How I Determined My Late Father Was a Malignant Narcissist (see earlier post below about testamentary capacity!)
RCN’s NPD
In Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, author Sam Vaknin
(a self-aware narcissist) writes: “The reason narcissism is underreported and
healing overstated is that therapists are being fooled by smart narcissists.
Most narcissists are expert manipulators and they learn how to deceive their
therapists” (p 235). If therapists are being fooled, it is very likely estate
and family law attorneys are also being fooled. I see the present time as a
learning curve for both the law and the general public regarding Narcissistic
Personality Disorder in the same way the mid-1980s taught us about anorexia
nervosa after the death of singer Karen Carpenter. In fact, in my
research on NPD and cases of testamentary and financial capacity, I have found
recent mentions of NPD as a significant, deciding factor in estate/trust
litigation. Here are two links to a Canadian law firm website which mentions
cases wherein NPD is a key issue in a case.
If some narcissists are so covert as to fool therapists, why should my
diagnosis be given consideration? Quite simply, I’ve been my father’s son for 56
years now (though he died six years ago). Fifty-six hours in a shrink’s
recliner does not come close to years of empirical observation in a family
environment. Though I sensed our problems as a teenager, I became aware of dysfunctionality
in my family in 1986, after I finished undergraduate school, when I saw Bradshaw
On: The Family by John Bradshaw on PBS. In the years following, I read other
books by Bradshaw as well as Susan Forward’s Toxic Parents. In April, 2015,
I hit upon some information on the web which made everything from the preceding
50+ years click and only become clearer in the time since. The abstract, general
characteristics of NPD, as described by experts, matched up perfectly with the concrete,
specific actions and words of my personal knowledge of my father. Metaphorically,
what the experts say forms the outer edge of the jigsaw puzzle, and once the
inner pieces are all fitted into place, the picture becomes my father.
I’d planned to get a PhD but wound up with an MA and a half and thus
was limited to adjunctdom and was usually disposed of quicker than holiday
retail help. My last three college jobs in the US all paid less (and
less than that the next job and less again at the last) than I earned as a
teaching assistant 15 year before. In addition to the financial disappointment
of my career, I developed asthma in grad school and, in the 30 years since,
have paid out of pocket for my hospital visits and many, many meds, often with
my help from my parents. In 2003, after many years of no health insurance and
part-time teaching, I moved to SE Asia, where I can afford my health expenditures
though pay from teaching still left me living hand-to-mouth. In short, when my
father died six months before I turned 50, my net worth was ZERO.
The following are some things (some his own words and actions, some
reported/documented by others, some memories of mine) which illustrate my late
father’s NPD. Many things fit more than one category, but I have tried to categorize
and combine, which I hope will let readers know him the way I knew him.
General
A bit of background: My father was the only child of a south Georgia
couple who had regular and major fights, ostensibly about his father’s
philandering. They divorced when my father was in grammar school before WWII.
Afterward, he had no contact with his father for a long time and lived with his
mother, who was married twice more. I believe, in between her later husbands,
she made him a surrogate spouse, and as a boy he was constantly doted on by all
his aunts and older female cousins as the only boy in the family.
Despite growing up in a broken family, he did achieve some success. He
had three years in the US army (becoming a sergeant), earned a Bachelor of
Science, and eventually had a 27-year career with the US Department of Interior.
He married my mother in 1956. She was the last of the 10 children her parents
had, and my father was the only one, out of all of the brothers and
brothers-in-law, to attend college.
My mother predeceased my father by nine and a half years and thus was
no longer around to check him on things he did though she was also an enabler
at times. He himself told me she’d been after him to do a will before she died
of ALS/Lou Gehrig’s (she knew how financially precarious my future would be),
but he ended up doing his will and trust over two years after she died, after his
bad luck in trying to find a replacement for her, and after a head-on collision
he and I had in my overseas home in early 2005.
Grandiosity and Grandiose Fantasies
My father was about as covert as they come; most of his grandiosity
would just seem like merely odd statements. In 1949, he enlisted and did basic
training near DC, singing in a church choir on Sundays when he got a day-pass;
he believed what saved him from going to Korea, instead being sent to Germany
with the US occupation, was when Truman attended that church and found out he
was in the choir. In Germany later, driving visiting Gen. Eisenhower around for
post inspection helped him to get into a good university once home and a
federal government career after. He claimed he had ‘connections’ in Washington,
really just a cousin who was an FBI file clerk. In 2003, when I needed a
passport to go to a university job overseas, he suggested we use his old manual
typewriter to complete the application because, he believed, “Someday the person
who reviews your papers might do you a big favor." (Yeah, right! Some
cubicle jockey examining dozens of forms a day is going to set aside one typed
on an old manual typewriter instead of completed by hand, just so he/she can
one day track down the person named on it and do him a favor!) In retrospect, I
think it likely my grandmother contributed to his fantasies along the way.
My father used to say my mother’s large family was ´very jealous of
us’ because we’d done better than any of them did. He had a propensity to see
himself as morally superior. He often noted the number of fatherless children
in my mother’s family. Maybe he had to defend his single-parent status to too
many nosy people during WWII and assure them his parents were indeed married.
After he retired, one of our neighbors was a divorcé with two sons. One
weekend, the father and younger son went on a camping trip, leaving home the
19-year-old, who had a loud patio party that kept us awake very late. Dad
decided that, in addition to telling the father about that, he’d also tell him
about the older boy’s girlfriend staying all night! ‘None of our business!’ A
similar thing happened before my father retired. After he attained project
supervisor status, he decided it was within his power to barge in to a
team member’s residence because he smelled marijuana on a morning when he
stopped by the man’s home to see why he was late to work. (Dad was military
police in the army and had wanted to be a policeman, like his uncle. He always
seemed to see himself as moral authority or neighborhood cop even though his
college major was geology not law enforcement.) In 2003, he flew here to spend the
Christmas holidays with me after my mother died. Upon seeing large pictures of
the (late) king everywhere, he expressed disappointment he might not get to
meet the Thai King–as if the King of Thailand would grant an
audience to Roy Nixon of Thomasville, Georgia!
Attention-seeking: PITY
One of the sentences spoken in the Bradshaw On: The Family series
has stuck with me ever since 1986: “If you didn’t get your basic, early
childhood narcissistic dependency needs met as a small child or as a baby, you
will in turn try to get those met by your own children” (who probably aren’t
getting their early mirroring needs met by your doing so). I think the
opposite extreme might be possible too. Even though I don’t have any siblings,
I’ve observed enough multi-child families to note how often Little Billy is
very quick and regular to run to Mommy, crying: “Bobby hit me!” even if he
himself threw the first punch!
Retrospectively, I remember my father started seeking pity from me
when I was about 13. He regularly said: “Nothing I do makes you or your mother
happy” or “I always feel like I am walking on eggs with your mother.” I now see
these as triangulating as well though at the time he just seemed weak in how he
related to women. I also always thought to myself: “I’m a teenager with problems
of my own! Aren’t you supposed to be listening to me? Don’t you have friends at
work to talk to?”
After he retired, his refrain became a pouty “Retired but never gone
fishing!” The truth is he hated
his mother’s favorite pastime and, as my mother noted, no one made him
spend all day doing genealogy at a library or on his computer or bush-hogging
and cutting firewood on our small acreage! But someone somewhere probably
responded with the sought-after pity: “Oh, that’s too bad, Roy! You should just
go sometime!” Of course, what he’d do is either fidget and quit quicker than
your average avid fisherman, or he’d likely just sit in the truck and nod off.
That was another of his “pity me!” complaints, how he did not sleep well. Well,
that’s just part getting old and part having sleep apnea; my mother and I both often
noted how he could sit down in his recliner and be asleep in minutes.
He’d also try to get a “sorry to hear that” response out of people for
ostensibly losing weight. At some point during my mother’s long decline with
Lou Gehrig’s, he saw or heard (maybe from hospice nurses) how a healthy spouse
often loses a lot of weight taking care of a terminally ill one, “25 pounds or
more.” That’s what I heard him say: he’d lost “25 pounds” though having been
through most of the caretaking with him, all I had to do was look at him to see
it was more like five! He was not hypochondriac though he did have two
significant episodes that baffled both my mother, who was pretty good at taking
care of our seasonal, occasional ailments, and doctors. (One time, after
getting up and getting completely ready to go out the door, he sat down in his
chair and completely zoned out. A scan at the hospital did not show any sign of
a brief TIA/stroke. Doctors were baffled. Another time, to my mother’s
questioning, he said he had no stomach ache, head ache, fever, sore throat,
etc., just “my teeth hurt,” and that kept him in bed all day. In an email to me
a few months before his cancer prognosis, he wrote about having health issues; “I’ve
been to six doctors in eight months… about five doctors concerned about me
losing 40 pounds have told me nothing as of this date.” Possible, but I think, out
of six doctors, one should have thought about cancer for a man who was
81. And no mention of buying a new belt or some trousers?
I see some of his pity fishing/seeking in what other people report he
said (below as well). I heard from the wife of his second cousin, during my
last visit to him in April, 2010, that he had “been worrying (to her): ‘What if
we (Tim and I) start fighting?’” This was not just pity-seeking; it was also
triangulating and preemptive smearing of me (see below). Her deposition further
states he came to live on their property ‘after a very lonely time in his life’
–six years after my mother died, yes, but also after he was rejected by at
least four women he tried them to get to replace her. He couldn’t admit even to
himself the truth of this: those women saw his extreme neediness and/or
controlling nature and didn’t want to get involved, so there was also no way could
he tell his second cousin’s wife the real reason behind his loneliness in
addition to his need for a HIT of pity from her at the same time.
