Believe it or not, I am actually happy to hear your reaction. It is a sign of backbone, but note what it took to bring it out (I was not trying to bait you, so don’t get the wrong idea). I may have misunderstood your comments too, but that is because I hear you saying one thing but doing another. Your comment about “There’s something all of you are leaving out of the NPD equation: ….” I what really got me on that line of thought.
Bzzzzz. In her mind she did nothing wrong.
I disagree. When you confront her on this, she will surely get angry for you challenging her actions. She is really responding in anger to your audacity of making her confront her hurtful actions, instead of staying quiet and justifying those actions with her. So she DOES know that she did something wrong. As evidence of this, try confronting her on something she really did not do or knows anything about. What is her reaction then? I bet she does not blow up or get angry because she has no guilt to react to. You give her too many excuses. She is more cunning and calculating than you give her credit.
I said that in her mind I over-reacted. If anything, I think I under-reacted.
Glad to hear you think you under-reacted
As I have related several times in this thread, W was saying to me and to others (in convos that I overheard or that were repeated to me) that I was kicking her out. I was not being anything less than completely honest. I was just trying to clarify that I was NOT kicking her out. I told her the rules and told her that if she found them unacceptable, she was free to leave. More correctly, I told her, “You know where the door is.”
I understood that you are not afraid of her leaving. I was not clear in my statement, since I see it sounds like your fear of leaving. The fear I was referring to is that of confronting her and standing up to her. Saying “You know where the door is” is a lot different from “GET OUT NOW!” In the first phrase, you do not take responsibility. You leave it up to her to decide, then you have to figure out how to react. This continually keeps you off balance. Telling her in no uncertain terms to get out plants your position firmly in the ground. It makes YOU take a stand. When you do this, you are accountable and now something to be reckoned with. Your avoiding this accountability is the fear I should have been clearer in explaining.
W threatened to leave. I stood my ground. I told her that I didn’t want her to leave, but I did not back down on anything I said to her.
I know you feel you stood your ground because you did not beg her to stay. For you, that is a major shift. But to her, you only moved into neutral ground, as I just explained. NPDs distort the truth. She still hears in your statement that you backed down, because you did not directly confront her. To her, anything less than “GET OUT NOW!” is not a confrontation.
But W told her friend that, “things are a lot better.” From that statement, I inferred that she thought I had done or was doing something different.
Or she could have thought that she got you to fall back in line…
And last time I said that I was going to ask the C about telling W about the NPD diagnosis, you jumped on me for letting him run my life instead of standing up for myself, making my own decisions, and letting the chips fall where they may.
I still believe you need to confront her, based on the diagnosis of your counselor. But I also know counselors are not God. If you want an alternate method of confronting your wife, I was suggesting that you use a splitting tactic, like kids use with their parents. Split off her sources of power. This is assuming she is not a hopeless NPD case, but someone who could be rehabilitated, or at least to some extent. But either way, you need to confront her.
To do that, your need to assume as much power, responsibility and accountability for yourself as you can, if your actions are to carry any weight. She needs to know that YOU want her out and that you are not following the direction of someone else. If she suspects the later, the first thought in her mind will be that she only needs to work a little harder to brainwash and manipulate you back into her camp. After all, someone else did just that, right? If she knows your decision is from within you, she may realize her attempts will be useless. Do you understand my point? This is very subtle, and almost irrelevant for most of us. But it is central to how an NPD thinks. They are extremely sensitive to any openings in your armor through which they can manipulate. You need to close all holes.
Lastly, take a good look at your last paragraph. I’m not going to debate the content, as I stand by my comments. I am glad to see you get angry, but it seems to me like you finally blew up because you felt like I got you into a corner and was falsely accusing you. That would make anyone mad. I react that way too. But it is wrong. Strong boundaries keep others in their place before they get too much in your face and you feel compelled to react so strongly. It’s a hard lesson for me.
The other thing I get out of your reaction is a certain sense of loyalty and dependency on your counselor. When I challenge this, you get angry. Why? This is a good example of enmeshment. You are too closely tied to him for affirmation, just as you are tied to your wife. Your move to “neutral ground” is a means of protecting her and maintaining the comfort of dependency you grew up with. This is not your fault. It is all you have known. But it is your problem. This is not a conspiracy theory on denial I am trying to force fit. But it is there in soooo many ways, just under the surface. You need to lift the veil.
