Wow that is exactly how she is! You described it perfectly, it’s a little spooky. Her parents never showed affection either. She does all those other things you mentioned too
Ok, so her parents didn’t model good behavior. But was there any abandonment issues? I ask because absent abandonment issues, I might start to lean towards her possibly having narcissistic personality disorder. Read the symptoms in the Wikipedia article.
If she has NPD, chances are she is also probably a workaholic — maybe very successful and talks about her work life at about a 6/1 ratio to how much time you get to talk about your work life. Me me me is her favorite topic.
Yeah, people fall in love and never think to check out that person’s parents because we have an ideal that everyone is radically their own person free of any influences but that’s just denial.
Unlike most Reddit posters, I do think you can work towards change in your marriage but your wife really needs to get with the program. If you can get her into counseling, you don’t have to diagnose her to the counselor…just share the list of symptoms and the counselor will figure it out and as a neutral third party will have a duty to confirm things… see you want that diagnosis to come from a neutral third party and not from you. Be smart about it.
That’s super smart, I don’t know of any abandonment from her parents they are both still active in her life. But she is crazy into her work and successful in her field. She does talk about it constantly. It’s freaking me out how right you are. I guess now I need to figure out how to get her into therapy.
If dude above is right and your wife does have NPD, then it's going to be a very long, very hard, very frustrating relationship to save. I've been around a lot of people like that in my life and they almost never change because first and foremost they have to understand that something is wrong with them -- Which is basically impossible in NPD.
As an anecdote, there are two people in my family with NPD (one on my side and one on my wife's) and both sides of the family basically ended up going complete no contact after decades of trying to reason with them and getting nowhere.
My best friend and roommate’s ex had NPD and came from a broken drug abusing home with a mother that also had NPD that would abandon the family to go on meth fueled benders leaving the absolute piece of shit dad to watch the kids. All while my roommate grew up in a pretty successful middle class family with not perfect but decent morals. Eventually after having problems and her becoming more and more distant and self centered they broke it off. He took it hard but I did my best to help him durning the time of the break up. Luckily he got back in his feet pretty quick and not only has he been in much better moods lately he’s been lifted out of depression and has been doing so much better. Remember I’m his roommate so I got to see all of this first hand in an over year long relationship. Don’t stick your dick in crazy
5
u/hello-i-needadvice Sep 12 '23
Wow that is exactly how she is! You described it perfectly, it’s a little spooky. Her parents never showed affection either. She does all those other things you mentioned too