Even in 2018, it’s still hard to imagine how a person can be addicted
to PITY from another person, but it happens. How often have we heard or read in
tweets: “Very unfair!” or some variation the last year? To get a grasp on it,
however, we can turn to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. In his study of
stages of early childhood development, he and Erik Erikson determined how infants
or toddlers are dependent on their mothers for reassurance that they (the
babies) truly exist and are “good.” In fact, some experts posit that for many
months the infant sees Mother only as an extension of himself until a
transitional process allows for steps that lead to differentiation of mother
and child. Sometimes, that doesn’t go so smoothly. My grandmother was likely
neglectful of him, especially during fights with my father’s father, or perhaps
when she went fishing and left him in the car (or dropped him off at her
sister’s house).
In all that follows, readers should maintain an awareness of the
possibility of pity-seeking being behind many things my father said and did in
his last years, but also in a couple instances even years before my mother died
and left him alone. THE NARCISSIST NEEDS PITY just like the smoker needs a hit
of nicotine, the alcoholic needs a drink, the heroin or cocaine junkie needs a
hit!
Controlling
For most of my life with her, I used to think my mother was the negative,
controlling perfectionist (thanks to his triangulating and
gaslighting—below), but in her last years and in the years after she was gone,
I began to see that he was more controlling than she was.
I have pieced together several memories which seem evidential of the
extremes of his controlling both my mother and me. Before she fell ill with ALS
and it seemed she’d outlive him, she saw something on TV about probate taking a
long time. Their assets all had “and” not “or” between their names. I did not
hear the conversation in the other room clearly, but I’ll always remember at
the end hearing extreme exasperation and desperation in her voice as she loudly
said: “But Roy!!!” as he REFUSED to even talk about consulting
a lawyer and perhaps doing something so there’d be no hardship for her if he
died first (this despite his father dying intestate and the headaches we
had because his third wife got everything, nothing for his own only son, my
father). I did not know how to label it in the 1990s; I see now what I
overheard was a prime example of my father’s passive-aggressive
controlling, which, for a long time, I thought of as his weakness in relating
to women: his technique was to leave the room and leave the problem eternally
unresolved. In addition, my mother died without knowing where she’d be buried: there
were originally extra plots with his mother’s gravesite, but he’d given those
to his second cousins in this story. When my mother was in her last year and a
half, she decided she wanted to be buried in the same cemetery her
parents are in, but with family politics with her side in an upheaval at that
time, he managed to get the old sites back from his cousins, yet he still
would not tell her his plans for her burial!
Two years after my mother died and I moved overseas, he put the house
up for sale and just THREW my stuff in storage and tried to pull a disappearing
act (narcissistic discard). I knew how reckless he was with packing stuff, so
when I finally got in contact with him the next year, I went to visit for a
two-week stay two different times. I accepted his moving but wanted to get my
stuff and keep it closer to where he was living AND repack and re-store things
better! No doing. He would just repeat: “Your stuff stays where it
is”–rather like his response to my mother’s trying to get him to do something
about the “and/or” issue on their assets. Other examples: In my high school
days, my best friend often noted how my parents treated me “like a favorite
family pet not allowed on the furniture.” In 1998, a close cousin commented to
me, when I visited her at her house, that my parents kept me “on a pretty short
leash.” I also now suspect that, in the snail mail days of the mid-90s, he
might have sabotaged my attempts to find a college job out West and move
away from home; he often offered to take my half-dozen letters of application
to the post office as he went out that day. I now believe the reason I didn’t
get replies for every inquiry was because he was probably putting my snail
mail letters in the garbage instead of the post office drop box.
In April, 2010, he again employed his passive-aggressive, silent
control method (as with my mother’s concerns about probate). After baiting and
gaslighting (below) me about his plan for my financial future, he changed his
story and told me I’d get $1,500 per month for life. As soon as he said that, I
thought of a hospital stay I had three years before when I’d had an asthma
attack so serious doctors had to knock me out and put me on a respirator
(intubation). I woke up eight days later in ICU and had a hospital bill for $2,000.
At that time (2007), I put the bill on my credit card and my father paid it in
the States because I didn’t have that kind of money. [Again, my financial
resources when he died—six months before my 50th birthday—were
practically nil.] To return to 2010, after he told me about my stipend amount,
I asked: “What if I need more some months?” thinking of my future medical needs
more than anything else. His response was a half-shrug with a palm held up. I
think he mumbled something like ‘you’ll have it’, but it was less than
reassuring; I didn’t press any further, thinking of the way he’d treated my
mother with her concerns perhaps ten years before. (His controlling was often
downright ugly.)
Baiting and Gaslighting
There were no bottles or bruises (though I once got a cracked collar
bone and a concussion for pointing out to him something in a Bradshaw book,
perhaps the line about not getting your dependency needs met as a child—above).
His tactics, in addition to passive-aggressiveness, also included what are
called baiting and gaslighting. Baiting is saying or doing something to evoke a
reaction in another; gaslighting is saying or doing something to cause another
to doubt his/her memory or sanity. A few examples from my father (and my
mother, who was co-dependent and aided and abetted him a few times) …
When I was a teenager, my acne often generated observations from my
father across the dinner table: “I never had it that bad,” after which he’d
direct me to the bathroom and we’d go and he’d scrub my face half an hour,
usually making my appearance worse. My Ds in high school algebra resulted in
the overhead light in my room switched on in the middle of the night and, as he
sat in my chair, he’d opine again and again: “I don’t understand this (my
report card). Do we need to send you to military school?” Four years after he
died, I found his school report cards in storage; back in the 1930s and
40s, teachers were able to comment on personal hygiene, and it seemed he had
several low marks for that as well as occasional Fs in math and other
subjects (my lowest grade in high school was a D).
I believe he enlisted my mother a few times in gaslighting set-ups
which often included an audience of visitors at our home in my adult years. On
one occasion, she said that upon my finishing undergraduate school in 1986 they’d
given me $10,000 to help me get set up in an apartment and look for a job. As
soon as she said that, I immediately remembered it was half that much: $5,000. I
probably reacted hotly to her lie: in 1986, I didn’t have a CD player or VCR as
many of my friends already did, so I wasn’t spending money on video tapes or
CDs yet; my Star Trek books were still being released on an irregular
schedule instead of two every month as in later years. In fact, shortly before
her death, I found the cancelled check from 1986 in the spare bedroom: $5,000.
(I showed him, and he asked me not to show it to her, but at the time I was
still thinking she was the enemy, not him.) On another occasion with
people visiting us at my parents’ retirement home, my health issues came up,
and my mother told our guests: “Tim thinks he has asthma.” I completely lost
it because of the absurdity of her statement. This was actually several
years and several hospitalizations after I was diagnosed
with asthma in 1988. “What about all those doctors? What about all those
times I have already nearly died from a life-threatening asthma attack?”
My father had some favorite topics to go to when he wanted to bait
and/or gaslight me: my work and financial struggles. One day in 1998, he and I
were sitting on the back patio at their home and probably talking casually
about my work or my recent stint in grad school trying to earn a second MA. Out
of the blue, he made a comment I now see in retrospect as a calculated ploy to
evoke an emotional reaction in me; it did. “You never worked hard a day in your
life.” Not long before this, I had two non-teaching jobs: one involved
operating a front-end loader at a sawmill and having to frequently jump down
out of the cab to hoist, by hand, and toss aside tree limbs or trunks which
weighed as much as I did; the other job involved delivering soft drinks to
retailers and my loading, pushing around, and unloading dollies of cases of
drinks that were twice my weight. Also, my career in academia (as a grad
student and a college instructor) regularly involved long hours of lecture prep
and paper grading (sedentary yes, but still often requiring 60-hour
weeks, at least at the one full-time teaching job I was lucky to get in
the US).
During my last visit with him two and a half years before he died, my
father was sure to squeeze in a couple psychological blows. Before telling me a
different story about the trust and how much I’d get (and his non-response to
my concern about needing more for medical issues), he took me and showed me
where the trust headquarters were before it opened for the day. In the truck, he
told me: “There’s a 75,000 CD in there for you.” He knew that I
knew he’d sold the house three and half years earlier for $130K. “What happened
to the rest?” “I used it” was all he said. He knew that’d be like a gut
punch to me as I’ll never have a retirement from anywhere and no Social
Security. All I would/will ever get is the trust stipend and, needing at
least a grand per month, before I even got married and had a family,
$75K would last me... 75 months! (Remember: My assets when before I turned 50
were ZERO!)
