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Illustr8r
Joined: Jul 12, '09
Status: New User |
2009-07-12 11:40:02 |
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I really hope that someone in this forum can help me with a problem that has been tearing at me for over a year now. This involves a person who may have HPD (some of the criteria listed fit, but I'd like to be sure), but I also have to describe my relationship with her to put it into perspective. Maybe my description of her, her behaviors, and our relationship will help someone tell me what is going on with her. My goal is to coax her (or find someone who can coax her) into therapy. I simply don't know how to approach her, especially considering the fact that she seems to completely hate me now. BTW, I have to warn any reader that this post is pretty long. I'll begin by telling about myself, and from hereon, I'll refer to myself as "Kevin." I am now 47 and have been married for 13 years. My relationship with my wife has been severely strained for the vast majority of these years. I will not go into too much detail about what caused the rift because that would really require a separate post, but my psychologist has told me she has definite anger and control issues. She has been resistant and hostile to my previous attempts to get us into counseling (ever since the time our first son was an infant), so a divorce is very likely imminent. The woman I'm trying to help, whom I'll call Marcie, is currently 42, twice-divorced. She is extremely pretty, and people are astonished to find out her age. Needless to say, she gets a LOT of attention from the men at our facility. Marcie lives alone, and she has an adult daughter and a grand-daughter. She is an impressionistic speaker, and has developed a reputation for "going from man to man." She is a very reckless driver (a friend of hers says,"like a bat out of hell"), and she suffers from frequent "chest pains" that sound very much to me like anxiety attacks. It's hard for me to know whether she has many friends. I think she remains rather withdrawn, although over the last year, she seems to have become less talkative. It's hard to say, though, since I now stay away from her work area whenever possible. Marcie seems to be an enthusiastic reader of romance novels, and a woman, with whom Marcie exchanges books, "Tina," says that Marcie is especially fond of a subgenre of romance in which a woman gets involved in situations that involve some sort of sexual or romantic submission (maybe this subgenre is called dominant/submissive or something similar? Maybe someone can help me out with this...). Tina says that Marcie may be looking for an "alpha-type" man who fits the mold of the characters in these books, someone to whom she can be submissive. Also, she is extremely insecure about her weight and her appearance, and she had asked me about several types of diet pills, and even procedures like lipo. Friends say she is always asking if her clothes looks ok or she is too fat. Also, I have been told by both Erica and Joan that she seems to exaggerate any illness or slight affliction she has. Managers actually had to talk to her about her frequent practice of leaving work to go to the hospital for various things. She is asthmatic, and she was taking prednisone (also called prednisolone or prelone) for her condition (this was before we met). She told me that she had read about the side effects of this medicine (I really think that she was mainly alarmed about the weight gain from this steroid, because she mentioned this point often) and decided to completely stop taking it - cold turkey. I have an asthmatic son, and I know that it cannot be stopped in that manner after being taken long-term without some pretty serious side-effects. She apparently passed out at the job and had to be taken to the hospital, but she had to have already known that the medicine has to be tapered off, because I think that's one of the first things the doctor talks about to anyone being prescribed this... In late spring of 2007, our office was experiencing a shortage of workers due to vacations, reassignments, and a few other situations, so the employees in my unit (I work on the first floor) began to frequently come up to an automation unit, complete with rows of processing machines, on the third floor, where Marcie works. I had worked with her a couple of times, but it was very uneventful. I am a quiet, withdrawn person (my therapist says I am somewhat avoidant in personality type, maybe a by-product of my childhood, growing up with a paranoid-schizophrenic father...), so my times working with her were strictly business, although not unpleasant. Almost no words passed between us. On June 6th, 2007, though, Marcie developed an interest in talking to me. She never came over to me at first, but she kept bringing me up to another worker whom I had a casual acquaintance, whom I'll call Joan. Joan approached me, pointed at Marcie, and exclaimed,"She wants you!" (Joan was never much for subtlety). Soon after, Marcie came up to me and asked, "Is it true that the French are great lovers?" (Joan would ask me about my heritage when we conversed, and I told her that my father's family was mostly french). After that somewhat unusual introduction, we talked at some length and she seemed a pretty nice person. It turned out to be her birthday, and I wished her a happy birthday (she would later call me her birthday present). She gave me her phone number, but I didn't call her at first. We saw each other at work and I let her know that I was married. She said, "I can handle that," but I told her that she would be wasting her time with me when someone younger, more handsome and more available would certainly come along for her. Her response to that was to tell me about her "last boyfriend," (I'll call him Arnold, and his name will turn up again later) whom she said she had been with for 5 years and was married with children, too. Apparently, this Arnold, a tractor driver at our job, befriended her after her second divorce and was "a shoulder to cry on" while she recovered from this divorce. She then told me that she would be with me for as long as I wanted her. She would actually say this to me often during most of our time together. As I got to know her more, she had some things that were a little odd: she was kind of clingy and insecure, often expressing worry that "rumors" at the job would cause her to "lose" me. During our first several months knowing each other she was sending up to 10(!) e-mails a day, despite the fact that we spent our lunches and breaks together and I was coming over to her place almost every day, but she seemed such a nice person that I began really feeling a warmth for her. We seemed to have quite a bit in common: she told me of her abusive father who was relentlessly cruel. She said he would try to walk in on her when she was in the bathroom showering, among other unpleasantness towards her, her mother, and her brother, and he eventually left the family to return to Puerto Rico. The mother, who seems to have been a doormat, basically arranged a marriage between Marcie and a man 11 years her elder when Marcie was maybe 15 or 16 (she believed that her mother and this man may have slept together), and then eventually left a pregnant Marcie to fend for herself while the mother left for Puerto Rico, presumably to look for the father (I know that there is something seriously lacking in this telling, but this is kind of how it was told to me - I assume that the older brother had left home before this, and there is no real explanation of other things: she said that she was left in a house with no lights or heat, and there were times she didn't even eat, but how was she able to stay in that apartment, dark though it was? and where was the husband during this? I never got answers to that, but there are holes in other stories about her past, as well, and Joan has told me that Marcie paints herself as a victim for sympathy). Because of my upbringing, I could certainly empathize. We also shared a love of computing. My maj |
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wadesa
Joined: Jul 24, '09
Status: New User |
2009-07-24 13:31:15 |
| your story cut off I am interested to hear more... | |