Invisible Friends, Imaginary Enemies: what happens when a narcissist has dementia

What I'm writing about today is really hard, really honest, and not a comfortable read but I've been getting a lot of sympathy lately, and not a lot of empathy and when you get sympathy instead of empathy you might as well just disappear - because its empathy that helps acknowledge you and sympathy that for all intensive purposes sweeps you, your thoughts, and feelings under the carpet. The truth is that the cookie cutter sympathy people give the families of dementia patients is incredibly condescending, and very painful when we are lumped all together as if our dementia journey is the same and that we are all witnessing the decay of a brilliant and beloved family member to a savage condition and that the ways in which dementia patients act out or lash out is a new behaviour they cannot help. There are families in which the dementia patient was always abusive and the ill-fitting sympathetic noises the family members receive is adding to a lifetime of being marginalised and unacknowledged. This article is about what happens when a narcissist develops dementia.

In order for you to understand the double whammy that is narcissistic personality and dementia, please allow me to take you on a journey of what it was like to be raised by a narcissist parent and what that parent's baseline was before he developed significant memory and cognitive impairment.

In a nutshell a narcissist has:

1. An extreme preoccupation with their own importance.
2. A lack of genuine modesty. When modesty is expressed it is shallow and used as a means of fishing for compliments.
3. A deep emotional need for things to be about them - and to have attention placed on them. They will dominate conversations and are notorious show offs.
4. Shallow charm - often seen as charismatic and entertaining their public persona often masks deep bitterness, pettiness, and a quick temper.
5. They are never wrong and never sorry.
6. A lack of empathy for others. While it is easy to injure their feelings (pride) they have little understanding and no sympathy for hurt feelings in others. 
7. Relationships scarred by a pattern of praise followed by disappointment, abuse, gaslighting, and threats.

There are two ways you get hurt by a narcissist. The first is directly - what they do and say to you. The second is indirectly - its by the way other people treat the narcissist or how they treat you in comparison to how they treat the narcissist, or how they treat you because of what the narcissist has told them about you.

Socially, my father has always been praised as good natured, cheeky and charming but few people use the word charm correctly - its actually not a good thing, it literally means control, manipulation, deception a type of confidence trick. My mother and I have witnessed my entire life the way other people respond to my father, as he is coddled, favoured, given preferential treatment, and treated as an endearing overgrown child. 

Behind closed doors he has struggled to exert control and the ultimate power over his family a very difficult thing for him to achieve when he is neither the brightest nor most able person present and the only way he could achieve such a thing is through an extremely volatile combination of threats, manipulation, and emotional blackmail. 

Like all bullies, he works by isolating his subjects. Mum never returned to work after I was born, and I was systematically brainwashed to think that I was "an uncontrollable little monster" and taught to think that "if anyone ever finds out who you really are they won't love you" and that all my family and friends would be horrified to find out who I am and that he was protecting me from their disapproval. But really I was being taught not to trust the people I loved and given no protection from  the emotional rollercoaster he was taking us on. I could not tell anyone what was happening to me for fear that it would backfire on me - "if people find out I have to treat you this way they will think you deserve it and you don't want that to happen"

There were times when I was simply howling with tears saying "I'm good, I'm good, I'm good!" and that was seen as backchat and that in his day children were to be seen and not heard. My mother never defended me or stood up to Dad, so the only thing I could do was try desperately to say that I was not bad. Sometimes he would get the phone book out and pretend to ring a children's home to come and take me away, (now as an adult I know he was pretending to look up a phone number and dial and its a bit embarrassing but he intended me to believe him and I did. I was 5) I was hysterical begging for my life crying "please don't, I'll do anything you want! Please!" and that is the one thing he absolutely wanted to hear, so he'd hang up the phone and I'd get to run off to my room in absolute turmoil between two concepts of myself - my own truth that I was good and had done nothing wrong, and his truth that I was being repeatedly and traumatically exposed to.

