TheAuthor, you’re awesome
I only became familiar with this personality type too late in my life to handle it well. After my xh left and someone told me about this. Oh, if I had only known years before!
Having said that, the chore here seems to be interacting with them versus not being bullied and bulldozed and trying to interact with a fake person while maintaining your own integrity.
Because they have no integrity and they HATE yours. So they’re going to make you either surrender yours in dealing with them (so they can call you a hypocrite) or they’ll make you sorry you tried to hang onto yours.
It’s easier to just dig a hole in the ground and pull the dirt over your head than to deal with this kind of person.
But here’s some suggestions.
Remember. You’re dealing with a person to whom the only thing that matters is the external appearance. As long as they LOOK good, kind and gentle, they don’t have to BE good, kind and gentle.
(Make sure this SIL isn’t draining all of Auntie’s bank accounts and using her credit cards for expensive shopping trips, by the way. When a narcissist becomes interested in taking care of an elderly relative, my alarm bells go off. Narcissists are not usually about taking care of other people unless there is something in it for themselves.)
When my kids were little, they wanted to play with the remote control. So they wouldn’t ruin it, we got them a fake one. It didn’t ruin our integrity as parents to divert the child from doing damage. Pretty quickly, they realized the fake remote was useless and avoided it and went back to the real thing. In your interactions with a narcissist, throwing them “fake remote controls” is not being dishonest, it’s just diverting the narcissist from causing real damage. Unlike an 19 month old child, they’ll be satisfied with “the fake remote.”
So:
Here’s your diversions.
When they explode in anger and hurl accusations and say you did things that you never would have imagined, trying to defend yourself is pointless. Throw them a fake remote: “You seem so angry about this. It must be very upsetting to be so angry. I’m sorry you feel that way. What can I do on my end.”
(Yes, you are sorry they feel that way. They make everyone sorry when they are angry. No surrender of integrity there.)
They’ll read that as you being subservient. No one said you had to DO what they said. Sometimes if they feel they told you off that’s enough for them.
Throw them useless praise. “Gee, Matilda, I see you drank all of Auntie’s 12-year-old scotch. That’s good you got rid of it for her. We wouldn’t want her poisoning herself.”
(Find ways to inject your own humor into encounters with them. They don’t have to get the joke, but you need to do it to maintain your own sanity in an encounter.)
Be careful accusing them of anything outright. Since they are paranoid and usually are doing the accusing, they can react badly to this. Instead of “Gee, looks like you spent $400 at Macy’s on Auntie’s credit card! Gosh, you thief!” Better: “Auntie went to Macy’s and spent $400 on spandex tights and Manolos. Where are they. We need to take them back. She can’t afford this. Who let her out of the house?”
Seriously… it’s unwinnable dealing with an NPD. Your wife probably is sick of her sister after all these years, but inexplicably loves her and hopes that one day she’ll wake up and be a normal sister like everyone else has. She is mourning the sister she’ll never have. Hearing you criticize her is painful. Just listen when she vents and say “I"m glad I married the better sister.”
Don’t get sucked into disagreements. It’s amazing the things they’ll pick fights about. My xh once sucked a relative into a 30 minute argument over whether the guy who went to market to market to buy a fat pig went home again home again jigity jig, or jigity jog. Of course he was wrong, because he left out the hog part, but that’s the kind of stupidity they’ll waste your brain cells on just to say up when you say down.
Yeah, they make you want to poke your ear drums out with an ice pick so you’ll never hear their arguments again.
Sometimes just looking at them with a smile on your face while they’re talking and saying nothing is the best weapon.
When they stop and say “What’s your problem” you smile and say “Nothing at all” and turn around and walk away. They MIGHT get it.
) That’s the only approach I’ve seen that works.
it’s simply & sadly just not that way. People w/NPD, if that’s what she’s geniunely suffering from, will never “just realize” anything, unless it’s on their terms and /or benefits them in some way. Therapy, if you could actually get the person to attend, is usually pretty intensive, and most patients don’t even see the need to go in the first place b/c they don’t see anything wrong w/themselves. Even if everyone had the same story in the family about how they felt in dealing with her, she would deflect their opinions back onto them -something is flawed in THEM…never her.