Are you married to a narcissist? 

I was married to this kind of a person. The sad part is even though I left, he still plays this game but now with the children. I just feel sorry for his new girlfriend. My stbx has gotten smarter and is now making her pay for our kids clothes and fun, while he goes out and buys himself new motorcycles and jet skis.

It is amazing that so many of us stayed for soo long. I would suggest that anyone reading this who believes they are with someone who has this personality seek professional help right away. Narcissism is not a disorder it is a personality type. The person is born that way if they are a true narcissist. These people do not change and do not recognize that there is anything wrong with their view of the world.

Do not waste one more minute of your life thinking "if only", there is no other ending to this tale.

Word of advice. Don't walk out mad. Make a plan. Gather the information you will need to support your case. Protect your assets. Study everything you can about your situation and potential mistakes you will make. Plan that you will have an ugly drawn out divorce and your spouse won't play fair. The world including you owe them everything. Think of it as war and everything is at stake.

If your spouse truly is a narcissist there will be no mutual agreement and settlement. Compromise is not something that is part of the narcissist MO.

Once you're out and decide to move on. Make sure that you have identified in yourself what made you choose the narcissist in the first place. You don't want to repeat that mistake.

I know this person only too well. This one of the characteristics of my stbx.She has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.Narcissist traits is prevalent. It is a living nightmare. The more devastating  effect is the children. Her children use it to get everything they can from her. That's not even cute when they were young now 17,15 and 13 its obscene.
Her children have no structure,no discipline are not goal oriented in any manner,lack all empathy,very destructive of everything.The narcissist or bpd does not recognize this at all,because everything is about them and them alone.They are excellent drama queens and quite manipulative to most everyone around them. The people they absolutely destroy is their spouse or significant other who ever they are intimate with.
It has taken me 9 1/2 years to develop the "contempt" necessary to divorce this "vampire" before she destroys me.

I'm terrified to leave my aggressive, narcissistic husband and be on my own in the world.  I moved in with him when I was 17, we married when I was 18 and we've had three children.  In the 10 years that we've been married I've lost nearly all my self confidence and just recently realized how far in denial I've actually been.  He's a good provider and sometimes is the sweetest guy in the world, but his mood swings and stabbing words erase all of that for me.  He goes through periods of time, months at a time, where he seems better and like a normal person, but it never lasts.  His had a lot of trauma in his life, and I feel bad because I can tell that every once in a while he gets a glimpse of his behavior and feels terrible, but lately I've been feeling like he's just broken and no amount of love that I can give him will ever heal his brokenness.

I'm going to school now and keep going back and forth on whether or not to leave when I'm able to support me and the boys, but I feel more and more hopeless for this marriage everyday.  Nothing I do is good enough, I have no say in decisions.  I used to argue for hours about things before I gave in, but he is relentless.  Now I just give in from the start because I know he'll get his way in the end.  I can never win, and if I try to make a point he says mean things to me, sometimes in front of the kids.  I'm terrified that one or all three of them will be like him in this way and do my best to counteract his example.  I'm really scared though.  I don't know if I'm strong enough to hold up to the storm that he'll surely bring to our lives if I "betray" him by leaving.  Even though I feel like he has betrayed me for years by taking the power he has in my life to destroy my self esteem.  Sometimes I'm not even sure if he knows what he does.

