FIL turns 90

I have read blog posts by those with aged narcissistic parents, and it appears that difficult behaviors, if anything, become more rigid as the years go by. It may be that those who have compensated for and been a mitigating factor in their lives are now gone. Or, as my MIL used to say, someone who is a mean old man was once a mean young man. And a nice old man was once a nice young man. We truly become ourselves as we get older.

When we landed in the U.S., we stayed for a week with one daughter's family, then drove across the state to visit our other children. At the time we were invited to visited my husband's sister's family, who lives in the same state. But FIL was staying with them, so we declined the invitation.

We stayed with another daughter for several months while we found a new, smaller house to live in (in another state) but while we were there, we were called by one of the twins to Skype with FIL. He was staying with her for a few weeks since the Sister caretaker was having a medical emergency. We knew what the interview would be like.  We knew he was angry because we had not informed him of our mission report, which we had given in our home congregation. At the time I was profoundly grateful that he was not there.  We declined to Skype with him, partly because he is profoundly deaf, and a Skype session would have been an exercise in futile shouting.

Sister Twin called later (refusing to talk to either me or my husband, only talking to us through my daughter) and said he now just wanted to Skype to say hello and congratulate us. We declined this too, knowing any greeting would be filtered through her. We asked the sane sisters how this sister was progressing, and they told us things were not good. After several years of attempting to reach out to her, and a slow but steady response, she had shut herself off from her family and refused any communication except with two of the sisters. Her memory of her family life was unrecognizable to those who had lived alongside her.

Her twin brother, who had been so miserable for so many years, had sunk even lower. He had lost his job and got another one that paid less, and his wife was rumored to spend even more time with her job on the other side of the state to the point that she was rarely ever seen. He would not communicate with anyone except in resentful grunts.

We knew we could not avoid seeing FIL  indefinitely. We had to keep returning to our farm house to remove our belongings from it, and when our renters finally moved out, to clean up and repair and mow the lawn until we could sell it. We had to visit the old farmhouse where my husband's sister was taking care of FIL. We were assigned to the Spanish congregation of our church, which met in the same building we had attended before.

So I inadvertently bumped into FIL in the hallway one Sunday. He looked at me as if he knew who I was, but couldn't remember my name. He seemed puzzled but not unpleased. We shook hands. My husband said he encountered his father too, but he recognized him with disdain and would not shake his hand.

We talked with the Sister caretaker, who told us that in the 18 months since we had seen him last, he had nearly lost his ability to speak, due, in part, to his deafness. He often could not remember peoples' names, but knew that he knew them. He slept 12 hours at night and napped 2-3 hours a day. He would work in the garden several hours one day and was too exhausted to garden for the next three. He was unable to make the walk up to the mailbox anymore. He had left off talking endlessly of his experiences at college (over 60 years earlier) to his experiences in the war (70 years earlier) to his current subject, his childhood in the Rocky Mountains (nearly 80 years ago). He was regressing. The Sister caretaker found this a much better situation for herself to care for him, since he was asleep much of the time.

The biggest problem was that the Brother twin would spend time with his father, and when he left, his father would be stirred up and angry to the point of ranting for hours about subjects he could not deal with. This became so obviously harmful that Sister caretaker finally warned the Brother twin that he could only speak to his father under her supervision. Brother twin stomped off at this and has not been back. Sister caretaker says that FIL has been in a much better frame of mind ever since, to the point that when he sees my husband occasionally around the farm, he even waves and smiles, and at church he shakes his hand.

Before MIL's death, FIL and the twins were at constant loggerheads, especially Brother twin. There was shouting, screaming, cursing, refusing to bend, the futile making of demands, and other noisy demonstrations of wilfulness on all sides. FIL was never overtly antagonistic toward my husband until after his wife's death, which provided the twins an opportunity for constant provocation of the now un-supervised FIL. They only joined forces in order to express their common hatred and envy of my husband. After all, he laid bare--for everyone to see--the root of the family division and unhappiness, which MIL had worked so hard to alleviate, at the expense of her own life and health.

Upon reflection, I cannot say how much of what we have recently experienced with these personalities has come as a result of their own self-directed personality disorders or their combined desire for the destruction of the family member who brought the hard truth to the surface. I attribute FIL's sudden more pleasant disposition is a result of a long-hoped-for concession to his own mortality--a letting go of the unhappy and the unnecessary, but it is impossible to know how much of his anger was really his or the result of constant, needling provocation. He was entirely able to provoke his own anger earlier on, so I cannot say when the change came.

