Couples Therapy and the Personality Disorder

Do you wish you could get your BPD/NPD to couples therapy? Or are you going to therapy, but finding yourself demonized and blamed for everything?

Couples therapy is the wrong tool to treat personality disorders, and the wrong tool to treat abuse. Couples therapy just becomes another weapon in the abuser’s arsenal to abuse you, and keep you under their control.

Note that in this context I use the terms for personality disorders (PDs) and abuser interchangeably and synonymous. It might have taken you a long time to realize you have been in an abusive relationship. Maybe you still aren’t there. But let me validate you here. If you are in a relationship with a BPD or NPD or heaven help you, an ASPD, you are probably being abused. A key behavior in all of these PDs is the devaluation of people; and devaluation is abuse. It matters not that the weapons of choice may not be fists, but are words, and it matters not if the abuser is female instead of male. Emotional punches are much more painful and long lasting. It’s also an insidious and potentially more destructive form of abuse because it is hard to prove, and slow to be acknowledged. Remember, having a personality disorder is no excuse for abuse. Not all abusers have PDs, but in general, BPDs/NPDs/ASPDs are abusive people. They range in severity from emotional passive aggressives to partner killers, but none are benign.

**The exception would be possibly being an inwardly focused BPD. It is possible they may only be self abusers, but since they are the exception, I will not go into that here.

Emotional abuse is the cancer of your mind and soul. As the target, it can be eating you away for a very long time where no one can see it before you even realize it is there and what it is doing to you. What you are experiencing is abuse.

Couples therapy is for couples who mostly function normally to begin with who just need more skills to become more efficient in communicating and other areas of concern for couples, not for couples with deep problems like personality disorders or abuse. Even many therapists don’t understand this. There is the old school thinking that “it takes two to tango.” It can cause you as the non PDed partner much harm, and can compromise your chances for healing if you go to a therapist that has this ideal.

Think of it this way: Couples therapy is like painting the walls or getting new carpet in an old but decent house. It can breathe new life into stale relationships, and help the average couple overcome issues achieve a new level of intimacy. But when issues like personality disorders or abuse are at stake, it’s like major plumbing issues, black mold, or a crumbling foundation. There is no sense in putting fresh paint on mold damaged walls or putting new carpet over a floor with rot. Any cosmetic changes will just distract from very real, dangerous deep issues. You must treat the deep issues and only the deep issues. Until and if the deep issues are gone, no one should attempt couples therapy. The “two to tango” idea just enables the abuser and puts unfair pressure and responsibility on the target.

Randi Kreger, author of the best selling books on BPD, says, “If they do go to counseling, they usually don’t intend to work on their own issues. In couple’s therapy, their goal is often to convince the therapist that they are being victimized.” In other words, they will not spend their time trying to get better. Their goal is usually to manipulate and hurt you, even if in the beginning they try to get you to come by saying they have things they need to work on too. They don’t really believe that. Even if they can admit once in a while in a moment of clarity they were wrong, they can’t hold onto that idea for too long. As a coping mechanism, they dissociate that as soon as possible… dump it… and everything goes back to being your fault. That is what they really believe.

Once the onslaught in therapy begins, they will generally do everything they can to turn the therapist against you and use it as a further tool of abuse. Unfortunately, because too many therapists do not adequately understand the specific nature of BPD/NPD or abuse, and because the BPD/NPD is a master in the art of manipulation, the PD often wins. The therapist tends to believe their illusions that you are the problem, and both gang up on you, making you feel like maybe you really are the problem. You live forever in self doubt and always trying to please the unpleasable. If the therapist sees through any of that, or in any way suggests they have things the PD needs to work on, the PD will declare the therapist incompetent and fire them, and blame you for turning the therapist against them.

From my experience, you need to prepared to be emotionally beaten going in and coming out. The abuse from the PD is pretty unbearable itself. They have been beating you down for so long, and your scars are already so deep. You are so beaten long before you ever make it to the therapy session. But they will add more. They are such skilled manipulators that they can fool even the experts. They have been practicing their whole lives after all. Think about this… they even get us to think it is us who were wrong and crazy even though we were there for whatever incident… How much more convincing can they be to the 3rd party who wasn’t even there? Very many therapists have little or no experience with BPD/NPD and are going to take the old school stance of couples therapy that “it takes two to tango.” That theory does NOT apply to a PD or emotional abuse. (Or abuse of any kind.) You will likely find the therapist validating them, which will make them worse, and invalidates you. Usually, the therapist starts to get wise to their game, and puts ANY pressure at all on the BPD/NPD… they will quit going. So you are caught in the inevitable catch. If your therapist is not versed in BPD/NPD or abuse, you will be unfairly ganged up on, and as bad as things are for you now, they will be worse. And if your therapist is any good, he or she will probably get fired.

In “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” by Lundy Bancroft, Bancroft, who is the world’s leading authority on abuser treatment programs, says:

Couples counseling is not designed to address one person’s chronically destructive behavior; its purpose is to help a couple improve their relationship dynamics, communicate more effectively, clarify their desires, and achieve greater closeness in a context in which both partners are behaving more or less acceptably. In a couples counseling context, your partner will be able to spend a lot of time talking about what he feels you are doing wrong, blaming his bad behavior on you, and continuing his pattern of escaping responsibility for his own actions. If he is charming and/or manipulative, he may succeed in enlisting the therapist as an ally, and the whole focus of the counseling may shift toward discussing what you need to change.” (Emphasis added.)

