Hostile Dependency: Is your Wife, Girlfriend or Ex a Child Masquerading in the Body of a Woman?
Does your wife or girlfriend believe it is your responsibility to take care of her emotionally, physically and financially? Worse yet, does your ex-wife or ex-girlfriend believe the same despite the fact your relationship is over? If so, you may be dealing with hostile dependency.
The Root of the Problem
Children rely on their parents for their care and safety needs. Good enough parents do their best to respond to their children’s needs while teaching them how to meet their own needs as developmentally appropriate. Even infants can learn to self-soothe by sucking their thumbs, chewing on a blanket, holding a toy and reaching for their bottle or pacifier.
Unfortunately, not all parents are “good enough.” Some parents shame their children or become angry/frustrated/impatient with them for expressing wants and needs.
When a parent punishes a child or tells them that they’re bad/selfish/demanding/inconvenient for expressing needs and feelings, the message is: It’s unacceptable to have needs and feelings and to depend upon me. Since most children actively avoid parental disapproval, these kids intuitively find indirect ways to get their needs met.
A child who has to disavow or mask their needs and feelings from a parent eventually develops an ever-growing anger and resentment. Since it’s especially unsafe to directly express anger and resentment toward their parent(s), these children often develop passive-aggressive behaviors and attachment issues.
Passive-aggression is not necessarily less aggressive simply because it’s passive. Essentially, passive-aggression is an indirect form of aggression–not necessarily a milder form of aggression (Seltzer, L.F., 2008).
Attachment issues arise from the conflicting messages and discomfort these children are made to feel about being dependent.
It should come as no surprise that adults who weren’t able to get their needs met directly, who didn’t have parents teach them how to self-soothe and who were made to feel bad, guilty or ashamed about being dependent upon their parents, bring these leftover childhood issues into their adult relationships. In more extreme cases, these issues are manifested in personality disorders and other emotional disturbances.
Healthy relationships between adults are interdependent:
Interdependence is a dynamic of being mutually and physically responsible to, and sharing a common set of principles with others. This concept differs distinctly from “dependence,” which implies that each member of a relationship cannot function or survive apart from one another. In an interdependent relationship, all participants are emotionally, economically, ecologically and/or morally self-reliant while at the same time responsible to each other.
A woman stuck in hostile dependency maps her unhappy childhood, dependency needs and anger about not having every single need met, no matter how small, onto her partner and/or her ex-partner. She is inappropriately dependent on her partner/ex while simultaneously furious about her self-imposed dependency. This kind of woman casts her intimate partners and ex-intimate partners into a parental role.
Women who have a hostile dependency upon their husbands, boyfriends or exes are, emotionally speaking, children in adult bodies. They’re stuck in a state of arrested development on a continuum of infancy to snide, bitchy, ungrateful teenager. This kind of woman-child doesn’t know how to meet her own needs, that is, if she even knows what her needs are. Many of these women are ambulatory masses of unmet, unnamed needs.
“I want, I want, I want. I need, I need, I need,” but damned if she knows what it is she wants and needs. She just know she wants and needs . . . something and your job is to figure it out and give it to her. Adult partners are expected to magically know and meet her needs and if they fail to deliver—look out!
This woman is very much the infant who uses the same distress cry for wet diaper, physical pain, “Validate meeeeeee!” and, “Pick me up, I’m bored!” Every need and want, no matter how trivial, is experienced and expressed with the same extreme urgency.
On the other end of the continuum is the woman-child who knows exactly what she wants—everything. She tells her partner or ex in excruciating detail everything she wants, needs and is “owed,” well, more like demands. She wants total financial and emotional support, blind loyalty and unconditional love—especially when her behavior is horrid and abusive. Furthermore, you must not expect her to reciprocate. Ever. This is the selfish, haughty teenager.
Kids are basically selfish beings; they’re supposed to be. The lid off the id-enfant terrible can sometimes be cute—in actual children. However, the same behaviors and attitudes in adult women aren’t at all cute. They’re obnoxious, contemptible and abusive. In her mind, it’s your job to provide her with the unconditional love mommy and daddy didn’t provide and/or the over-indulgent, permissive, no accountability, “you’re wonderful and special” parenting that created this overgrown child.