I thought things were pretty good the first two years and then the last year was pure hell.  It seemed the harder I tried, the worse he treated me.  When he married me he moved to be with me, then just a few days later moved back to his town, 174 miles away to take a job, telling me it was temporary, things would get better.  Last June I found he had a woman living with him in our trailer.  He said he didn't want a divorce, he never wanted to hurt me like that again, etc.  I remortgaged my home to pay off his debts (he'd started and failed in a trucking co.) so he could take a lower paying job and come live with me (I'd offered to move there but he said he wanted to do the moving)...instead he ran up more debts and then he started coming up with excuses not to come home in mid Sept.  In Nov., his bdy. weekend, he didn't show up or call and I decided it was one weekend too many and I decided to get a divorce.  But he disappeared on me, took money out of the bank, quit his job.  I filed a missing person's report and Thanksgiving a policewoman called and said they found him living in our motorhome with another woman (a different woman...he'd disappeared right after I'd signed papers on the motorhome).  l got an attorney to start divorce proceedings but it was complicated because he'd disappeared.  I had to continue paying for the car insurance, motorhome insurance, and all of our bills.  He took me for $50,000.00 and I now get to work until I'm 76 to pay it off.  The worst part is what he did to me inside, I was so good to him and all of it meant nothing to him.  He used me and threw me away like a piece of garbage. Narcissists are a losing proposition, they're difficult to spot at first and impossible to make a good marriage with.  The emotional abuse is unbelievable!

I just had my husband removed from our home with a restraining order, he is still trying to call everyday, he leaves me the messages stating all the things he will do to get me back. I am not falling for it and I do not want him back. But I can't help but feel sorry for him. All the things he has said and done over the past 5 yrs, & I still feel sorry for him???? My breaking point to leave him, was for my kids. My 3 yr old boy, told my mom & sister one day that he was worried about me, cause dad makes her sad and she cries. How does someone like this get help?

Yes, I was married to a narcissist.  They are very hard to diagnosis and very hard to figure out.  Basically, you can't figure them out.  It is all about them.  The only thing I can do is forgive and move on with my life.  I will never understand and she will always point the finger at me.  The only defense is to leave.  Thanks for the responses.

my wife and I could never make a decision together.  If we did not do it her way, she was bent out of shape.  If I thought that we compromised, she would say that I always got my way.  I was never good enough and she told me that she had high expectations of me but had to lower the bar periodiclly.

*sigh* yes yes yes...our divorce process was a nightmare and I am still in the home with our child...and he has yet to help financially....doesnt care that our child is going without food, school supplies and school clothes, I have provided ...though I am maxed out financially....he brings in a new sofa/chair/paintings etc..and moved my belongings aside...my child sees all this...he sees that his needs are not met...yet the ex is concerned about his comforts only. The entire marriage was like this...emotional abuse is painful and the ex being so narcissitic is hard to witness.

Not officially diagnosed as such, but then, he'd have to admit having an issue, and well.... since he's "always right" that's NOT gonna happen.

Sure am glad I left when I did. Emotional abuse, borderline physical. No fun at all.

My challange was with a Passive Aggressive, a close cousin of the narsisstic type.

Covert Abuse to the highest degree.

WoW.... I am thankful for finding this site.  My husband is everything totally narsisstic.  I have tried to figure out what is wrong with him to act and do and say the things he does for 3 years now.  So abnormal in his thinking.  The verbal and mental abuse is horrible.  Everything is my fault.  Can't do anything good enough.  He chases younger women ( he is 55).  Very selfish and critical towards me.  I am so good to him.  So much more - everything I have read so far!  I want to learn what I can about this.  I want to learn how to deal with him in a reverse physology sort of way if possible.  Oh thank you for being here...

Hello all-
Acouple of you mentioned that other people would never have thought him capable of such abuse or manipuation.
Throughout my 22 year marriage the emotional, physical and psychological abuse continued by my aggresively manipulative stbx.  Thephysical stuff ended after the first 4  years as a senior member of our family group noticed, and this shamed him.
Because he gave to charity so much, hosted the best dinner parties (I was the pack horse for the workload) and we all wore the best clothes, car, house and other surface things, everyone assumed we had a perfect life.  So many were shocked when he left.
A few very sharp people have said to me they were surprised I hadn't left HIm sooner; as I was always bending over backwards and it was never good enough for him.
And here I was, dumb enough to think no one noticed.
Also I can relate sooo well to me being at fault for everything, something they have obviously done almost immediately becomes your fault.