He fought it so hard for so long, and it is catching up with him. He is fortunate to be under the care of a loving and faithful daughter. All I can say is that the change of countenance is most welcome.

I do worry about the desperateness of the twins when FIL finally shuffles off this mortal coil, worried about how far their desperation will take them.

They are everywhere

We left for our mission in the fall of 2013. After 10 days of training, we flew to South America and took up residence in a little high-rise apartment in the city center. We met and worked with wonderful people, who have become close friends, in spite of language, culture, and distance. We traveled by foot, by taxi, by bus, and finally we bought a car, and traveled further. We had amazing experiences. And we ran into narcissists.

The first one was not actually a narcissist, although some of the symptoms are the same across mental, emotional and personality disorders. The third day we were in country we walked the 10 blocks to the office where we would be serving and met the wonderful staff of ladies, which included another volunteer missionary like ourselves, a local woman who was evidently depressed, negative, controlling, incompetent, unable to take direction, and interfering. It became apparent from the moment she arrived a month before we had, that she was a very troubled soul. She had not finished high school, had three illegitimate children, lived with her children's abusive father until his death a few years earlier, and as the only recipient of her late father's pension, was resented by her siblings. She considered herself an expert in marriage relations and was upset when we did not ask her to teach a marriage relations class.

Eventually the other ladies in the office confided that she had delusions of being in love with a young missionary, (she was 55 years old,) had driven people out of the office by lying about the staff, and had been thrown out of one apartment and had to find another place to stay. We visited the president of the mission and suggested she be evaluated by a psychologist, and this was done. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which, I have been told, is one of the most difficult and intractable of mental illnesses. The wheels were set in motion to have her removed as a missionary. In the meantime, we were told, we were to make sure she did not feel any pressure for the remaining weeks she would be with us. In other words, we were to babysit her in the now-empty office. When she got very tense, she would start cleaning, so for those weeks our office was extremely clean. The church leaders who recommended her as a missionary knew of her mental problems, but sent her anyway, perhaps thinking she would improve with distance--although serving as a missionary is fairly stressful, especially for those who cannot tolerate a change of circumstances.

When she finally took her two-hour bus ride home, we began to pick up the pieces and build the volunteer office services back to previous levels. The delightful office manager, Rosa, was known and loved far and wide, and with our efforts and the efforts of the faithful office staff, we eventually had many people coming for help with education and jobs. It was very rewarding.

In order to further develop this initiative, a well-paid manager was hired by the church to administer the program over a large geographical area. He moved his family closer to the office and began spending time with us. From the beginning my husband recognized him as another controlling, self-involved person, who although competent in financial matters, was without consideration of any kind for much of anything else, apparently unaware that the faithful staff were not slaves there to make him look good, but long-time volunteers who had worked without pay to accomplish more than he could. He seemed content with driving people away from the office because they were too poor, too humble, and less than he was. He tried to control all our movements, claiming it was instructions from his superior, although his superior disavowed that he had given any such instructions. Eventually we contacted the program headquarters in the U.S. and were told to break with him and continue with our own initiatives. He drove away four of the seven local volunteers. We spent far less time in the office, and tried to mitigate the damage he was doing and the plight of the remaining office volunteers.

Over a year of trying to compensate for the incompetent manager and protect the remaining volunteers became so wearing on my husband, that he developed the symptoms of and was eventually diagnosed with a chronic medical condition. We were told not to have contact with the manager anymore. My husband needed medical attention at home. The office ladies were heartbroken. We wrote up our last report, said our goodbyes to those we had come to know and love, and made the return trip to the United States, where our children took good care of us while we rested, bought a new home,  and began to re-establish the life we had left. My husband paid close attention to his chronic condition, which is now under control through diet.

We look back and try to reconcile what happened to us. On the whole we had a wonderful experience, fell in love with the country and its people, and wish they lived closer so we could visit them whenever we wanted. It was an eye-opening adventure, and we loved it all. But one person was able to make everything so difficult, and was so destructive to the program we were trying to build and improve. The negative effect he had on faithful, humble church members was appalling. From what we know of personalities like this, they do not believe they are capable of doing anything wrong, and will not take instruction, even though they are afforded chances to do so. We wonder if his superiors will allow the program Rosa created with such care to be completely ruined while they discover this for themselves.

