Or you could tell her that it is where you keep your gun locked up and that guns are for killing and you own that gun for shooting people dead. And that dead people are dead forever. Then you could teach her some actual gun safety in case she ever stumbles across your firearm.

Just riffing here.

You know the best way to avoid shit like this? Don't have guns.

Exactly. I don't know anything about this woman's life (and she's not providing the context necessary to know), but I do know this: if every time you try to address a problem or conflict with someone, they immediately become defensive and turn it around on you without accepting any of the responsibility (even if you…

Oh good for you. I do think that people who're twisted up in that way can improve (assuming they genuinely want to) — but man, teaching empathy and perspective is NOT easy. Very well done indeed, and best wishes for continued success.

It's funny how when you're not doing so great they're always like I have no idea what I did wrong, he/she turned into a willful teenager and ruined their own lives. And then if they become successful they're like look at this great kid I made!

Ah, sweet Boomers. They went from "Trust no one over 30" to having the AARP scream "Ageism!" in almost every situation.

My mom does exactly this. She was a completely atrocious mother and threw me out when I was 17 because I made a huge deal about her dating a coke dealer after he made multiple deals FROM OUR HOUSE. (Dealers and addicts are her type). During the arguing he went at me and took a swing and the neighbor called the cops…

This is my (and my two sibling's) experience with our mom. I recently had a huge breakthrough with her. I gave her the example of what she said, and she started to weasel it around into "what she meant". As usual.

I feel sorry for him in an academic way, if that makes sense? It's sad to be a person so miserable and angry that you actively destroy all your relationships. He is incapable of being happy even though he chases "happiness" in really destructive ways. I felt a lot of guilt and shame initially but therapy really helped…

Agree completely. It's unbelievably rich to hear Boomers accuse other generations of narcissism considering they're the most narcissistic generation America has yet produced. Millennials have NOTHING on Boomers. These are the people who broke the country, tried to hand it to us, and when we went "uh, hey, this…

Exactly. It's not like I don't have other people in my life who don't have issues but unlike my father, my feelings matter to them and they want us to have a good relationship. My father only ever cares about his happiness and thinks he's entitled to do whatever he wants no matter how harmful his actions may be to…

You can certainly make behavioral allowances for people you care about or are related to. But once reality and reasonableness get trumped by "I want to continue to behave in this manner and believe things that demonstrably aren't true, and I want you to enable me to do so" — then it's over. Screw that. I'm not going…

This literally sounds like my ex husband. A diagnosed narcissist. "Conversations" are not possible at times. Learning that I was not at fault in this crazy cycle of communication made me feel more FREE and happy than I can possibly describe.

For a second, I thought I had already posted to this thread, because you described my mother to an absolute tee. The BPD/BD combo really seems to encourage that delusional self-preservation - the number of times I have brought something up, only to be screamed at that "I never said that!" or "That didn't happen!" is…

Denying things that actually happened is called gaslighting, in case you didn't know, and pretty serious emotional abuse in my opinion.

Yes, yes, and yes. Cutting family members out of your life is not a decision one takes lightly. I didn't understand it before. Now I do. I will have only limited contact with my siblings. I will not be alone with them. That's just the way it is. Anyone who wants to put the blame on me for that will be shut down…

I have some experience dealing with someone (not a parent) who is so willfully disconnected from reality that they just don't understaaaaaand why you're upseetttttt what did they do wronnnnng can't we talk about it? And fine, you summon your backbone and your patience and you explain it clearly and simply. And your…

Your mother sounds like my mother; I cut her out of my life when I was 16 (I lived with my father) and asked her for an apology for the beatings and neglect that she inflicted upon me. Her response was basically a shrug that I could visualize over the phone. I just had to get on with life knowing that there would be…

Vagnoni is 56, a few years older than I am (I'm at the boom's end.). When she writes about the ideas boomers have about how parents should be treated, I have to laugh. Boomers treated their parents like garbage. They had tons of advantages. The kind no group before or since had.

My mother has a lot of mental health issues (bipolar depression and borderline personality disorder) and she doesn't process guilt at all well. So she denies things so aggressively and persistently that you start to wonder if they ever really happened. I am (mostly) estranged from her because she was emotionally…