It was also during this visit (2010) he took me to see my stuff in
storage in AR. “I owed you that much”—a harsh remark I let go with no reply though
I thought, ‘You owed me the care to all my worldly goods my mother/your
wife would have showed them and yours.’ He KNEW it’d be an emotional
shock for me to see how he’d crammed my stuff in storage. And I let him have it
too; I told him: “This was my future! This was my last dream: to have someday
what everyone else I know of takes for granted: being able to spend my
last years surrounded by things I cherish and give me a sense of home and
comfort.” I felt like my life was hit by a hurricane, and he was standing there
enjoying it, but my hurricane was a human being who should’ve had some
consideration for others’ feelings (lack of empathy, below!) [Side note: I
remember two occasions my mother commenting to him about how he packed and
stored their things. Him: “You can’t expect things to be in perfect
condition after years in storage!” Her, sotto voce reply to herself and to
me in earshot: “That’s not true.” And it’s not. She knew how to pack
things away with care. The irony is, in his 27-year career, we packed up and
moved twice a year for almost every one of those—more than any
half-dozen families I’ve ever known. After my mother died, I talked to him many
times about carefully packing and storing stuff for whenever he was
ready to move out of the house... to no avail.]
There was one more incident of baiting/gaslighting during this visit,
which I believe he had also planned before it even transpired. In April, 2010,
we went to his local bank to do two things. First was to add me as joint tenant
to his checking account in case I needed to take care of his final business one
day; I think he might have thought about my question a day or two before about
maybe needing more funds some months for health issues. Second was to let me get
some emergency cash to take overseas with me. For nearly three years, since my
eight days knocked out and on a respirator in ICU, I had been very concerned
about being able to opt for going to the doctor or hospital without having to
worry if I could afford an overnight stay. I was also thinking how he’d turned
79 a couple days before my visit, and it was getting harder for him to go to
Western Union when I needed emergency money as we’d done a few times before.
I believe I planned to take $5,000 (primarily for medical emergencies
or if I returned to the US in the event of his major illness one day and needed
cash in pocket). Immediately, in front of bank staff who’d never seen me
before, he challenged: “Do you really need that much?” He set me up! He
KNEW before we even walked into the bank that he would challenge whatever I
planned to withdraw and that I’d lose my cool; because he wouldn’t acknowledge
or even debate my logical reasons, I relented and took less. In his video and
in his book, Vaknin makes an observation I believe my anecdotes in this section
illustrate quite well (emphases mine): “One form of control by proxy is to engineer
situations in which abuse is inflicted on another person. Such carefully
crafted scenarios of embarrassment and humiliation are meant to
provoke social sanctions, condemnation, or opprobrium.” (In this video,
“Abuse by Proxy,” Vaknin discusses what this story is an example of: Smear
Campaigns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0aOH6kw9ug)
Sadism and Lack of Empathy
I put these two together because they both seem possible explanations
for the following, and they both share something with baiting above. It is a
common observation in discussing NPD to say: “Hurting you is not something the
narcissist does accidentally.” Another common trope is to say narcissists view
those around them as mere life-sized cardboard cutouts, like those found in
mall novelty shops, no dimension, no real needs and wants, or at least not in any
relative comparison to a narcissist’s needs and wants. My father’s actions show
how he had little regard for what my mother would have wanted.
1) My father KNEW all about my unlucky career as a college instructor.
He knew, because I spent the last five years of my 30s living at home, I was
earning less than a subsistence level with my community college part-time
teaching; there was no retirement, no health coverage, no opportunity to build
up savings, and job security was a joke. In 2007, he wrote a cousin of his and
lied: “He doesn’t keep any job he has.”
The truth is many of my college teaching jobs didn’t keep me.
If one student complains about your too strict grading or attendance
policies, even if others exalt you, you’re gone. No more contracts. I had four
jobs like this between 1992 and 2002. I must note that in my father’s work with
Uncle Sam for 27 years we moved up and down the country to a different state
twice a year; every time we set up in a new place, he and the team had to hire temporary
workers, who had a job for six months, until we pulled up stakes and moved
again. So, he KNEW from four years before I was born until the year I finished my
second BA about people having to look for new work when a job ended. Further,
when I did choose to leave a job, it was for good reason. In 1990, sandstorms
in Saudi Arabia put me in a hospital for four days at the end of my first academic
year there. In 2003, the SARS epidemic in China was killing people during my
month in the central part of the country. In 2012, I was attacked by a
colleague at a university job in Thailand.
Further to this point, common sense should say it’s not much fun to be
in your 30s, unemployed, broke, have to live at home, and have to look for a
new job again and again. Despite this and my point above about lack of job
security, my father repeatedly twisted the truth about my unlucky career in
order to get pity from uninformed others and triangulate and smear my
reputation with them as well.
2) My father KNEW my asthma problems, lack of insurance, and need to
pay medicines and health care out of pocket. I developed asthma in grad school
in 1988; he often helped me pay my daily meds, doctor visits, and even a
surgery in 1991. He should have known that his son was getting older, as
we all do, and likely will have other health issues added to the asthma. He should
have known that everyone has more medical expenses as one ages. But the
extreme egocentrism of NPD blinded him (mind-blindness).
3) He KNEW how my financially unrewarding career in combination with
my pre-existing, uninsured asthma impacted my future; i.e., building any
savings with a chronic, incurable health problem while also making less money
than the poverty level is the epitome of impossible. My adult life attempts to
become financially independent have always amounted to one step forward, two
steps back.
4) He KNEW I was a responsible family man (learned from him, somehow!)
and moved to Asia not just to get full-time teaching at the universities and
afford my health care but also to have a life finally, to marry and have a
family. A bit of background about him is necessary to set context for his
“thinking.” In 1952, after three years in the US army in Germany, my father
returned to the US and had news for his mother: there was a girl in Germany he
wanted to marry. He told me himself my grandmother wrote the girl and stopped
it. Maybe that was behind his thinking when he tried to stop my
marriage in 2007 when I was twice the age he’d been 55 years
before! Later that year, when my wife found out she was going to have a baby, he
wrote a first cousin of his (I have an email) to suggest my wife ABORT--his
own grandchild! A 76-year-old man jealous and resentful of his own
grandchild?! [I do not think it “speculation” to think what my mother, or any
grandmother, would say about this! No matter what the courts say about speaking
for a person already dead! Some things are universal, such as happy grandmothers-to-be.]
It took me a couple years after his death to figure out his possible
“rationales,” after his life-long anti-abortion stance, when it came to his own
flesh-and-blood. He might have just pretended to be racist with his pious,
racist audiences (though there are many reasons I don’t believe he was ever
racist). More likely, his (shocking) reasoning was this: Tim’s Thai wife is
Buddhist. Therefore, their marriage is not legit in the eyes of God. Therefore,
their child will not be legit either. Therefore, better my mother’s
granddaughter and namesake be aborted rather than be born and live as a
non-Christian. Maybe he realized he’d stuck his foot in his mouth, and that may
be why later he changed his story/lied, claiming that I said
something which led him to say: “Tim refuses to take responsibility for his own
child.” Now, I look back at how my own grandfather bugged out when my father
was a boy and did nothing to help for a decade or more and all the out-of-wedlock
children in my mother’s family. I can’t let slip the hypocrisy of my father
suggesting his own flesh-and-blood be aborted, especially with another email of
his (to me) in which he voiced disapproval of my father-in-law, who retired
early from the police due to alcoholism: “What kind of man doesn’t take care of
his wife/family!?” (More on my father’s hypocrisy below!)
Are these the actions of a man with a sound mind? Are they the actions
of a sadist? Someone with a lack of empathy? Both? I think they are examples of
what Chief Justice Cockburn in 1870 called “poisoned affections” and “perverted
sense of right.” The story is not yet finished...
Triangulating, Smearing, and Discarding
For a long time, it seems, it has been acceptable for parents to
exaggerate (lie) about their children’s accomplishments. But what is hard to
imagine is how a parent might tell hurtful, reputation-damaging lies about their
own child. All parents have stories of a time a child disappointed, but to
deliberately set out to cause your child sorrow and pain by backstabbing and
lying about him is hard to grasp UNLESS you have gone through it yourself,
maybe with another family member or someone you once called ‘friend.’ Triangulating,
smearing, and discarding are variations of baiting, but they enlist the help of
unwitting accomplices (“flying monkeys” as in The Wizard of Oz). They
also usually involve pity seeking and lying.
A quick example/reminder how triangulation works: When I was a young
teen, my father often privately told me: “Nothing I do makes you or your mother
happy.” By including me, he was intentionally making me feel bad (relishing the
pain he caused me). By saying this to me, he was seeking pity, the same way Little
Billy seeks pity from Mommy for an imagined transgression by big brother Bobby.
By saying this to me about my mother, he was twisting my perceptions
about her, driving a wedge between us, casting her as a ‘bad cop’ and himself
as a ‘good cop.’ It worked, too; for most of my life with my mother, I saw her
as the negative, controlling perfectionist instead of him. Triangulation uses a
third (tri-) person to get at the target, controlling or manipulating
family politics, and harming and abusing the target.
In my inbox, I still have several emails my father sent his first
cousin in 2007; I’d met her once or twice in my entire life before then, but
she and I had connected via email two or three years before 2007 due to some of
his other shenanigans. She thought I should be aware of things he was saying
behind my back: about my ‘not keeping a job,’ about my marriage, about my wife’s
pregnancy. There’s also an email to her in which he falsely accuses me
of trying to ‘convince him he’s lost his mind so (I) can take over his
affairs.’ (How was I going to do that when I barely had enough money
for my own survival needs and none for a lawyer?) In each instance, he did
several things at once: 1) he tried to triangulate me from his cousin by smearing
me (trying to make her not want to talk to me or hear my side of the story), 2)
he tried to shift/deflect attention from himself with a red herring (pointing
the finger like Billy vs Bobby again), 3) he tried to cast himself as the
victim (when the truth is I was the victim of his
lies), and 4) he tried to obtain pity from her, but she wasn’t falling for his
lies because she and I had caught on to some of his lies before this. In the
end, after she called him out for his lies and behavior, he narcissistically
discarded her even though she was one of the few remaining family
members in his family.