Post Script, November 2016: We have kept in contact with our friends in South America. Earlier this year, when Rosa retired as a volunteer in order to spend more time teaching her university classes, the other volunteers quit as well, rather than continue under the direction of the hired manager. The hired manager, unable to get anyone else to run the once-thriving center for him, closed it down and set one up closer to his family, where--my husband and I are sure--his kind-hearted and competent wife is probably running things for him.

Escaping the narcissists in our lives

I came back to this blog when my husband, who, never having any facility with electronics, suddenly found himself compelled to master the basics of the iPad in order to keep in contact with the sanity and order of our blessed United States, as well as scattered family members, while we live for 18 months in South America.

He was reading my other blog about our current adventures, and clicked the link to my profile, which lists the blogs I have started and abandoned. He started reading this one, and reminded me of it. I have been reading through it today, and although it ought to be a memoir of a difficult time in my life that I've put behind me, it isn't. Because even though we are living in South America, we have not escaped living under the shadow of the personality disordered and the plain mentally ill. I am beginning to think that this is God's curse on my husband and me: to take a stand against those who would suck the life, joy and pleasure out of you, and learn to not only stop it in its tracks, find ways around it, and neutralize it, but to teach others wounded by this type of person how to defend themselves.

We looked forward for years to going on a mission for our church. We serve in a fund which gives loans to students of all ages trying to improve their earning ability. It is gratifying, exhausting, and rewarding work. We studied our Spanish, saved our money, and finally were able to sell the cows, (our nephew having decided to go back to regular employment rather than be partners with us and his grandfather,) filled out our mission papers, and made the long flight to another hemisphere. I must admit that years along the way I really really wished we could have left earlier, in order to get away from the excruciating demands of the narcissists in our lives.

My FIL is nearly 90 years old now, having outlived his wife by over ten years. (She died when she was 78 years old, of pancreatic cancer.) Following his casting us off over the problem with the garden water, he went it alone for a few years, during which time he had his driver's license taken away for erratic driving (he earned it back by taking a driving class,) made spectacularly bad financial decisions such as buying hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of annuities, selling his IRA for the chunk of cash it represented and then having to pay thousands of dollars in taxes, and nearly dying from "grunge," the word the emergency room physicians gave to his super-bacterial infected toe which he broke by tripping on the side of the washing machine then shoving into a manure-soaked sock and boot. He was always one to tough things out. He refused to go to the doctor until one of the brothers-in-law put him in the car and drove him there. It took several days and a super-antibiotic IV drip at the Veteran's Hospital to get past the delirium. He was given a warning from the doctors to bathe more often, not obeyed.

When we finally came to the point where we were within a year of sending in our mission papers, there was still the problem of what to do with FIL. Although Brother and Sister Twin both declare undying love and devotion to their dear old dad (after years of nonstop hollering and cussing,) neither of them can tolerate him in their home for more than a few hours. We told the other sisters to get ready to take care of him until we returned. We looked forward to this.

My husband's divorced sister had been earning her living as a well-loved public elementary school teacher. She endured one terrible year trying to teach in spite of an out-of-control student, compounded by the lack of support and outright hostility shown by the new principal. During the school year she not only lost a great deal of weight, the principal wrote up a negative, accusatory evaluation on her permanent record.

Following this, she spent one rewarding year of teaching , and then returned to the classroom the next fall only to find that she had not only one, but seven out-of-control children. She was emotionally shattered by this, and had to stop teaching. She had saved up a lot of sick days. My husband, who had flown to a dairy meeting in her city, where he usually stays at her house, found her nearly catatonic, and told her he would bring her back to the farm in her silver pickup. He helped her pack and said she was curled up in the fetal position the entire drive.

It took a lot of time for her to recover. She was emotionally, mentally and physically very weak. She slept a lot,  listened to music, quilted, read books, took walks in the countryside, and helped me in my garden--better than becoming her father's garden-slave, which she refused to do. She cooked and cleaned for her father and visited her sisters. She returned to the school district more than once, to get a psychological evaluation, and to notify them of her retirement. The principal discovered that he could not keep a substitute teacher in her classroom for longer than two weeks. He was compelled  to re-write his evaluation of her. She told her father that she would stay with him for the rest of his life. He said it was an answer to prayer.

