Before reading this, read up on Parental Alienation Syndrome.
It's not that I'm truly a horrible person, it's that to an Aspie/sociopath/narcissist, anything you do that's different from them (and let's just say it - EVERYTHING you do is different from them) is "abuse". When it comes to parenting, they are the ultimate and forever "Disney Dad". No discipline, no rules and the times you DO make them take part in being "the bad guy", it rocks their whole world.
I can remember one time, my youngest had disappeared with one of his friends. He was under 10 at the time and neither I nor the other kid's parents could find them. We were all, every one of us, terrified something had happened to them. They finally appeared but it was after a pretty rough couple of hours and we were on the verge of calling the police (and the father of the other child WAS a police officer).
The STBE Aspie/Sociopath/Narcissist was out of town for this event and after talking to him about it over the phone, we decided to offer Elias a choice of punishments - either he lose his XBox for a week or he get one spanking with the belt. I also talked it over with my son's psychiatrist and we gave Elias the time to decide which one he wanted, by telling him he had until his dad came home from his trip to make up his mind, which was four days hence.
When the STBE Aspie/sociopath/narcissist came home, Elias decided he wanted one spanking with the belt so I made the STBE do it since I'd already dealt with all the other crap while he was gone. The STBE Aspie/sociopath/narcissist went upstairs, gave Elias one crack with the belt and came downstairs BAWLING HIS EYES OUT!
Why was he crying? I asked him and he told me, "It just hurt me SO much to do that" and he went on bawling. Long, heart-wrenching, blubbering bawling. No mention of Elias and his pain both physical and emotional. Nothing. Elias was completely removed from his mind so focused on his own pain was he. I even asked him, "Is Elias okay?" His response was, "I don't know. I just came downstairs right way so he wouldn't see me crying." I don't know?????? This is your kid. You just cracked him with a belt and you don't know?????? There should have been some discussion after this with the child. There should have been some soothing of hurt feelings. Something. Anything, other than, "I don't know."
Turns out Elias was barely fazed by this. He took his spanking and went on with his life. But this stayed with the STBE for months! He would break out in tears at odd and random times, such as if we were at an amusement park with our son. We'd be standing in line at a ride and he would just stare at Elias and suddenly start crying over the heartache he still suffered over having to spank Elias that day. Aspies/sociopaths/narcissist are SO afraid of one of the kids disliking them for even a nanosecond, they make for lousy parents. Kids are often ambivalent about their parents. This is a fact of life. It doesn't mean they don't love you. It just means they're your kids. The STBE simply couldn't bear the thought of being anything less than perfect in the eyes of the kids, even if it meant them hating me pretty much 24/7 and he encouraged that, the hating me.
And that was about the same time he started his campaign of hatred against me with the kids, both Elias and my son from my first marriage. He started undermining me with the kids 100% and suffered no angst in doing it.
See, Aspies/sociopaths/narcissists have such a great need to be liked, they can't even stand it when they have to be anything but the "fun time" parent with the kids. There's absolutely no support as a parent from these people because that gets in the way of, "The kids HAVE to like me more than they like HER!" Because of this, the kids WILL have a definite preference for Good Ole Dad before it's all over and you... Well, you will be the abusive monster.
Whenever I tried to punish one of the kids for something (again, both Elias and my son from my first marriage), he'd go behind me to "talk" to them. There was a rolling of the eyes. There would be statements made like, "You know how your mom is...!" or "Yeah, I agree. She's being unreasonable. But what can you do?" with a huge shrug of the shoulders. Everything he would say to them at these times was to reinforce to them he was the good guy, I was the monster. He'd then promise them he's "talk to me" about it all, which translated to, "Nancy, you need to change your mind."
He was so good at this, it took me a while to figure out just what it was he was doing. A lot of times I'd cave because of his working so hard to convince me of just what a horrible parent I was for expecting the kids to be punished for such a "minor" infraction.
And this is an example of what he considered to be a "minor" infraction (and I'll have a couple more. This was just a big one) - New Year's Eve, 1999-2000 - My son from my first marriage wanted to go to a friend's house for a party. He was 17 at the time. I was pretty sick with the flu and running a fever so he had to wake me up to ask me. I'm not usually my best after being awakened suddenly like that. Add to that a fever and you've got a recipe for disaster. I agreed to let my son go to this party with the proviso he come home at midnight. He argued he wanted to stay out later due to midnight being "the best part". Okay then, one o'clock. I also told him I wanted the kid's phone number and address so I could get hold of him for any reason. I then fell back asleep.
Around three in the morning, I woke up for some reason and my son wasn't home. However, the STBE WAS on the computer surfing his porn and engaging in his online affairs and spanking off to "chat sex".
