I agree, and the court has witnessed her behavior and I'd pushing for a physcological evaluation which she is strongly opposing.

I do agree that she is capable of following the MB program, it is just alot harder for her. For example, the first step in the checklist... requires her to send a no contact letter to the OM. She may agree to end her relationship with him... possibly, but to admit to an afair is almost impossible for her because it would destroy her identity. I disagree with Dr Harley about these personality disorders because having lived with it, I know that she needs to be handled differently. We cannot as assume that we can just wake up one day and follow the POJA... she is incapable of that now. I believe that she can do it, but it won't happen until her emotions are dealt with first. Once her emotional side is dealt with, logic and reason can follow. It is not easy though.

I say that she is "Off the page"... because, the minute a councelor says something she does not like, her face changes... the emotion is imedediatly evident... or she walks out of the counceling all together. She cannot hide or cover up her emotional state.

More on BPD..
There is no one set of criteria that defines BPD... and Dr Harley is right in that it is very subjective. Whether we can get a diagnosis is irrelevant. The facts are still the facts: I cannot treat my wife as a logical person without a PD or I simply get no where with her. It is extremely difficult for her to pick up Dr Harley's principles which are logical without addressing the emotional side first then leading her to it. I haven't given up hope.

Divorcing her is very difficult... given her personality, she will "split" me if I divorce her. She will do whatever she pleases with the children. She will drop them off whenever she feels like it. She will alienate them from me. She will pay for only the things she feels like paying for.. If I have custody, she will ignor it, and I will be stuck going to court with her endlessly. It will be a life of misery, but I will go there if she forces me to.

Right now, my plan is this...
#1 Address emotional needs as best I can.
#2 Set firm limits on what I can control for her lack of boundaries opposite sex friendships...
Why I am asking for help with the text messages... I need reassurance that there message were across the line to an affair and completely unacceptable.. as such, I will not tolerate future communication with this man, or any unaccompanied travel to state that he lives in. I cannot force her not to travel... but I can tell her that I will not pay for it; the kids cannot go; and the locks will be changed when she comes back.
#3 We must be showing progress towards reconciling our marriage or I sign the divorce papers. This means undivided attention each week which is lunch for now, but will need to turn in to date night etc.. and spending more and more time together; more negotiating and meeting each other's needs.

She is showing some progress: She actually meets some of my needs right now... domestic support, admiration (the occasional compliment), Physical attractiveness (she makes herself look really nice to have lunch with me). Conversation is improving.

The big issue we have is POJA... she is very controlling, does not negotiate, etc... I did an experiment yesterday for example though...

She completely overdrew the checking account. It was 100% her fault as she is the only one using that account... but she blamed me for it and got emotional. It's all my fault because I did not deposit enough money or I should have monitored it an put more in there sooner. After to listening to her emotion... getting her to recognize that I was willing to help her solve the problem and I was not attacking her, she began to turn logical and she agreed that we could brainstorm solutions together so that it doesn't happen again. This is a babystep... but it is a babystep toward a POJA.. she is capable yes, but it doesn't come as is should for a person without a PD. I expect that a mentally healthy person is simply capable to acknowledge that they made a mistake..., this is something that is very basic for a mature adult. She cannot do it.

Last weekend, she crashed her car into mine (which was parked in the driveway) She blamed me for it... It was a parked car!!! I was not even in it. I parked it in the same place that I park it every day. She began to fly off in a rage!!! I explained to her that it was just a mistake. It does not mean that she is a bad person or a bad driver. She eventually calmed down.

I have been with this woman for 15 years... I know her better than any doctor, or any therapist, or anyone else. She has a PD... I know that, I accept it, and I don't judge her for it. I am trying to get to be as good as possible at living with it. Until the last 4 years, we weren't together all the time. She said that she liked that arrangement because it was easier for her to "pull it together" for the time we were together.

Dr. Harley also dislikes personality disorder diagnoses because they fail to provide any insight as to treatment. A personality disorder diagnosis just leaves you stuck where you are, with no effective treatment options to deal with the problem.

OK.. fair. But, recognizing her personality (disorder) helps in terms of how you work with such a person and setting reasonable expectations.

I bring up my wife's PD for three reasons:

#1 is that implementing DR Harley's principles are going to be more difficult (or maybe impossible) I don't know.
#2 it is hard to know what is going on with this affair because the PD and affair symptoms are similar
#3 Divorcing her is a whole different set of problems... I would hate to stay with someone who is a bad marriage partner just because divorce will be even more miserable, but it's true.

With kids, in order of best to worst is:
#1 Loving marriage
#2 Divorced parents that work together
#3 Married parents that don't love eachother
#4 High conflict divorce

With a BPD partner, you can guarantee #4 if you divorce. #2 is impossible so #1 and #3 become the only options.

