My Cousin Gets a Dose of My Mom & Sister--Part 2

Part one here.

A state police patrol car was signaling from behind. To her horror, Lee realized the bus was pulling over to stop right on the Interstate. She had made it several hours away from her aunt's house, but was still within the reach of law. My mother had called Lee's father when she realized Lee had run away. A flurry of phone calls and investigation led to the bus being pulled off of I-5 to retrieve a 14 year old run-away.

Lee's father and mother arrived to pick her up shortly after she was taken off the bus. Her mother was quiet, her father was enraged. Lee soon found out she was being accused of more than running away. It didn't take long to find out the hot anger of her father had to do with something else. Lee was accused by my parents of having stolen a stack of postage stamps and around $100 cash from my father's desk. Lee's father being in law enforcement made the accusation of theft all the worse for him. And for Lee.

My uncle, Lee's father, is my father's younger brother. My uncle thought very highly of both of my parents. If they said something, it was the absolute truth. Lee soon realized there was going to be no appeal of the verdict. She had been accused by an unimpeachable authority. My parents. Lee's mother wasn't so quick to condemn her daughter. She had been the one who received the letters from my grandmother describing the disappearance of some her of personal things while living in my parent's home. Lee was not living in my parent's house at that time. My sister was. My aunt had always suspected my sister of the theft of my grandmother's items. Lee's mother also knew that Lee didn't have a history of theft. Her son did, but not her daughter. So when Lee vehemently denied the charges, she saw her father only became more angry, although her mother was quickly convinced of her innocence.

The aftermath of these events was devastating in my cousin's home. It was the equivalent of a bomb going off and shredding everyone in its radius. Lee had "earned" the disgust and opprobrium of her father through my family's accusations. Her mother was so completely convinced that her daughter did not steal from my parents that she was set in diametric opposition to her husband. Their already rocky marriage was now in extremis. My father had issued the verdict that Lee, the thief, was not ever to be allowed into his home again. This shame was nearly insupportable for Lee's father. His rage and disgust was directed at his daughter. His wife's efforts were directed at protecting Lee from her angry father. The battles raged on.

The chaos of Lee's home now increased exponentially. By the time she was fifteen she again made plans to run away from home. This time she succeeded. She was gone for many months. Her circumstances deteriorated once she was out on her own. She eventually was living in the street. I don't need to list the trial of woe that her middle teen years resulted in. With a little imagination you can probably guess what pitfalls she was set up to fall into by the circumstances I've described.

Shortly after Lee found herself in the street she contacted her parents. Money was sent so she could ride a bus back home. When she returned, home was very different. Her mother seemed distressingly indifferent to her. As was her father. No one asked her where she had been or what had happened to her. Obviously malnourished, thin as a rail and in poor health, no one expressed a shred of concern except that she take a bath because "you smell horrible". She was home again, but she was on her own. Her parent's marriage was all but over. Neither of her parents seemed to give a shit about her so immersed were they in their own drama and misery. Shortly after she returned home, her parents separated.

Over a year after my cousin had run away from my parent's home a surprising event occurred. My father called his brother and asked if he and my mother could come over for a short visit.

When they arrived my mother sat quietly not saying a word, as is her usual role when something really big is going down. My father was acting as the family spokesman:

"We were wrong. It turns out that our daughter [my sister] stole the money from us. We owe you an apology. "

End of subject.

Immediately after this statement my father turned to his brother and started making small talk. That was it. "We owe you an apology." There is a very large difference between saying you owe an apology and actually giving an apology. This was a grand example of a non-apology. Minimally, an apology would look like this: "We are very sorry for the false accusation made by our daughter and we ask your forgiveness." My cousin, sitting with an infant in her arms, was stunned into complete silence. She felt confused at my parents' attempt to sweep away an avalanche of dreadful consequence with this barest mention of culpability. It effectively trivialized everything she had endured as a result of my sister's vicious lie against her. Something so huge was just reduced to a mere dishonorable mention. My parents assumed a cool, distant mien while they mechanistically pronounced their reversal of the accusations that turned Lee and her family's life completely upside-down. They refused to even wear a look of humility. And where was the perp, my sister?? Safely back at home sheltered from having to make the confession herself.

I am certain that what happened is my sister finally got caught stealing cold hard cash from my parents with no one else around who could be blamed. This would have led to a line of questioning about the cash that went missing from my father's desk that wasn't noticed until Lee ran away. My father would have been the one to revisit that event in light of new information. Whatever my dad had on my sister, it had to have been overwhelming for her to confess to a previous crime of stealing and then blaming her cousin. It is very likely it was my father that put two and two together and was holding my sister's feet to the fire. Whatever my sister's punishment ended up being, it couldn't have been too bad because the most difficult thing for her to do in order to make redress was not required of her. She was not required to make things right herself to the people she had so grossly wronged.

