Another thing my narcissist dad does a lot is tests people. Like, he’ll test your loyalty. But he doesn’t actually tell you that he’s doing that. He’s babbled about it to both my sister & I many times, but about other people who he’s going to test. We 100% know for sure that he tries to play the game with us, too.
And his loyalty tests are ridiculous and unnecessary. They’re based off of his warped sense of societal rules (you know, the rules where there’s 1 set of rules for him and another set of rules that everybody else has to follow). It’s all very sneaky, underhanded, passive-aggressive, and manipulative.
Once somebody doesn’t pass his loyalty test, then he stops love bombing them and puts up a big front like he’s going to drop them like a hot potato, totally cut contact, etc.
…which he then does for awhile…until then his need for attention becomes overwhelming and then he’ll resume communication with the person. This usually coincides with him having burned bridges with other people, too.
As a result, he’s put my sister & I on time outs regularly over the years. However, she & I do not see it as a punishment. It’s more of a relief. We get a temporary vacation from it.
When we were all in the throes of grief after my mom died, he’d call my sister & I daily and talk about himself for over an hour. Never asked how either sister or I were doing, how we were holding up. It was all about him. We later learned that he did this to other people he knew, too, during that same time period.
He’s gone to therapy repeatedly periodically over his entire adult life but none of it ever seems to stick. Sister & I think that at this point, if he IS seeing a therapist, it’s basically to have a paid audience of somebody who WILL listen and pay attention to you.
He’s also a really really bad liar. You can spot it from a mile off. He has a certain way of speaking that changes when he’s telling a lie (tone & other non-verbals change). Whenever we’ve caught him in lies, he never apologizes. He’s more sorry that he got caught.
On what would have been my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, I was getting baptized at church. Really big deal to me. Invited him to attend in person. He declined. Offered for him to watch online (the services were broadcast online). He said he’d attend online. Found out after the fact that he did not watch the services that day…he’d gone house hunting with then-still-married girlfriend (aka my mom’s former friend) instead. Another time, he & girlfriend were a 1/2 mile from my sister’s apartment in her city…he & girlfriend were sight seeing there that day. He was there for 4 days, not once called my sister to suggest to get together. She found out after the fact when he accidentally blurted out that they’d been in her city the prior weekend.
No apology on that one either.
Another time when my kids were in elementary school, he promised and we made plans to go to the San Diego Zoo with him. He was going to be in CA at the same time we were. Picked a date & he was going to meet us at the zoo. Didn’t call me for 6 wk prior. didn’t answer my phone calls for 6 wk after that either. thought he’d dropped off the face of the earth. He never showed up. Went totally incommunicado. My kids thought the reason he didn’t come is because they were bad kids and they’d made him mad.
The reason he didn’t show up?
His wife’s dog had died 6 wk prior.
He didn’t come to D24’s HS graduation either. Reason that time was because wife’s dog had been under the weather. Meh, ok, whatever. By that time, our GAS (give a sniff/care) meter had broken with him.
Dealing with a narcissist can be a lot of exhausting work. With my dad, it’s like having to deal with the emotional maturity of a 5 yr old. Whoever he’s roped into the role of the soother/caretaker/whatever you want to call it…that person has to anticipate his needs all the time, constantly stroke his ego and tell him how awesome & amazing he is, listen to his repetitive talk about his insane conspiracy theory reasons of why he thinks people are doing this or that (he always links it back to himself and in his head everybody has an underhanded negative ulterior motive to everything they do). Sometimes you just want to tell him, “JUST SHUT UP ALREADY!”
My sister & I deal with it by becoming super boring people to him. Therefore, he no longer seeks us out to feed his narcissistic needs. He looks elsewhere for that. It’s never enough with him.
As he has aged, he has not coped well AT ALL with not being the hero anymore at work. He loves to tell tales about his glory days in the workforce. And at this point, all of that ended 15-16 yr ago.
People who meet him at first think he’s charming, a great conversationalist, etc. But if you pay attention to his conversation style, the ONLY reason he ever asks somebody a question about themselves is to use it as a means to continue talking about himself. And because MOST people are polite, he gets away with it.
I now have a very low tolerance for manipulative passive-aggressive behavior. I’ve found it to be much easier to spot this in other people, which helps me to politely avoid them and not get sucked into their vortex. 