Childhood Development
During adolescence, parents help teens individuate into autonomous, responsible adults. Meaning that teens stop attributing their difficulties to parents and others and begin to assume responsibility for their own actions (Bios, 1968). The other developmental tasks of adolescence are identity/personality formation and consolidation, separating from parents, sexual maturation and sexual identity formation, and mature time perspective (Buhler, 1968; Neugarten, 1969).
Identity consolidation is “a process of investing oneself in new adult roles, responsibilities, and contexts and evaluating one’s ongoing experience in order to construct a coherent, grounded, and positive identity” (Pals, JL, 1999). Mature time perspective involves “being able to foresee the future implications of [one's] present behaviors and envisage how [one's] present behavior can serve the attainment of future goals” (Simons, Vansteenkiste, Lens and Lacante, 2004).
These are essential developmental milestones that many HCP (high-conflict) and abusive personality disordered individuals (histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, etc.) fail to achieve at the age appropriate time. If you’re dealing with a woman whose hostile dependency is part of a personality disorder or personality disorder traits, I don’t know if it’s possible to successfully navigate this developmental task in adulthood. In fact, it may be impossible.
All about the Anger
Most children experience hostile dependency primarily in adolescence. It’s part of growing up. You see it in teens who want to be treated like independent adults, but are still dependent on mom and dad for food, shelter, etc.
Teens still need their parents, but resent their parents for needing them; much like women who resent and hate their husbands/exes for their own self-imposed dependency. This mentality is obvious when a hostile dependent woman angrily asserts, “Screw you! I don’t need you!” while she has both hands out to jack her ex-husband for spousal support or her husband’s/boyfriend’s hard-earned paycheck and when she relies on her partner/ex for an ego massage to make her feel good about herself.
The telltale sign of hostile dependency is the anger it generates, in both the dependent person and the person depended upon. Most ex-husbands are incredibly angry and resentful about having to financially support their ex-wives—grown adults who either refuse to support themselves or who erroneously believe they’re entitled to a better lifestyle than they can generate on their own. This is also evident in husbands who have to play nursemaid to their wives’ every emotional need and/or are stuck shouldering the entire financial burden in their families because their wives refuse to work.
Given that these women project their unresolved mommy and daddy issues onto their partners/ex-partners/children, it makes sense that they feel entitled to ungodly amounts of lifetime spousal support/attention/time/special treatment/etc.
Unfortunately, since these women’s parents failed to teach them how to self-soothe, to be responsible for their choices, to have empathy, to experience consequences for their choices and raise them into responsible adults, we’re stuck with these perpetual greedy infants, terrible two-sters and arrogant, nasty adolescents. Worse yet, these women-children are passing their dysfunction on to the next generation.
These women are children and you simply can’t treat them like adults or try to reason with them like adults; nor can you use logic. They are children and are not capable of reasoning beyond an adolescent’s mind on a good day.
You can also forget gratitude for their “allowance,” ego massages, blind loyalty and acceptance and humoring their delusions of grandeur to keep the peace. Much like a child, this woman believes it’s daddy’s/mommy’s (i.e., her partner’s) responsibility to take care of her and make her feel good. She sincerely believes she could be a CEO, have her own successful business or be a prima ballerina/president/astronaut/cowboy if she hadn’t “sacrificed” everything for you.
When you try to point out the flaws in her reasoning, you get the same convoluted reasoning you’d get from a kid. Ultimately, it comes down to this: “You’re supposed to take care of meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” and, in many cases, thank her for the “privilege” of doing so.
The bottom line: You can’t have a reciprocal, mutual, interdependent relationship of equals with a child and this includes a child masquerading in the body of a woman. You either need to resign yourself to the thankless parental role in which she’s force fitting you, find a way to get her into long-term psychotherapy that focuses on re-parenting her to help her achieve the missed developmental milestones, emotionally detach from her and the relationship or end the relationship.
Shrink4Men Coaching and Consulting Services:
Dr Tara J. Palmatier provides confidential, fee-for-service, consultation/coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.
Sources:
Bios, P. (1968), Character formation in adolescence. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23: 245-268.
Buhler, C. (1968), The course of human life as a psychological problem. Hum. Develop., 11:184-200.
