There is definitely some overlap between NPD and BPD, but my dad doesn't have the emotional volatility that seems to go with BPD. In either case, I don't think my dad's issues are significant enough to be declared a bona fide personality disorder. He definitely checks more boxes in the NPD column than he does in any other.

I absolutely felt relief when my 1st step-mother died. And I will feel relief when my mother dies. My dad likes narcissistic women. When I was a teen and asking "Why do these women act terrible towards me?", Dad kept saying "They love you in their own way". Well, no, I don't think they do. In the case of my 1st stepmother, she even said so in her journal to be read after she died! I can laugh about that now, but it wasn't funny at the time. Who does that?! As your final act toward someone, instead of responding with generosity or kindness, you say "Actually, I don't love you, but that's perfectly normal and I'm sure you understand why". Like, you could just...say nothing instead. Or if you felt compelled to say something, you could say "Our relationship was difficult, but I wish you well in life". But instead you choose "I didn't love you". Ok, you mean old cow! Who does that?! lol!

This is how it is with one of my narcissistic relatives. I can't say if they actually have NPD, (it is beyond my paygrade to diagnose!). They are profoundly self-absorbed to the point where I can't honestly tell if they recognize that I am a full, separate person. I sort of exist as a doll or a concept in their world. My narcissistic parent lacks self-awareness. All of their actions are with the goal of stopping themselves from feeling bad, insecure, lonely, worried. I do not have any evidence of them thinking "How would this action impact those around me?" or "I can see why so-and-so felt insulted or hurt when I said/did XYZ". They are extremely focused on how others perceive them and need boatloads of external validation to feel ok enough to get through the week. If someone feels upset as a result of my dad's actions or words, he will either insist it's not a big deal or claims he has no recollection of the event. To my dad, words are meaningless. You can say whatever you want, whenever you want if your feelings justify the words. So when my former step-mother threatened me and my kid? Dad didn't see it as a big deal, because "She didn't mean it. You can't take her words seriously. She was just mad". Well, what *did* she mean by it, dad? Why say that if you don't mean it? You would have thought I'd asked him why water was wet. The question baffled him because in his mind it's a given that words are meaningless mouth-noises and that if I was upset by what his wife did (and what he did by defending her), then I was consciously choosing to be disagreeable and make life hard for him. It took me a shamefully long time to understand that you can't say snotty things about someone just because you feel mad at them, and still expect the other person to stay in your life. Thanks, dad, for that life lesson! My dad absolutely has assigned everyone a role and gets really frustrated when one of us goes off script. He'll spend a lot of energy trying to wheedle and cajole his kids back into our assigned roles and gets upset when one of us (usually me) refuses to cooperate. However, if you told him this is what he's doing, he'd be genuinely baffled and confused. He has no self-awareness. If you told him that manipulating his kids into doing what he wanted was not normal, he'd argue that he's not manipulating you at all because this is how normal people relate to each other, and manipulation is an abnormal thing. He thinks it's normal and that I'm consciously choosing to be disagreeable and difficult when I enforce boundaries. Since he believes he's normal and understands that manipulation is abnormal, he can't possibly be manipulative, because you see, he's normal which means none of this is happening. He never stops to think "Is there any truth to what is being said? Could my words and actions be perceived as manipulative?". That would require self-awareness and the willingness to admit he's flawed. He can't admit that, because it would destroy the little self-worth he has. In his mind, a character flaw is like death. I do believe there are narcissistic people that enjoy causing strife and anguish for others. They likely have a sociopathic streak in addition to their narcissistic tendencies. But for my dad, his motivation isn't to watch someone struggle and be uncomfortable. It's just that his self-esteem is so very low that he can't see any way of building it up without taking part of someone else's joy for himself. Also, thank you for letting me brain-dump on your threads, @gardenmom5 . I feel like I jabber on too much sometimes! You inspire a lot of introspection in me and it's helped put some things in order in my mind.

How do I overcome the gaslighting? a) I have a list of what I call "wtf moments". These are moments I have described to other people who invariably stare at me with wide eyes and say things like "WHY do you still talk to this person!?" b) I think about what my reaction would be if any of these things happened to my child. That usually brings things into sharp focus for me.

I have run into this too in homeschooling circles. The anti-vaxx families I know 100% believe that measles, whooping cough, polio, etc are no worse than the flu. When the ebola scare was all over the news a few years ago, I had someone tell me "I am not worried about ebola because I eat organic and my body handles toxins better than non-organic eaters". No. That's not how that works.

