Projecting a diagnosis?

[GreenEyedMonster]

This is something that has crossed my mind more than a few times since my breakup, and I can't tell if it's a realistic possibility or my own paranoia.

How often do people with Cluster B disorders project their diagnoses on to others?  My exBPD/NPD told me about his ex-girlfriend's alleged diagnosis, which I will get to in a moment, and the whole scenario sounded pretty implausible.  It makes me wonder if it was really his diagnosis.

So here's the back story.  After our breakup, I made the mistake of thinking that this guy is wired like non-disordered folk and tried to contact him and a mutual friend to reconcile.  My ex went off the deep end and developed a very persistent delusion that I am stalking him.  He went so far as to send me what he calls a "cease and desist" letter, which was actually more legitimately harassment than anything I've done to him.  He claims that things like RSVPing to parties I've been invited to or looking at him wrong at said parties is "stalking."  He also claims that I stalked him by knowing his e-mail address when he openly shared it with me on multiple occasions.  His grasp of state law is slippery at best.  However, given that he is a narcissist, all of this really appears to be a giant campaign to keep me from criticizing him so that his ego doesn't dissolve.  In other words, it is a really desperate, primitive defense mechanism to avoid the fact that he treated me like absolute crap and it ensures that he never has to be held accountable for his actions.  It also justifies all the things he did to me because I am a "bad person."  (Interestingly enough, he still seems to really enjoy my presence at certain parties, and at one post-breakup gathering, talked and joked with me for about 2 hours, even cracking jokes about sex.  You know, it works if I pay him a lot of positive attention and act like he's a stud.)

All of this made me remember the claims he made about his other ex-girlfriend.  After the breakup, he claimed that she was a "bad person."  He claimed that she shared a diagnosis with him that she was a sociopath!  He inferred that this meant that she was a murderess, and was going to hold him prisoner in her house, use him as a sex slave, and then shoot him with her rifle!  HE ACTUALLY BELIEVED THIS.  He would look at me in utter seriousness and conviction and tell me that he cheated death by leaving her.  He said this on multiple occasions.  However, he would sometimes tell me that he had homicidal thoughts toward her, and attributed this to a desire for revenge on a sociopath.

He was in therapy at the time that all of this happened and it makes me wonder . . . is he the one who was diagnosed with AsPD?  Maybe he couldn't handle knowing this about himself, so he pushed it off on her?  I debate this a lot.  Has anyone else experienced an ex becoming so delusional that they projected their diagnosis on to the non?

I can't imagine that a real sociopath would tell her target exactly what she was doing to him, then propose getting married, as he claims she did.  Even more interesting, he stayed with her after she shared the diagnosis, for several weeks or months, and only left the relationship when she appeared to lose interest in him.  If he was really so scared of her after the diagnosis, why didn't he leave?

[thisworld]

GEM hi,

In all honesty and with so scientific basis, I think your ex boyfriend's previous girlfriend called him a sociopath and he is embellishing the rest. Or the woman was scared of his volatility and was trying to scare him to be safe - in which case it worked. In more natural conversation, I'd also expect " a diagnosis ... .ASPD.", not "sociopath".

A real ASPD may tell these to scare someone as well and then propose getting married but I think this is something similar to your eye-contact stalking. Your ex may be rewriting the past in relation to how strongly he feels about facts that we may not know. My ex projects stuff like this a lot - especially in terms of assigning his exes his own motives.

[GreenEyedMonster]

The other thing that doesn't add up in the situation is that he said that his ex was diagnosed with "primary and secondary sociopathy."  This is in no way representative of a DSM diagnostic label, nor is it a current or common way to describe the disorder.  I have a hard time imagining that a psychologist would sit down a patient and say, "You are a sociopath."  They would probably diagnose the patient with AsPD, if they shared the diagnosis at all.  Also, primary and secondary sociopathy are different diagnoses and seem to be fairly mutually exclusive, based on my reading, though I could be mistaken.  Something is fishy here.