This is how I look at my sister's refusal to personally apologize. At the time she would have been around 20 years old. Although she was still living in my parent's home, she was no longer a minor. Knowing her as I do, if my parents told her she needed to apologize directly to Lee and her family, my sister would have been quite capable of flatly refusing to do so. She could not have been forced to do the right thing because my parents had little power to make her do what she didn't want to do. My sister had long ago rebelled against parental authority. So her absence from the apology scene at my cousin's home was likely less about my parents sheltering my sister from the consequences of her behavior and more about my sister absolutely refusing to make things right herself. So, in my mind, not only is she a complete coward, but she is a low-life for not ever doing anything to even try to make things right. Morality is fundamentally about doing the right thing by others. It is about how our personal habits and behaviors and words affect other people. My sister, like all narcissists, violate all the fundamental laws of morality because they put themselves first in every situation. In my opinion, my sister belongs in a zoo because her level of morality resembles an animal's. She is unsafe to directly interact with humans.

Because my father had issued the edict to his brother that they weren't welcomed in his home if Lee was with them (which means they didn't feel welcomed at all) my father would have felt the pressure to clear the air a bit since the residual sense of fairness still present in him would have required he make some signal that the closed door was now open again. Naturally, my father's lame-ass overture did little to bring the two families together again, but I doubt he cared about that. He only wanted to remove the evidence of his part in the crime against my cousin and her family by removing his imposed sanctions. This was his "cleansing act" to absolve his own conscience. It obviously wasn't about making things truly right.

I do understand that the level of shame my sister brought on my parents was substantial. Part of the evidence of their sense of shame is that these events were never even hinted at to me. I never heard any of these events from my parents' or sister's lips. I did hear about my cousin running away and being a thief. They never told me the "rest of the story". I also know how my father, for as long as I have memories, has held his brother in some contempt. This was largely because of my mother's nasty attitude toward anyone in my father's family. She was able to infect my father with her many insinuations toward all of his family. Since my sister's actions affected people whom my parents considered "beneath" them, this would have helped to mitigate their sense of shame giving them the courage to show their faces for the fake apology session. All that "these people" deserved was a quick quasi-apology with no acknowledgment whatsoever of the dreadful consequences my cousin and her family had lived with because of my sister's bad act. These facts, when I finally was made aware of them two decades later, outrage me to this day.

My cousin shared this episode with me about a year after we had developed a close friendship. The year was 2003. At that very time my sister was beginning to show signs of jealousy that Lee and I were close friends. It was something I tried to hide from my sister as much as possible. But certain events (involving our mother) were making the truth evident. Sister dearest wanted a piece of this action. As had been true all of our lives, if I have something, sister feels entitled to it. She had already made comments to me that made it obvious she expected me to smooth the way to open up the possibility for Lee and my sister to start communicating. When I became aware of my sister's outright crime against our cousin and her lack of confession for any of it, I was sickened that she would expect to come into Lee's life like nothing had ever happened. I was aware of my sister's expectations of me; how she was expecting to have a friendship with our cousin, too, with me opening the way for that to happen. I was also aware that my cousin not holding resentment toward my sister (she's just that kind of person), but she was having a hard time feeling like she could trust my sister. No small wonder. Like me, Lee had been the recipient of malicious acts that had never been admitted to. This makes forming a trust nigh to impossible. Because I now had a big picture of my sister's past relationship with my cousin, I never did anything to try to facilitate the two of them becoming friends. I wasn't going to be found pressuring my cousin to trust a person that I myself was still not able to trust.

Keep in mind, my sister could have made the effort to start communicating with our cousin on her own. Nothing was keeping her from picking up the phone. Well, nothing except for this sordid past. She knew she had a huge hurdle to get over in order to have a friendship with our cousin, but she wasn't willing to pay the price to truly make it right. She was unable, nay, unwilling, to make a full confession even after 20 years and apologize to the person she directly wronged in such a callous and devastating way. But my sister, as usual, was more worried about her own feelings. Not wanting to set herself up for rejection she would not extend herself in such a way as to experience full rejection if her advances were rebuffed.

In true narcissist fashion, my sister wanted to proceed as if this unpleasant past didn't exist. She wanted my cousin to pretend it didn't exist. Sister dearest hung back, occasionally making small overtures toward Lee, but Lee never took the bait. Sister was held back from more aggressive overtures because of this past history. She was afraid of outright rejection, so she would make a tentative attempt, like a Christmas gift one year (kinda funny after never having given my cousin Christmas gifts in all their lives) or a short email. Lee acknowledged the gift or would answer an email without inviting a response...and then would let the contact drop. My sister didn't have enough moral certitude to proceed more aggressively, which is why she wanted me to get in on the action. My sister did send one email to Lee during this time in which she made an attempt to wash the slate clean by vaguely apologizing for things not specified. While attempting to look like she was apologizing, she also minimized her own guilt by blaming the "damage" done to her by our mother. She attempted to pretend to not remember anything specifically wrong she might have done, but wanted Lee to know she was sorry for whatever Lee may remember being done against her. I was singularly unimpressed when I read it. She was trying to whitewash things, not apologize. An apology is completely ruined when accompanied by excuses. If you are not willing to completely own your shit and to not attempt to shuck any of the blame, then don't bother calling it an apology, cuz it ain't one. I'm sure my sister noticed that her shitty non-apology didn't buy her any capital.