I am also directionally challenged. I can only figure out cardinal directions when the sun is out. If someone gives me directions like "Go North for 3 miles, then head east" and it's night time? What the heck, should I navigate by stars? I'm not a Viking, this plan won't work. My sister lives in a major city that is mapped out on a grid system. She extols the virtues of this system by saying "It's great! Once you know where you are on the grid and where the streets fall in relation to the grid, you can navigate anywhere!" Well, yes, if you memorize the dang map, yes you can navigate anywhere! If you don't know where the center point of the grid is, then how do you know which direction to head? Also, Madison Street turns into West Madison Street *as you head EAST into the city*, so you have to remember that West Madison is east, not west. And East Madison? It's like 1 block long, but West Madison? It's 8 miles long. Just why?! None of this makes sense to me. Just tell me to turn left at the 3rd stop sign past the Burger King and I'll get there. Don't tell me things like "It's 1/2 mile North of the 7000 block of West Madison, on the odd side of the street". Exhausting.

Also, many people aren't looking to join your family. Most people just want a little information to further their research and will happily share info they have about shared ancestors. My 3rd grear grandfather Valentine has hundreds of descendants. I have no more claim to him than any other random cousin. Just because I and the modern day "Rice/Reiss" family are related doesn't mean we are all going to start having Sunday dinner together, lol. It turns out that one of my grandma's cousins lives in my town. I have zero contact with her, even though she and I also have a mutual friend. She knows who I am and hides when she sees me in the store, lol. I want to say to her "Lady, I didn't move here to follow you! It was just a weird coincidence! Calm down!". Anyway, I don't think it is odd for people on ancestry or 23 and me to reach out to other people they match with. That's one of the purposes of those sites, to help people connect and share info.

I'm surprised that my grandma does not have some half siblings out there. Her father was MIA in Russia (or Poland) for awhile during WWI. The story goes that he was sick/injured and a Russian woman pulled him off a pile of dead that she was robbing. She realized he was still alive and nursed him back to health, and he just kind of...hung around for a year or two "getting his strength back" and working on her property to "pay her back". 🙄 It's a fantastic story and I'm sure there's some truth in there, but it's also the sort of "Big Fish" style tale that my family tells, where everyone is a hero that meets colorful characters and nothing unsavory ever happens. I'll update when/if a Russian or Polish distant cousin ever pops up, wondering how we're related. 😉

I definitely think they approached you all wrong, but may I ask why you don't respond to other genealogy researchers? I have a few "brick walls" in my family tree that I can't get past because there isn't any documentation available online to move me further along in my research. I keep hoping that one day, someone will load a developed family tree and I can finally figure out where my great great great grandfather, Valentine Reiss, came from in Prussia, so I can find the names of his parents. You'd think with a name like "Valentine", he'd be easy to find, but no. 😕 Every February, I try again to get some more information about him. I got lucky one year and a kind person on ancestry had loaded a photo of him! But now we are both stuck at the same point in our research. 😕

That's an interesting way of looking at it. I wonder what you do with those types of people, though? Do you cut them out of your life completely, do you keep them at arm's length? Where do they fit in? That's the million dollar question, I suppose.

10 year old kiddo is an only child. He reads, plays Legos, has some solo board games he plays, plays with the dog or cat, plays games on his Nintendo, or sometimes watches videos related to his hobbies. Sometimes we play games together or he talks with his dad about shared interests. He has a few chores he does at night, too.

Several years ago, my half-sister wrote me because she, a newly married and 26 years old, wanted my advice on how to help her newly-acquired-via-marriage nephews and nieces adapt to their own parents' divorce. You see, my half-sister and her husband had come to the "realization" that one day, they may have to step in and take custody of these kids, because half-sister's SIL was such a basketcase (nevermind that these kids had fathers that might want custody of their children). My half-sister wanted my advice and opinions on steps adults had taken to help me adjust when my parents (my mom and her father) divorced way back in the 70s. She, at 26 years of age, childless, and married for a year? maybe two years? had determined that if everyone simply *talked it out*, why things could just sail along so smoothly. She just wanted to know what she should say to these kids to ease their way in life and make up for their parents' disastrous marriage and divorce. And the arrogance of it all made me furious. Talk it out? Really? You think all it's going to take to resolve years of hard feelings is a few chats over cocoa? Well, how nice. How exceptionally nice it was of her to offer to patiently listen, offer a few pat phrases, and think that would make it all better for those kids. Even now, almost 10 years later, I'm still profoundly angry about this argument with her. It turned into a huge fight because she kept saying "But if you just *talk about it*, you'll feel better! These things only get better if people *talk about it*!", and I kept saying "Drop it. I don't want to talk about this with you". She kept pushing and I finally blew up at her and said, "Fine. You want to talk about it? Great, let's talk. Here's all the crap I dealt with as a step-child in your mother's family. What are your solutions for fixing it, since you know so damn much about all this, tell me!", and spilled out 30+ years of anger. Suddenly, she had nothing to say and didn't want to talk about it anymore. Sometimes, "talking it out" doesn't fix anything. Sometimes, talking about it just turns it into a scab to pick at.

