Dear Jenny:

You are very welcome. I am impressed by your courage to face what is distressing and move forward, toward more understanding and more clarity, through the distress involved.

1. “Based on everything that you know, was he a narcissit?”- if I was a psychiatrist, I wouldn’t be able to diagnose him through a second person’s account of him, I would need to see him in person for a few sessions. Problem with the term is that it became a non-professional, online name-calling term, often abbreviated to narc. And everyone online seems to feel comfortable with handing out this “diagnosis”, which really is a name-calling. Therefore I will not respond to whether he is a narcissist.

“after… reading up and thinking he is narcissistic, I’d been told that he will be the same in every relation. A basic part of narcissism as I read was that they don’t change”- let’s say that a psychiatrist diagnosed R with NPD (Narcissism Personality Disorder): not all people with this diagnosis are the same. Mental diagnoses exist on a continuum, some people are at the extreme of the continuum, others are in the middle. Some people with personality disorders can change with hard work and perseverance.

2. “Is there a possibility or even a high likelihood that tomorrow he would have a perfectly healthy relation/ marriage with a non-argumentative, more sorted girl and not be abusive toward her?”- the possibility that he will have “a perfectly healthy relation” is very, very low. The reason is that perfectly healthy relationship are very rare in reality (unlike in the movies and the books you mentioned, perhaps). And from what you shared about him, he is not a good candidate for a healthy relationship.

“Extremely Selfish people like him never change”- I tend to agree, similar to the president of the U.S., a prime example of an Extremely Selfish person, whom I strongly believe will never change.

3. “Was I a bad girlfriend and did I ill-treat him? Was I the wrong, abusive.. one? Will he be better-off without me?”- at the most, the two of you ill-treated each other, but it does not change the fact that he ill-treated you repeatedly and undeniably. If you went back to him so to treat him well this time around, you will end up in a relationship where you will be .. the perfect victim, the recipient of his ill-treatment. Better, later in time, get into a relationship where neither party ill-treats the other!

“Will he be better-off without me?”- maybe, but better you focus on becoming better and better yourself, which is possible only if you live without him.

anita