If you are thinking, "I'm right and you're wrong," watch out! You are just an utterance away from disaster. The Love Buster, disrespectful judgments, will not straighten your spouse out, as you hope. Instead, it will drive your spouse away from you. At first, you will develop emotional distance with your tactics. ... Your spouse's point of view is worth considering.

Markos, you are assuming that I'm talking about a mentally healthy person. I am not. I appreciate your post and wholly agree with not DJing. I believe in MB a lot.

This is true...MB won't work with someone who has an underlying personality disorder.

I asked him to take a persoanlity disorder test I found online (one of the non-jokey ones) and it resulted in Very High for narcissism and histrionic, High for OCD. The others were all low, it checks for markers of about ten different PDs.

This is true...MB won't work with someone who has an underlying personality disorder.

I appreciate your post and wholly agree with not DJing.

http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/dsm-iv.html

Top need is admiration?

Hallmark of NPD (according to the DSM IV); requires excessive admiration.

Could you forward a link? I would love to take that test.

I'm done

Hy H has chosen to see the program as a manipulation tool and discarded it on that basis after six months of working directly with SH. I'm done putting lipstick on a pig. He does not think he should have to consider my feelings, because doing so is manipulating and controlling.

"Excessive" is kind of a judgment call, isn't it?

Aren't there a lot of women who feel like their husbands require excessive sex? And men who feel like their wives need excessive conversation? And formerly wayward spouses who feel like their betrayed spouses need excessive openness and honesty?

Dr. Harley says emotional needs simply aren't rational. When you are dealing with some area where your spouse does not seem to be rational, you are probably dealing with an emotional need.

It helps noone to judge your spouse's needs as excessive.

1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

4. Requires excessive admiration

Translation: Excessive in two ways: they want praise, compliments, deference, and expressions of envy all the time, and they want to be told that everything they do is better than what others can do. Sincerity is not an issue here; all that matter are frequency and volume.

5. Has a sense of entitlement

Translation: They expect automatic compliance with their wishes or especially favorable treatment, such as thinking that they should always be able to go first and that other people should stop whatever they're doing to do what the narcissists want, and may react with hurt or rage when these expectations are frustrated.

6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends

Translation: Narcissists use other people to get what they want without caring about the cost to the other people.

7. Lacks empathy

Translation: They are unwilling to recognize or sympathize with other people's feelings and needs. They "tune out" when other people want to talk about their own problems.
In clinical terms, empathy is the ability to recognize and interpret other people's emotions. Lack of empathy may take two different directions: (a) accurate interpretation of others' emotions with no concern for others' distress, which is characteristic of psychopaths; and (b) the inability to recognize and accurately interpret other people's emotions, which is the NPD style. This second form of defective empathy may (rarely) go so far as alexithymia, or no words for emotions, and is found with psychosomatic illnesses, i.e., medical conditions in which emotion is experienced somatically rather than psychically. People with personality disorders don't have the normal body-ego identification and regard their bodies only instrumentally, i.e., as tools to use to get what they want, or, in bad states, as torture chambers that inflict on them meaningless suffering. Self-described narcissists who've written to me say that they are aware that their feelings are different from other people's, mostly that they feel less, both in strength and variety (and which the narcissists interpret as evidence of their own superiority); some narcissists report "numbness" and the inability to perceive meaning in other people's emotions.

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes

CWMI, do you want help to clean up those DJs?

It is my belief that this is the main reason your marriage is not progressing and that there's still a lot you can do for your marriage on your side by cleaning this up.

Sure. I disagree that the failure of progression in my marriage is because I am hurt by what he says to other people, or that I am bothered that he neglected to secure our anniversary weekend,