It's interesting how the symptoms of some Dx's play out in a way that comes across as manipulative & passive aggressive. Where it's not actually a behavior but the way their brain works that comes across that way. Makes life hell to live with someone like that though. I lived with more 1/2 truths or silent lies because he honestly thought that it was the way he said it was.

I found that whether someone does something intentional or not, the resulting hurt is still the same.

I remember every time I would talk about getting a divorce, my H would go out car shopping & we would end up getting committed to a new car loan rather than getting a divorce.

Honestly getting out of the warped way his mind thought was the best thing I ever did for myself but it took 33 years to finally get out. I saw the warped way his mind thought before I ever got married but I didn't have the understanding at the age of 21 to actually grasp what it meant. He had told me that he got lousy grades in college in the classes that he thought he was smarter than the professor in because he thought it was a waste of time for him to put any effort into the class. Then after graduation, he didn't bother to interview with other companies on campus because he was SURE that the bank he worked for through college would hire him into their computer department. They didn't hire him because he didn't have a high enough GPA. He got angry & said that his GPA didn't show his capability........the sad thing is that IT DID SHOW HIS ATTITUDE....but I didn't have the words to sort through it at the time I told my mom I really didn't want to get married to him. I manipulated my own thinking telling myself that someone with an education & a good solid degree couldn't possibly be irresponsible like my own dad was without an education. (ah, even manipulation of our thinking). He always placed the blame of something else rather than taking responsibility for his own behavior.

The priceless one was when he tried to convince our T that he failed in his engineering career because he only went to a state college rather than Cal Tech. I graciously pointed out to our T that his brother had gone to the same useless state university & had received his masters from there & was a successful assistant director on a local power company & I highly doubted that it was the University's problem. Manipulating blame was a perfection of his not wanting people to see who & what he really was.