If I had someone taking care of me the rest of my life, this sister would be among those at the top of my list. She is loving, wise, musical, well-read, never annoying or overbearing, incredibly helpful and hard-working, and very pleasant company. It only underscores how lucky FIL has always been and continues to be, to have the services of his brilliant wife, his son, and now this daughter to compensate for his every flaw and to carry him on their shoulders his entire, long, long, life.

The truly sad thing is that this daughter, who remembers him during her growing up years with fondness, now has a greater understanding of us and her mother and why we acted the way we did and say the things we say. She uses every skill she ever had, working with ignorant small children, in a possibly impossible task of helping him learn how to think clearly, take responsibility, and judge less harshly. Although he seems to improve while living in her house for the six months required for him to be declared her dependent, the rest of the year, living in the farm house, since she gives in to all his demands that she possibly can, he reverts to his usual behavior.

Following our mission call and the exit of our nephew to greener pastures, we were in the process of selling the cows and preparing our home to be rented by someone else. My husband also saw to it that FIL's 50-year-old stacked lumber farmhouse was upgraded so it would be more pleasant for this sister to live in, by installing new toilets, a new bathtub, several heating and cooling units, new windows--that can open--throughout the house, a pellet stove,  a new washing room sink, and wonder of wonders, close-able doors in the upstairs bedrooms. This sister says when she closes the new door to her father's bedroom, which has very large windows facing the morning sun that traps heat like an oven, it lowers the temperature of the rest of the upstairs by several degrees. My husband also had the hired men disconnect the plumbing that allowed the barn to share the same water well as the house. He filled in the large ugly pit that FIL used to store old pallets he scrounged in town, which he used for firewood for the house's smoky, homemade wood stove. The pit was covered over with gravel, making a parking spot for her silver pickup. She of course was ever so grateful, even while FIL grumbled and griped and complained about all these changes.

During the few months before we left, FIL became more and more indignant that we were being allowed to actually go on a mission. This was odd since when we had first announced our intentions to be missionaries shortly after MIL passed away, FIL actually offered to pay for most of it. The bishop told us later that FIL looked forward to us being gone so he would be in charge of the farm again, but by this time his attitude had reversed itself. He went three separate times to talk to each of the three men of the presidency of our combined congregations, telling them how my husband had betrayed his family, ought to have his church privileges taken away, and should not be allowed to be a missionary. The last was following a meeting presided over by the president, after which FIL marched into his office without an appointment and demanded that we have our privileges revoked. Fortunately my husband's sister was caring for him by then, and accompanied him. She called the president later and apologized for her father's behavior, telling him that nothing her father said was true. FIL was certain that he was believed, and that we would be denied this opportunity, but we continued to prepare. He was visibly disappointed when he asked us if the president had said anything to us about his warnings about our lack of worthiness, but we told him he hadn't. Because he hadn't.

We have thought more than once that when it really comes down to it, it frightens him that we would abandon him.

Lying before God and the Law

I don't remember there being a lease, although it had nothing to do with us. MIL and FIL had made an agreement with Brother Twin six months after he left the employ of the farm, having worked for six months and never once earning his salary. This was a few months before the partnership papers were drawn up.

There was finally a showdown in which my husband told his father he would have to choose which son he wanted to work with. This was following a pattern on the part of BIL of threats, intimidation, not showing up until late and leaving early, taking off weekends (on a dairy farm,) whining and begging. My husband said he would no longer "work" with his brother because it was not worth his time.

After the recriminations were over, and the gauntlet laid down, FIL turned to my husband and said, "Let's go to work." He obviously knew who would actually do the work. But of course it was always my husband's fault for throwing his brother out.

Brother Twin had a string of jobs after that, non-high-school diploma-requiring jobs mostly milking the cows for other dairies, and when he was invariably fired, his entire family always blamed my husband. He finally ended up coming back to work for a landscape outfit, and then eventually went to work for a family-own dairy construction company as a foreman. He was valued by his boss, although the Mexican workers under him considered him lazy. The bottom fell out of the dairy construction business, everyone else was laid off, and Brother-in-law's wages were cut in half while he was working twice the hours he had been. BIL's wife would not share her professional income with any of her family, although she had paid for the replacement manufactured home on the hill with her inheritance when her father passed away.