Pals, J. L. (1999), Identity consolidation in early adulthood: Relations with ego resiliency, the context of marriage and personality change. Journal of Personality, 67 (2): 295-329.
Neugarten, B. L. (1969), Continuities and discontinuities of psychological issues in adult life. Hum. Devel., 12:121-130.
Simons, J., Vansteenkiste, M., Lens, W., & Lacante, M. (2004). Placing motivation and future time perspective theory in a temporal perspective. Educational Psychology Review, 16, 121-139.
75 Responses to “Hostile Dependency: Is your Wife, Girlfriend or Ex a Child Masquerading in the Body of a Woman?”
Comments
Read below or add a comment...
Follow Shrink4men
Where in the World
Subscribe to Comments
Affiliate
“I want, I want, I want. I need, I need, I need.” – It’s been 25 years since I’ve heard that expression but I can still hear the voice saying it, escpecially stringing out the last plaintive “…neeeeed.”
It was often followed by,
“If I had a boyfriend who loved me, he’d (fill in blank).”
For the longest time, I thought she was making a joke. Time and experience taught me she wasn’t.
“I want, I want, I want, I need, I need, I need” is actually from “What About Bob?” However, I’m sure many men experience the same phrase in their relationships.
Out of the mouths of “babes.” Ugh.
Then my exgf should be making a fortune in royalties since she was using from at least 1984.
You reminded me, she used to tack on the soft “uh” after the last “need.”
I said it many times when i was going thru this… “what they want from you is more, More, MORE… and what you get back from them is more of the same. Not in reciprocity, but in drama… just more of the same…
I experience that constantly. “I want, I want, I need.” I married into that family. I thought it was novel that my wife wanted to be a housewife. She doesn’t want to work nights or weekends. Unfortunately with young children it is hard to justify putting them in full-time daycare. It was a dream to live a modest lifestyle and raise a family. Now I know the dream is a nightmare. With constant barrage of I hate everything about you. You aren’t emotionally available. You are a good Dad to my stepson. Why didn’t you adopt him in the first months we were married(I have only known her now 2 years). The abuse is physical at times. Mellaril I totally identify with your post.
Once again, Dr. T., your ability to articulate an area of the dysfunctional relationships so many men find themselves in is amazing and appreciated. Thank you for shining the light on another dark layer of relationship hell. My ex was an oppositionally defiant teenager (is this related?) who made my life truly woeful and maddening. Thankfully, since my divorce, I only have to do deal with her in very measured doses in a co-parenting capacity. That said, I’m still worried sick about the long-term well-being of my children, considering the emotional and psychological terror she inflicts on those all around her.
This resonates so much with me and my experience with my ex. I endured expectations that I would alleviate her boredom and be responsible for entertaining her, provide her with validation that no one could possibly provide other than herself, just live with the fact that she has violent outbursts, and best of all, just accept her and her issues, because that’s just who she was/is. Even now, she occasionally rails at the fact that “I have the upper hand” because I’m giving her alimony. The idea that she could get a job and be more independent is completely lost on her and always has been.
I feel your pain the_mathemagician. I know this has been said many times before in other comments on this site, but I continue to be amazed at how many times it feels as though these women operate off of the same script. Once I saw my ex’s madness for what it was (which sounds nearly identical to how you’ve described your ex) and began to discover I wasn’t in complete and desperate isolation, I marveled at how many of the men’s stories on this site are similar to one another and to my own. It’s tragic and scary.
Wow, is this ever spot on! I remember so many times where I wouldn’t back down and my ex-girlfriend would pout and sulk just like a six-year-old for days on end. And although highly educated, when we disagreed about anything, she’d get very angry and her reasoning skills dropped down to the same level — “Now We Are Six” in A.A. Milne’s words.
Gratitude? My ex told me many times that I should be grateful to her for allowing me to live in her house — although I paid her entire mortgage every month.
Absolutely perfect conclusion. It’s almost four months since I moved out, and my life is returning to its previously calm and happy state. There’s just no way to get a six-year-old to become a mature adult overnight — I suspect that any successful therapy would require going back to her childhood and “re-raising” the woman-child through her teens and early twenties, which would certainly take several years.
My own recommendation: get the hell out of there, because the relationship is pathologically broken and there’s no way you can fix it.
Thank you Dr. T for another terrific and insightful article.