I am certain my sister never has connected the dots between her letting her cousin take the rap for her own theft and the violent upheaval of Lee's life and her family's cohesion. This doesn't take her off the hook. This makes her all the more despicable to me. Why? Because, in her own mind, she is less guilty than she really is. She has no real appreciation of the extent of her guilt and the depth of reparation necessary to show true remorse. She is less guilty in her own mind than she really is in reality. Even with this lesser amount of guilt from her perspective, she isn't willing to come clean.

My sister spends an inordinate amount of effort and emotional energy on remembering the past with her mother and father and recounting all the ways their actions hurt her. This is because she found Christianized, yet still Freudian, psychology which tells her all her problems stem back to her childhood. Nothing is ever her fault. She is a class-one victim and is anxious to make sure everyone around her knows how damaged she is. I used to wonder when she was going to get around to reviewing the past where she hurt people. Then, I would wonder if she would do what she was expecting her parents to do for her: completely own her bad acts and express eternal remorse for them. But, no, it never seemed to go there. She does exactly what she faults her parents for...ignores her own bad behaviors and acts like they never happened or puts a positive spin on her deeds so they are no longer viewed as mis-deeds. If you feel like making excuses for my sister, go right ahead. But I'm done with excusing her. She has never been willing to own her own shit, while expecting everyone around her to own theirs. Like any narcissist, she is a complete hypocrite. One of my greatest temptations right now is to send her a link to this blog so she can finally see in black and white what I know about her and what I think of her so for the first time in her life she would be forced to hear what her victims think of her. I'll probably resist this temptation successfully unless she tries to force herself on me at some point. All bets are off then.

One of the people most relieved when I cut off my sister was my dear cousin Lee. I was the only person through whom my sister could have access to her. The same was true of my parents. When I stopped communicating with them, I was not only sheltering my immediate family, but Lee, her sons and her father. We all live in the same city a few houses apart. My parents and sister are unaware of where we all live. We moved in tandem for a second time to a whole new state and city. This move was not done specifically to drop off the radar, but it happily worked to that end. We all feel delightedly happy and safe from their predations.

I can end this chapter with a happy note. Before my cousin was out of her teens, her father turned around. He radically transformed after he and his wife separated and eventually divorced. The abusive behavior stopped. He has been a loving and supportive father to his daughter. Those who know their situation, know he has gone well beyond the call of duty in how he subsequently helped Lee and her sons. They are a close and loving family now. Her sons are good young men with bright futures. I am proud to know them all. They are more than family, they are beloved friends. They have each and all experienced the very worst of my family. They know personally the hateful and cruel ways of my parents and my sister. I am blessed beyond measure that our lives came together in spite of my mother's multiplied efforts to keep me from knowing these wonderful and real people. I am grateful that I stopped believing my mother's lies so I could find the people who are more family to me than my parents and sister ever were.

When you expunge narcissists from your life, you find that you have a lot more room in your life for good people.

The Christian and the Fifth Commandment-Part One

Exodus 20:12 NIV: "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you."

It has recently been brought to my attention through an email exchange with a reader of my blog that there is a need for me to address the unique issues confronting Christians when dealing with a narcissistic parent.

It is hard enough to deal with the disapproval of societal expectations when you aren't a Christian. There is a lot of pressure in secular society for adult children to excuse any bad behavior in their parents. There is also a strong disapproval by society for anyone to use the label of "evil" to describe certain behaviors. Pop psychology promotes the idea that abusers are victims too. We are told to look sympathetically at abusive people and find "reasons" for their behaviors. This serves as nothing but a preamble to excusing the behavior. This gives the abuser a pass to continue treating you as they want with you having no real power to remove yourself from the situation.

As difficult as it is for a non-Christian to find relief from the evil behaviors of their narcissist parent, you can multiply those difficulties by about a factor of ten for the Christian. The narcissist parent who claims to be a Christian has the huge leverage of a God-given commandment to "honor your father and mother" which they universally interpret to mean, "do everything I tell you to and make me happy). They also have the leverage of a community of people (other believers) who tend to dismiss the idea that another Christian may be covertly evil and abusing their children. So other Christians can often be recruited by a narcissist parent to put the pressure on the adult child to make all efforts to stay reconciled to the abusive parent with the added fear of condemnation from God if they don't knuckle under. This behavior is spiritually abusive. It can not be over-stated how powerful a club this is on adult children of narcissists to keep them, and their own families, under the tyranny of their parent(s). Should a person decide that such a God isn't worth serving if He forces us to stay in an abusive situation with a parent or risk hell, they really can't be blamed. I wouldn't want to serve such a god either.

The good news is that the God of the Bible is just (as in justice) as well as merciful. (Psalm 89:14) His mercy is reserved for those who are humble enough to realize they need it. His justice is dispensed without partiality. (Partiality is presented as being the opposite of "just" in the Bible, therefore God doesn't condone it or engage in it. For example, see Acts 10:34 and James 3:17) Non-repentant abusers are not given a pass by God to continue just because they happened to bring children into the world.

Let's look at the greatest spiritual narcissist's club: the fifth commandment. Is the fifth commandment carte blanche for the abusive parent?