Nothing like a therapist with lousy boundaries!

I'd still be going to her department chair or the dean about this. Everything you described is just...weird, creepy, icky, not ok.

This part worries me, too. I have an acquaintance who takes her genetically female child for hormone injections, so the child can transition to male. The child is 14. The child also has a mom that is very vocal about her belief that being female is a terrible burden and emphasizes all the terrible things that happen to women, (assault, harassment, unequal pay, etc). I can't help but wonder how much influence mom has over the choice to transition away from female. Because after listening to mom talk, it feels like the kid is moving *away* from femaleness rather than toward maleness.

I lived near Toronto during college, and a lot of girls would cross the border to see what they euphemistically called "The Canadian Ballet". A friend kept pestering me to go with her until I told her that I had a boyfriend who would happily let me see him naked *for free*, so I didn't feel a big need to pay to see someone else's boyfriend in the same condition, lol.

Your daughter needs to go to the Dean and keep going up the chain until this professor is made to stop. The requirement raises all sorts of red flags! This prof is opening up the college to a long list of sexual harassment charges! I don't really care if people strip as a profession, as long as they are treated well and it's their choice, yet I would absolutely NOT feel comfortable going to a strip club with anyone in a position of authority over me, (like...a professor!). I mean, I wouldn't want to go to a strip club at all, but doubly not with some dude that is basically my boss.

(((hugs)))

I have had "to be continued" type dreams, where the dream picks ups on what happened the night before. I am a lucid dreamer, too, but I don't usually meddle too much in my dreams. I like to see what my subconscious will come up with. I have had a weird dream for many years that is so hard to describe. Basically, while I am in the dream, Itell myself 'You have dreamed this before and have for many years". Then I wake up and wonder, have I REALLY dreamed this before? Or am I only dreaming that I have dreamed this before? It is weird and unsettling and makes me doubt which way is up. I finally journalled about the dream and dated it, that way if I have it again, I can refer back to the journal and know I have definitely dreamed it before. Of course, since I journalled it, I have not had the dream again. So maybe I have only ever had it once after all, lol.

I always fold the laundry as soon as it comes out of the dryer. I also hunt down any missing socks as soon as I realize one has gone rogue. I am not consistent with this habit, but having the dishwasher empty when I start making dinner is a big help. I can load the prepwork dishes while dinner cooks and dinner dishes are put in immediately after we finish.

Breakroom with tables, chairs, fridge, microwave, sink, coffee pot with a hot water tap on it. The last place I worked had all that, and they supplied the coffee, tea, sugar, and creamer, and also had a stash of cups, mugs, dishes, and flatware for the employees to use. We also had a dishwasher, and the cleaning person would make sure it was run every day. Most of the staff was pretty good about putting their used dishes in the dishwasher so the night time cleaning staff didn't have to load the dishwasher. We also had a water dispenser. I once worked in an office that also had a stand-alone ice maker. That was pretty nice, but maybe that is more typical in the south (it was in Alabama). I never had that when I worked up north. At my husband's office they have soda fountain drinks that are free for the employees, plus the usual coffee, tea, etc. He doesn't utilize a lot of the corporate amenities, so I'm not totally sure of what they have available other than the sodas and standard breakroom tables, chairs, microwaves.

Love my Speed Queen. Large capacity, manual dials, can add things to the wash after it's started, I set the water level not some internal computer, a true hot water wash, fast wash cycle, and everything comes out super, duper clean!

Deleted because it felt like an overshare.

I downloaded a sample of this book on your recommendation. I'm only about two dozen pages into it, and I can relate to SO much of what's happening in the book. Like, chin-on-the-floor-oh-my-god-that's-my-life type of moment as I read the pages. The timing of the recommendation is excellent, too, because things have been rough between me and my dad lately. (Dad = zero boundaries, Me = struggling to put boundaries in place and seething with anger when he doesn't respect my boundaries).

If dad can't talk on the phone, he can use his words and say "Sorry to cut you off, but I have to get going", rather than sit there and seethe with resentment.