I asked BIL if I could see a copy of the lease he had in his car (we had stopped to chat on the ditch road up to their trailer) but he wouldn't. So I wrote to the attorneys and they sent me one. MIL and FIL gave them a 50-year-lease at $1 annual rent (only paid for the first few years), including a clause that they could own it outright if the laws of the county ever changed in the future. (The laws did change; they tightened up even further.) There was no right-of-way. FIL had tried two years before the lease became effective to deed the land to BIL, but since there was no legal right of way, it was not allowed. Besides the fact that there was no access to emergency equipment. My MIL, before she died, expressed several times that engineering that document was the worst mistake she had ever made.

There were three covenants, two of them having to do with keeping the place clean, and a third keeping up the fences. None of them kept. We sent reams of background information to the judge, but he refused to consider any of it. We showed him pictures of the trash everywhere (I got screamed at for taking those, let me tell you), the Google map, and telephotos from my back yard showing the broken fences. The judge said he would rule on the covenants alone and not from equitability (emotional testimony) and I thought, if that is so we will win on it.

But he lied. He ended up ruling opposite, for the emotional testimony given by the Father-in-law, who maintained his attempt to mediate his quarreling sons, his desire to treat them equally, the fact that he had told his younger son he could mess the place up as much as he wanted, and he'd never required him to clean it up. It was painful to listen to, after hearing them argue with each other for years about BIL's failure to clean the place up.

The judge admitted that BIL violated the covenants he had signed his name to, but that he wanted to leave the road open for further litigation, which he warned against, and admitted that he was affected by FIL's testimony allowing BIL to trash the property. The judge also said the lease was an attempt to give the land to the son in contravention of the land use laws of the state. BIL testified that it really wasn't that bad of a mess. I was glad he left the rest of his family home; I couldn't take the histrionics. As it was, the defense attorney badgered me unmercifully, but our attorney thought I was a good witness and let him.

So the liars won, all three of them. For what it has cost them. I have always hoped the ruling haunted the judge, who consigned a family to filth and illegality and an immoral, degraded life that he could have ended with one ruling. It has haunted BIL, who over the last three years has become more depressed, unhappy, grouchy and cynical. It has given FIL a stout, sturdy stick to beat us with and blame us with, ever, ever after. Even though, as we remind him, he won.

Interestingly, the defense attorney who badgered me and who is at heart a decent man, eventually dropped FIL and BIL as clients. This occurred when the attorney called me in behalf of FIL, who was sitting in his office, asking if I would open the books to him. (FIL eventually reneged on his promise to gift his remaining ownership in the partnership to our nephew, his grandson.) The attorney asked me several questions which he told me I did not have to answer. I answered him freely. I told him I had recently put together a financial history of the farm and was perfectly willing to open the books on one condition: that all the children were present and they would have copies of all the financial records at the same time.

I did not hear from him again. When FIL came home it was eventually relayed to us that his attorney had walked out of the room and left him sitting there, and not come back.

It was our own attorney who informed us that FIL and BIL had been dropped as clients, and furthermore, they were now shunned by all area attorneys. I believe this has to do with the fact that FIL too often refuses to acknowledge his own signature even when signed in the presence of a notary public. He might be able to make unfounded accusations to us that we forged his signature or that he hadn't known what he was signing, but it didn't work in front of his own attorney.  I may be wrong in that, but I don't think so.

I could barely even stand to be around my father in law at all for the next year. It was a physical effort to be even in the same room with him. I wanted with all my heart to move far away from such people. I had never been face to face with such envy, such entitlement, such raw naked covetousness and such creepy dishonesty. FIL kept asking if we thought he lied on the stand, and we told him yes. He lied. He lied.

The only good thing that came out of it was that BIL's children finally found out the truth (that they didn't own the place and never would) and started acting a little more respectfully.

Epic Fail

It's been nearly three years since I've written in this blog. I expected that I would have written in it a few more times, and then perhaps deleted it. But I've found in the interim that narcissism is forever, and I'm still having to live with it.

Three years ago we were preparing for an unwanted eviction action against my husband's brother at the county court. Neither of the two local judges were going to be available, since one of the judges was my husband's golfing partner, and the other was wife to Brother Twin's attorney. So we had to wait a few weeks (after waiting a few months, after waiting a year or two,) for the out-of-town judge to appear via video cam, who was not happy to be there in the first place.