I was married to a passive agressive narcissist for 33 years. He was very subtle and mild mannered. Learned some of it at his father's knee. He hid what he did very very well. He preys on women and kept me to handle all financial dealings. I was his sanctuary, his place of peace. We never socialized with anyone because he didn't socialize with his fellow employees.
 
I used to work in and own bars. I could spot a con before anyone else. Not him. He was home on time every night and the paycheck and hours always matched.

 He kept a string of women. He would get GF 1 and be looking for GF 2. Dump GF 1 for GF 2 a and be looking for GF 3. This was on every new job assignment. Eight different job assignments in the states.  Then he went overseas. China,  Philippines,
Maylasia, Singapore, Trinidad, and Algeria. He was in China at least three times.

He had been away so much the last ten years he got sloppy and I was beginning to put the pieces together when he married a Chinese woman in 2005. I am free as of Dec. 2007. He was so mild mannered and full of shame he gave me everything I wanted. I got my farm I worked so hard to pull out of the woods and the money to take care of my horses farm and me.

He only got agressive if he could cause someone harm and it wouldn't come back on him. I have some electrial on my farm that does not work. His revenge for my going thru with the divorce. He tried to keep me from getting Cobra health insurance by backing up the date of our divorce. I finally got HR to straighten the mess out 3 days before my eligibility ran out. I think he got in trouble with his company but he knows I caught him so I think he will leave me alone.

I never could figure out why all these stupid childish things kept happening to me and where it was coming from. I know now and I will forever be watching my back for one of his vindictive tricks. They are not capable of changing. The best thing to do is get out and never go back.

I have been married to one for a little over two years. It is pure emotional torture..

I married a man thinking that he was perfectly normal and capable... What I got was a CON a person who quit working after only two months of marriage and stayed that way for nine months... He had only worked for about 12 months out of the two yers we were together.

Everything was centered around him. There is no way to talk with a person like this, they become violent of seemingly normal issues and are very abusive emotionally and manipulative. They are great at conning perople into believing they are something that they are not.

This person has ruined me financially and tried to ruin me emotionally. He is still bothering me with nasty emails one day and nice the next.

I have been scared of his ups and downs in the past and now I realize that these people are not rational and you can not talk to them.

The sad thing is that we haave a daughter together and I believe the only reason he even wants to maintain anything with her is to get to me...

These type of people feed off attention whether even if it is negative.

I have said once before that mental, emotional and verbal abuse leave as deep of scars as physical abuse. It's just that people can't see these scars. Any type of abuse leaves it's ugly marks in heart and mind and it takes years to get over and sometimes you never do get over it. You always have that little nagging voice in your head that makes you build up those walls of mistrust. Abuse in any form is wrong and should not be tolerated. I myself was very weak and I voluntarily lied down to be a doormat. I still have days were the depression overwhelms me and I don't think I can go on. But then I come on here and I let out all my frustrations and my feelings and there is always someone out there to pull me back to reality. I let my stbx beat me down to where I attempted suicide twice. Last week the depression monster snagged me again and I was feeling worthless and very close to reaching for those pills again. Even though he has been gone for over a year now he still finds a way to beat me down. He knows my vulnerabilities and he uses them to the max. But thank God for the people on here that reached out to me and made me feel like I was important to someone. Because of them I am here tonight to tell you I know how you feel and you have my support.

I married her. 14yrs. (9 married) to what you just described, but add physical abuse to it. She refused to get help, I refuse to give up on my marriage. I took it everyday until she snaped and left. I'm sure if was all on her and not some caused by mean.

I forget about the the ways I was treated, I always felt it was my fault.  He's all giving not selfish which in turns makes everyone around you think he's not capable of being self centered, manipulative and passive aggressive.  I'm not sure if people who are self centered are also making everything your fault and doing the passive aggressive. Making his lies your imaginations.  I had not thought of the fact that he had conned me, but he manipulated and continued to during our marriage, but this helps making it more clear. People from the outside always said he wouldn't do that.  ??

There are a few of us here that married this type of person, some divorced, some not yet,
and yeah its quite a ride.