Let me state this very clearly for the record. I am not presenting you with the Biblical arguments I used to justify my decision to cut off my parents. These are the the principles that I used to inform my decision to do so. If my examination of the Bible made it clear that I am supposed to keep evil people in my life if they call themselves "mom" or "dad", then I would have had to comply. It didn't work out that way I'm happy to report.

First, I can categorically state that there is no Biblical example of God honoring evil. We have no Biblical example or statement of God requiring His people to honor evil. We have scores of Biblical exhortations for God's people to rebuke and shun evil (I will deal with this more in an upcoming post). If you are willing to acknowledge as truth these two realities then you will have to conclude that whatever God was telling us to do in the fifth commandment, He was NOT requiring us to honor evil. This is not going to be an exhaustive treatment of the fifth commandment. I am only going to give you some highlights to help you examine what you believe.

Christ divided the commandments into two parts; love for God and love for man. (Matt. 22:36-40) The second part of the ten commandments (love for man) begins at the fifth commandment which tells us to honor our parents. The very foundational authority of society is parental authority. If children are not taught to obey parental authority it leads directly to societal degradation through the disregard of ANY authority that is the inevitable result of a disregard of parental authority. This foundational authority is reinforced by God's Own authority by placing this command in the Big Ten. The intent and purpose of this commandment is to maintain structure and order in society and respect for higher authority at the place where it originates...the family. Ideally, parents are to be loving, protecting and nurturing even as they establish their authority to make the rules in the family. When these principles prevail in a majority of families, society is law-abiding and healthy. We see in our present-day examples of how the breakdown of parental authority has far-reaching effects on society at large. God is protecting all of us with this commandment from the devastating effects of the breakdown of respect for all authority which begins in the family home.

When we grow up and leave the parental home the fifth commandment doesn't apply in the same sense, though it still has force for the adult child. In Biblical times, up until quite recently, children would leave the parental home when they themselves were entering marriage. The Bible is clear that a new dynamic occurs when this happens. Genesis 2:24, where God performed the first marriage we are told this: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Biblically, when we marry, we are no longer under subjection to parental authority. We are no longer to live as if our parents come first. The Biblical language on this is profound. In God's eyes, married people "are one flesh". No where is the parent/child relationship described this way. In God's estimation, marriage binds two people together more profoundly than even blood relation. What comes first, after we marry, is OUR SPOUSE. We do not live our lives according to parental "laws" except the laws of kindness and respect and making sure our parents are not indigent. This is a crucial point because narcissistic parents are audacious enough to make the claim that they come before your spouse and your own children. This claim can not be supported Scripturally. If you are conceding to this demand you are not honoring your vows before God and your spouse and you are failing your own children. The Biblical instruction for married people is that they are to be in subjection to each other. 1 Cor. 7:3-4. Other, more controversial, verses put the husband in authority over the wife, but this is with the careful caveat that the husband is to love his wife as tenderly as he loves his own body and as Christ loves the church. Since Christ died for the church, this puts the bar very high on the level of sacrifice and other-centered love a husband is to have for his wife. No oppression is being sanctioned in these instructions. But I digress. The point is, Biblically, a husband and wife are a new entity before God and are subject to each other and not their parents. A conscientious married Christian is duty-bound before God to no longer subject themselves to the rules and regulations an unscrupulous parent may demand. The narcissist parent who demands the regard of first place in the lives of their grown children hasn't a Biblical leg to stand on.

In my next post on this subject I will continue to present the principles involved with the fifth commandment.

My Cousin Gets a Dose of My Mom & Sister

For previous installments of the indictment of my sister, go here.

In a matter of weeks after I moved out with my daughter into my own apartment a crisis unfolded in my cousin's household. I will refer to my female cousin as Lee and my male cousin as Darrin.

Darrin was the cousin living with my family when I ran away from home at age 17. He is about five years my junior. I think it is fair to label him sociopathic. (His father, a retired police officer, doesn't argue with this label.) No, my mother's efforts to reform my male cousin didn't work. At all. The older he became the less his parents were able to control his behaviors. Drugs, violence, theft, promiscuous sex, cruelty to animals; if it was bad he was doing it. He had been difficult even as a very young child; the difficulties only increased with age. I am sure that he was one of the reasons his parents marriage was strained. There were other reasons, but I'm sure this was not an insignificant factor.

The next part of this story is in my cousin Lee's own words. This is from the letter she wrote to my dad in the summer of '05. Names and places are changed to protect the guilty and the innocent:

The next significant time that I spent with Aunt D was when I was fourteen years old. My mom dumped me in Aunt D's lap quite suddenly one day. Mom and Dad had decided that we needed to leave [the city they lived in] to escape from Darrin. Darrin's constant scrapes with the law, violence at home, drug use, and licentious behavior were making things very difficult for all of us at home and for Dad at work. I think the last straw was when a local drug dealer began making threats of violence against our whole family because Darrin owed him money. I desperately didn’t want to move away from the only friend I had bonded with since my family began moving around when I was nine. We did move though, and within months Darrin was living with us in [new city], anyway. In retrospect I can see that my parents’ marriage was already in trouble. My mom had already announced to me while we were still living in [previous city] that I was now "an adult" and she was "through raising me." I ran pretty much wild, as our household continued to revolve around Darrin and his needs, problems, and violent outbursts. I lived in an atmosphere of constant stress, turmoil, chaos, and violence. I broke out in skin rashes, had headaches, and lost my eyelashes as stress ate away at me physically and mentally. I couldn’t make real friendships and was very withdrawn. Dad was busy at work and still trying to straighten out his errant son, and my mom had begun "living her own life" by attending church and developing friendships there and volunteering at the library. I was as alone as could be.