We had spent several years in negotiation with Brother Twin, who is on record saying things like, "I knew when we first came here it was a mistake," and "We thought your son could move in here when we move out," or "Give us six more months," or, "Give us another 12 months," and we did. What precipitated the action after believing lies like these, was Brother Twin telling us he was going to be gone for two years on a job in Texas, (a job that never materialized,) leaving his children behind to trash the place unsupervised. His wife had taken a job as a traveling nurse several years earlier and was in the home maybe 2-3 weeks in the year. My husband and I wrote a letter and hand-delivered it, asking him to clean up or move. Once that ball started rolling, we had to follow up on it--something unexpected in this family of rants, raves, threats, intimidations, and cowardice.

He did hire his youngest son and a friend of the family to clean up somewhat, mostly because they needed the work. The friend of the family told me the condition the yard was in, how he had picked up 200 three-gallon buckets (and how Brother Twin had hollered at him for disposing of them), how after days of cleaning his arms were black with grime. Some of the more valuable vehicles outside the fence (and on our land) were towed off to the metal recycler for the value of the metal in them. Other than that, it was hard to tell any cleaning had taken place. I had a bird's-eye picture from Google Maps of the two acre dump, and it was hard to look at. What couldn't be seen was where, outside the fence, Brother Twin had buried two chest freezers full of rotten meat since the electricity had been unplugged.

More negotiations. Our nephew desperately wanted them out. They threw trash, made faces, hollered at us to get off their road, let their dogs out to chase our cows (ten died, nine in a frozen pond and one run into a wire fence by a chasing dog), gave us a tongue-lashing when we complained about the dogs, and trashed the road with gigantic muddy ruts by running up and down at ninety miles an hour in four-wheel-drive vehicles. When the bridge over the ditch needed replacing, Brother Twin did not contribute, as he promised he would; the farm paid for it. When they let the fence around their house fall down and our cows got in their yard, they called up Grandpa and complained that we weren't feeding our cows well enough.

We were worried about Grandpa getting involved. Even though he promised several of the sisters that he wouldn't, it was something tailor made for him to imagine himself important: mediating his quarreling sons, prodigals both, needing his wisdom and steady hand; nothing about how he had spent the last 25 years hollering at one of them for making a huge mess, violating the covenants in the lease agreement, and not one word about how he had skirted the laws of the state in order to make the lease in the first place. How he and his wife had enabled a son who proudly wore the Black Sheep label by tempting him with a sick, insidious dependency, imagining that they could gently guide him into a better life and church attendance, when BIL's real intention was to make his father pay.

The Shallow Pond

"One of the most effective methods of exposing a narcissist is by trying to go deeper and discuss matters substantially. The narcissist is shallow, a pond pretending to be an ocean."
http://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/malignant-self-love/how-to-recognise-a-narcissist/menu-id-1469/

I've been trying to think more kindly of my FIL, even as my husband and I detach ourselves from his life. But it's not easy.

He wanted to have a discussion with me many years ago about a certain point of doctrine from our scriptures. That was a mistake. "Discussions" for him are never give and take; they are opportunities for him to point out others' shortcomings. The discussion ended up being an indictment of the son of my best friend, a young man about to leave on a mission to a foreign country. The young man had quoted a scripture that FIL thought underscored this young man's "pride." I was appalled when I discovered later that FIL had gone to my best friend's house, and instead of offering him support and encouragement on his imminent two-year absence, instead excoriated him for the (misread) "sin" of being like the humble prophet in the scripture.

My friend will not speak to FIL, understandably. I will not have doctrinal discussions with him.

FIL likes to go to farm meetings to bring up obscure or unrelated questions that no one can or wants to answer. Or they are questions someone already answered half an hour before. He thinks this shows how smart he is. My husband and nephew refuse to take him to farm meetings at all.

During my husband's excellent Sunday School lesson a few days ago, FIL raised a question about where something happened in obscure religious history. Then he answered it himself. Although he presents a persona of meek and mild humility, The Humble-Pie Man, he really likes to dazzle people with his intellect. He likes to mention his famous religious forebears in passing. He likes to ask questions constantly and sits in the middle up front so the teacher can't avoid seeing his hand creeping up. My husband handles this pretty well, but I've seen other teachers founder on my FIL's obsessive desire for attention from his church going neighbors. It's where he does his best work.

Another member of the Sunday School class (my best friend, actually) raised her hand and referred to the manual with the proper answer, which wasn't the same as his. He spent the rest of the class time injured, paying no attention to anything else. In the last two minutes of the class he raised his hand yet again and insisted that his first answer was the correct one.

