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Dealing with imposs...

[Closed] Dealing with impossible parents... A problem shared is a problem halved?

mboy · 2017-10-13T18:42:48Z

Just venting and reaching out right now for hopefully, some useful 3rd party views that may help me see things a little more clearly than I do right now... I make no bones about the fact that me and my father have a difficult relationship, anyone who knows me knows that, it won't come as a shock to anyone. We all have faults, I could sit and write mine down, I'd be here all night! But I also know I'm a grown adult, and I don't believe I'm even half as bad as he makes me out to be. Anyway... To cut a long story short, I'm now 37 and have come to the end of my tether with him. He has pretty much never apologised to me (to the point where he refuses to acknowledge any wrong doings, before then accusing me of some of the very criticisms I am levelling at him!) for anything. And I don't mean in a "sorry son, couldn't get you the games console you wanted for Christmas" kind of way... I mean in the "sorry son, I shouldn't have brought my new GF to your mum's funeral" (9 days after she died, he met new GF within 3 days of her death FFS!) kind of way for starters. The long and the short of it is, he does and always has done what he has felt necessary to satisfy his own personal needs (usually revolving around women and to a lesser extent, booze) and me and my sister always came a distant 2nd place. These days I've been an adult for 2 decades, but he is still the one thing in my life that consistently drags me down, and I have realised that I can't take it any more! He'll walk into my shop whilst I'm working, accuse me of not doing something which he said he was going to do (he does my books for me at work, or attempts to!), will start a fight with me in front of staff (or even customers!) and then storm off. He'll spend ages convincing me black is indeed white, til we're both blue in the face, so much so on occasion I've been known just to go along with it and let him have his way and agree that black is white, for him then to change his standpoint and insist that black is of course now black! Basically he tries to make me feel worthless all the time, and it's taken til now for me to realise it! So how do you approach someone like this to get them to stop? Can they stop? Will he ever see what it is he does to me, and begin to understand how angry I am? He flies off the handle at me and says "of course you're never wrong are you", but how do I argue with that? I make mistakes all the time, and apologise to people when I have made them if and when they have been affected by said mistakes. My father? Well he's never made a mistake of course... :roll: It comes as a major shock to a young lad when his father isn't quite the superhero of a man that he idolises from a very young age... Don't get me wrong, I'm some way past that I'm afraid! Right now I'm more concerned with a practical path forwards, short of the two of us battling it out til the death (he's initiated that one before, sadly me not being a willing participant, it's a horrific thing to be able to say you owe your life to your little sister who managed to drag him off me whilst he was 80% of the way to successfully strangling me! And no, 15 years on, I've still not had an apology for that one), how do I approach him? I'm well aware that I've not been pro-active, I've let my anger build and build, and right now it it flowing over and I literally can't speak to him without calling him all the names under the sun. Which is of course counterproductive, because he believes he's never done anything wrong, and all my anger (which has been pretty well restrained so far) is just white noise to him! FWIW, I'm 37, he's 63. In the mistaken belief that all I'm now interested in is any potential inheritance from him, he frequently uses the passive agressive "well you won't get any inheritance from me if you carry on like this" arguments as if it will hold any power over me (I couldn't care if he had £5 or £5million for me to inherit, money doesn't drive me in the slightest). I would dearly like to fix things (if at all possible) and have a functioning relationship with him, of sorts, before he gets too old, but I'm not playing his mind games! I've got my faults for sure, but I also know some of my own strengths, and he'll consistently make me doubt those and he gives me a huge crisis of self confidence all the time. So any help/advice gratefully appreciated... What would you call the way he acts towards me? Is it Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Something else? I'd love to understand what it actually is to do some more reading around the subject! Also if you've successfully dealt with a parent with similar traits yourself, please describe what worked for you. I really am all ears, cos otherwise, it's the last straw which is sadly to cut him out of my life for good!