In Bancroft’s book, “Why Does He Do That?” Bancroft says:

Attempting to address abuse through couples therapy is like wrenching a nut the wrong way; it just gets even harder to do than it was before. Couples therapy is designed to tackle issues that are mutual. It can be effective for overcoming barriers to communication, for untangling the childhood issues that each partner brings to a relationship, or for building intimacy. But you can’t accomplish any of these goals in the context of abuse…

Couples counseling sends both the abuser and the abused the wrong message. The abuser learns that his partner is “pushing his buttons”… and that she needs to adjust her behavior to avoid getting him so upset. This is precisely what he has been claiming all along. Change in abusers comes only from the reverse process, from completely stepping out of the notion that his partner plays any role in causing his abuse of her. An abuser has to stop focusing on his feelings and his partner’s behavior, and look instead at her feelings and his behavior. Couples counseling allows him to stay stuck in the former. In fact, to some therapists, feelings are all that matters, and reality is more or less irrelevant. In this context, a therapist may turn to you and say, “But he feels abused by you too.” Unfortunately, the more an abusive man is convinced that his grievances are more or less equal to yours, the less the chance that he will ever overcome his attitudes.

The message to you in couples counseling is: “You can make your abusive partner behave better toward you by changing how you behave toward him. Such a message is, frankly, fraudulent. Abuse is not caused by bad relationship dynamics. You can’t manage your partner’s abusiveness by changing your behavior, but he wants you to think you can. He says, or leads you to believe, that “if you stop doing the things that upset me, and take better care of my needs, I will become a non abusive partner. It never materializes… If you have issues you would like to work on with a couples counselor, wait until your partner has been completely abuse free for two years. Then you might be able to work on some of the problems that are truly mutual ones.

Couples counseling can end up being a big setback for the abused woman. The more she insists that her partner’s cruelty or intimidation needs to be addressed, the more she may find the therapist looking down on her, saying, “It seems like you are determined to put all of the blame on him and are refusing to look at your part in this.” The therapist thereby inadvertently echoes the abuser’s attitude, and the woman is forced to deal with yet another context in which she has to defend herself, which is the last thing she needs. I have been involved in many cases where the therapist and the abuser ended up as sort of a tag team, and the abused woman limped away from yet another psychological assault. Most therapists in such circumstances are well intentioned but fail to understand the dynamics of abuse and allow the abuser to shape their perceptions.

If couples counseling is the only type of help your partner is willing to get–because he wants to make sure that he can blame the problem on you– you may think, Well, it’s better than not getting any counseling at all. And maybe the therapist will see the things he does and convince him to get help. But even if the therapist will see the things he does and confront him, which is uncommon, he would just say, “You turned the therapist against me.” –the same way he handles other challenges.

The proper treatment for BPD is not couples therapy, traditional therapy or anger management. These usually make them worse not better. Couples therapy becomes a tool for more abuse. Traditional therapy usually becomes a vomit session where all they will do is go on and on about how abusive you are, and all the ways you fail them. Anger management doesn’t work because they already spend too much time ruminating on their anger, and it only gets worse.

The only way a BPD could become a proper partner is to:

• First, do at least a year or two of a specifically designed program that effectively deals with BPD behaviors, which typically last in duration for 1-2 years. It very hard work and the washout rate is very high. Even then, You can’t fix BPD/NPD, At best with the worlds best treatment, if they work very hard and really want to change, they might minimize a few behaviors. Is that going to be enough to make you glad you spent your entire life waiting and hoping… and being abused?
• The second essential step they would need to take is they would need to enter an abuser (batterer) treatment program that would use the Lundy Bancroft principles as he is the world’s leading expert in that area, and his ideals are really the only ones shown to work. (NOT anger management!) Most states in the US (and almost no other countries) even have such abuser’s programs because the abuser mind set of an abuser and a target are something that we are just now starting to understand. Personality disorders have historically not been understood, and education even among mental health professionals is limited. Good, adequate batterers programs are also on average 1-2 years in length of very hard work, and the wash out rate is incredibly high. With both personality disorders and abusers. they are like life long alcoholics. The temptation is always there to slip back into old patterns because they have become hard wired that way.
• After your relationship is abuse free for two years, (this is how long it takes to make sure anything really did change) you can then go to a couples therapist who is well versed in both personality disorders and abuse. If one or the other is lacking, it won’t be the proper treatment for your situation, and can again make things worse, and cause regression in the abuser.

There has been no effective treatment proven for NPD or ASPD. No therapy has ever clinically proven as been able to shock them into having enough empathy or desire to change. And you should also know… if you are with a BPD, chances are the also have a varying degree of NPD or ASPD. The personality disorders tend to come in clusters, and if someone has BPD, their odds of having traits of the other PDs in that cluster is very high. It is the NPD and ASPD components that make BPD so resistant to treatment, because they do not believe they have a problem. If you can’t see a problem… you can’t fix it. Therefore; the higher number of those traits your BPD has, the less likely they are to ever get better.

We should all get therapy, but it needs to be personal therapy with a therapist who understand abuse and the personality disorders, and their job should help us heal and be the best we can be. Our therapy needs to be designed to help targets of abuse. NO couples therapy. The therapist you choose should in no way invested in the relationship with the PD, which means couples therapy is completely off the table. That is a conflict of interest that cannot be reconciled.

Peace and Love…