Is this dissociation or manipulation?

[thisworld]

So basically this is what my ex did: He wrote an e-mail to his ex (with whom he said he was obsessed for a bit but then overcame it - which I discovered he didn't) that was quite intimate (dreams about going to a hotel room together etc) and violated our relationship boundaries. He deleted it from the e-mail thread. But it was there in his sent box. He denied this e-mail (and that he had contacted her at that time) very very strongly. Brought his laptop to me and told me to prove it, show it, which I did - sent box. He looked surprised, almost shocked but I don't know whether this was because he didn't really remember or because he never guessed that I would check the sent mail box. He turned crazy, broke a lot of stuff etc etc.

Next day, without any apologies (which isn't the issue actually, he said neutrally that on that day he woke up after a bad dream, was like in a state of psychosis and did what he did.  I don't know what to make of this. The psychosis explanation was given rather calmly. Is it possible to be in a state of psychosis or disassociation but act so cunningly/methodically, like writing the e-mail and delete it?

What would you make of this?   

[Joem678]

Well we know they can dissociate.  I have read that they can become addicted to dissociation and keep themselves in this state for a while. 

It is possible.  It has happened with my wife.

[fromheeltoheal]

Hey TW

I dunno, my ex was a pathological liar, and that would always be my go-to with her.  Flashback: she once told me she had a mild heart attack at the gym and spent the weekend in the hospital, after the gym folks had used the defibrillator on her, turns out the truth was she spent the weekend in a hotel screwing some guy.

What that and yours have in common might be the woe-is-me story to go with the lie.  Oh poor baby, she had a heart attack, I need to be kind and gentle and supportive, eliciting sympathy while maintaining another attachment.  And the thing that absolutely amazed me was the speed at which she could fabricate such silliness, blindly fast with massive detail, you only get that good with lots and lots of practice.

But in hindsight I now see that I had started setting and enforcing boundaries with her, which she equated to loss of control, therefore I might leave and was probably already cheating on her, both false, but that motivated her to seek other attachments as well as use sex as a way to bliss out for a while, that and ice cream being her favorite soothers.  And also, she had a lot of impulsive sex which she was ashamed about, so covering that up with a plausible, detailed lie avoided the shame, which was right up there with fear of abandonment as far as priorities went.

Went off a little.  So psychosis?  Someone with an unstable sense of self will forget things, things that another version of their 'self' did, maybe impulsively, and then there's the shame avoidance and sympathy elicitation, although psychosis is scarier than it is sympathy-eliciting.  :)unno, were you able to tell when he was lying and when he was telling the truth?

[thisworld]

Sometimes I could and sometimes even though there was no reason to suspect anything there would be something so off in his speech, like he had rehearsed something. I thought maybe that was a personal difference, people have different mannerisms but it always made me uncomfortable.

His explanation in itself made me uncomfortable. Saying that you get psychotic like this sometimes and treating it as a completely normal thing is quite a response in my eyes. He looked uncomfortable as if he were lying. When he said that, I asked him if he wanted to see a doctor - we had this ground between us because of his addiction problems. I saw him in such states and know such parts of his history that a psychiatric diagnosis wouldn't make things change for the worse. But then maybe he was afraid that doctors would force him into more controlled addiction recovery - which he had dropped at the time- and didn't want to go because of this. Maybe he hoped to get out with the psychosis explanation but then realized that it included a potential risk- recovery!

In either case, my girlfriends and I are very familiar with non-disordered men who hide between strange psychiatric states when they are caught cheating - nobody seems to be doing it consciously nowadays

Still, I find it hard to be so methodical (delete the email) in dissociation but maybe I'm being judgmental because I don't know much about it. Hopefully I can learn.    


and yes, woe-is-me and my dear exes who went through so much are at the heart of every triangulation in our relationship.

