that tells you all that you need to know, and what you really ever meant to them.

C.

Learning about this personality disorder explains everything @Corny. It's the only real answer because nothing else comes close to a fit ..... I thought it was the eating disorder, but that didn't explain the stalking and interpersonal control of high was also off the scale, and yes, the cold-hearted discard after a few years of constructing a financial ensnarement behind my back, the complete now-public switch to a completely different appearance, value system and identity ..... like changing his shoes ..... says everything. It's like the stuff of spy novels.

You're right @Faith-and-Hope , its the discard and the calculating behind your back to shore up the money that reveals a lot about his mental health and where it fits on the scale of cold-heartedness. You really don't need to know much more. It's scary how long it takes to get to know someone.

I don't think NPD is something that is taken very seriously. My sibs and I never talk about it outside of our threesome. #1 no one would believe us, oddly none of us have any friends that have experienced anything close to the childhood we had.....and Google is where most people get their information.

RE: feeling like you are in a spy thriller, I did read a book by an ABC journalist about her being conned by a conartist....I can't remember the title. It isn't a sensitive book and she speaks very derogatorily about personality disorders in general and makes some very ignorant statements but it was an exmaple of a similar experience that you have been through.

The way I see it, a-holes can get mental illness too. They were an a-hole first. But the combination of being an a-hole and having a brooken or dysfunctioning brain is a heady one.

I reckon I agree with you @Corny . He sure had me fooled, but then I also believed in the mirage he created ..... and it was lovely to hike it lasted. Hard work, but I felt we were thriving on it ..... one of us was anyway, and that was me. I intend to get back to thriving when all this blows over - older and wiser.

Thanks so much for your understanding and support. I am so sorry for what you have come through to gain the insight you have. I like to think my experiences will help others find their way, that something good can come out of something so bad.