Yes, great article. I agree- we have a lot of programming/attachment to a parent than to someone we have just met. This may be why your H is able to be of help to your mother and not have it affect him emotionally as much.

The giving praise/validation aspect. With my BPD mother, it also includes doing things for her. Her responses have startled me sometimes- how she seems to grab on to it. She can't seem to get enough of this and feels she lacks it.  But she has it- all around her - she has people who have tried to befriend her, she's had material needs met, and she can't seem to perceive this. Encounters with her are transactional- meet her need in some way, even a small thing- because it's the dynamic she wants. I might call her to see how she's doing and she will end the call with "need more pictures of the grandkids" or  something and it's that she needs this in the relationship. So even if the "need" isn't something I wouldn't do- it's that this is the relationship- and the choice of words.

Very impressive how much you've learned and know now. I feel sorry for the both of you.. and I can see why she stayed faithful to you for 25 years. I know how very difficult and hard it is to avoid and resist that love-bombing during a vulnerable time. Poor folks are locked right into their rollercoaster ride and can't get off until their thrown off. This is a long-shot but, do you think this attraction to the married narc, may be a guide, leading her to the ideal psychological solution, she instinctively and subconsciously really needs, yet avoided so long? Once again, you have my deepest sympathy.

Thank you so much for your reply and sharing your experience. We will start learning about DBT as you suggested. I hope to limit the episodes, but sometimes we feel like losing more grounds and not able to set up boundaries. I hope she will start seeking for help, but based on last conversation I know we have a long way to go. Hang in there and hope your child is getting the help needed and improving. 

Keep repeating this to yourself everyday "You will never get what you need from her and she will never be willing to give it to you. You deserve to have a healthy, reciprocal relationship"

You just gotta figure this out on your own and you will.

Cheers and Best Wishes!

-SC-

I thought I'd add a bit more context.

I've said to my ex, multiple times, that she betrayed me. The first time I said that to her, she acknowledged that she had. On subsequent occasions, she rationalized her actions.

My therapist does see my ex as manipulated and victimized by the guy, but also noted that people can be complicit in their own victimization. I agree with that perspective, in my ex's case.

My ex has had a very unusually high lifetime number of sexual partners. She has never had difficulty finding men, when she's wanted that. When we got together, there were multiple interested men circling about her.

Over the course of our 25 year relationship, she often threatened to leave. But while we were in a relationship, she never sought, or even flirted with, other men, up until recent events.

Two years ago, the NPD guy reached out to her, then pursued her. They had been lovers when they were young adults, but she has absolutely no memories of a sexual/romantic nature, involving him, from that period - she has apparent complete dissociative amnesia around this, potentially hiding painful or unpleasant memories from herself. After he tracked her down two years ago and pursued her, on the evening before they initially slept together, she apparently expressed major qualms and the situation triggered a severe dissociative episode for her, but the guy persisted and they ended up sleeping together. Then the affair took off like a supernova, with both of them idealizing each other.

I won't be participating in this thread i do not believe in divorce and it's not something that i want on my mind.

Thank you

More "big waves" in the gut today, but I am the lighthouse in the tempest.

Amazing how powerful the brain chemicals are.
Damn you Dopamine. Damn you Cortisol.

My therapists most recent words have become a repeated mantra.

" She doesn't ever go over a month and a half without reaching out for some reason or another. I feel that seeking other's company might be best for you in the long run. You will never get what you need from her and she will never be willing to give it to you. You deserve to have a healthy, reciprocal relationship. "

Indeed.  Once, I couldn’t help myself — I engaged. I told him he should go ahead and do whatever he wanted, I think it was a short trip at the time, and that I was okay with it.  HE GOT MAD!  I guess it was because I wasn’t angry.  Other times I’ve offered solutions to his problem, and again, he’d get mad!  Clearly, he does NOT want solutions.  He just wants to complain.

It's helpful to have it laid out like this (in the article), rather than always having to learn by the school of hard knocks.

"Don't give praise or validation easily"  This kind of goes against my natural instinct, as in my profession I worked from a "strength based" perspective, and it was my place to encourage and to help build confidence and character in addition to skills.  But I remember a conversation with my mom a few years ago that made me do a double head turn in my personal life.  I think my mom is typical BPD in a lot of ways - extreme waif.  She is needy, insecure, childish, lack of sense of self, constantly seeking validation, emotionally unstable, her feeling of abandonment is triggered every time we go away...etc etc.  So, at a time when she was "low", and visiting our house many years ago, I was in my "strength based mode", and gave her an example of something I thought she did well as a mother.  Holy - did that boomerang, and now I can see how it completely fed her narcissistic supply.  I got an indignant lecture on what a great mother she was.  I could write a book about the ways she wasn't a great mother, as could all of us.  Until then, I was blind and didn't see the narcissism.  That was a turning point for me when the light bulb finally came on for that trait - or maybe it was in that moment that I "accepted" it.

"Make your boundaries clear − and stand by them". My husband has done this well.  He doesn't have all the grooming I've had, and he doesn't have the emotional psych baggage (parentification, fear etc).  All her FOGGing doesn't have an effect on him.  It's been good for me to observe his detachment.  He doesn't feel guilt.  I frequently turn to him for guidance when I start feeling the push-pull.  He let's me know that I "don't need to do this or that" to "supply" her.  I don't seem to know what normal is, so I turn to him for that guidance, including holding my own boundaries.  

"The first thing you have to do is recognize who you're in the room with," she says. "What you don't know can and will harm you." I can't say enough about this.  I know I've said this before, but I think more could be done in the schools and maybe community groups to teach communication skills with difficult people, relationship skills, and mental health education. At the risk of sounding gloomy, I think this world is full of difficult people in home life, work and community life, and government. It's hard to respond in a healthy and self-protective way if we don't recognize who's in the room with us, especially if we've grown up in a dysfunctional FOO, or with dysfunctional people in our lives.  

Thanks for posting the article.  

UnderstandBPD, is your reluctance to meet with a lawyer due to a concern that it acknowledges the divorce?  I know that you are deadset against facilitating a divorce.  Emotionally, I can understand how meeting with an attorney makes the divorce proceedings more real, however just meeting with a divorce attorney doesn't make the divorce any more likely to occur.  In fact, it might give you some options on how to delay the divorce or motivate your wife to attend marital counseling.

Also, earlier I mentioned that your wife may have difficulty paying for the divorce, however as I think through things more, I imagine that in a Western country, your wife's attorney has ways to make you pay for it.