Darrin continued to rule our home. One day as I was sitting at our kitchen table eating and Darrin was in the kitchen fixing himself something to eat, he suddenly, out of the blue, turned to me with a malicious, frightening grin on his face...in a scary, satanic voice he hissed, "I am the devil, and I am going to kill you!" My eyes opened wide and I laughed nervously and uncertainly..."Darrin?..." I said...all of a sudden his distorted face fell back into its natural expression and he laughed in his regular tone...the scary voice gone, he laughed, "Oh, just kiddin’ Lee!" He really scared me.

One day, soon after that, my mother and I were having an argument...I don’t know what it was about...screaming, yelling, and anger were the rule in our home, not the exception, so who knows? It doesn’t matter…what does matter is what followed our angry exchange. I went into the bathroom, and Darrin followed me in...in an instant he had grabbed me by the throat, forced me down over a tall standing laundry hamper, and was choking me! I couldn’t scream or call for help or make any sound...the next thing I knew, my mother was practically climbing Darrin's back, peeling his hands off my throat, screaming for him to stop. Finally he let go of me. I was crying and shaken...my mom instructed me to pack my things; I was going to Aunt D’s house! I was astonished and confused...why was I being sent away? Darrin had just tried to murder me, and he was staying...I was being exiled without a word of explanation! I quickly threw a few belongings into a bag, and Mom drove me the four-hour drive to your home. I remember screaming at my mom in the car that I didn’t want to be sent away...she would not answer me or explain what I had done wrong. She never addressed the fact that my brother had just attempted to strangle me...she just stoically drove the four hours. When we reached your home, my mom told me to stay in the family room-kitchen area, and she went up to your bedroom to await Aunt D’s arrival. Apparently, she didn’t want to sit in the same room with me while we waited for Aunt D. I remember Aunt D’s surprise to find me in her kitchen when she arrived home. She went upstairs, and she and my mother had a long conference. My mom left immediately following the conference with very little said to me except, "Good-bye." It has only recently occurred to me that perhaps my mother didn’t ever tell Aunt D about Darrin's attempt to strangle me. She probably didn’t want to admit that a murder had almost occurred in her home and instead of punishing the guilty one, she was exiling the victim! Most likely, she presented me to Aunt D as in need of discipline. Even though I had been allowed to pretty much "raise myself" since my mother declared me "a grown-up", I doubt very much that she presented that picture truthfully to Aunt D. Anyway, I was left in your home by my negligent mother who couldn’t find it in her heart to protect me. I definitely felt like I had been "dumped" into your laps, and I was exceedingly embarrassed and self-conscious of that.

These are the circumstances which landed Lee in my parent's home. As you can tell from what was said, her home was in turmoil. Her parent's marriage was in trouble. Her elder brother was running wild. Lee was having to raise herself because her mother was bored with parenting. Her brother was the favored child by her mother...the above event is just an example of how that was the case.

Now that my cousin is in the custody of my mother it is important to describe what Lee's attitude toward her was. I'll let her describe it...again from her letter to my father:

I tried not to be a burden in your home. I was a bad kid with a stunted character, so I don’t blame Aunt D for everything that went wrong. I got blamed sometimes for things I didn’t do and sometimes for having motives that I truly didn’t have, and, just as when I was younger, I accepted the blame without telling the true story. One day soon after I arrived, Aunt D told me that I would begin attending [a private Christian school] the next day. I started to cry, as I was just overwhelmed with one more change...Aunt D put her arms around me and quietly said, "I know, honey, you’ve had a lot to deal with all at once." That amazing moment has lived in my heart ever since! That was the first kind, loving touch or sentiment that I had been given in months and months...maybe years! I was starved for love and understanding! That moment seared a love and loyalty in my heart for Aunt D that made it possible for me to accept the false blame, the wrong understanding of my motives, her back-handed criticisms, and her exacting demands...they were over-ruled in my heart by my gratitude for her acceptance and love at that crucial moment when I let my guard down in front of her and cried.

Side note: My mother consistently would offer comfort to my sister and I after we had broken down into tears. Most often those tears were the result of our mother pushing us emotionally until we broke down. This was an important part of her brain-washing technique. She instinctually knew to present herself as a "comforter" after we were sobbing. It creates a Stockholm syndrome response. Your tormentor and jailer is transformed into your solace and sustenance. It was very effective. My mother's animal instinct told her at this moment with my cousin that Lee was very vulnerable. My mother didn't have to beat her up to get her to the tears, but she saw those tears and used them to her advantage. The advantage my mother always angles for is that of a savior. She comes in on a white horse and saves you from whatever and you feel eternally grateful and assume the best of her motives even when things start going horribly wrong. This pattern has been repeated so often in my mother's relationships with me and others that I can assure you this was the dynamic in this little vignette my cousin shared above.