[A brief digression on paranoia: The email to his cousin in 2007 was
just one example of his paranoia (that’s what she called it too). Allegedly, at
the end, he was concerned I might get killed over any big money I took back to
Thailand. Besides sounding like every Columbo Movie of the Week,
something like that can happen anywhere! Sometimes, his paranoia was more about
seeking pity; other times, it was more part of his grandiose fantasies. In
2003, before I moved overseas, he had the idea we should “both get a
copy of the same book and make a code with page numbers referring to words in
the book.” In 2005, after we’d both received apparent emails from each other
because of our address books being hacked, I suggested we use a special word in
our subject lines to each other to avoid either of us getting a virus upon opening
a fake email. HE always thought we did this “to keep other people from reading
our emails,” which I think Uncle Sam’s cyber-scrutiny can bypass if the feds
were at all interested in our mundane emails. Most narcissists are indeed
paranoid about being caught out and their 24/7 act being discovered and their
true nature revealed. This is one reason they are pathological liars, as Vaknin
notes. Vaknin also talks of narcissists’ cognitive deficiencies due to grandiose
fantasies, borderline delusions, and lack of full-fledged empathy. “They fail
the reality test,” he says. My father had a BSc in geology; my mother, a high
school diploma. In his paperwork and correspondence with the trust, his last
letter to me, and his actions in extremis, he showed less cognitive
capacity than she had. Again, I suspect that was why she’d been after him to do
a will before she died; she knew he’d really mess things up.]
About the same time as the “You never worked hard a day in your life”
barb in 1998, I visited my cousin P. P was my maternal first cousin and was,
for a long time, my father’s favorite nephew and one of his flying monkeys as
well. Instead of the two of us catching up, P turned our 1998 meeting into a
reaming-Tim-out session, criticizing me harshly for moving home at the age of
35, “sponging off your parents! Get a job!” I’d just left grad school, where
I’d hoped to earn a second MA, had $30K of debt, and had very serious asthma
making some kinds of work impossible. After what I learned though my father’s
first cousin in 2007 and what I learned my father had said to his second
cousins through their depositions, I now see my first understanding of my
meeting with P was only partially correct: that he was just being arrogant with
his status as a lieutenant colonel and assuming he knew more about my own life
than I did (as his brother and father usually did too). I now also see that seven
years before our head-on collision and the subsequent drafting of the will/trust
(and five years before my mother died), my father had seized the opportunity
to lie to P about my career to get pity from him by smearing me
behind my back, twisting the truth of my work history and the fact that even
then US employment and economic philosophies were so screwed up that even
people who did the right thing and got an education still fell through the
cracks.
My father’s relationship with his favorite nephew, my cousin P,
continued on a rocky basis a few more years. P was original trust advisor (2005-11).
Piecing together information from different people, I’ve put together “The
story of the trust advisorship change” (below). Suffice it to say here that, as
my father’s first cousin did in 2007, in 2005, my cousin P challenged my
father’s ideas/reality, ultimately leading to a break in their relationship and
a narcissistic discard by my father.
Like the nastiest political smear campaign, a narcissistic smear
campaigns can do serious damage. Unlike a political smear campaign played out
in the media, a narcissist’s is usually a more in-your-face approach, often
seeming like gossip or chit-chat. An added dimension is narcissists make themselves
into the victim to get pity from their audience, of perhaps just one (as with
“Nothing I do...”) or things my father said to family above. The narcissist takes
advantage of the fact that listeners know just part of a story (Tim seems to
change jobs often) and ‘fills in the missing details’ with half-truths and lies
both to obtain pity and to harm the target more (as my cousin P became a flying
monkey/surrogate for my father and read me the riot act as my father’s campaign
surrogate based on the lies he was told).
To understand the impact and scope of a narcissist’s smear campaigns,
I suggest the following short videos (about 8m each): “Narcissistic Smears” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBK6PljfVe0 by
Narcissist Survivor and Vaknin’s “Abuse by Proxy: From smear campaigns to 3rd
party stalking and abuse” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0aOH6kw9ug. In the
latter, Vaknin talks about the third parties a Narcissist enlists and uses
against the target; I believe my father did this at least three times (in
addition to the family members here described). First, my father probably lied
to his original estate attorney in 2005 (Vaknin notes in this same video that
Narcissists have very good acting skills; most likely that first attorney would’ve
taken the default position that people doing something as solemn as a will
would not lie or set up potentially harmful situations that could mean life or
death for a beneficiary.) Second, there is a letter among the trust documents,
which was held up before me but I was unable to read (I believe there is a strong
possibility this letter could be seen by a psychologist/NPD specialist as
evidence of NPD). Third, I suspect my father might have done some PRE-judicial
smearing of me with the staff at his bank (the baiting at the bank story above
“Do you really need that much?” and the way he ‘complained to his second cousin’s
wife before my last visit in 2010: “What if we start fighting?”) Again, narcissists
like to manipulate/prejudice opinions of unsuspecting, uncritical
people in underhanded, subtle ways to their malicious advantage (pity for themselves,
pain for the target).
Narcissists
discard people (even and especially those closest) when they see no use in
continuing the relationship, more specifically when the other person no longer
provides the pity or praise the narcissist needs or questions the narcissist’s
shaky narrative. The narcissist discards when his reality is challenged, when
he can no longer manipulate someone else into believing the lies. There is
actually an observable and predictable series of steps in the process:
Idealize, Devalue, (Vaknin adds Dump here), and Discard. There have been
several public discards in the news since 2017: Mika and Joe, Jeff Sessions,
George Papadopoulos. Rather than admit to doing something wrong and having the
balloon of their perfect persona popped, a narcissist discards and smears, as my
father did with his cousin and my cousin.
With those two family members no longer in his camp, he had to find
someone else whose perceptions he could manipulate. He didn’t have to look far
and found his second cousins, who—despite their claims under oath—really
had had little contact with him in the 60 years prior to his moving onto their
place. L cannot even get dates correct and doesn’t know when my father started went
to college and in the army or started work and moved clear across the country. My
father took advantage of their ignorance of many things in his pity and praise
seeking, his triangulating/smearing of his only child, his 24/7 act being
believed by people too naïve to see through it as the two family members above and
I had.
L and his wife C know nothing from me about
my work and financial history and future, health issues, and personal life.
Thus, as with how he manipulated P’s perceptions about me with fractional facts
and twisted truths, my father lied to them about the reasons I had many
different jobs, he lied about my financial need in the future, he lied about my
adopting the ideas and ways in my new adopted home overseas. (In fact, many
things in my new home’s culture truly disgust me). But all of the things he
said were ultimately to get pity or praise for himself and to smear and
triangulate me and bring me further pain even after he was long gone—as he
intended. (“Poisoned affections, perverted sense of right.”)
Projection and Hypocrisy
Projection and hypocrisy necessarily go together in
NPD because what the narcissist projects onto his victims (accuses them of) are
the qualities he hates in himself. Thus, on the receiving end, it evokes the
wish to respond: “It takes one to know one!”
It’s true: he was able to keep his job with Uncle
Sam for 27 years until he impulsively retired when he did not get
promoted to regional engineer, which he thought he deserved (though they
didn’t, more of his grandiosity). He used to comment on my impulsivity (what
he thought of as impulsivity) when my reasons for leaving a job—if the job
didn’t keep me—were well thought out and had been considered for quite a while.
In retrospect, I think he may have been aware his retiring at 55, when he could
have had a few years of work left, was impulsive and something he didn’t like
about himself but couldn’t admit to. I know from what he told me he had several
jobs as a teen in the Depression and WWII. Perhaps his changing jobs then was
something his mother chided him for during those lean years with no help
from his absent father. Knowing about the major fights my grandparents had, I
wonder if my grandfather’s changing jobs was behind some of their fights as
well as his philandering.
When my father retired at 55, he’d not had to do
much yardwork in the years he worked because we did not often have a yard.
Thus, his workaholic nature with his government job became inverted and he
didn’t want to do things around their retirement home until he thought those
chores merited his attention: building a kitchen pantry or flowerbeds, mowing
the lawn (she usually started, making him lose face to himself and get moving),
or painting the garage door (which I did because he didn’t
seem to hear when she brought it up). In the early years of his retirement, I
got the impression he thought retirement meant he wouldn’t have to do anything
he didn’t want to, including general upkeep of a house, which he’d not had to
do for 30 years before retirement. (I knew also that he never helped with my
grandmother’s yard.)
So, my supposed issues with my “work ethic” and my
“impulsivity” were in part a hypocritical awareness of his own
unsatisfactory ways. In an email to his first cousin (above), he wrote about my
‘refusing to take care of (my) own child,’ and in an email he wrote me after my
writing and telling him about my father-in-law’s forced early retirement for
alcoholism ‘What kind of man doesn’t take care of his wife or family?’, it’s
likely my father was struggling with something deeper in himself: his own
father’s doing nothing at all to help my father and grandmother for years after
he left, a nagging feeling kept alive in my father by seeing all of the
out-of-wedlock births in my mother’s family over the years. (There were other ugly,
hypocritical aspects to this as well! See below!)