At the time we started dating, which was about 15 months after he broke up with "the sociopath," he was still very regularly posting articles about female sociopaths on his Facebook page and said that he talked about it so much that people were unfriending him!  It reminds me of that quote, "The lady doth protest too much."  For some reason, he *needed* his ex to be a horrible sociopath in order to protect his ego.

He explained how sociopaths work:  gaining supply, devaluing, and discarding.  Then he did them all to me.

[thisworld]

They would probably diagnose the patient with AsPD,

Yes, this is what I was trying to say. I can relate to this sociopath thing actually. I know for sure that whenever I practiced healthy boundaries, my ex probably experienced me as an emotionally very cold person. So, in his emotional world, I may really be close to a "sociopath" and I know that holding him accountable for certain things, I also turned into his prosecutor in the end. So maybe, your ex experiences this person as a sociopath. (Or maybe this is part of a smear campaign) as he experienced you as a stalker. I think I may be described to my ex's next girlfriend as a sociopath.

Or maybe he is projecting his own feelings but wrongly comes up with BPD/NPD as sociopath seems to be more popular in everyday currency.

[GreenEyedMonster]

I think you are right on many points, thisworld.

I think that he experienced his ex as a sociopath because she caused him narcissistic injury.  This is both his personal reality and how he maintains his ego in the face of the narcissistic wound.  After that relationship ended, he maintained that there were no warning signs he ignored, there was nothing he could have done differently, and nothing that happened was his fault.  He was completely the victim.  You know, because someone who gets engaged to someone they've talked to on Facebook messenger . . . totally a victim.  No responsibility there.

I think he experiences me as a stalker because I am in such close physical proximity and it wouldn't be that far-fetched that I could confront him about the relationship and cause him narcissistic injury at any time.  So I am a walking narcissistic accident waiting to happen, one that could appear at any place and at any time.  So his reality is that I am a stalker.  This also absolves him of any guilt for what he did to me, because I am a "bad person." 

The degree to which he believes these delusions is what is truly frightening.  He will talk to friends about me in the same matter-of-fact way that he talked to me about his other ex being a murderess. 

[thisworld]

The degree to which he believes these delusions is what is truly frightening.  He will talk to friends about me in the same matter-of-fact way that he talked to me about his other ex being a murderess. 

Yes, I think he may. How do you feel about this? It happened to me once before and I was terribly anxious about my self-image. I felt like I had to explain myself to people, too. It felt like this became my burden for a while. Nowadays, I don't care much but I've worked on this a lot before, it was a really bad feeling. Actually, I'm OK with a bit of smearing nowadays as long as there isn't bigger damage caused by his volatility (I had to hospitalize him again last week although we are not together anymore.) But you sound a bit worried about it, are you?

[GreenEyedMonster]

The degree to which he believes these delusions is what is truly frightening.  He will talk to friends about me in the same matter-of-fact way that he talked to me about his other ex being a murderess. 

Yes, I think he may. How do you feel about this? It happened to me once before and I was terribly anxious about my self-image. I felt like I had to explain myself to people, too. It felt like this became my burden for a while. Nowadays, I don't care much but I've worked on this a lot before, it was a really bad feeling. Actually, I'm OK with a bit of smearing nowadays as long as there isn't bigger damage caused by his volatility (I had to hospitalize him again last week although we are not together anymore.) But you sound a bit worried about it, are you?

Most of my friends figured out long ago who the crazy one was.  The overwhelming opinion is that I am the victim here.  So I'm not really worried.  The only friend who doesn't see it that way seems to be in denial that one of his friends is such a jerk.

But I'm going to his house next Saturday, and my ex will be there.  I wonder what this friend will think when my ex pines for my attention.

[thisworld]

It's great that you feel strong about this

The friend may have to do some thinking for himself as we have ourselves.