I've posted before about my narc mother. She is truly one of the dark, sadistic ones. I have been on and off contact with my parents because of issues in my extended family concerning people I care about, and she has triangulated relationships so much that I can only contact/hear about them/help them through having occasional contact with her.
Last week was one of those "occasions." She visited with my enabler father concerning a family matter. Although through therapy I have come to believe that he is weak and that his complicity in her behaviour makes him culpable too (and that hardly helped me as I was growing up as he never challenged her), I can't help but just feel awful for him when I see him with her.
She humiliates him constantly, treats him like a dogsbody, brings up private things about him in front of other people, excludes him from conversations, laughs at his misfortunes and makes him the butt of jokes. He has several chronic health conditions and she seems to enjoy aggravating them: like preventing his access to the toilet, or enjoying him having to huff and puff up several flights of stairs when there is a lift. If he tries to tell an anecdote or a story she will talk over him loudly, accuse him of making it up or heckle him. If another woman asks him a question and he answers she will shout over the room about "here he goes again. She doesn't fancy you. How pathetic." I find it extremely difficult to deal with this. It causes me a lot of pain to see my father ritually humiliated.
But when I do defend him and cut her dead with her comments, he for some reason will not run with my support (never has) and either retreats, or agrees with her. I then get a load of verbal abuse from her and he sits there in silence once again and continues to obey her orders.
I have tried so hard over the years. As a child and now as an adult. He refuses to have a conversation about it and has never taken my side.
I do, however remember him as a warm respite during my childhood which made me vaguely normal, even though he never defended me.
What do I do? Do I give up on him?