[GreenEyedMonster]

My ex would deny things he seemed to do quite deliberately as well, and I'm totally sure he did not remember doing them.  My experience with my ex was that his brain basically erased anything he did that did not mesh with his image of himself.  He liked to think of himself as patient, caring, and generous, so if he did something outside of these boundaries, he'd often just deny that he had done it at all, or not remember.  This was his brain's way of defending himself from deep feelings of shame.

[vortex of confusion]

Some things that I have been told:

"I didn't think that I said it, I was just thinking about it."

I know that I brought something up with my stbx and he denied it. His excuse was that it was like he blacked out. He has big gaps in his memory about some things. He only likes to remember things that are congruent with how he wants to see himself. He sees himself as sober and not acting out but I think any rational person would see it just the opposite.

I had to learn that it had nothing to do with me. It was all about him and how he wanted to view himself and think about himself.

He has stopped arguing about some of that stuff in recent years and just gets kind of huffy and says stuff like, "Could be. You know how bad my memory is."

[thisworld]

He has stopped arguing about some of that stuff in recent years and just gets kind of huffy and says stuff like, "Could be. You know how bad my memory is."

Ha, denying it, accepting it, just doing nothing about it!

[GreenEyedMonster]

Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if my ex doesn't remember threatening me with a PPO, and wonders why I won't go to parties with him!  He checks every day to see if I've signed up, and seems to be baiting me.  I am not going because I can't risk even looking at him wrong.

[Welgrow]

Hey,

     I caught my ex doing something similar and had to restore her text message history to find two long text strings with two of her exes. They were detailed and went over the course of at least a couple weeks. I got extremely angry, because during that timeframe she was quite cold and verbally abusive to me. After I cooled off, I listened to her explanation. She claimed that she couldn't believe she had done those things and that it didn't seem real. She described something out of body. In the long run I couldn't accept these affairs coupled with all of the other issues. Whether this is dissociation or downright pathological lying seems to matter not. My friends and family told to ask myself whether I wanted a relationship with someone who would violate me and cheat on me. A friend asked me yesterday if I would want a relationship with her if the cheating never happened but all the borderline traits remained. Vaya con Dios.

[Notsurewhattothinkofthis]

Some things that I have been told:

"I didn't think that I said it, I was just thinking about it."

I know that I brought something up with my stbx and he denied it. His excuse was that it was like he blacked out. He has big gaps in his memory about some things. He only likes to remember things that are congruent with how he wants to see himself. He sees himself as sober and not acting out but I think any rational person would see it just the opposite.

I had to learn that it had nothing to do with me. It was all about him and how he wanted to view himself and think about himself.

He has stopped arguing about some of that stuff in recent years and just gets kind of huffy and says stuff like, "Could be. You know how bad my memory is."

I used to get the same lame excuse. She kept telling me she had a really short term memory. Maybe she did? She used to go on these rages and throw stuff around. She would deny it or not remember all the stuff she did the night/day before. I recorded a video of her going crazy and showed it to her after. She could not believe it. Then she told me " You deserve better than this"

Until today I still don't know if she knows she has issues and just don't want to accept the fact that she has them or she really is oblivious to it all.

[vortex of confusion]

Until today I still don't know if she knows she has issues and just don't want to accept the fact that she has them or she really is oblivious to it all.

In my opinion, somebody that is that oblivious has issues. I often refer to my stbx as Captain Clueless. He is so oblivious and so clueless about so many things. At some point, I had to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he is that friggin' clueless and oblivious, then he must have issues. I don't see how any "normal" person could be that friggin' oblivious.

[blissful_camper]

What is your gut feeling telling you?

[Joem678]

This time around I did witness what I consider the dissociation first hand.  The confusion, the lost of memory control.  I wish I could say she was faking it but the process was clear. 

[blissful_camper]

This time around I did witness what I consider the dissociation first hand.  The confusion, the lost of memory control.  I wish I could say she was faking it but the process was clear. 

