Let's say you suspect someone has a personality disorder of some sort: what can actually, practically be done?

[Unprune]

We've all known for years (from an early age, perhaps) that my brother is not quite right. He's 34 now, and yesterday my grandmother told me a story of a particular way he'd treated my father, and I thought, oh for goodness sake, this isn't going to stop, he isn't going to grow out of this behaviour (until a few years ago my family were still excusing him as 'just a bit young for his age' - unbefuckinglievable!).

I don't have any contact with him, and I like it that way. He's a scary man. But my father obviously still wants his son, my grandmother is very stoic, and I just wondered if anything could hypothetically be done if he allowed himself to be helped.

Lizzabadger, what was this sort of thing called, before we got so glib about saying 'personality disorder'?

I'm not sure, my sister has been diagnosed with a personality disorder (by a psychiatrist) they didn't tell her which one (or she doesn't want to tell me which one) I have no idea which one is the truth.

We used to be pretty close but have drifted over time, she visits around once a year and each visit has gotten progressively more difficult. She is very "forceful" in her opinions and doesn't even begin to listen to me. I have gradually gotten more and more fed up of her behaviour, she also has an alcohol problem and as of giving up her job a couple of years ago spends all her time at home on the internet. She likes to blame me for things that happen, and feel sorry for herself.

I have tried to help, but it's not going to work. She is very obsessive and fixed in her views. I have given up disagreeing with her, it never ends well.

She has had many forms of counselling/aa etc. None of these have helped, she complains that she doesn't have a life but is unwilling to do anything to change her situation.

It's very sad but I have given up on her. I won't invite her to visit anymore as it's always stressful, she expects us to serve her every need/shouts at my children etc.

I do phone her now and again, and we get on great/have a laugh. But I know the real person that hides behind this facade and cannot expose myself to it anymore.

It's the massive sense of entitlement I agree with, she went into a 2 day strop last time because we hadn't made her welcome enough. We didn't say good morning apparently and treat her as a princess. Apparently this is her "holiday",no kind of recognition that we have 3 children to deal with, we never say good morning, I do not have the will or time to concede to her every wish.

That sounds very familiar stillconfounded.

The endless blaming is exhausting, isn't it? I had forgotten that until this weekend. Apparently my brother screamed down the phone at my father because he wouldn't give him a bit of furniture that wasn't his to give. Dad got blamed for my brother (a working person, able to drive to a shop and buy anything he needs, at that point in a flat of his own, responsible for himself) not being comfortable. It's just lunacy.

He blames us all for one thing and another. The truth is that we were brought up to nitpick at each other. My dad does this - it's his 'thing', it's not an attractive trait, but he genuinely thinks he's being funny. So it's not like any of us was a shining beacon of positivity.

Unprune, your comment ...

"I would like to talk to my family more about personality disorders but I sense it would be very sad for them and if the logical result is that we all break contact with him, I don't know if I can be the one to suggest it."

... rings many bells!! That's exactly the situation in my family. We are all pussy footing around one another in order to avoid my sister and my mother and everyone else involved being hurt. At one point my brother had the guts to actually start to confront my sister about her behaviour, and for some reason, we all told him to back off. In retrospect I think that was a probably a serious error but if I'm honest I still vacillate wildly between thinking that it would be very good for my sister to have her pride/self-delusion punctured a bit, so that she doesn't keep repeating the same mistakes, and on the other hand thinking, it's too late for her to change now, it's her life anyway and I don't have the right to interfere, and/or she might crumple and collapse completely if her "balloon is actually punctured" by her own family. Who knows what is right???

Your brother and his situation sounds even more difficult to handle though because of the "meticulous planning" you mention which sounds a bit more calculating (whereas I think my sister is just in total denial) and the threatened violence of course which must be terrible to have to deal with. And yes, the endless blaming is AWFUL .... In your shoes, I think I would be avoiding contact too. It doesn't stop one worrying though does it?

Suncottage that is strange isn't it? Obviously the connection between comedy and depression is well-known but surely a pre-requisite of being a good comedian is having insight in to how others respond?? Which is what our siblings seem to lack. Or maybe they don't and carry on anyway (which is an even more depressing thought!). Perhaps it's all a strategy in order to charm and manipulate ...