Free at Last,
Thanks for your post. It is also about four months since I moved into my own rented house close to where my children and former wife live. Night after night I am experiencing the kind of peace and a wonderful sense of order, safety and bliss that mystics speak about instead of the tension and fear and emotional persecution that plagued my life as a hostage to a hostile dependent woman. My new house is surrounded in a protective bubble of peace, safety, perfect quietude and exudes a sublime sense of warmth, comfort and order.
When I married “the hostile one” she had two business degrees including an MBA and she earned a very good salary – significantly more than my salary as a design professional. Within a month of our honeymoon she had quit work and never worked again until about 3 months after we separated. She sponged off me for 15 years and sent our kids to expensive day care or got her mother to look after our kids while abusing me and them and complaining about everything and taking all the credit for my income because she had sacrificed her career in order to be a full time mother.
I stuck it out the emotional abuse for much longer than I needed to because I thought it was the right thing to do for the kids but now that I have left they are doing better than ever at school at sport and in their music studies and they are very happy, well adjusted with part time jobs (even though they are only 11 and 13). I took a lot of trouble to prepare them and I now find it much easier to maintain a polite “business-like” relationship with the ex. I do not support her anymore financially (but provide support for the kids) and she has now started to work full-time. Consequently, she is far happier and her physical health and self esteem is far higher.
I have survived with the help of friends and a lot of counselling and I continue to learn, learn, learn. Every single aspect of my new life is now wonderful, safe and good and I agree with you that the only effective option when dealing with these perennially parasitic hostile-dependents is to bail out!
I’m about to take this step and am scared of the unknown; living on my own, living away from the kids, paying alimony. I know I’ll be a better dad but keep bottling it at the last moment. She’s a psychopath and her upbringing is of psychopaths . She’s attacked me three times. I need to escape
Sorry, apparently WordPress can only properly handle one “blockquote” per post. The two other quotes were supposed to be:
[2] You can also forget gratitude for their “allowance,” ego massages, blind loyalty and acceptance and humoring their delusions of grandeur to keep the peace. Much like a child, this woman believes it’s daddy’s/mommy’s (i.e., her partner’s) responsibility to take care of her and make her feel good.
[3] The bottom line: You can’t have a reciprocal, mutual, interdependent relationship of equals with a child and this includes a child masquerading in the body of a woman.
This article is really helpful. I first heard the term “hostile dependency” maybe 10 years ago but have never seen much written about it. One thing I wondered about is if it’s possible for someone to be a hostile dependent who has a job. I note that there are references to women who expect their husband/boyfriend (or ex) to take care of them financially, etc. while they don’t have to work. I’m thinking of someone I know where the woman does work but seems to expect the man to do everything else– housework, dinner, chauffeuring, making sure she’s happy– and making sure she has abundant time off when she’s not at work so she can go shopping, out with friends, etc. As a working person, she is contributing financially, but expecting the man to do everything else and using work and the stress from work as justification for being taken care of. It seems that even the overspending is a way of subjugating the man, keeping them so far in debt that that becomes a kind of mutual dependence. Anyway, was just wondering if there are also cases where hostile dependent women do work and do earn money but manage to use that to control the man by spending it all, being too stressed to share in the work of homelife, etc.
There are many types of hostile dependency other than finanical. There’s emotional for one and housekeeping for another. My perspective is a bit different as it’s my mother who’s the primary Cluster B in my life. She worked, but she definitely expected first my father and then after the split, her boyfriend to take care of her emotional needs and buy her certain material things. While she wasn’t demanding of my brother and I for material things, we were expected to meet her emotional needs and I was expected to pretty much run the household from 11 on, not just normal kid chore stuff.
My wife has a good job, but expects me to handle all the booking details for vacations, maintain her car, handle any house repair issues including finding and calling contractors, decide what’s for dinner (but actually tease out of her what she actually freaking wants. She does not want what I think would be good.), grab the attention of the waiter behind me, make EVERY phone call to anyone that isn’t her immediate family… basically do EVERYTHING. Because she has a job and has to make phone calls and decisions all day and she shouldn’t have to once she gets home.
And then she scolds/lectures me about how I don’t do anything except for cleaning the kitchen now and then.