Many years after these events I listened for some time as my cousin described what it was like for her in my home during those months. She was foisted upon my sister by my mother. Everything my sister did, she was expected to include Lee. This was not something my sister seemed to appreciate. She took special delight in little torments of her cousin. Or she would take advantage of her for an audience as my sister preened and bragged about her conquests and exploits. Never mind the years of my behavior toward my sister where I didn't punish her for being forced upon me by our mother. My sister didn't choose to "do unto others as you would have them do to you." She was cruel, arrogant and used our cousin as a scapegoat. My sister could now steal things and blame our cousin for it. Lee is willing to admit to her deficits in character. Whatever her character failings at the time, she never once stole anything from my family. In fact, she made it a point to eat as little as she could and to minimize any financial burden her presence may incur.

Lee made it a point to make herself as small as possible. She would wash her clothes in the bathtub so as not to burden my mother with her laundry. (WHY didn't my mother inquire about my cousin's laundry? Good question. My mother really didn't give a crap about Lee. She was an inconvenience.) Lee only had a few items of clothing, so frequent laundering was necessary. When my mother finally took her out to buy some clothing, my mother bought frilly and silly girly stuff that wasn't at all what Lee was used to wearing. She wore them without complaint. Lee would tuck herself away in a dark corner of the furthest room in the house for hours at a time trying to stay out of everyone's way and notice. Her existence in my family's home was lonely and scary.

I could regale with with many little details of the torments my sister and mother put my young cousin through, but I prefer to cut to the chase. I will let my cousin tell one more story in her own words so you can get just a bit more of a feel of life for her at my parent's house. Again, I'm quoting from her letter to my father:

One day, after washing your [delivery] truck, Aunt D came outside to find me to chastise me for some wrong thing I had done. I don’t remember my crime or whether or not I was truly guilty this time. Let’s assume I was. Aunt D stood before me and chastised me...I don’t remember why she was angry, but she was. She grabbed both of my arms and continued to scold me. I wrenched myself free of her grasp and walked away from her. I was only about ninety pounds at the time and not prone to violence. I didn’t want to fight with her or hurt her, but my home life had taught me that when things get physical, the best thing to do is to get away! That’s what I did...I got away. I walked away into the house. Later that evening, I was summoned in to the family room. You and Aunt D were waiting for me. Aunt D sat quietly in a chair off to the side, and you did all the talking. You said Aunt D had told you what had happened between us earlier that day...you said I was never, ever to touch your wife again and that if I ever did, you would kill me! Looking back, I have to assume that you were not actually serious about killing me...however, I took you at your word, Uncle R. Your threat was one of the main motivations in my plan my escape. Wouldn’t you have quickly found a way to "get out of Dodge"? After all, it was clear to me that you had been made to believe that I had acted out violently towards Aunt D. What was to stop the next story told about me from being worse? What would stop you then from keeping your word and killing me? .... I have to wonder if thinking that I had tried to hurt your wife didn’t make it easier to think other bad things about me later after I left your home. I ran away from your home and didn’t look back because I received unfair, unjust treatment there. I was grateful to Aunt D for every kind thing she did for me...I wanted to be bonded to her and to believe that she meant well... but when I realized that again Aunt D’s "truth" was far from reality and that you were willing to defend her to the death, I knew I wasn’t safe there.

Lee's serious plans for running away were shortly set in motion. She had two friends she was able to maintain contact with through letters. One of them lived in southern Cal. These are the only two human beings on the earth who had any idea of what she was enduring in my parent's home. They took pity on her and helped her make plans for her escape. She was sent money for taxi and bus fare.

So a second young girl makes a get away from my parent's house of torments. Unfortunately for Lee, her plan didn't work as well as mine. She had the major disadvantage that her father worked for the State police. This means that State authorities were able to stop the Greyhound bus southbound on the Interstate to force my cousin to get off the bus.

My sister's role in the next scene was primary. Stay tuned.

A Revealing Phone Conversation

About eighteen months ago I received a phone call from my sister. The evening before she and I had been talking again about my reading on NPD and discussing our mother.

My sister had apparently settled on a niggling, disquieting thought...what if I, her sister, was seeing some parallels between NPD and her?

In a voice sounding slightly higher pitched than normal she posed a question:

"Ah, S, I was just wondering. Um, with all of your reading on NPD, do you think I might be a narcissist?"

...the sound of her voice trailing upward at the end with a bit of a coy, saccharine tone.

Since I wasn't born yesterday I recognized an emotional land mine set for my feet, so I had to think quickly on my feet. I picked the most diplomatic yet honest reply I could find on the spur of the moment.

"I think you showed some narcissistic tendencies when you were a teenager."

Her reaction was immediate and defensive. Suddenly sounding quite huffy and very irritated she responded with an immediate defense of herself as a teen. It wasn't her fault. It was Mom's fault. She was a victim of Mom and didn't know how to react appropriately, she hardly even remembers what she did back then because of the trauma, etc., etc.