He missed the entire lesson planning on how to stun everyone, but then, this is how it always has been. This is a man who is dependent on others to the point that he cannot plan an outing, much less an airplane ticket, on his own. He cannot keep records, make schematics, or even rationally explain his genius inventions. He cannot manage the navigation it takes to deliver Meals on Wheels. He constantly gets confused trying to provide one meal a month for our local missionaries. He cannot make a dental or doctor appointment on his own. He can't breed cows or do anything that takes advance planning. He refuses to clean up after himself, and will not listen to anyone's opinion that does not agree with his.

A pond pretending to be an ocean.

The Humble Pie Man

FIL is a man of the soil. He wears overalls over stained shirts that reek of working for days in the hot sun. He has a humble air, self-effacing, solicitous, ever-helpful. It is easy to be fooled. As long as you are on a shallow level of interaction, and require nothing of him and only want to thank him for his efforts, you are safe.

But wait awhile, and you will discover that any and all gifts to you from him require a double gift back, whether it is of your time and attention, your resources, the apricots on your tree that he covets and the water in your pipeline that should by rights of entitlement be his. He should not have to ask you for permission, since you have already granted it by accepting gifts from him.

He will get teary-eyed thinking about his sinful nature, since he is a Christian and all Christians need to repent. This is especially so in front of fellow members of the local congregation he attends. A lot of the Humble Pie is meant for them.

But once you get to specifics, the only sins he can really think of are yours. He is happy with his life, he says. He maintains that he knows people who don't need to repent, and he lets you know with a wink that he thinks he's in that company. If he ever needs to repent, he wants to pay the price himself. He doesn't want to ask too much of Jesus' atonement. He doesn't need anybody else--except to keep the Narcissistic Supply coming.

"Question: I met many narcissists who are modest – even self-effacing. This seems to conflict with your observations. How do you reconcile the two?

Answer: The "modesty" displayed by narcissists is false. . . The real aim . . . is intended to either aggrandise the narcissist or to protect his grandiosity from scrutiny and possible erosion. Such modest outbursts precede inflated, grandiosity-laden statements made by the narcissist and pertaining to fields of human knowledge and activity in which he is sorely lacking. . .

One of the more efficacious defence mechanisms is false modesty. . . This way, if (or, rather, when) exposed he could always say: "But I told you so in the first place, haven't I?" False modesty is, thus an insurance policy. . .

With false modesty he seeks to involve others in his mind games, to co-opt them, to force them to collaborate while making ultimate use of social conventions of conduct.

The narcissist, above all, is a shrewd manipulator, well-acquainted with human nature and its fault lines. No narcissist will ever admit to it. In this sense, narcissists are really modest."

http://samvak.tripod.com/faq36.html

Committing to Humility

More from Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me Chapter 8:

p. 144 Humility is the opposite of pride because it reflects a lack of self-preoccupation, a willingness to serve, an acknowledgement that we are limited in our ability to control other people and circumstances, and an understanding that we cannot demand favored treatment. . . . it means being proactive in seeking reasonable treatment but doing so with a spirit of decency. . .

People who truly embody humility are quietly confident and are not prone to irrational outbursts . . . (humility) grounds a person in the realization that life is not always fair, yet it can be manageable. . . Even as they lay down the wish to play God, they also choose not to allow another human to assume the position of a god over them."

He's just annoying

About a year or two before she died, my mother in law kept saying "He's just annoying. He's not really a bad man."

She said this over and over in spite of the fact that she had lived more than 50 years with a man who was annoying at the very least, and selfishly, inhumanly cruel at the worst. Her desire to be a charitable Christian, patient and long suffering, giving up her boundaries and selfhood to placate him, allowed him to become entrenched in his behaviors so completely that great changes took place when the inevitable drying up of his influence began a year after she died.

I say a year because technically, he was her estate Trustee, mistakenly so due to attorney error, although he did no other work than signing his name. The actual work of settling the estate (as MIL had meant it to be) fell to my husband, and to me. FIL got plenty of Narcissistic Supply by having us take him to the bank, and the attorney's office, and having him sign endless documents, tax statements and estate checks. When the year ended, the solicitous attention did too; it was then that he began to rage and shout and lash out, in a futile attempt to get the rest of us back into line with the status quo ante.

