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I found this... .

If some man were to say to your daughter: "Here's the deal, sweetie. For several months or so, I'm going to pretend to be everything you ever wanted. I'll shower you with attention, affection and all manner of stuff to make you feel special. Then, once I know you're depending on me as your significant other, and have made a commitment, I'm going to quit pretending and be who I really am. I'm going to start treating you really badly. I'll say insensitive things, I'll lie, I'll cheat, I'll be really cruel, possibly humiliate you in public. Hey, I might even beat you. Your job will be to figure out what happened and do everything in your power to restore the relationship to what it was, until you either die, try to kill yourself, or collapse and get sent to the hospital, which will be pretty funny because there's no chance whatsoever I'll ever pretend to be that 'nice guy' again—and by the way, it WAS a pretense. So what do you say, sweetie? Do we have a deal? Several years of hell in exchange for a few months of fantasy."

Narcissism Book of QuotesJun 17, 2004 by Sam Vaknin and Femfree

Herodias, that is really insightful and does help capture the turmoil. That is really how i feel though, when things were going well it was truly magical and i did become quite dependant on her affection.

The bad part is that he'd probably pass the parent test with flying colors. 

Oh this is so true.  We need to teach our kids to not trust anything "too good to be true".  I'm sure as parents we all say it now and then, but they really need to learn the message clearly.

I've thought about that but then i came to a realisation: it is life's job to teach kids to be cynical, not parents. Ive become fairly bitter because of mistakes my parents made and when i try to talk about this with people they often say "well at least you are a tougher person as a result". To that i repeat my point, yeah but thats not their job. 

Good perspective.

Well, I'd have to say "Wait, I have a daughter? When did this happen?"

The thing is, there isn't much I could do but tell my hypothetical daughter that sometimes people are just broken, and she probably wouldn't understand it. When I got together with my ex-, someone could have told me exactly what she was going to do, and pointed out the warning signs that had already happened, and I wouldn't have believed it. There would have been a mix of 'oh, this guy is a bitter ex-', 'oh, there must be a reason for it', and 'well, she's clearly got problems, but I can help her work on them'. And in many ways I think I needed the bad relationship, because it's helped me improve my communication skills, understand how to break up with someone you still love, and get over a lot of being codependent.

Hi Herodias,

I can see how that would be a scary ordeal. I have a D9 and I notice in your post it says a few months of fantasy.


Boundaries is an outward layer that protects our morales and values and a simple analogy is to keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. Would it not be sensible to take our time to get to know someone over several months? That way we should be able to detect the push / pull behavior against our boundaries and it would raise alarms bells?

My daughter is 9 and I have been teaching her about boundaries since she was around 7. I validate her when I pick her up from daycare because she can have stressful days and I listen to social settings in her classroom, playground, after-school care and I teach her about boundaries that way. It helps her with coping through grade school and later university, workplaces, interpersonal relationships and with her undiagnosed mother with BPD traits.

Do you feel like it would help to teach our kids about boundaries?

One of my best friends here at work actually said something similar to me... .

she asked me if I would be ok with my own child being treated the way I was being treated.

I said, no.  She was like, well there you go. Why are you putting up with such awful behavior from this loser?

That's the thing... .we need to figure out WHY it's ok to let someone treat us like crap but not ok for others to be treated poorly. Do we not love ourselves at all?

Something to really think about!

Thanks for posting this, Blue.

The absolute 100% best way to teach kids about boundaries, is by respecting their own.  What I mean, is you let your kids make their own mistakes, develop their own beliefs, and you respect their ability to do so.  You can't prevent them from ever getting hurt and after a certain age you really can't tell them what to do.  

What you can do is share your experience with them--what you did and what the consequences of those decisions were.  But there's a difference between 'guidance' and 'control.'  If you try to control them, then you are setting them up to be codependent--even if you are just trying to keep them from getting hurt.  Your love for them becomes 'conditional' (or feels that way to them)--their behaviors become divided into 'successes' and 'failures' (successes make mommy and daddy happy; failures make them sad).  Ultimately you'll be setting them up to seek the (at first) unconditional love of a Borderline.

Both of my parents were Boundary Busters (NPD dad, Borderline-lite mom), with very rigid thinking and standards of behavior.  I have no doubt that they just wanted what was best for me; but my first 21 years were a fight to establish myself as a separate emotional entity.