The only hope for my kids is to be in #3 and do everything possible to get to #1 and hopefully avoid #4

Please : you are the one deciding what she will be like.
My ex was diagnosed with BPD and you are in your own fog.

Your imagining all of this and my ex was way way way worse than yours.

We have very firm boundaries about what and when he can see the kids. He tried for a while to get around that but most BPD hate to have others watching them (aka the police-other people etc) and will stop bad behavior.

(and if she continues to stop you from seeing kids or alienates them or whatever- the court will issue you as the primary parent)

The only issue I have is him not paying child support but you won't even be concerned about that.

So please do not come here acting like you know what it will be like for sure or anything else because you don't have an absolute here. There are plenty of things you could do if you did have to divorce to make sure all of your bad ideas won't happen.

I feel like you are stuck in such a fear cycle- I will not feel sorry for you as you are the one making decisions here to put up with horrible behavior while teaching your kids that this behavior is normal and acceptable enough to stay married too. So #3 is ridiculous. (do they watch this blaming you for her hitting a parked car nonsense daily?)
My kids thanked me forever for divorcing their father.

If you eventually want to escape your abusive relationship:
Get an awesome lawyer> go to a dark plan B> stop the cycle of fear thinking you already know the outcome of all of this.

Your "recognizing her personality disorder" really comes down to one gigantic disrespectful judgement. It is not your place as a spouse to engage in such behavior. Dr. Harley has said repeatedly that even though he is a fully-qualified diagnostician, he would never presume to analyze Joyce.

Have you seen this? Emotional Personality Disorders

From that thread:

What you (original poster) are doing is exactly what these excerpts from Dr Harley warn spouses against.

You need to understand.. I have taken 100% responsibility for everything and my spouse has taken 0%. I have met all her EN's. I have eliminated all LB's. I have made all the changes and she has not made a single change. 100% of everything is my fault so she does nothing and it gives her a license to go have whatever affair she wants and take 0 responsibility for it. The article above is not the situation at all.

This is also not true. Dr Harley says that for me to tell her she has a PD is a disrespectful judgement. For me to recognize that she has one and try to make accommodations for it and be understanding is quite different... it's actually quite caring. I have not told her that she has a PD... the act of verbalizing it to her is the DJ... Dr says that your own thoughts and logic is not a disrespectful judgement. It is what you say and how you say it that it.

Another thing to understand... I dated my wife for 7 years before we got married. There were big problems with her emotional state and reactions to things. I wanted to make sure that I could handle it before we got married. I did not fully understand BPD at the time, but I knew that she had a certain type of personality that proved very difficult. Over the 7 years love won out, we stuck together, and got married. I also recognized that it wasn't all her and I made mistakes too. I never thought ever that she would cheat on me though until it happened... then I found Dr Harley's material. Dr Harely's basic concepts should not be that difficult to implement...but they are with my wife. Let me give another example..

We had a discussion about emotional needs and completed the survey. I asked my wife to give me direct feedback on how I was doing meeting her EN's and what I could do better. She said that I should just know... she should not have to tell me. This could be a PD or it could be an affair because when having an affair you don' t want the other person to meet your EN's.

Things that I expect from a rational person without a PD:
#1 Being able to admit a mistake, say I'm sorry
#2 Discuss an issue at hand... not bring in events from 10 years ago like it is happening right now
#3 Ask for what you want
#4 Not blame every single problem on someone else
#5 Understand what an inappropriate boundary is with someone of the oposite sex
#6 Understand that kidnapping your children across the country is wrong
#7 Not walk out of marriage counseling (for no reason)
#8 Do not hit your spouse
#9 Be able to balance a checkbook
#10 Be able to get up in the morning and hold a job
#11 Be willing to negotiate or make a compromise
#12 Be able to talk like an adult when you have a problem or are upset about something

etc...

This thread is getting off topic... I knew that would happen by bringing up PD's.

I need to know if this affair is dead or not... I posted these text messages that started it all.

My WW says "I'm crazy" for exposing her affair and it does not exist... how should I respond to that ask her to end all contact?

Please give me some ideas of what to do... I will try it and post the response here. Thanks.

Actually, you are wrong. Independent of what you might say to her, you are not to play diagnostician with your wife. It is not your role as a spouse. It does not lead to caring behavior. It leads to you assuming a position of superiority, as you have amply demonstrated here. It destroys any hope of an equal partnership. No woman is going to want a lifelong relationship with a guy who thinks he is so much better, and I seriously doubt you are half as successful in hiding your thoughts than you think you are.

