LagunaBubbles I find your post incredibly validating - thank you. My mother doesn't do psychiatrists or counselling or anything like that because unlike various members of her family who have sought help for the issues stemming from their extremely poor and chaotic upbringing, my mother has sufficient strength of mind never to need any help. I'm not a psychiatrist, I will never share my opinion of my mother's mental health with anyone IRL, but inside my own head I'm as sure she has NPD/paranoid personality disorder as I am of anything I've ever known, and I find it really hard to cope with the idea that I would have to have a professional qualification in order to be allowed to form an opinion of her behaviour. It was a long journey to understanding her behaviour, grasping that I didn't have to subject myself to it and that I had a responsibility not to expose my children to it. Some people would probably say that I should have been able to get there just by identifying her behaviour as abusive, but the problem is, you don't know it's abusive if you grew up with it. And emotional abuse is harder to define than physical or sexual, a lot easier to put down to you being oversensitive or misinterpreting or whatever. I just saw my mother as this difficult thing that I had to manage in my life. I'd see her, and I'd go right back into my role of placating her and taking up as little space or attention as possible. I only really noticed it when I had my kids, when I was forced to choose between my modes of looking after their feelings or looking after her feelings, on a minute to minute basis. And I chose them - there were times when, looking back on it, she pushed the boundaries and tried to get me to choose to prioritise her - and I didn't, and he behaviour went right downhill and I was debating with myself whether to go NC - I was just disgusted and exhausted by the whole thing, why she would steal things and break things from my house, why she would create drama about nothing, go about spoiling for a fight, how my stomach would knot up every time she came in the room, how I was always waiting for the next burst of unpleasantness. But I still don't know if I would have gone NC, only I watched Disney's Rapunzel with my kids and there she was, my mother, but she was the bad guy. And then I googled "why is my mother like Disney's Rapunzel" and I found out what NPD was and it was like a solution crystallising, like suddenly all these things that had made no sense, things I'd ignored, suddenly made perfect sense. And a couple of people I'd had problems with in my working life, and I remember thinking "that person reminds me of my mother and I don't know why", and I realised that they probably had traits if not the disorder. I just wish I'd known what it was when I was younger. I'd have dealt differently with my mother, and with those work situations, and it would have made quite a difference to my life. I'm passionate that people who might be living with a parent or partner who has NPD should know what NPD is, so that unlike me they don't spend half a lifetime fighting blind. If you lived with a psychopath, you'd want to know, wouldn't you, what a psychopath looks like? You wouldn't feel obliged to give them the benefit of the doubt or to leave their diagnosis between them and their doctor, you'd be very happy to have as much information about it as possible and to have some insight into how this person with disordered thinking (very hard for a normal person to understand) would be likely to react to you for example trying to leave, or setting a boundary with them. I don't see why it should be any different with NPD.
Sorry, have totally derailed the thread now. As you were!