I recognise many things in your post too LadyFnarFnar. I tend to have a superficial relationship with my sister atm (laughing, as you say, on the phone etc) and she comes to visit fairly frequently. Sometimes it's OK and sometimes it's awful. But a superficial relationship is fairly easy when times are good (ie she is in work) it's when it all goes belly up again that I have to hold my tongue. She went for counselling at one point, but as with everything else, thought she knew better, didn't listen, didn't commit.

Lizzabadger and Ladylush that's very useful information (I will now go and Google avoidant borderline personality). I didn't know there were different types! LB You've hit the nail on the head. No progress can be made without the person concerned admitting they have a problem. When times get tough again (as they inevitably will) I will keep saying that to myself like a mantra and perhaps my responses to my sister will be more helpful than previously.

V. good to be able to natter about this on-line. Thank you for starting the thread Unprune. Although I wish, for your sake, and everyone on here (inc. Attila and AnonymousBird) we had different preoccupations!!

Ime people with borderline personality disorder can be very charming indeed. Even people with NPD....though tbh I can see right through those. BPD is imo harder to spot and often you've been reeled in by the time you realise something's not right.

I met a woman recently who has been diagnosed with 12 different personality disorders I was helping her fill in a form and in the part that asked about diagnosis I had to say lets draw the line after the third type of PD!

Hello all, I find reading these posts unbelievable - unbelievable that 90% of each post seems to describe the same person!!

However one major difference with my sister is that she is absolutely NOT funny, and that is not just me saying that because I don't like her, she just isn't funny in the way that some of your siblings are "funny" from what you say.

My sister is not funny, but maybe in a similar vein, she never ever (and I mean never) stops talking. She actually takes breath whilst talking, I don't know how she does it, she must be a medical miracle. And she will only ask questions to which she already knows the answer.

When she visits every single time (they are not very frequent) she will ask exactly the same questions she asked the last five times...

She can also have violent tendencies (though thank god, this does seem to have passed). She once tried to throttle me, luckily my mother interrupted her before she had done any more than push me against the wall and start shouting with her hands closing in, so I wasn't hurt other than shocked. I suspect my mother has completely forgotten about this incident in her blindness (mother and daughter quite similar in some respects). She used to hit a boyfriend, many years ago when she was a teenager.

LadyFnarFnar - the strop/sense of entitlement thing is so similar. My sister, on the RARE occasions she has been to my house in recent years has a pattern. She arrives, whatever time (always accompanied by my parents I would NEVER let her here without them) and within a couple of minutes she wants to eat/drink/do something completely inappropriate for that particular moment, because, say we are having lunch in half an hour or whatever. And then has a strop when I say (god, I have to treat her like a child) "well, actually we are eating soon, so is that ok?". She is like a baby - decides she wants feeding, so wants feeding NOW.

Now I say to my Dad "make sure she has eaten before she leaves, I am not making her separate snacks".

It's a silly example, but it is typical of her behaviour. It's about attempting control over the situation, ie. accommodate me and my pathetic needs, regardless of what is happening next, it is about being the centre of attention and it is about knowingly stirring and causing an immediate confrontational situation....

OP - this is a great thread, the chance to share our experiences and off load and vent! Sorry to hijack, but as another poster said, I can't help it, and the release of saying my bit is quite de-stressing....

Ahhhhh.

suncottage and others who feel sorry for your parents at the way they are being treated:

This is going to sound harsh, but I think it might help you to stop feeling sorry for your parents and, instead, blame them.

Because it is they who have created these monsters. NPD for instance can be 'caused' by neglect, abuse and/or emotional smothering and papmering like the treatment you describe.

In a way sun, you could feel a measure of pity for your odious brother, because your parents have actually (whether they like it or not) deliberately turned him into the nasty piece of work he is today. They have in fact ruined his life. Not that I am saying for one minute that you should sympathise with him.

The traits you describe very much sound like NPD (and others - PDs exist on a spectrum and there are always traits of more than one) and there is NO cure. Treatment is unlikely to work and he would have to want to get help anyway. Whcih he never will.