My experience has shown me the opposite.. if I treat my wife as a non-BPD, she feels quite disrespected and defensive. If I use my understanding of her personality and emotional state and adapt my approach, I get much better results. If I get offended and personalize every attack that she makes on me, I cannot survive... If I depersonalize it and understand the deeper feelings she is projecting on me... I begin to understand her and respond without anger and defensiveness. Understanding the person you are trying to love and how they think and feel is not disrespectful.

I knew of her personality before we were married and if I disrespected her for it, I would not have married her. We have had discussions on how we are both different in this way, but we also complete each other.

If my WW feels disrespected, she is welcome to tell me so, and I am willing to accommodate any feelings that she has.

I do struggle to respect her for the text message string posted at the beginning of this thread. I feel quite betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. I do not disrespect her for making a mistake... I do have trouble with the fact that she still defends it and thinks it's OK. I have trouble respecting that. Dr Harley says that I have a right to my thoughts and opinions on that. I am right to be angry about it. Voicing that to her is a disrespectful judgement that he talks about and it serves no useful purpose. You are right though... it is hard to hide it sometimes. I think most of us betrayed spouses from time to time will slip and make a disrespectful judgement about the affair.

The problem with Dr Harely's approach is that it is very logical... you complete the checklist and your marriage will recover. This approach does not sit well with my wife. She says Dr Harley is a "jerk"... she is happy with the marriage as it is and we should not spend time together,we should not share passwords, we should not be open an honest, POJA is too "controlling".. etc...

I am looking for any possible suggestion.. I will try it and post the result here. Lets not continue to debate BPD please... tell me what to try and I will try it and provide the result. We need her to see the benefit of ending the affair and working towards a loving healthy marriage. I have a divorce already in process so there is nothing to lose at this point.

tm, the big problem I see here is that you are disrespectful to your wife and dismissive of her perspective. Until this gets better I would not expect your marriage to improve or survive.

Please note.. I do not say any of these things to her. These are things that I think are reasonable to expect and would hold myself to.

We all get frustrated with our spouse from time to time and commit "love busters" ... I have eliminated them almost entirely for more than 12 months.

Ii do not know why you would say I am dismissive of her perspective? Please tell me in what ways I can be more understanding? I think I do understand to some extent her reasons for the affair although I still don't excuse it.

Let me be completely honest... since the affair and all the actions since...I really struggle with "feeling" respect for her... that is 100% true. I have done my best to not show this... help me, how do you combat this feeling of disrespect?

The problem with your diagnosing your wife with BPD is that you are now customising MB, and declaring most of it unsuitable to your situation, because of what you have decided are her in-built limitations.

That is exactly how Dr Harley describes the problem once people self-diagnose a personality disorder, and also when qualified people readily use these highly-contested labels. They find an immutable reason for anti-social and anti-marriage behaviour, and adjust their expectations accordingly.

If you read through the thread that BrainHurt attached yesterday, you will see clear, irrefutable explanations from Dr Harley for why personality disorder labels should not be the focus when there are marital problems. It pretty much comes down to the fact that people who really DO have personality disorders are unlikely to have been able convince anyone to marry them, because there would have been terrible problems in any relationships they tried to forge. And if, for some reason, the problems surfaced only after marriage, they would be unmistakable; they would always include self harm, and the person would be unable to keep a job. They would not just be difficult, like your wife, with her ability to cut people out of her circle at a stroke, and her loving someone one moment and seeing them as evil the next. A person with a personality disorder would barely be able to function in society.

There is nothing I have read about your wife that I haven't read about dozens of difficult spouses on this forum. There are spouses who seem utterly unfit for marriage, because in several ways they refuse to consider the happiness of the person to whom they are married. They won't acknowledge a complaint, they have angry outbursts all the time, they behave independently, they are sarcastic, aggressive, spendthrift..they behave badly. Your wife behaves badly.

If you can get the affair to end, or if you can wait while it dies a natural death, and if your wife - even very reluctantly - decides to return to the marriage, you can work on creating an MB marriage, at which POJA and extraordinary care and protection are at its heart, or you can divorce if your wife refuses to create a happy marriage.

You can also stay in a marriage that is unhappy for you, on the grounds that you want to live with your kids full time, and you do not want them to have a stepfather. I have heard Dr Harley say that some men that he counsels, whose wives refuse to stop their affair or do other work on the marriage, choose to stay put for those reasons. They plan to stay until the youngest child is either old enough to choose to go with the father, or is out of the house. That a huge sacrifice to make, but some men are prepared to make it.

What you are unlikely to get is support for diagnosing your wife as having a personality disorder, then picking and choosing which bits of Marriage Builders you think you can apply to your marriage.

I do recommend, as others have suggested, that you write directly to Dr H about your situation. Do it now; don't put this off.

So because she does those things, she has a personality disorder.

That logic is astonishing.