My MIL believed him to be ADD, which is possible. I have known and taught ADD and ADHD students and found them to be capable of humility. My niece, who took care of her grandmother in her last six weeks of life, labels him as obsessive, which is obvious. MIL thought his predictable blowups could be traced to a building of need for the adrenalin that comes from runaway anger, so it could serve as amphetamine-like Ritalin, paradoxically used to calm the hyperactive. It's always the backwards reaction with him. Perhaps that's what was happening, I can't say.

But it's amazing how many fewer blowups he's had since she's been gone and his grandiose ego is so rarely rewarded, once he learned the raging and shouting and lashing out resulted in his audience turning their backs on him and walking away. And not coming back. Leaving him all alone with himself for company.

The injury is complete and no one pays attention anymore. His wife is no longer around to compensate for him and make him look good. His daughters make sure he has food to eat and his clothes are clean, but conversation with such a man always has been futile. His expensive and useless inventions sit rusting and crumbling. He locked away his money in an annuity and can't fiddle with it anymore. His biggest claim to fame, teaching a Sunday class once a month, lasted only half a year, since the powers-in-charge realized belatedly that he wasn't much like his son--my husband--who is a superior counselor/teacher. FIL was eased out of the Sunday teaching position that he abandoned family Christmas togetherness and risked his life for, flying and driving at age 83 in blizzard conditions, to make it to church in time for a disorganized and stuttering performance. Other callings, tailored especially for the bare simplicity his capacity demands, were no longer lasting. The large and needy family that so appreciated his garden tomatoes and beans and corn suddenly moved away.

In self-pity, he pines for his dearly departed wife. He misses the way of life she provided for him, the papering over of family pathologies, the closed mouth about the giant borderline elephants in the room, the passing along of blame to those of us who were sane and uncomplaining. The Narcissistic Supply so evenly handed out, the filling her role of devoted wife by fudging the truth here and quietly edging the burden onto her son, my husband, there. When FIL is happy, everyone can have a little peace and quiet.

He was and is annoying, but more to the truth of it, he is and continues to be pathological. Only now he has to behave better, because nobody rewards the adult temper tantrums anymore.

Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me

I highly recommend Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me, by Dr. Les Carter. Solid examples and clear, common sense writing.

Some excerpts:

p. 4 People with a full narcissistic behavior pattern are so completely, even pathologically self-absorbed that they lack empathy, can be thin-skinned, and demonstrate very low levels of true awareness of themselves or others.

p. 5 A high percentage of the people who come to me for counseling reveal that their problems have been either instigated or greatly worsened by very selfish or manipulative people . . . By definition, narcissists have a very low ability to incorporate someone else's version of reality because they see themselves as the ultimate keepers of truth. They admit no wrong, or if they ever do admit wrong, it is only a matter of time before they convince themselves they are actually right.

p. 10 Narcissists are not genuine. . . They are more interested in posturing for favorable reactions than being known as authentic . . . They enter relationships looking for ways to coerce others to do their bidding.

p. 11 Underlying the manipulative behavior of narcissists is a belief that they are entitled to have others do whatever they want or need.

p. 13 The need to be special is so central to narcissists that they repeatedly lie to themselves about their own importance . . .

p. 18 As narcissists ignore truth and invent their own alternative realities, they are not free but imprisoned by their own falsehoods. Over time, it becomes a prison they cannot escape.

p. 19 Narcissism represents personal immaturity at its worst.

p. 59 When you persistently tolerate others' rude or intrusive behaviors, you are saying that you do not believe that you possess enough dignity to stand up for your needs or convictions.

p. 77 Passive-aggressive narcissists find a perverse delight when they know they have generated strong responses of anger in others. As they witness how others fume or rage in response to their stubbornness, they indulge the thought, "This proves how you are inferior to me, and that means I control you."

p. 89 Narcissists define pain differently from the way the average person does. To them, pain means they are not getting their way. . . for narcissists who feel anger or pain at entirely reasonable demands or decisions, their response can be understood as an adult version of a toddler's temper tantrum.

p. 91 Narcissists anchor on the question, "What are you going to do to make my day go better?"

p. 94 . . . Holding them accountable to the consequences of their actions is one of the few ways to convey the message that you intend to be taken seriously. . . Because narcissists like being in tight control, they are likely to protest greatly when someone applies consequences. They will likely express outrage, but usually that rage is a cover for panic. . . They are so enamored of their own special status that they are convinced that others' lives would be much better if they would give them control. This explains why they can be persuasive, stubborn, and bossy.