Before the next example of discard, projection, and
hypocrisy, let me quote from the video by Narcissist Survivor above: “If you
bring up something about their past or possibly any bad behavior that they have
had, they do not know how to defend against that with the exception of attacking
you and making you the bad guy, making others think that you’re the crazy one.”
(I might add they don’t know how to apologize either. Sounds like something
we’ve a lot seen on the news!) I first saw this video in 2015/16, at least ten
years after my father’s second visit to me in Asia (his last visit here though
he was invited to my wedding two years later, which he refused to come
to, even with my cousin P’s urging and saying he’d travel with my father to my
wedding—his way of saying I’m not worth it, just as he did with his “choices” in
extremis).
When my mother died in 2003, my father gave me a
small CD that had been in her name. My salary in Thailand the first couple of
years was about $750 per month. During his last visit with me here in 2005, he
saw me use $3,000 to buy a little bar though I’m not sure he was even thinking
about why I did that: to supplement my subsistence income from the university.
He wasn’t happy with my using money on that though the amount I spent buying a
bar was less than ten percent of my grad school loans in 1997, which HE
insisted on paying those off even though I was actually willing to default and
even declare bankruptcy. Again, my net worth when he died, six months before I
turned 50, was basically ZERO.
At the same time, he told me about things he’d
done, not as a lesson to me, but more as either praise-seeking or
condemnation-seeking, which narcissists sometimes do. (“I hate to be loved, and
I love to be hated”.) Two things he told on himself about were what he’d done with
the heirloom china his mother/my grandmother said were “for Tim when he gets
married” and a traditional Thai shirt we got for him his first visit to
Thailand the year before (details below). After my mother died, I pointedly
told him and packed away things I wanted to keep from the house. I even bought
small sticker dots to put on things to remind him after I moved overseas of
these specific things. This idea came to me because, in the weeks after my
mother’s death, he ‘donated’ many things to migrant workers through the church.
(I was okay with most it, but again there were specific things of my
mother’s which I wanted to keep. I also had a memory of my mother telling me she
had had to stop him from giving away too much of my grandmother’s household
stuff after she died in 1972. After my mother died, I heard him turn it the
other way around and say my mother told him ‘IF he didn’t share the tangibles
of his mother’s house, he could find himself a new wife’ –a lie and another
pity-seeking. He never knew that I knew the truth of that story!)
My mother didn’t even know how to boot up a
computer or use a mouse, but if he’d predeceased her and I moved overseas, she
would’ve learned how to do email and asked me about what I wanted to do with
different things we had. “Do you want your father’s tools? His pen and ink
drawings?” I think it is more common for widowed parents with grown children to
consult them about what to do with family belongings, at least parents with an
ounce of consideration for someone else’s feelings, the deceased’s in
particular! Thus, when he told me about having given away my dishes and the
Thai shirt, I started to wonder about other household items I had a special
attachment to.
At this point, I was 42 and had never had my own “home,”
where (like everyone else I knew) I could be comfortable, surrounded by
mementos to show for five decades of life. He and my mother had had trailers to
live in for 30 years, then a house for 20. After college, I had a year in Saudi
Arabia, a year in Tennessee, a stint in grad school in a dorm, a lot of time
living with my parents, but never really a place of my own. Still, it was
always in the back of my mind that I would someday have a place with my book
and music collections and things, like our Persian carpets, to surround myself
with and give me a sense of “home.”
I spent my first ten and a half years in Thailand
living in a one-room apartment and out of two suitcases. Until fifteen months
after he died, we sat on the floor to eat dinner and washed dishes in the
bathroom sink. Most apartments I lived in here were smaller than hotel
rooms I’ve stayed in in the US. I was 51, and my daughter was seven before we
could afford to move to a two-bedroom apartment with kitchen and a living room.
How many people in this story (lawyers, family members) lived in a motel room
for 10 years?
With all this in mind in early 2005, I lashed out
at my father, asking “What else?!” he’d given away which I wanted to keep: the
Navajo rugs, my mother’s Precious Moments figurines? “Do you have to have a
woman tell you what to do all the time?” His whining, pity-seeking “Nothing I
do makes you or your mother happy” in my teens did its job of triangulating and
also built up in me disdain for his way of relating to women. I told him he
seemed like a Mama’s boy and never needed a wife; instead, he needed a mama to
tell him the right thing to do. (When my mother died, I even heard him
say to hospice nurses: “Thanks for taking care of my mom”—Weird!)
I didn’t know during our head-on confrontation in early 2005 he’d pursued
several women we and he had known a long time (and I can name) and was rejected
every time, likely because they all saw his controlling nature or had their own
lives and didn’t want to give up those lives to take care of a 72-year-old man
who was like a needy two-year old. He couldn’t admit this to himself and so
made his ‘bad luck’ and ‘lonely life’ even more pity-inducing when he said
things to his cousin’s wife C, leading her to say in deposition: “He came to us
after a very lonely time in his life.” I read that line and thought how, even
when my mother was dealing with her death sentence her last year and a half, Dad
would go downstairs to his computer room behind the garage and leave her upstairs
in the living room, ALONE! It was TIM who sat with
her most in those long months of paralysis and waiting to die!
In 2017, I found the following by Sam Vaknin which
seems applicable to our 2005 confrontation (before the drafting of the
will/trust later that same year): “Here are a few of the things the narcissist finds devastating: Any
statement or fact, which seems to contradict his inflated perception of his
grandiose self. Any criticism, disagreement, exposure of fake achievements,
belittling of ‘talents and skills’ the narcissist fantasizes that he possesses,
any hint he is subordinated, subjugated, controlled, owned or dependent upon a
third party. Any description of the narcissist as average and common,
indistinguishable from many others. Any hint the narcissist is weak, needy,
dependent, deficient, slow, not intelligent, naive, gullible, susceptible, not
in the know, manipulated, a victim.” (Many times, my mother described my father
as “naïve”; I remind readers of the quotation above: “with the exception of
attacking you.”)
I told my father he was Walter Mitty. I quoted “sins of the fathers”
and thanked him for setting me up to have problems relating to women. My
grandfather was a lothario; my father, a eunuch. With events in my mother’s
family beginning in 1999 and the magnifying of that with my mother’s prognosis
in 2002, Dad and I became closer (at least I thought so) than any time before.
When he left to return to the States after the 2005 visit, things seemed good
despite our confrontation. I must point out that, while I lost my cool with
him, I did so because of things HE had done: Do NOT take this turning point as all
and only me! A fair assessment of what happened must consider both sides’
contributions, and I believe that confrontation would not have happened if
Narcissistic Personality Disorder had not affected his every behavior.
After my mother’s death in 2003 through 2005, my father had grief
counseling/hypnotherapy with a psychologist (PhD/LPC with 35+ years’
experience) in the town they retired in. I don’t know what they talked about or
uncovered during hypnosis sessions, but I firmly believe whatever the shrink
did brought many of my father’s old issues from his early years closer to the
surface. I don’t even know if my father was open enough with the shrink to
discuss the rejections from women he was trying to get to be his surrogate
wife/mother; he probably couldn’t even broach the subject as it would be too painful
to acknowledge. They probably didn’t even get far in exploring my father’s
issues of abandonment (by his father and, in different ways, by his mother) or
his fear of anger, which likely formed by watching my grandparents’ fights when
he was young). Neither my father nor mother understood legitimate anger
might stem from transgressions by one person against another. Instead of any true
contrition, my father developed a false self which was never wrong no
matter what he’d done, creating the need within him to project his own faults
onto someone else or magnify that person’s faults with the addition of his own
unrecognized, unadmitted ones (This is commonly known in psychology as
Projection, more below).
In September, 2005, my father sent me an email about emptying the
house (i.e. throwing my stuff, my dreams, into storage with no care whatsoever),
putting the house up for sale, and going somewhere. “I shall continue to email
you as time and places permit... Rest assured, I have “NO” intention of
disowning you, disinheriting you, NOR will I ever abandon or forsake you.” This was just three months before he did his
will/trust (more about which below). I suspect part of his decision to leave
the house they bought 19 years before was all the rejections, such as the widow
living across the street, whom we’d known since buying the house. Not a good
year for him—though I have no pity for him thanks to what he did to me.
I didn’t care where he went, but I’d been asking since my mother died,
when he put my stuff in storage, to do a few things I’d not been able to do in
the time before I left for Asia. I didn’t know what to call this action of his
except his ‘disappearing act.’ About three years after his death and three
years into my NPD research, I found a term for it: Narcissistic Discard. Just
as he later did with his first cousin and my cousin P, he decided to discard
me, his own flesh-and-blood for making him see things about himself he did not,
could not, and would not own up to. With me he also began to smear me behind my
back with lies and half-truths about my work ethic, my responsibility to my
wife and child, and more.
In early 2005 I’d challenged his reality, just as my
cousin P did later that year and his first cousin did a couple years later.