Just last night she sat down next to me and started scolding me because I hadn’t done/said anything about getting a gym membership she wants. Then when I didn’t respond fast enough to this out-of-the-blue criticism, I got criticised some more.
I suspect that might count as hostile dependency. (I also think she had a bad day at work and wanted a fight to make her feel better. I didn’t give it to her.)
MB, my NPD worked part-time at a very well paying job. But virtually all of her income, and the child support she got from her kids father, went to pay for her horse habit. She contributed less than 20% toward the household expenses. And, I found out later, the horses were the reason for her complete emotional and physical withdrawal from me. The intimacy that should have been shared with me was instead given in the form of lavish attention on the horses. So I got double-whammied – the same thing that was draining our finances was also destroying our relationship.
She couldn’t be bothered with household details, that was up to me. Even though I worked more than an hour away, and she worked part-time 8 min. from home, I was expected to deal with all the “things” that came up, service people, etc.
When I confronted her about the state of our finances during our final round of marital counselling, she just said “I thought you would take care of everything.” I can’t take care of everything when I have no control over where the money is going!!!!!
Wow… what a creep. She should be using that child support to support her kid! It’s situations like this that make me think that non-custodial parents ought to be able to demand an accounting of how child support is spent.
My wife did the horse thing to, except she needed a cowboy and had a 2 year affair with him until I found out. She was pissed when I sold her horse LOL. Now we are in the process of getting a divorce. What a waste, should have divorced her years ago. She thinks she is going to get alimony for life, what a joke, she is in for a surprise. She will probably be “in Love” with me again when she finds out what she will get in alimony and have to work full time.
My BiPD ex expected me to watch the kids, clean, cook, home-school and do everything else including contributing financially. It was also my job to drop everything and spend every second with her as soon as she got home from work until she fell asleep at night.
She managed to control me by making sure that none of my attempts for SSI were approved and by spending any extra money on her (unknown to me) pain pill addiction. She was always stressed at something or another and did use that as an excuse not to do housework. Then I would do the housework and because I did a good job of it – I was accused of being OCD. At the same time, she would tell stories of 20 years ago when she did the housework even better than I – thus putting me down in yet another way.
That first photo really caught my eye. I remember as a kid, my mother would sometimes literally throw herself onto the floor, and throw a tantrum. When I was younger, we’re talking around kindergarten, I was completely perplexed and had no idea how to handle it. She did this another time on what I think was 11th or 12th birthday and my dad basically talked soothingly to her like you would a child to coax her off the floor and back into standing up.
She is also toddler like in that she can’t articulate what she wants or changes it when she does. When I was growing up, when she was upset, even over an adult matter which should have been discussed with her friends, such as a fight with her boyfriend, she would be angry at me for not being able to give good advice. Sure mom, just let me finish junior high, so I can get some more romantic wisdom first (sarcasm).
From the age of 11/12 on, I was expected to do the laundry, clean/scrub the bathroom, clean/scrub the kitchen. Dust and vacuum the living room, my room and her bedroom. She and my brother would strew their crap from one end of the living room to the other. Games, toys, sock, etc. in his case. Dirty ashtrays, jewelry and clothing removed in the living room, including her bra in her case. They would both leave glasses, cans of soda and food around. Normally there wasn’t leftover food/drink, but I’d have to rinse out glasses & plates and put them in the dishwasher and dispose of the cans. As for their stuff, I “only” had to put it back in his room in my brother’s case. In her case, I had to put things away. Jewelry in jewelry box, bra in hamper, etc. I also had to make her bed. If it were up to me, the rule would have been, living room doesn’t get cleaned ’til everyone gets their crap out of it.
If any of this was done improperly, it would be a screamfest when she walked in the door. She wouldn’t even teach me how to do it properly, such as scrubbing the bathroom. I was using a regular old kitchen type sponge and not even the kind with a scrubbing surface, instead of a brush. I’d use that and Comet and sometimes I’d miss a spot or not scrub hard enough. Then I’d get to hear how stupid and lazy I was.
While they act like toddlers, when they’re looking for a vocabulary to insult with, they’re more sophisticated. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be done wrong, she’d just be in a bad mood and look for something to go off on. I did try to argue back a few times that I did x, y & z, it only escalated things. Since things could get violent, slaps, shoves, etc. when escalation happened, I stopped arguing back.