Stop feeling sorry for your parents. Hell, they probably even strangely enjoy being victimised and bullied by their darling boy. They cannot perceive that they have done anything wrong either can they!

Just do not engage with them or your brother at all except for on a very superficial level.

Your mother is obscene really to allow your father to be given crap food when he is ill. It is a sign of something inherently wrong and disturbed in her own nature.

Your father sounds like your mother's enabler and is playing the victim possibly - as he may have done all his life.

I do not mean to sound mean. But seeing them as all players in their sorry lives might help you to stop feeling guilty or sympathetic. Just be very very thankful ironically, that you were left to get on with your own life with a book and with not being papmered and indulged. Because in being out of tjhe limelight you have gone on to create a happy and normal life (hopefully, and presumably!!)

Hello Unprune, I usually just lurk on Mumsnet as I find it interesting to read but I really wanted to contribute to this conversation. :)

As someone who works in mental health with adult clients I wanted to say that although you all sound like you have extremely difficult siblings, they also sound very different in some ways. Unprune, as you said you weren't sure where to start in defining your brother's behaviour, I wanted to say that it sounds like if he had a personality disorder, it would fall into the antisocial personality disorder/ psychopathic umbrella of disorders (there are a number of names for the same traits). The callous disregard for others, the superficial charm, the use of others to meet his own ends, the calculatedness, the aggression, etc., all point towards this. I am not convinced by the "narcissistic" description as there doesn't seem to be any underlying vulnerability/ latent perception of himself as flawed - just the systematic abuse of others to meet his own needs.

Sadly his behaviours have been shaped and reinforced from a very early age and he has learnt that he gets what he wants through them so I don't know that anything could help him. Why would he want to change?

UnlikelyAmazonian

Thanks for that and that is the route I have been going down over the last few years - when Mum phones up crying I just go quiet - I neither agree nor disagree. I used to sympathise, get mad, jump up and down etc but I now know she just wants me there to sound off to but nothing will ever change.

It drives her crazy that she gets no response from me but since Dad has been ill I have been around a lot more to witness what goes on and the family dynamics.

I am out of it (thank god) I left home very, very young and never looked back.

One thing they all know for certain is that he will NEVER turn up at my house and be welcomed in. When they go he is on his own (we have no other family) and I know that terrfies Mum.

Hate to sound harsh but tough matey-boy you can sink or swim when that happens

Is this not one of the things that social services is for? To protect vulnerable elder people.

I've got two siblings left at home and afaik the will has been written to protect them living there after parents die. Seems very unfair because they are grown adults like the rest of us, but also awful to complain. Hard.

"Stop feeling sorry for your parents. Hell, they probably even strangely enjoy being victimised and bullied by their darling boy. They cannot perceive that they have done anything wrong either can they!

Just do not engage with them or your brother at all except for on a very superficial level".

I would fully agree with the comments that UA has written here and boy oh boy I have no sympathy at all for my BILs parents situation they now find themselves in. Its their fault in the main.

The first para is so true in my ILs case; they cannot and will not admit to anyone let alone themselves for screwing up big time here.

I blame BILs parents for turning him into the person he now is; the signs were there years ago (he was also violent on occasion as a teen. Nothing was said or done). His dad opted out of family life at an early stage and was solely seen by his wife to be the familial provider (he is himself the product of a dysfunctional and very religious upbringing). BIL's mother smothered and over protected her eldest child. People from dysfunctional families play roles; my MIL and FIL have both played and continue to play out roles here within their own dysfunctional family unit. I do not feel at all sorry for his parents at all.

Earwicga

My parents would never have anyone involved from that sphere - the Macmillan Nurses come in to tend to Dad and that is fine but Mum defends my brother to the point of insanity.

He could shoot dead 37 people from the top of a multi-storey building and she would say "They must have done something to upset him"

Let's not go there!

"I am not convinced by the "narcissistic" description as there doesn't seem to be any underlying vulnerability/ latent perception of himself as flawed - just the systematic abuse of others to meet his own needs"

Hmmm.