I knew right then and there that I had picked the safest course. I didn't even say she was a narcissist way back then. I said that, as a teen, she had shown tendencies. So, my littlest criticism of her behavior as a teen (which was twenty years earlier) and she still goes into a completely defensive mode. She proved as recently as this phone conversation that she refuses to own her bad actions during a time when a person is considered accountable for what they do. Can you imagine what holding her to account in the present would look like? Not good. Which is what ended up happening about six months later.

At that time, I was choosing not to perceive my sister as narcissistic. She had been playing it quite cool during the two year period that I was doing intensive research on NPD. I was willing to put everything behind me and proceed as if my sister had actually matured because I was always wanting to believe that. Whenever she gave me the slightest excuse, I would think the best of her.

My diplomatic answer that day was an honest one. But her over-reaction to that tiny piece of honesty forced me to recognize that my sister was fundamentally unchanged in one important respect: she is never to blame. This conversation was also proof she was not sorry for her bad acts as a late teen and young adult. Which meant she would be even less sorry for anything she had done more recently. Even the distance of twenty years was not enough for her to be willing to admit to anything. She has a pile of guilt and shame she isn't willing to pay the debt on so she can be free of it. The "demon at the door" demands payment in order for her to proceed. Deny, deny, deny. The projection of perfection even as she was as a teen is still imperative for her to keep in place. Sad, really.

As I stated in my previous post, my sister has never asked for forgiveness. This conversation confirmed why she hasn't...she is not willing accept any blame for her bad behavior. None. She is always perfectly justified for anything she says or does. Someone else is always to blame. This has been the way of it all through the years.

Just like any other narcissist.

I let my sister talk until she had herself feeling good again. I didn't raise any contradictions. I made noises like I understood what she was saying. Mind you, we have never had a talk about her treatment of me over the years. Never. I always knew it would lead to her justifying herself and quite angrily, at that. I've never been able to contradict her, or even to hint to her that her behavior is wrong, without having to pay the price of her anger and self-justification. I have also learned that even when my sister solicits my opinion, there is only one "right" answer...what she wants to hear. So, I just wanted to her to lay her feathers back down so I could quietly walk away in one piece. She had herself all put together again by the end of this short conversation.

Now I was the one left with disquieted feelings and an uncomfortable niggling in my mind.

My Sister's Life of Crime

Part one, two, three, four of the sister saga.

I'd like to stipulate for the record that my sister became a thief. This isn't something I have brought to your attention yet because I didn't find out my sister's fingers were sticky until I was in my twenties. Since I'm trying to tell this story in some sort of order this fact hasn't been brought forward.

Lemme back up a bit. As I've recounted to you, I moved back in with my parents and sister after leaving my first husband. My sister was fourteen when I first left home. She was now eighteen. Much drama occurred between my sister and mother in the immediate wake of my absence. My mother withdrew into herself and quit being a mother to my sister. Cruel scenes occurred as my mother vented her rage on the only person within reach and still dependent on her. This twisted up my sister pretty good. From the sheltered fair-haired child to an object of unfair rage. It was a jolt. I was the one who took the brunt of my mother's behaviors up until I left. My sister's run-in with the full force of our mother was a shock to her. She decided to accept she didn't have a mother anymore and proceeded to live life on her own terms. She took a serious turn into narcissism. It was all about my sister as far as my sister was concerned. Some say that crisis builds character. Other, wiser folk, say "crisis reveals character". My sister didn't change so much as she committed herself all the more to her narcissistic bent.

This set up the stage for the next clash of the Titans. After two or three years my mother decided to check back into mother-mode. This didn't settle well with sister. Now the rage was coming from sister and directed at mother dearest. Their relationship closely resembled a sibling relationship after this point. They argued and fought and sassed back and forth at each other. It was unclear who had the most power. Actually, it was clear that my mother had surrendered power during her period of self-indulgent depression and my sister refused to hand it back to her. This fundamentally changed their relationship forever.

Sometime during my four year absence my sister decided if she wanted something, it was hers. She started with mom's things. She would swipe articles of clothing routinely. Sometimes she would return them. She was just "borrowing". Well, it was a bit of a shocker to me to start finding things missing. She started stealing articles of clothing. Then my make-up and toiletries would go missing. I finally realized I was being stolen from and started to go hunting for my things in my sister's room and found them often enough to know who the thief was. My mother was useless in dealing with it. Even when I forced a confrontation with my sister in my mother's presence with the evidence in my hand I got no help. My mother had abdicated her role, only I really didn't know that yet. I was just confounded and outraged that there were no penalties for my sister's behavior. I can still see her arrogant look as I was confronting her. Like I was being petty and small for caring that she permanently "borrowed" something from me without asking.

One day I noticed that my sheaf of poetry was missing. As an angst ridden teen I had composed some poetry. Some of it erotic, some of it was actually rather good. I went hunting for it in my sister's desk one day. I was enraged to find it in her things and to also see she was trying to pass it off as her own in one of her classes.