To THIS DAY, I F**KING hate housework!!!! One week I was paying extra attention to my body and how it feels when an instructor for a body awareness class told us to note tension, how we were holding our bodies. I noticed mine was all tensed up/cramped while doing housework. No wonder my muscles hurt after!
I’ve bought some of the green friendly spa smell products to try and make housework more pleasant (I really like citrus and mint smells) and I try to listen to music to make it more pleasant. But it’s still my least favorite chore, even though it’s been decades since I’ve had to deal with her screaming. Anyone else have any tips about how to make this better? Even with this, I put off housework because I hate it so much and it’s really a self-defeating kind of thing to do. I’m not in danger of being featured on Hoarders any time soon, but I’d like to be able to spontaneously invite people over without worrying if it’s clean enough. And I hate that feeling of “oh, I really should clean” and the guilt accompanying it.
If I ever get finanically successful enough, I’m hiring a housekeeper. The bright side is I had no trouble adjusting to taking care of myself in college because houseworkwise, it was a lighter workload!
When I’ve tried to talk about the overload in housework, either at the time or before our estrangement when I was an adult, she’d go on about how she had to work, so someone had to do the housework and as a single parent, who else was going to do it? I dunno, how about distributing it more evenly among the 3 of us or cleaning as a family together on the weekend or a weeknight? Oh that’s right, it would’ve cut into her dating/drinking time. And if I had to do the housework with her screaming as I cleaned, I’d probably be a candidate for Hoarders. Btw, even after my dad moved out, he still helped with many household and car repairs because he figured making life easier for her would make life easier for me and my brother. It was a source of tension between him and my stepmother that he spent time there, but he was worried she might get upset and take it out on us even more than she did.
I mentioned you in one of my post and used your father as an example. I hope you don’t mind. I empathize with your Father and the way he tried to help out even though your parents were divorced. He was protecting you in a sense.
@jham, that’s fine with me. I realize he was trying to protect us. It was tough for him because this was back in the late 70s/early 80s and men had even less rights than they do now when it came to custody. Also, it was the dark ages as far as information about personality disorders go. After he died, I found out from my stepmom he used to refer to her mood swings as her “Sybiling out” after the movie based on a woman with dissassociative disorder. He could see that I’d be upset by her many times, but he was afraid if he was too assertive with her, she might prevent us from seeing him.
The 2 pieces of advice I have for the non-PDed parents are:
1) don’t pass messages through your kids. You may hate to deal with your PDed ex, but they will take it out on the kids if they don’t like the message. If you’re going to be late getting back with the kids, call the ex yourself, don’t make a child call. My mom got angry that my dad was late with us one time. She yelled she wanted someone to call. And when I did the next time we were running late, weeks after, she got angry that I woke her up with my phone call. *Mr. Rogers voice* Can you say double bind? I knew you could! *Mr. Rogers voice*
2) if you’re paying child support for a child who is in college and not living in the household, make it part of the agreement that the money will go directly to the child after high school. My dad left it up to me and I made the mistake of asking my mother which resulted in a whole tirade about how she still had bills to pay in the household even though I was away at college. And that was with a choice left up to her!
Yet, despite claiming she still had utilities regardless of whether I was there or not, she would claim the electric was higher when I was home. Probably because it was during Christmas when lights were on and summer (the one year I made the mistake of going home for the summer) when the air conditioner was on. I was afraid to call her on it, but how could the bills both stay the same and require the child support money when I was gone, yet rise when I was home? Even if they did rise, wouldn’t having the child support year round compensate for that?
She would do things like pressure me to have a phone line in my room, instead of sharing with neighbors, (back in pre-cell days) and say she was going to pay for the basic charges. Then when bill time came, she’d cry poor and go back on her word. Sometimes I’d pay, sometimes my dad would help me out. I had no problem paying because I was an adult and I was using the phone. But then since I was the one paying, I should have been the one deciding if I would share with my neighbors (basic charges split 4 ways) or have it in my room (basic charges split 2 ways with me & my roomie).