I have no doubt whatsoever my BIL is NPD and he has systematically abused others.
Narcissists as well do not respond at all to therapy even if such a person got into therapy in the first place which is very unlikely as they are "right" all the bloody time!. Also my BIL apparantly knows all the "right people" and everything about everything.

Pigglesworth, I certainly agree with the content of your last paragraph.

Sun - my brother isn't as bad as the relatives described above but does have very little self control and behaves like a child. Doesn't wash, is short tempered (and I always get blamed if he blows up) and is light fingered so I have to watch my bag when I am there. It seems like such a waste of a life. And my mother says, 'well he's my little boy'. He's 30!

Do any of the siblings of which we talk have partners/any form of relationship outside the family?

My sister is 35, I suspect she goes out/meets people/has sex or whatever, she is superficially sociable but doesn't have, and as far as I know never has had, a "proper" boyfriend (other than the one she beat up as a teenager).

No, my brother doesn't.

Not been able to read all this thread yet, but am finding it chilling. I think my sister has a "mild" version of what you have been describing. What you are all talking about sounds like "golden child" child syndrome taken to an extreme. That, and a mixture or NPD, where the parents have become the enablers.

Also, some of what you've been describing made me think of something I read recently about sociopaths. Apparently, it's believed that something scary like one in three people is a sociopath.

Sociopaths: www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

Greta, that stat is false. One in three sociopaths are female but the figure of sociopaths in the general population is very different.

earwicga, sorry, I wasn't intending to sound authoritative on this, I was trying (obviously poorly) to recall something I'd read a while back. Thanks for the correction. What struck me is how many people in my acquaintance can tick many of these boxes, yet are, superficially, upstanding members of the community.

My brother has had brief relationships in his teens and twenties but nothing since then.

Any girl he brought home was expected to sit and watch TV with Mum and Dad and or go to the pub with Mum and Dad.

My sister can join this club, only just 20 but well on her way.

-stealing a purse from work (in a nursery school!) and being caught on CCTV

-lying to police about being mugged when lost her phone

-threatening suicide then going to the pub to relax with her phone off while everyone went spare looking for her

-sense of entitlement, lives at home and creates work/ mess

-constantly moans about money despite having no living costs at home, most expensive items such as shoes bought for her and signing on AND getting DLA

-expecting things like dinner on the table when mums gets in from work (she doesn't work)

-shouting at mum over everything

I could go on.

greta at your link.
I actually had to stop reading the lists..

I had always thought she had NPD, had not seen the sociopath stuff...

Hello
This is all really interesting. I think it goes way beyond 'golden child' syndrome: eg DH's brother is the golden child, gets what he wants at home, is more on a wavelength with their mother, BUT although narcissistic to some extent, he's a fundamentally decent, generous person and not to my knowledge abusive (I'd be really surprised if he were).

Pigglesworth, thanks for posting. It's scary when you read the word 'psychopathic'. And I do agree that these people are made, and in fact I've been saying this for years to my dad, who has of course always said 'well what am I supposed to do?' (and ignored my suggestion that he go to a gp to ask about further help - I do understand why that would have been impossible for him to do ).

He was always such a cheeky chappie as a child, getting into mischief, the usual stuff. Then a bit of vandalism, underage drinking, but still just 'laddish' with a hint of threat. And nice to his granny (= source of inheritance?). When I think back to him at my son's age, they don't seem that different. I can't bear the thought that this sort of thing might be hereditary.

A couple of times, he has talked about family, our lack of family - we are not close. But he's missed the point, that if you mistreat people, they retreat. All this 'I just wish I had a family I could rely on" stuff has sounded very plausible to me - I wish the same thing - but it's not possible for him to be part of a family, is it? In the way he means.

If I'm honest, I am absolutely terrified of him, of having to have our lives intertwined in some way. My dad wanted to talk a couple of years ago about how to write his will. I had to say that if the choice is to have to have a financial relationship with my brother, or to have it all left to my brother, I'd choose the latter.

Anyway, anyway...all this angst.

Anonymousbird: have you looked into Asperger's? Your sister sounds like she has some of the traits my mother has, and someone once suggested that as a possibility for my mother. Disclaimer: I am completely NOT an expert!