I understand. I've witnessed that too and it's heartbreaking.

[NCEA]

Here is a story for you, this is 6-7 years old, my exHistrionic.

We're walking in the street and we see a movie poster with an actress she liked. She said "oh, it's X, we've seen her in Z movie, remember?"

I've NEVER seen that movie.

So I turn to her and say "we haven't seen this movie together" and she starts telling me that we did. Anyway, she probably watched it with someone else, god knows when, and confused me with that guy, and then kept trying to convince me that I DID see it.

A year later I found out she cheated on me multiple times.

[thisworld]

What is your gut feeling telling you?

At that moment, my gut feeling didn't tell me anything about the credibility or lack of credibility of my now-ex. I felt something like "ThisWorld, what are you doing here? Why are you here? Look at what you are discussing with him. Get out of this thing." It wasn't like panic or a tightening in the stomach. It was like a cold suffocation.

I think what my gut was saying was correct: This isn't a thing I can like or live with either way. (I mean a boyfriend doing these in dissociation is not any better than someone who is doing these consciously, and the friggin mail gets deleted in either case, ha!)

[Newton]

My tuppence of understanding and experience with ex's whom I believed expressed BPD traits is this... .

Dissociation is the absolute pinnacle of acting out/in... .the brain has reached such a state of stress it simply branches out to somewhere else it can cope with, a necessary alternative existence to remove oneself from stress.  It occurs when things become so overwhelming with feelings/thoughts/experience (sometimes triggered by me questioning their behaviour which upset me, or back in the day a child suffering abuse) that the only escape for them was to manifest an altered state of being... .this would exibit with fits of screaming, rage, smashing objects, attempting to smash me... .opening 3rd floor windows and threatening to jump... .hair physically standing on end... .darkened/blackened eyes, dead effect... .black and white thinking that would last for 3/4 days etc ... .

From my reading I see that BPD has sometimes been mis-diagnosed with MPD due to the similarities of 'fugue' state episodes (travelling distances with no recall etc).

Reaching out to dating sites or ex partners sounds like something very different than this. 

Acting dumb is an easy excuse to make when caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

[blissful_camper]

What is your gut feeling telling you?

At that moment, my gut feeling didn't tell me anything about the credibility or lack of credibility of my now-ex. I felt something like "ThisWorld, what are you doing here? Why are you here? Look at what you are discussing with him. Get out of this thing." It wasn't like panic or a tightening in the stomach. It was like a cold suffocation.

I think what my gut was saying was correct: This isn't a thing I can like or live with either way. (I mean a boyfriend doing these in dissociation is not any better than someone who is doing these consciously, and the friggin mail gets deleted in either case, ha!)

A cold suffocation sounds like a body reaction to something feeling not quite right to you. You're right. Identifying what's happening at the other's end doesn't make much sense when you know it's not behavior you can live with. 

[balletomane]

With my ex I think it was both. He would say extremely cruel things and then not remember them afterwards. His bewilderment and disorientation when I brought them up seemed genuine, and I noticed that he seemed to have some kind of emotional trip switch in his brain - once he reached a certain level of panic, paranoia, or anger it would flip and the memory would be obliterated.

When he ended our involvement by getting together with his flatmate with no warning, and I said I couldn't cope with this situation, he said, "I don't give a sh*t whether you can cope or not." A few days later I challenged him over those words and said that I didn't want him to speak to me like that again. I was polite about it, but I made it very clear that it had made me feel worse. He denied that this had been an unkind thing to say, insisted that he'd only said it because I needed "tough love", and declared that now he could see that he had never said anything bad in the past - I must have waited until he had forgotten the incidents, then taken his words out of context and manipulated him just to get apologies out of him. When he came out with this ludicrous paranoid theory, I decided that there might well be some manipulation going on as well as dissociation, as he projected a lot and would often accuse me of doing what he was doing himself. Until then I'd believed it was purely dissociation.