This reminds me in some ways of the BPD “friend” I tossed out of my life nearly a year ago. Her husband, who (I thought) was my friend, would tell me how she kept resisting doing the housework or helping out with the kids. Another friend stayed with them for a time and saw how she would sit at the computer all frickin’ day long, so my former friend had no help with the kids or the housework. The place was a pigsty. I was told that the kids were even taken away for a time because it was so bad. When they moved to our state, I saw for myself how bad it could get. And I kept hearing how, whenever my ex-friend confronted her with the need for her to pull her weight around the house, she would pout and complain and act like *he* was the one with the problem.
He said her sisters would do all the housework, so she had no clue what it takes to keep up a house. I noted that myself when they stayed with us for several weeks, and she complained because I was doing housework for hours instead of sitting and chatting with her. 
Wow. These are all very interesting situations.
My case does not seems that simple. I’ve been married 20 years and shortly after we got married I felt something was wrong. I worked and my wife was finishing up her undergraduate teaching degree in science. She graduated with high honors.
To further rewind the tape, I knew early on that my wife had issues with intimate relationships and that when we got closer her opening up to me attracted me to her even more. It was bliss and it felt like our needs were both being met.
The resent with me started some time between her student teaching and about three years after we had our first child. There was just no discussion about going to work or even seeking employment.
My Wife is not a yeller whatsoever. She holds it all in and has this infuriating way of stonewalling and ignoring me. I feel that if I press her on these important issues she will crumble like a china doll. So things just drift along and I got angrier by the day and at times verbally exasperated. You could call it abuse but it was truly like nailing a lemon marang pie to a tree. It’s incredible and when she eventually got upset, I felt terrible for even asking the question and guilty for losing my cool.
I actually said YEARS ago that our family felt like we had three children and one adult. I sought out therapy and soon peeled back some patterns which seemed obvious. My Wife grew up without a Dad, nor her Mother or Grandmother. I started to hear the nickel drop. It wasn’t all me, but i was still upset that nothing was going to change. Marriage counseling went just so far and my Wife simply chaulked the situation up as me being a moody crab and me needed medication to tamp that down.
Everyone loves my Wife. She is engaging, funny, caring, smart and loyal. She is also frugal.
She just shrinks, retreats and shuts down which makes me feel like I’m bearing down on a baby seal on pack ice. In other words, this ends the conversation and then the resentment builds since I am prevented from expressing my needs and fears. I’ve expressed myself lately in very concise, unemotional fashion and have been told that everything is about me. In other words I should just man up and get on with it. Discovering this web site has clued me into this behavior as code for really saying: continue taking care of me, and by extention, our children totally ignoring the fact that she bears as much of that responsibility as I do.
I just don’t see this changing and firmly beleive, as this article says that she is in need of years of psychotherapy.
I must confess that she did see a social worker last year, but because it was our former marraige counselor I was really put off and angry that my privacy was not being protected. A great therapist, but this was just unethical and I openly objected and said so.
In retrospect, that was a situation where I should have canned the beans and just let it play out. I probably was working against my own interests and regret even taking notice of that arrangement. My fear was being painted as the devil himself, whereas the counselor probably knew me better than that. A mistake.
How should a man deal with a Wife who has these characteristics, but does it in the image of the Easter Bunny?
Tom, my wife was very much like this, she’d just shut down and ignore me. The passive-aggressiveness was maddening. Then, when I finally couldn’t stand the withdrawal and spoke my mind, I was accused of having “anger management” problems.
Typical behavior from an NPD. Withdrawal or withholding of affection is a trait of the NPD and is a form of mental/spousal abuse. Tom’s situation is so so typical, the NPD abuser is such a social butterfly to everyone else, but withholds affection to the Spouse……it’s abuse, pure and simple
Again, I can’t explain it. It’s been going on for years. Her silence does anger me and that anger then seems to do a few things. It neatly and cleanly transfers the issue into my anger management “issues.” It seems to support her persona of the good person, and assigns blame for the very issue we disagree on me. I consider myself a very sensitive person, so this discord makes me feel very guilty and out of sorts for a long time.
I guess to keep the persona of “the good partner” you need a really big SOB to prove it. Yeah, I’ve heard it all. Mood issues. Anger issues. Being unavailible. Not being an attentive father. Guys, it hurts. it really hurts.