Rather than admit he was doing/thinking something questionable, he chose to
discard us. I relate more details elsewhere but here focus on his behaviors and
“choices” indicative of his state of mind at the time of drafting of his will
and trust. It is important to consider not just our head-on collision earlier
in the year, but also the social rejections he received (I know he was pushy
and even caustic with two of the women) at this time as well as whatever
‘regression issues’ had arisen during contemporaneous hypnotherapy sessions,
all in the context of life-long NPD (Disorders, unlike mental illnesses, develop
early in life and do not correct themselves; I believe I’ve presented key
pieces of evidence in the preceding pages of his NPD going back even to his
late teens).
In the video “Abuse by Proxy,” Vaknin talks about
the narcissist’s ‘impressive thespian acting skills,’ which I believe my
father’s estate attorney was an audience to, as were people at the trust (if
only through the letter held up to show me but I wasn’t able to read), and in
his last few years with his second cousins and staff at his bank. He appeared
to be ‘a man who knows what he wants’ and gave a stellar performance to all his
audiences, so stellar that at the time no one could see the pity-seeking and
the malicious smearing of/lying about his own only child’s reputation in the
topics of work ethic, financial issues, responsibility to his family, and one
more (below), one where his hypocrisy was even more disturbing and clear
examples of ‘poisoned affections and perverted sense of right’ due to Narcissistic
Personality Disorder.
Smearing, again
There was a third topic my father liked to smear me with, but before
turning to that, the reader must be reminded of my grandparents’ fights. In the
days before air conditioning and closed windows, I imagine these fights were
heard up and down the street. Also, after my father died, I came across a typed
eulogy he’d written and given at my grandmother’s funeral; I noted he said
something about my maternal great-grandfather being ‘a real mean SOB.’ So, when
anyone considers anything my father said about me ‘having a temper,’ they must also
consider his significant encounters with anger as a boy: his parents against
each other and his maternal grandfather both seem to have left an indelible
impression on him.
As for my temper, yes, it irks me greatly when people think
they know me, my career, and my life better than I know these myself, especially
when those same people have never had a conversation with me about these
things and they dismiss anything I say about my own
life. (If you’ve not had this done to your face, you don’t know what a kick to
the stomach it is.) It also ticks me off when people assume they have nothing
more to learn, denying the possibility of facts which disprove what they
believe they know, and they don’t listen when I try to teach them (the college
instructor in me) how to check their logic and knowledge and have an ethically
stronger point of view. Who wouldn’t get angry if this happened to them? In my
adult life, I have again and again had to deal with major consequences to my
livelihood and financial survival because of people who think they are smarter
than they truly are.
I’m sure, five years after his death, most people who “knew” my father
believe he never had a temper, never got angry, never did things out of rage.
Some people he probably also prejudiced the opinions of regarding me before
they met me or got to know me, as I know he did with his second cousins and
possibly with staff at his bank in his last years. Recall the section on
Baiting above: in 1998, he said to me: “You never worked hard a day in your
life!” knowing it was a lie and he’d get a rise out of me and compliment
himself for never displaying his anger as Tim did. Or did he? Even his last letter to me, which I received after
his death, included one last jab, knowing with his being dead and gone there’d
be no way for me to challenge the incorrectness of his statements and I’d have
no way to respond to his lie. He wrote that my temper was my worst quality. Let’s
see about that…
What did HE do but kept hidden
under his lies. (In one of the last letters his second cousin’s mother wrote to
my father, she talked about my grandmother lying all the time.) Here are a few
things my father did in his rage and out of spite...
1) After my mother died, my father
disposed of our tangible property without the slightest regard for his late
‘beloved’ wife’s feelings or her memory or for his son’s connection with his
mother. There were many things she would’ve wanted to go to her daughter-in-law
and her granddaughter. But he didn’t give that a moment’s thought. (I had many
aunts and uncles on my mother’s side to compare his actions with. Also, even
after moving over 50 times in his career, he took no care to pack and store our
tangible property as my mother would have done with his stuff if
fortunes were reversed and she outlived him.)
2) My father lied about my work
ethic (so other people, like my cousin P, would harangue me about what he
thought was the truth–based on my father’s lies, which he told to get
pity). He lied about my marriage choices, as if it were his business who I
married when I was twice the age he was when my grandmother stopped him from
marrying a girl overseas. He lied about my refusing to accept responsibility
for my own kid—very hypocritical considering what he did to me and to her
(below)!
3) Prima facie, it may seem a
trust with an income for life was a caring, benevolent action, but omission of
language for discretionary help with life-endangering medical issues in my
future (such as heart attack or stroke) means I might someday have to forgo
treatment because I have no resources or savings built up because, for decades,
I’ve paid for asthma treatment out of pocket, thus regularly depleting anything
I manage to save. Further, the “no further payments out of principal” (as
interpreted by two former trust attorneys) means, before all the litigation
arising from the way the trust was written, a large amount of principal could
wind up going either to people who already have all the things most people take
for granted or to people who live on what attorneys earn before lunch on
Mondays. Half-way around the world, I hear my father spinning in his grave
about people here getting even a tenth of principal. In short, despite a
monthly stipend for life, my financial future is more perilous now than it was
before he died because, while he was alive, I could contact him about help with
medical costs, whereas now the trustee has been so obstinate I cannot even
bring up the issue without it being quashed or simply just ignored.
4) My father exaggerated/lied about
my temper while HE was guilty of intimating that his late ‘beloved’
wife’s grandchild and namesake be ABORTED. Why? Because she’s ‘mixed race’? Because
she’s not Christian? Because she’s more justifiably worthy of having her needs
met than some self-entitled old man and his need for praise every last waking
minute? (He didn’t think he’d get that without making a bribe!) In fact, many
of the things he did, without being open about it, we might label Roy’s rage,
which makes Tim’s temper seem small.
Are some things my father
did valid reason to get angry? Yes, I think so, if you truly understand what he
did. Are some things he did (more below) prime examples of “poisoned affections
and perverted sense of right”? Yes, I think so. Is there a way to do something
to guarantee yourself some praise from others to salve your awareness of all
the ugly, nasty things you have done, to stoke your ego? Maybe even a way to
achieve that as well as continue doing things which continue to harm the target
of your sadism and malevolence, concealing your “poisoned affections and
perverted sense of right” in acts meant to win the adulation of the ignorant
people in your immediate surroundings? Yes, there is.
Attention-seeking: PRAISE and Compulsive “Giving/Generosity”
Consider the toddler with a box of Animal Crackers at the family
gathering. Little Bobby has been able to walk only a few months. Now, armed
with a box of cookies, he is urged to toddle around the living room and dole
out cookies to everyone present. “Good! Now give one to Uncle Richard! And give
one to Aunt Pat! Good job!” Does Bobby know “giving” is considered a virtue
by those who have followed a faith for many years, decades perhaps? No, Bobby
doesn’t even know what a virtue is. All he knows and all that drives him from
one person to the next is the positive, feel-good reactions of all the people
in the room: the cheers and applause, the glowing compliments, the PRAISE…
In 2017, we saw and heard about praise being heaped upon a prominent
individual, and in each case, he soaked it up like a sponge. “Soak” is the key
word. Just as an alcoholic needs a drink every day, just as a smoker needs a
nicotine fix, just as a junkie needs a hit of cocaine or heroin, a narcissist
needs a dose of pity or a dose of praise REGULARLY. If it’s not
obtained, the result is like withdrawal from any of the hits above, or—equally
apt—like a toddler screaming for Mommy. (The baby cries to control the
mother.)
Before examining my father’s actions, let me first refer readers to
two independent sources which give further insight into compulsive “giving.” (I
use quotation marks because it is not really “giving” in the sense of a moral/ethical
virtue.) First is an article at Psychology Today’s website with a
self-explanatory title: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201405/generosity-and-its-pathological-variants.
Second is NPD expert Sam Vaknin’s video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8-qrrbVBco
titled “Narcissist as Compulsive Giver.” Watch this video; make note of the key
points; think of them as you read the following about my father, some of which is
provided by the defendants. (Another video by Sam Vaknin: “Narcissist’s Objects
and Possessions” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pXDHKi15hY).
The earliest example of my father’s compulsive “giving” I
remember was when my grandmother died. He never knew my mother told me many
times she had had to stop him from giving everything
away. HE liked to gaslight/lie/pity seek and tell people she said if he
didn’t share his mother’s stuff, he could go find himself another wife. When my
mother died, he started again. I pointedly told him, marked stuff, even packed
away things I wanted to keep. He later dug these out and used them and other
things to elicit gratitude/praise from anyone and everyone—even from complete
strangers! After he died, I went through everything and found a lot missing I’m
sure my mother would’ve wanted to go to her daughter-in-law and grandchild. Her
gold jewelry (engagement ring, wedding band, gold bracelet), kitchen stuff,
knick-knacks, anything he could put in someone’s hands to get him
immediate “thank you’s” or “you’re so kind’s” but not endless gratitude/praise
he desperately sought from anyone—as a substitute for love.