When I was courting Ed, who would be my second husband, we would write letters back and forth because we would not see each other during the week. After realizing that letters from Ed to me, and some of mine to him, were not arriving at their destinations I again went on the hunt. I ruffled through my sister's top dresser drawer and found a half dozen of Ed's and my own letters in there. That means she would go out to the mailbox after I put a letter in there and would steal it and read it in addition to occasionally swiping his incoming letters. All the letters had been opened. This was nothing more than pure voyeurism on her part. I began to despise her again. I moved out shortly thereafter and had as little to do with her as possible for the next five years or so.

My paternal grandparents lived with my parents for a couple of the years during my first marriage. I found out later that my grandmother was vexed by the disappearance of certain of her undergarments, like camisoles, and other lacy things. My grandmother had a nice figure and a love for pretty things. This worked out well for sister dearest because she could steal things that fit from her own grandmother. My grandmother didn't confront my mother because she thought my mother might be the thief. The aunt, to whom my grandmother was writing letters to at the time and sharing her perplexity at the missing items, was certain it was my sister. My aunt was right. For all my mother's faults at the time, she wasn't yet a thief. I had direct experience shortly after this time of my grandmother's missing items so I lay the charge at my sister. There isn't any jury who wouldn't have convicted her given the chain of evidence.

My sister started to steal cash from my parents. Most of it from a little jar that sat on the kitchen counter for years. They called it "egg money" because my parents would sell their chicken's eggs and put the cash in the jar. It was like "petty cash" and therefore careful accounting of the cash in and out wasn't done. My sister would "borrow" egg money. She was allowed to if she put a slip of paper in there with an "IOU". But more often than not it just "slipped" her mind to put that little note in there. Somehow, the cash missing in the jar didn't seem to equal the IOUs. I remember my parents yelling at my sister many times over the "egg money" jar, but she always seemed to have "plausible deniability". They never really got a handle on her cash swiping. She did start to steal cash from other places in the house, too. Like my father's desk. But this was later...and she had a scapegoat for it.

***I also want to stipulate for the record that none of these offenses my sister committed against me were "unforgivable". The only deed that is unforgivable is the one you won't confess to. She has never asked for my forgiveness. So, in the truest sense of what forgiveness is, I am unable to give her something she hasn't asked for. I lived for years without thinking about her "crimes" against me. I made a sincere effort to have a relationship with my sister that was truly sisterly. I didn't revisit the past in my mind until she would do something in the present that looked like what had happened in the past. But it was only after I was forced to realize that I could never have any kind of relationship with my sister that I have re-examined past events in light of what I know now. I don't have any hatred of my sister. She is just a character populating my past that I can study on occasion, but don't feel much one way or another about her. I just want to make it clear that I do understand that what she has done in the past isn't like the "crime of the century". I'm not trying to make it into that either. I'm simply telling how things happened. Cause and effect. A good relationship relies very much on trust. Trust, once broken, needs certain things in order to be re-built. If you want someone to trust you after you've done something wrong to them, the best and quickest way to re-build trust is to specifically apologize for what you did. No caveats. No excuses or blame-shifting. Without that as a start...you will never be able to re-build trust. The best you can hope for is some kind of emotional "truce". This is the fundamental problem created by my sister's acts in the past. They remain unconfessed to the present. She has never "owned" what she did. You just can't trust a person who won't admit their bad acts especially when they were malicious. So these things lay beneath the surface undermining any chance of a truly close friendship to develop between my sister and me. Continuing to violate little bits of trust I would give to her only underlined and highlighted that niggling distrust that remained from years of her betrayals.***

My sister's thievery, and lack of accountability for it, had extremely adverse consequences for my cousin within a year of me moving back out on my own. I'll tell that story another time. This will be the only story about my sister or mother on this blog that I didn't personally witness. But the "witness" has been thoroughly vetted by me. She is in my life. In fact, she lives about six houses down the street from me. (Our families have moved in tandem now to two different states. We've all managed to "slip" my family and are living in peace.)

My cousin is much like me in many ways. We are like sisters. My cousin has direct experience with both my mother and my sister's narcissism. She has experienced everything I have with both my mother and sister. I have an extremely empathetic friend in all this. I have someone who knows personally everything I've been through even though she didn't have to go through as many years of it as me. She's experienced the full range of what I've been through with my family. I have had ways to corroborate my cousin's recollections of events. I have even told her I was going to tell some of her story, as it relates to my sister, here on my blog. She is cool with that. She will be my fact-checker so I tell the story as it happened. Frankly, I'd like it if she told you the story, but I doubt I can get her to sit down long enough to write it up, so it'll be up to me. I do have a copy of a letter she sent to my father in 2005 which outlines her experiences with my narcissist mother. It is quite a well-told tale. Maybe she'll let me share it with you some day. My father rejected the contents of that letter saying my cousin just has a "heart full of hate"...something we all laugh at hysterically every time we quote him because she is about the sweetest person you could ever meet and know. My cousin has been criticized (gently and with humor) by all of us (her family and mine) for taking it too easy on my mom in that letter. Even so, it was rejected by my dad. Talk about a man who refuses to see. Anyway, I digress. My cousin has been neck-deep in the dysfunction of my own family. She's lived it all. It profoundly affected the course of her life.