Then my wife sees her therapist and she seems to have developed a more self rightious way of dealing with me. I don’t know whether I’m on foot or horseback alot of the time. Then I expess my feelings and an told “It’s all about you”, or ‘It’s not all about you.” Is she right? Am I missing something? How do I cope with or reason with this? Oh, and I can’t leave out her claim that I am too dramatic. I do feel literally emotionally cut off at the pass.
I agree with the displayed behaviors and arrangement of them, however, I differ with the etiology. I do not believe that the psycho dynamic perspective is always or largely true with the Cluster B’s. Given that the psycho dynamic field has long falsely blamed parents for everything, I am careful and skeptical. If you ask a BPD or N if the Mailman did it and they are responsible, they will agree with you that the mailman did it. Thus a new branch of Psychology opens up. This one would be called Social Contact Job Victims! Therefore, blaming their parents is a given and I have no doubt that they will agree with the psycho dynamic perspective for that reason alone. I tend to agree more with Hervey Cleckley’s perspective of love and psychopathy. Even if the love is there, a psychopath will see it differently and will falsely accuse people of wrong doing when there was none. In that context, he largely describes narcissism and the paranoia that is common and usually seen in BPD and Narcissism. Since narcissism is the root of psychopathy and both are inherited, I find that answer more compelling because I have seen no abuse to low abuse with the BPD and N; yet they react as though they were water boarded on a daily basis. A look becomes a death threat(paranoia) etc. Another interesting fact is that Schizophrenia often runs in the families of people with BPD and Narcissism. I myself find their paranoid traits very similar to the onset of decompensation seen in Paranoid Schizophrenia before the grandiosity is full blown. Both BPD’s and N’s often become psychotic and/or live in a psychotic fantasy world and have the comorbid diagnosis of Schizotypal PD; which I believe is a milder form of Schizophenia.
I always love the particularly appropriate photographs that go along with these insightful articles. Given all of the misery one gets in dealing with people like this, every bit of humor helps.
The thought that I spent twenty years in bed with a woman that is emotionally a toddler is revolting. It is amazing how these people are high functioning and mask their true selves.
Thank the Lord she left.
James, I just re-quoted what you stated. Only I was married almost 14 years. It makes me sick to my stomach. “The thought that I spent twenty years in bed with a woman that is emotionally a toddler is revolting. It is amazing how these people are high functioning and mask their true selves.”
Thank the Lord she left.
Amen James. I never thought I would say that.
This is my first post. After reading a number of replies I realize their are others like yourself that have experienced much of what I have. Physical – hitting me in the face not once but twice for giving our son some extra plastic hangers to use instead of the metal hangers he was using. Threatening to divorce me if we got into an agrument about something. She would never except no for an answer. She would always get her way no matter who she hurt or what the consequences were. And she didn’t care as long as she got what she wanted. One day she was yelling at me in the kitchen and I told her that I couldn’t talk to her with her acting like this. I said I was going to run a couple errons and I would be back. She came outside and yelled that I hope you get killed in a car accident. Who’s says that to their spouse? We had separated after 4 years of marriage for 2 years. I always stayed faithful to her, I thought she stayed faithful to me as well. Now I’m not sure. We got back together and she now had run up $15,000 in credit card debt. We had agreed we wouldn’t use credit cards. She tells me a couple months after getting back together that it’s now my responsiblity to pay her debt off because I’m the husband. Really? I was willing to help, but my responsibility? Where’s the conscience? I realize now there was none. Her mother was married 5 times. I always stayed with my wife because I was going to be the guy that would never leave her. I always thought one day we would work through things. Our church even paid for counseling for her a number of years ago. We counseled with our church counselor. I took her to another counselor about 2 years ago and she only went a few times. She told me she wasn’t going to go anymore. Counselors just give her a headache she said. I counseled a couple more times and I asked the counselor in desperation what can I do to change to try to help things. She said you can’t do anything. She told me that she will probably always be the way she is. I couldn’t believe she said that. And I didn’t want to believe it. Everything ended this past April. She divorced me and moved to South Carolina to live with some guy who she went to prom with in high school. I think they met on Facebook. Imagine that. This was a snap shot of what my life has been like. Sorry for being so long winded. I’ve had a lot on my mind.
Hi Chevy and welcome. I’m glad you found your way here. Keep reading and commenting. Sadly, you’re definitely not alone.
Dr T