A couple examples of how odd his
compulsive “giving” was: he told me both of these himself, almost as if he were
looking for condemnation (Narcissists do masochistically seek reminders of how
bad they are). First, before my grandmother died, she wrote a letter to us
about an expensive set of china in her attic. “Those dishes are for Timmy when
he gets married.” My mother didn’t like them but kept them in a china cabinet
in our living room. After she died, the grown daughter of one her
cousins, whom we’d seen only once before, dropped by to visit my widowed
father, living alone in the house then. This young woman must have made an
off-the-cuff, just-polite-conversation remark about how beautiful or pretty the
dishes were. The next morning, he’d packed up the ten place settings and put
them in her car. We never saw or heard from the young woman again, and I bet she
has those dishes packed away, not using them. (My Thai wife is fascinated by
Japan and would have loved them.) Second, when my father came to see me here,
we bought him a traditional silk shirt, bright red with embroidered gold lamé
elephants on the front. Back in the US, he wore this shirt on a solo trip to
Wal-Mart. In the checkout line, a young girl and her mother behind him
complimented him on the color of the shirt, and the girl said she liked
elephants. What did dear old Dad do? He paid for his purchases, went outside,
took off the shirt, and waited for the girl and her mother to exit, where he
stood waiting in his ratty, old undershirt, with his potbelly and white, flabby
old man arms, holding this expensive, sweaty shirt, and gave it to them!
I imagine their reaction.
In a letter to a trust attorney in early 2016 as well as in her
depositions in mid-2017, the wife of my father’s second cousin describes some
of my father’s supposed “generosity.” A couple of her examples were his giving
money to staff at hospice and his paying for a headstone for someone else. For
the first of these, I must call attention to the fact that this was the very
same month his second cousins were using his credit card at the gas station and
the supermarket, the very same month his own flesh-and-blood did not
have money to buy life-preserving asthma meds to continue breathing
(after an ER visit for a potentially fatal asthma attack), the very same month
his own flesh-and-blood did not have any money to pay rent or buy food!
For the second, I actually know the story better than his second cousin’s wife
does. It was for my mother’s eldest sister, who died a few months after my
mother; the remaining sisters were slow to pay for a headstone, and he beat
them to it so he could pat himself on the back (praise himself) for being
‘sneaky.’ But the significance of these stories is even more than that…
‘I was surprised
he told me about the marker’ or something like that was his cousin’s wife’s comment
in deposition in the context of her observation how ‘private’ or ‘secret’ my
father was. I, however, think of Socrates’ statement to his accusers at the
trial that lead to his death sentence: “I’ll not mention the things you have
done,” which is exactly what he did do by putting it that way. More
than a year before the depositions, I found a number of online descriptions of
compulsive “giving/generosity” in addition to the Vaknin video above. One of the
eeriest is by Dr. Sharon Spano of Heathrow, FL: “Watch not only what and
how they give, but pay attention to the after-effects of their generosity. Are
they boasting or bragging about their own generosity? Are they
submitting others to more power and control as a result of their giving? Are
they showing up as selfish and greedy in other aspects of their life? Do they
fail to demonstrate empathy for others in the midst of their giving?” (The
answer in all cases is “yes.”) In another paragraph, Spano writes: “Such acts
of generosity are often accompanied by exaggerated stories of how and what they
gave.” https://sharonspano.com/time-money/beware-of-narcissistic-generosity/#respond
Narcissists crave
attention, whether positive or negative. Positive is usually better, and being
Mr. Deep Pockets is a sure-fire way to garner praise just like a toddler handing
out Animal Crackers to adults in the room. (Despite the axiom, ‘Money can
indeed buy you love’ –of a sort.) Consider the last three questions in the
first Spano quote above and the facts of my life, especially the
precarious financial predicament I was in while he was being Mr. Deep Pockets, and
how I could face that same predicament again in the future because of his
actions in extremis.
[Another example
of my father’s attention seeking also involved a headstone: When my mother
died, we placed her at the foot of my grandmother’s grave. As we drove to the
place to order a headstone, he asked what I thought about a black headstone instead
of grey. I readily agreed because black is my favorite color. His next comment didn’t
seem significant until 14 years later, as I wrote this: “I want something
different so people will notice; all the surrounding stones are grey,
and black might make people come look.” Thinking of how to be the focus of
attention even after he’s six feet under! / I’m also thinking now of how he
once told me of how his preferred car brand, Pontiac, was because ‘People will
notice.’ I also note how the diamond of my mother’s engagement ring had been
roughly cut off when I finally saw it again after he died. No one told me, but
I suspect he had his second cousins place the diamond in his lips in the casket
so he could give it again to my mother when they met in heaven and he kissed
her—likely something he read somewhere. He always seemed to be copying actions
he saw in movies or read in his genealogy research, which included wills and
final instructions. This sure would have given him attention when he told
people what he planned to do!]
Sometimes, it
takes a practiced ear to hear the outrageousness of a narcissist’s confabulations
and lies. Unaware people might fall for a narcissist’s stories, such as fictitious
congratulatory phone calls by the Boy Scouts or letters of praise from network
anchors after a televised cabinet meeting on immigration (Jan 11, 2018). Narcissists
lie to themselves to assuage their knowledge of the truth of their own ugliness.
From deposition transcripts,
I learned several things my father said, in his last weeks which must be
examined more than superficially. First, he reportedly said that I am ‘adopting
too many Thai ways.’ This reminds me of his 2007 attitude toward Thailand and
my family in his emails to his first cousin (which I still have) about my
getting married and having a family here: “I was not thrilled
about Tim's marriage, and I am even less thrilled over having a Thai grandchild
and having to support (send money Dad!) his family the rest of my life. That is his responsibility and he will not accept it.”
BS! I never said anything about not accepting the responsibility! Again,
there are lots of fatherless kids in my mother’s large family, not to forget
that my father’s father bugged out when Dad was quite young. There is also my
father’s intimation that my wife should abort my mother’s grandchild. He
KNEW I detest aspects of Thai culture, but his pronouncement above was meant to
invoke pity from his provincial and ignorant audience and get them to respond
with something like: “Oh, that must be disappointing for you! What a shame!” (Just
like “Mommy! Bobby hit me!” to cover the lie of Billy hitting Bobby first.)
Second, my
father reportedly claimed I might be killed if I brought a large amount of
money from the US to Asia. Besides sounding like every other Columbo
plot, this can and does happen anywhere! If he was truly concerned about my
life, he should have thought about my already-existing and future health issues
which might be survivable with the financial means to seek treatment or NOT SURVIVABLE
without those means. No, this comment by my father was another praise-seeking
exercise as well as pulling one over on his listeners, who likely responded
with “You’re such a good father to be worried about your son’s welfare” –even
with his OMISSION/LIE and their ignorance of how in truth he was
actually HURTING me and my family’s welfare and future!
Third, “Tim
only calls when he needs money.” A lie! My family and I were able to call him
from half-way around the world on his 80th birthday in 2011. A
couple days later, he wrote his letter/amendment to the trust
headquarters, in which he notes: “(P)lease contact me by mail since my Cell
phone doesn’t work sometimes...” Moreover, his claim ignores the fact that his
second cousins’ grown daughter (on the same property) and I had each other in
our Skype contacts list between 2010 and his death though there was NEVER any
use made of this possible way to connect: a 12-hour time difference between
here and there being part of the problem though not insurmountable.
Fourth, also in
this context, he claimed I never called to inquire about his health. I have
copies of several emails I wrote to him, as well as to his cousins on whose
property he stayed, where I note how I checked email several times a day for
news about him for years but he seemed to go for long stretches of time without
checking his email. Moreover, I have his email in
which he writes: “I have been delaying writing to you about my health issues”
and tells me about his staying in the hospital ten months before. Had I known,
I would’ve tried calling then, but no one told me about it. In truth, this claim
was just pity-fishing and, smearing of me, and red herrings to cover and hide
his sadistic intentions.
Fifth, I refer
readers again to his reported actions of giving money to hospice staff,
donations to widows via USPS, a headstone for my aunt, then bragging about them
to CS. Though he might not have seemed boastful, he was still heaping praise on
himself and seeking praise from others as people do with a new hairdo or
hard-won weight loss. The difference is what is behind these self-praising
utterances and, just as with a claim to receiving laudatory letters from TV
news anchors for a ‘really terrific cabinet meeting,’ these declarations were
self-ego-stoking-praise meant to invite a verbal confirmation from
hearers. The same goes for his comments to a bank teller, as per her
deposition, “(T)here were times he shared, I guess, his want to help
others in anything he felt necessary. I think it was something he was
passionate about if he felt like he could help” etc. He was praise-seeking,
trying to get someone to tell him he was good because he knew he wasn’t, he
knew he was being sadistic, harming his own flesh-and-blood, being a hypocrite.
The bank teller wasn’t
asked how she responded to these claims, but how does one typically respond to such
announcements about one’s generosity: “You’re so kind/generous!”? Consider
again the questions by Dr. Sharon Spano: “Are they submitting others to more
power and control as a result of their giving? Are they showing up as selfish
and greedy in other aspects of their life? Do they fail to demonstrate empathy
for others in the midst of their giving?” The narcissist “constructs
a narrative in which he figures as the hero. He is brilliant,
perfect, irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, powerful, wealthy,
the center of attention, and so on.” (Vaknin’s video “Narcissist’s Reaction
to Abandonment, Separation, and Divorce” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdOTCz2eoE8)
See the next two points.