The conversation went like this:
Me: Where's Billy?
Him: I don't know.
Me: Did he call?
Him: I don't know.
Me: Did he come home and leave again?
Him: I don't know.
Me (now frantic): Do you fucking know ANYTHING????
Him: I know he's not here. (See the disconnect from the reality of what was happening?)
So now it's on...
I called the number my son had left me. It was a fictitious number. It went no where and was a disconnected number. I drove to the address he gave me. It was an empty lot. I now had absolutely NO idea where my kid was and the STBE couldn't have cared less. God knows a missing teenager can't get in between him and his porn/jacking off/affairs.
The Burger King my son worked at with this kid finally opened at 6AM and as soon as the manager unlocked the doors, I was in there like a bull in a china shop demanding contact information for this kid. After the manager put me through some general douchbaggery, telling me what a horrible mother I was for not knowing where my kid was, he finally gave me the information and I think I drove about 100 miles an hour getting there - TWO COUNTIES AWAY!!!!!
We finally found the house with the help of a deputy we came across. Turns out, this house was a major drug house and it was supposed to be raided on New Year's Eve but my son turning up in the mix prevented that because they were trying to find out what major drug lord this was showing up like this.
We get Billy in the car and he REEKS of alcohol. REEKS! It's coming out of his pores, he's had so much of it. I ask him if he's been drinking and he denies it. I tell him I can smell it coming off of him and if he's not going to admit to it, I'm happy to take him to a police station to have a breathalyzer done. He admits it. He also admits he was passed out when he was supposed to be coming home.
When we got home, I sat a chair in the middle of the living room floor and told him to sit in it until I let him out of it. I then told him, "I'm sick with the flu and instead of sleeping I was out looking for you. Now you can sit there and watch me sleep while you think about what you did."
I took him to work that afternoon, after a good nap, and when I picked him up at the end of his shift, we sat down and talked. I told him he was grounded. He asked me for how long. I told him, "Until I get over it."
Over the next four months, the STBE did his damnedest to convince me I was being "unreasonable" and "outrageous". I refused to budge on this one. I finally let Billy off his grounding but the STBE worked me the entire time. To him, this was a matter of "Boys will be boys".
Another time, this same son, on home for leave from the Army for Christmas, wanted to use our car for a date. He told us, "I'll wash it, I'll fill it before I give it back you." Oh, okay, that sounds fine.
He came to us about an hour before he was supposed to pick up his date: Mom, Mark, can I borrow about $100 for my date and to put gas in the car?
I told him not only could he NOT have the $100 but because he came to us under false pretenses with no intention of paying for the gas he was going to fill up the car with, he couldn't use the car, either. This was such total BS I can't even say it was funny. Not now. Not then. I went upstairs to take a shower and watch some television, considering the matter closed. When I came back down, the car was gone. The STBE was, again, sitting at the computer involved in his porn/jacking off/affairs and this is how the conversation went:
Me: Mark, where's your car (already knowing the answer)?
Him: I let Billy use it.
Me: I thought I told him he couldn't.
Him: I know, but I thought you were being unreasonable so I let him take it. It IS my car, after all.
Me: I thought he didn't have any money?
Him: I gave him $150.
See? See how they do this? Turn the kids against you? Not only did he openly defy my wishes when he should have been backing me up, he gave Billy MORE than he'd asked for, thus solidifying in my son's mind what a "cool" stepfather HE is and what a total bitch I am.
This went on for years. Me being the hard-ass parent, him being the one they all went to because Mom was "unreasonable". The culmination of it for me was when Billy wanted to use my car (after he'd gotten out of the Army and came to live with us) and I wouldn't let him because a couple months earlier, he'd wrecked it by backing into something and didn't tell me. He looked me square in the eye and said, "I'll just ask Mark. HE'LL say yes".
Also in this time frame, he'd become pretty abusive to Elias because of jealousy or because he's also a sociopath, who knows. His father raised him to hate me, too - Billy screaming at me once, when he was about 9 years old - "Dad's RIGHT! You're nothing but a total fucking cunt!"
By this time, Elias was pretty scared of Billy and wasn't afraid to tell me so. I went to Mark that night and told him, "You've undermined me so much with Billy he has no respect for me at all. He's also gotten so abusive to Elias, he's afraid to sleep alone at night. I don't care what you and Billy do, but Elias and I are moving out at the end of the month." (And as a side note, this was in October of that year. Since this was also the month my mother passed away a few years earlier, Mark declared to all and sundry I was simply being "emotional and unreasonable" due to the anniversary of my mother's death approaching)
The result of this was, Mark finally told Billy he was out of it and that all decisions regarding him were mine to make. This angered Billy so much (following so many years of running the household and manipulating everyone), after a couple months of him trying to get Mark to be his buddy again and keep me in line so he could do whatever the fuck he wished, he attacked me and hurt me pretty badly.
