So many questions...

[fkamontijo]

Hello, I am not exactly sure where to start.  I have so many questions and those questions just bread more questions.

I am a year separated from my husband who my counselor believes had NPD.   She has been counseling my kids and I for a year, seen all the email and text conversations we have had, plus email and text conversations between him our daughters and son.  My husband went so far as to call, text and walk up to our counselor and explain to her why he had to have so many affairs and write things about me to her.  Hence where she came up with the unofficial diagnosis.  We were married for 20 years.  Actually 19, I spent our 20th last month alone.  He told me for most of the 20 years he was miserable and his new thing makes him feel things he has never felt before.  He had two failed engagements before me, told me how bad they all were.  With me there were 4 affairs and 2 work place sexual harassment charges (at 2 different jobs).  We have 3 children ages 15, 13 and 10 (the oldest two are girls with the youngest being my son).  We are going through a divorce right now.  He is accusing me of mental cruelty.  I am trying no contact however he keeps telling me there is nothing in writing (despite verbal agreement with counselor to only speak on Thursdays) however he contacts me anytime he wishes.  I even gave him his own email address to use to contact me (he thinks it is my general email).  I can go in on Thursday's and find multiple messages one week or none at all on others.  I do not respond except on Thursday's however I am afraid he is going to use this against me in court.  My daughters will have nothing to do with him.  My son will only see him on Friday's to visit and wont go over night with him.  He used to yell, scream, swear and throw things all the time that the kids are afraid of him.  I stepped between him and my oldest a few times.  We walked on egg shells.  Waited to have some sort of idea on his mood before we did anything.  My counselor was going to put a child protection order against him for what the kids told her in individual private sessions.  I assured her he would not come to the house so it wasn't put into effect.  He hasn't although he frequently says how he is made to feel like a monster.  I kicked him out August of 2014 because I found out he was still in a relationship I discovered he was having a year previous to that.  With someone half my age and he's older then me.  Both email and text me lovely messages.  Her telling me how much she is pleasing my husband, how if I were better he never would have had to look elsewhere and the more I ruin the relationship he has with his daughters the more it pushes them to have their children.  Him... .about anything.   I am a mess over what he's done to me, our family, our kids.  What he still continues to do to us.  Because my son will see him he lavishes gifts on him and puts him in the middle with the girls.  I then get accused of putting my son in the middle.  I am confused on so many levels.  I have done research on NPD and I can see where he fits but then I just question whether I am looking for a reason for this break up to not be my fault as he (and she) have told me it is.  I have read a number of the posts on here before posting myself and the video on how to stop an argument however I feel like I am in a no win situation.  I am afraid anything, or nothing, I do will come back to bite me with the legal proceedings and I don't understand those either.  I would have done anything for my family, and did; including declare bankruptcy because his job was hit and miss and if he filed he could no longer do his job (finance).  I go to church that is strongly based in family and that is hard.  Even more so now because I found out she just joined.  Insult to injury.  I feel like I am getting hit at every turn and nothing is making sense.  Even a year later with counseling.  I am hoping at some point this will all make sense.  I think I made this to long.  Sorry.

[livednlearned]

Hi fkamontijo,

Welcome to bpdfamily, I'm glad you posted and let us know how you're doing.

I came to the forum with many of the same questions you have, feeling much the way you describe your own state of mind. It takes time to make sense of these disordered relationships, and when there are active divorce proceedings and kids involved, our stress can feel stratospheric. This makes it harder to think clearly.

To start, I highly recommend reading Spitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing a NPD/BPD Spouse by Bill Eddy (who also has a lot of information on his site, www.highconflictinstitute.com). Eddy was a former social worker who became a family law attorney, and he began to realize that 80 percent of divorces were low-conflict, and 20 were high-conflict, and of those 20, most had a spouse with a personality disorder. He has written at length about how to take an assertive approach to custody and divorce battles. For those of us who don't know anything about legal proceedings, this is a godsend.

Communicating with him once each week on Thursdays is a good strategy to help you take care of yourself. If your case goes to court, and you share the kinds of emails he sends, it will be very clear that your strategy is reasonable and needed.

Every time his GF sends you an email like the ones she has sent, keep it. Keep everything, document all of it. Document, document, document. The Achilles heel of many people with BPD is that they are not consistent and methodical in their thinking, and are instead impulsive and retaliatory. The more you document, the more you can paint a picture of his lack of credibility. Your husband does not take responsibility for his bad behaviors, he blames them on you -- he will continue to do this throughout the divorce, even if deep down he does not want the kids. Your job is to hold up a mirror to his allegations so that the court can judge who is more credible.

It works in your favor that he does not see the kids much. Courts tend to go with the status quo because they don't want to change things too much for the kids, and they figure that whatever you decide informally outside the court must be best.

There is a lot to take in. This place was a godsend for me, and in many ways equally if not more helpful than my own lawyer, who was very good. There is a lot of collective wisdom here from people who have walked in your shoes.

You're not alone 

LnL

[maxen]

hi fkamontijo, and another welcome to bpdfamily. you are being put through a very hard time right now and it's important, if you can, to proceed in an orderly fashion to protect yourself. please take lived'n'leaned's advice about the book Splitting and about documentation. lean on your friends and your counselor. keep posting here, we're a board full of people who will understand what you're going through.

i want to say two things about this:

We are going through a divorce right now.  He is accusing me of mental cruelty.

first, from what you describe, he is engaging in projection. he is obviously being cruel to you, and it is characteristic of BPD patterns (and NPD too, i think) to deflect the pain of self-awareness onto the other party. (my ex-wife, for example, got blackout drunk and then made a point to her family that i drank.)

second, this is the text for cruelty in my state: 

The cruel and inhuman treatment of the plaintiff by the defendant such that the conduct of the defendant so endangers the physical or mental well being of the plaintiff as renders it unsafe or improper for the plaintiff to cohabit with the defendant.

an interpretation is here: www.nydivorcefirm.com/divorce/cruel-inhuman-treatment-divorce/

so from that you can get a sense of how far his accusations would get him!

let me also say that there is no way in which you can be at fault for your husband's infidelity. that was a choice he made.

i was once where you were and i was in a complete panic. again, please try to deal with the situation one element at a time. have you consulted a lawyer yet?

[ForeverDad]

We are going through a divorce right now.  He is accusing me of mental cruelty.  I am trying no contact however he keeps telling me there is nothing in writing (despite verbal agreement with counselor to only speak on Thursdays) however he contacts me anytime he wishes.  I even gave him his own email address to use to contact me (he thinks it is my general email).  I can go in on Thursday's and find multiple messages one week or none at all on others.  I do not respond except on Thursday's however I am afraid he is going to use this against me in court.

He is accusing mental cruelty.  Typically cruelty would be of actions, not lack of actions.  You are doing well by keeping your contact to a minimum and limiting it to only parenting or necessary divorce topics.  In all communications speak or write as though the court were looking over your shoulder.

A common way for a high conflict disordered person to file is to claim all the worst behaviors, including the kitchen sink.  They're expecting the sheer magnitude of claims will gain them added attention.  My ex claimed all sorts of poor behaviors about me.  What did the court do?  It moved on to the next step.  Literally, that was all.  For example, at my initial hearing when we separated CPS stood up and stated they had "no concerns" about me.  Though my ex was facing Threat of DV charges at that time and she was claiming I was abusive to our child, judge simply asked our work schedules and defaulted to mother.  (Months later when I filed for divorce then-stbEx tried to claim there was a case pending with CPS but she sunk herself when she said the person on staff there said she's look into reopening it.  Magistrate had to wrangle with her that it was closed.)