Sixth, as with
True/False items on a test, sometimes one word is key to detecting false
statements. My father reportedly said to his second cousins: “There’s enough in
the trust to help with Tim’s retirement.” In truth, the trust IS
my retirement and my Social Security and my Medicare/Medicaid. I
will never have those things from anywhere. He KNEW my financial future is
precarious because my career and health issues both made my decades-long
efforts to be self-sufficient a ‘one step forward, two steps backward’ ordeal. Maybe
this and the knowledge of how the locked-in trust stipend amount were behind
his idea to take me to the bank in 2010 and add me to his account. I did ask
him, after he told me how much I’d get per month for life, “What if I need more
some months?” –thinking of my 2007 eight-day stay in ICU, knocked out and on a
respirator because I couldn’t breathe on my own.
Seventh, he said
that by diverting major money to his second cousins, he wanted to “teach Tim a
lesson about keeping a job.” There are several ways this bears assessment for
truthfulness and motivation:
a) In the same
email above, he wrote: “HE SIMPLY WILL NOT KEEP A JOB. He has
always been that way since high school which is and was a great disappointment
to his mother and me. We have hoped and prayed countless times that he
would change but he hasn't. I am counting on him waking up with the responsibility
of marriage and a child but am afraid it's too late.” As he’d done with my cousin P in 1998,
he was counting on his cousins not knowing the details of my career and
responding to his pity-fishing.
b) What is
astounding is that he KNEW about my career and why I moved on from different
jobs. He KNEW about sandstorms putting me in the hospital in Saudi Arabia. He
KNEW about the SARS epidemic in China and my mother’s imminent passing. He KNEW
about my headaches at my last three college jobs in the US due to one or two
students each place. (In 2000, he even went to class with me one day after a
student was hostile the class before and sat in a student desk just behind her
throughout my lecture to make her squirm! With prompting, he could probably remember
her name.) Further, before his death, he KNEW and acknowledged by email, my
terrible experience at a university job I’d been at for two and a half years. (I
was ambush-attacked by the program coordinator and wound up with three stitches
in the back of my head and a concussion. The attack was so unrelenting and
brutal I wasn’t even able to turn and face my attacker, who was never fired
for attacking me. Was I supposed to go back to an office where I’d received a
head injury due to an attack that could have damaged me for life? Is that what
he meant by my ‘not keeping a job’? Literally adding insult to injury, the
university didn’t pay me though I was unable to lay a finger on an
attacker who pounded the back of my head two dozen times, and HE received his
pay and still works there.)
c) My father, and
his listeners, would PRESUME that I liked looking for a new job all the time,
that I liked not having my own money to do what I wanted with, that I liked
living at home in my 30s. In short, with some thought, anyone should see the
patent falsehoods of his claims. Further…
d) My father’s
claims about my not ‘keeping a job’ were pity-seeking from the uninformed
people who heard them and smearing/triangulating of me, causing my reputation
with them harm, trying to make my work history/ethic seem disappointing. In
2012, did he mention to his second cousins that between July and December, I
was working three jobs concurrently? That these jobs were about as consistent
and loyal to employees as my adjunct teaching in the States had been?
e) Though he
never saw me have a Level-8 or higher asthma attack, he knew my asthma was
serious enough to require regular ER visits/hospital stays. In July, 2007, he
called me after I woke up after eight days of being knocked out and on a
respirator in an ICU hospital due to a Level-10 asthma attack. So, one has to
ask how his ‘lesson about keeping a job’ would work when my asthma gets/has
gotten to the point I am not able to get enough air to walk to class, stand up,
and give an hour-and-a-half-long lecture. (Most people take breathing for
granted and don’t realize how much air you need to walk and to talk.)
f) I spent so
much time focusing on my father’s twisting of the truth with ‘Tim doesn’t keep
jobs’ as opposed to the fact ‘some jobs didn’t keep Tim’ that I missed what the
professional educator part of me should have seen when I read the second cousins’
depositions in 2017. How was this diverting of major monies that could make the
difference between life and death to me one day supposed to be a lesson
to me if I never learned/heard of it? I hired my first attorney to deal with
the trust in mid-2015 when I was not getting any answers from the trust about a
health amendment or the check that was returned (and why) after he died (there’d
been more than $8,000 still on balance, so ‘how much was the check and what was
it for’ had been questions for me since the trust told me about it in early
2013). I learned of the large check in late 2015 when my lawyer and I got
copies of scans from the bank. I didn’t hear about the “lesson” aspect of it
until the second half of 2017, over four and a half years after my father died.
How is that a “lesson”? In fact, there seems to have been a concerted effort to
keep it secret and keep me from learning of a transaction; I have some very
misleading emails from the second cousin’s wife during my father’s last weeks,
including one that says to me that they ‘live on Social Security only’ and
could maybe ‘send me $500 via Western Union MINUS the Western Union fees’ ON
THE EXACT SAME DAY that she and her husband took the check for $90,000!
What ALL these
statements/claims by my father in his last months show is a state of DELUSION
and disconnect from reality in the way DT’s claims about calls from the Boy
Scouts, laudatory letters from news anchors are evidential of delusion,
“cognitive deficiencies,” and “fail(ure) of the reality test.”
Regarding his inter
vivos “gift” and using Banks v. Goodfellow as a standard for assessing
capacity:
Did my father understand
the nature of the act and its effects? Did he understand redirecting a
quarter of the assets might very well mean his own flesh-and-blood might have
to take a pass on emergency, life-preserving medical care from lack of
financial means? Possibly not Narcissists are known for their ‘lack of empathy.’
I have recently come across another, better term: “mind-blindness.” This is an
idea knocked about in conjunction with autism and Asperger’s; however, the
similarity of “mind-blindness” to being completely blind or deaf is hard to
dismiss. In fact, I would say ‘lack of empathy’ has lost its power as an
expression and does not convey the idea that narcissists view other people as
cardboard cutouts, like those seen at mall novelty shops, as having no needs or
wants or hopes. Blind and deaf people cannot fake sight and hearing, but
narcissists learn to fake having empathy or feelings in general. But if
directly asked, they probably go blank (mentally) unless there is a sadistic,
malevolent element (re: Narcissistic Baiting to get a reaction out of you). On
the other hand, if my father did understand the effects of what
he was doing to me financially, emotionally, and psychologically, then, Cockburn’s
points below…
Did my father understand
the extent of the property of which he was disposing? No. Did his claim
there was “enough in the trust to help with (my) retirement” and then
his redirecting a quarter of the assets while also denying his flesh-and-blood
the means to seek life-saving medical treatment denote delusion about the
“extent the property of which he was disposing”? I’d say yes. In an online
article about the nature of compulsive “giving,” the author states: “Narcissists
show such generosity for the sole purpose of establishing their reputations as
VIP’s.” (That sounds like all the acts of “giving” in his last weeks.) Other
articles describe how narcissists are delusional about the extent of
their power, attractiveness, wealth, etc. (There’s been much speculation
about DT’s wealth, especially considering his several bankruptcies.)
Did my father comprehend
and appreciate the claims to which he ought to give effect? I believe this
is where mention is made of “objects of natural bounty.” Considering the precarious
financial and physical implications for his own only child (and only
grandchild), no, he did not “comprehend and appreciate the claims” (if he did, see
below). [“Mind-blindness” again!]
Was there a
disorder of the mind which poisoned my father’s affections? Poisoning
affections is exactly what NPD does through scapegoating. If you don’t see how,
reconsider triangulating, smearing, and discarding. There are both obvious and
not-so-obvious examples of affections poisoned due to NPD.
Was there a
disorder of the mind which perverted his sense of right? Is it right
to deprive your own flesh-and-blood of means to live a safe and healthy life,
to increase the likelihood of life-or-death decisions that would not be an
issue if the Narc had not sadistically misdirected major monies. Odd how in
1870 Cockburn used the word disorder and 150 years later NP Disorder is
named and described scientifically.
Was there an
insane delusion which influenced his will in disposing of his property? Consider
carefully his actions and words, especially those in the last pages above, and as
objectively as possible, ask yourself if there is any hint of delusion about
his son or about his assets. Yes.
Was there a
disposal of his property/assets made which would not have been made if there
had not been delusion due to NPD? Yes. Further to this….
There is another
reason his “lesson” was a lie. What my father could not say, probably even to
himself, was that his intent was to manipulate his second cousins into staying
with him at his deathbed and telling him every waking last minute what a kind,
generous, thoughtful, good person he was. If they only knew!
Was he/my father
bad? Was he sadistic, heinous, and evil? What do you call redirecting/”giving”
away monies that could make the difference in whether his own flesh-and-blood could
afford even palliative care when a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or Lou
Gehrig’s affects him? (Death and taxes, yes, but also failing health and high
medical bills.) Here’s something else you can call the above: “poisoned affections
and perverted sense of right.”
Maybe why he needed Haldol on
December 28, 2012, to calm him from a major anxiety attack was his own
self-awareness of what he did to his own flesh-and-blood and what a hypocrite
he was: In 2007, after learning that my Thai father-in-law is a wet brain
alcoholic, my father emailed to me: “What kind of man doesn’t take care of his
wife/family?” I’m sure in the back of his mind he was thinking about how Grover
C. Nixon bugged out/was kicked out and never did anything to help his ex-wife
and his only son during the Great Depression. Perhaps Roy C. Nixon realized
what he had done to his own only son/child and his late “beloved” wife’s only
grandchild; perhaps that’s why he needed some Haldol to calm him after
realizing what he had done.
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