Billy was kicked out of the house and I got an order of protection. I haven't seen him since and, frankly, I don't miss him because he's become so abusive and threatening I worry he'd try to kill me, given the opportunity. Even Elias' therapist told me he grown fearful Billy was going to harm Elias and he was on the verge of calling Children's Protective Services about having Elias removed from the house if Billy wouldn't leave.
This is what having an Aspie/sociopath/narcissist in the house does to your family. They create SO much chaos with their line of BS and then like to stand back to watch their work in action, all the while demanding all the chaos go away because it's just TOO much for them, blaming it on the target parent.
This was about four years ago. Fast forward to now. Mark turned on Elias and started targeting HIM with all his hatred of me now that Billy was no longer there to manipulate. He would drive Elias to school every morning and spend the entire half-hour ranting about what a horrible and abusive person I was/am, even if he had to make it up. I had no idea this was going on until Elias spilled it to his therapist when he was about 16 or so. The therapist saw it for what it was, emotional abuse, and called Mark in for a private appointment; just him and the therapist. I don't know what was said that day, but Mark was put on notice if the therapist ever heard of it happening again, he was going to call CPS and turn him in for being abusive. (He should have done it then, and I should have insisted on it but hindsight being what it is...)
It never happened again, that I know of, but Elias also told me his dad told him, "If you ever tell anyone again I'm doing this, the state will take you away and you'll never see me or your mom again." With an Aspie/sociopath/narcissist, everyone's fair game for abuse. It's all about them being able to do/say whatever they wish, no matter how horrible or abusive, and everyone is just supposed to say, "Well, that's Mark!" The need to be the favored person is SO deeply ingrained in them, they don't care who they hurt in order to have the admiration of others. They will use people like you might use a box of Kleenex during a cold. And they don't care. They have absolutely NO empathy at all for anyone else. This is also the mark of a sociopath and why they are so similar personality-wise.
Mark kept up his tirades against me, planting the seeds of hate in the kids, to the extent none of them are talking to me now since I filed for divorce. Elias, whom I was once so close to and who could/would talk to me about anything and everything, told me in our last conversation I was an abusive bitch and "You need to just kill yourself and put me and Dad out of our misery".
Now who does that sound like?
Since Elias left for the Air Force, we got along pretty well for the first year or so. At least until about eight months ago. He started getting extremely angry and hostile towards me (and I found notes Mark had been making beginning about the same time - this past July - that he had begun making plans to divorce me. This explains why Elias' personality and love for me changed so radically and so quickly) and had cut me off from him then. His campaign to hurt me using the kids went into effect LONG before he left, LONG before I had him kicked out.
If you were to ask Elias today if there were any good qualities to me at all, he couldn't come up with a single one. A few months ago, he told me he KNEW he could always count on me to be there for him, while knowing he couldn't count on his dad to have his back. Now, he'll tell you the opposite, along with about a dozen other horrible things about me. Not long before he cut me off, he'd also stopped telling me he loved me.
Parental Alienation, anyone?
Note: I'll be honest - I can look through the list of PAS symptoms and see where I'd done things like this to my son. One item that stands out, #8, is - I refused contact with my family for several years. This was following a long campaign by the STBE Aspie/sociopath/narcissist to convince me my family was awful, his family was wonderful. He also outright lied to me at times about it - such as when I was in the hospital following major surgery. I'd asked him to call my siblings (my parents were gone by this time) and a few other people to let them know I was there. He even had a list and took my cell phone with him to call them so he could have their numbers. He was gone about an hour and came back to report to me none of them cared. He told me my siblings all took the stance, "I don't care. And please tell Nancy to stop calling me". Seems they'd also tried to call the house to talk to me and he would tell them, "Nancy doesn't want to talk to you".
I was LIVID at all my family once Mark reported this back to me and I wrote them all a pretty scathing letter about staying out of my life. It wasn't until three years later my oldest sister had the courage to call and she got me on the phone (right after Mark had been kicked out of the house).
So, yeah, taken out of context, it would look like I'm guilty of PAS by the simple fact I prevented Elias from having anything to do with them. Which is exactly what Mark wanted. I'm working on fixing things with my siblings but the nephew I helped raise still refuses contact with me as do a couple other people. When you divorce an Aspie/sociopath/narcissist, they spread it around. MY family heard from him about the divorce before his OWN family had. They want everyone to hate you as much as they do.
