Gerda Rises Up to Go On

[Gerda]

Thank you so much, kml, for stopping in and for your thoughts!

The main problem with too much magnesium is it can overwhelm the kidneys, so patients with kidney failure should not take supplemental magnesium. Usually in a person with normal kidney function 500 - 800 mg/d is safe. If he was taking it not to fix constipation but to induce weight loss by abusing it as a laxative, that would fit into the whole eating disorder thought.

Well he started using it to fix constipation alongside a complete and radical change in his eating habits but I am pretty sure he was taking at least 5 times the recommended dosage, so that would be 2000 mg per day. Since MLC started at the end of 2013. I don't want to get too graphic, but being the only person in the house who cleaned the bathroom, it was pretty intense daily. It was one of the good things about him moving out, that I would stop cleaning toilets daily. When I am sick and can't hold my food at either end, I get extremely dehydrated and sometimes even have a panic attack. So I imagine this has to have a brutal effect on his body, and I read a few anecdotes on the internet of people who had gone a little batty from it. But it sounds like you have not encountered anything about that. I remember my uncle had a nervous breakdown from mercury poisoning and seemed sort of stoned for almost a year, so I was thinking it could be something like that.

As for your brother, who knows if that diagnosis was correct, I think teenagers in crisis and using drugs get mislabeled a lot. Does he strike you as a narcissist now?)

Yes, he is one of the most self-centered people I have ever met. I just never realized until now that it was that all these years. I thought he was just like that and that never having kids made him never get over that self-focus. I actually feel like an idiot for not realizing it! And it actually made me feel a lot more forgiving -- I realized that he has been trying really hard to conquer that in himself all this time -- tons of therapy and all sorts of physical, nutritional and other practices, and that he might be doing the best he can. He might actually serve as a model for me as the best that someone with NPD can do after years of intensive therapy.

It does sound like the family dysfunction in your childhood may be the reason why you never recognized it in your H - you were accustomed to it. It felt familiar.

Thank you for your empathy, that is very comforting. What I am grappling with now is that I thought it wasn't familiar at all. I thought my H was totally different from what I knew. It makes me wonder if I was sleepwalking all this time on some level, except that he really seemed like a wonderful guy in most ways, and we were so close. So I think he was either hiding it or battling it or ... I don't know anymore.

(In my case, the opposite was true - my ex was a fairly benign narcissist, and nobody in my family had any kind of pathology like that, so I feel like I was naive and just didn't know what to look for because I'd not been around it.)

But did you notice any behaviors that bothered you? I would think that if you had never encountered it, you would find it really horrible and not something you had to put up with. Or did your H also seem mostly good until MLC?