Dad was completely comfortable causing that level of distress in a very young child and to this day is alternately oblivious to, or satisfied by, emotional distress in people around him. He experiences only his own rudimentary feelings - mostly pride based - and views hardships in life by how they impact on him.

Late last year when my mother fell and fractured her face, the ambulance hadn't left the street when he said "now we can buy dinner". There was an entire roast nearing completion in the oven, but Dad is in the Chicky Nuggies stage of wanting to buy junk food as often as possible and views Mum as an obstacle to that. When Mum was two days into her recovery from that accident Dad threatened to leave her because she would not let him drive - which he is medically not allowed to do. He screamed at her that she was against him, and that she hates him and that "I can see I will have to leave you"

When I was trying to prevent my dad from having a fall himself, he growled "I wish I didn't have a daughter" a little stung I countered "I'm sorry I didn't die in my infancy!" and he was completely happy to leave me hanging on that. He likes to have the upper hand and he will never reach out, reconcile, comfort, or apologise. That one hurt a little more than you'd think because he used to have a favourite tangent when I was growing up about how he didn't want to have me and had to be talked into it by Mum (who hadn't had any kids when they met)

In one of the more humiliating moments of my life I can remember a dinner when Dad's artist friend and his wife were staying at our house where Dad went into the tangent about not wanting to have me, and going on and on for so long about it and I was frozen in my chair with these tears quietly streaming down my face and the guests were not saying anything because they were horrified but you think he's eventually going to say "but look how great things turned out" but you'd be wrong.... its just a really long, really awful speech about his life and the way he feels and how he was manipulated into having me. Funnily enough those guests never came to see us again.

I think that actually stands out as the only time my father has revealed that side of his personality in public and I think it was an accident - I don't think he realised he looked like an asshole or that anyone was disturbed by it. Normally its good news for Mum and I if people are around because Dad is happy to show off and talk their ears off. His good mood is our bit of relief although it can be trying when someone comes to visit us and he insinuates himself into the visit and takes over the entire conversation. I have a friend who every time she comes for afternoon tea, Dad gets his book out (the definition of his book: a book of poetry written by someone and illustrated by Dad's art work) and he has to show off the entire thing and talk about it for the entire time they come and then the next time she comes he'll say to me "get my book out" and I'll say "no we're not having the book, you've shown her your book" and he'll go and find the book and make her look at it anyway. Or my Mum's cousin from interstate came for a short visit for morning coffee, they hadn't seen each other for 30 years and will probably never see each other again and he has to do all the talking - show off about his art, regale them with his very dramatic and long winded heart valve replacement stories - and every time someone manages to get a word in edgewise and change the topic... well he has the best stories about that topic too!

And the book! And his paintings! My God he'd give the mailman a painting. Every man and his dog gets a copy of the book pressed into their hands even if they don't fucking want it. Any doctor who has ever treated him gets a painting or a book. I can remember when he wanted to write in a card (to go with a gift of the book) to the doctor who operated on his cataracts. First of all he didn't even know how the surgery was going to turn out - we didn't know if his vision had improved or not or if there were going to be complications - and he's already writing in this card.... and he wanted to write this glorious, effusive message to her... a near complete stranger that has no personal relationship with him and kept asking me what else to say and I said "this is really inappropriate this is what you say to someone you know really well. You don't even say this much in a card to Mum" KABOOM nuclear explosion. You'd think suggesting saying "dear Dr ---, many thanks, from -----" on an unnecessary and maybe not even deserved gift was a personal attack on both him and the doctor. Lordy, back away.

So, with narcissism you have a really difficult, troubled personality that is on its own especially taxing to deal with and what happens when you add dementia into the mix is that you have all kinds of chaos. Dementia naturally causes a strong degree of self interest and loss of awareness of other people's feelings but it sends an actual narcissist into frenzy.

In the prime of his power, my Dad was someone who was afraid and threatened by the goodness and ability of other people, incapable of taking on board advice and ideas and hostile to those who offered them. In short My Mother and I have been his invisible friends and imaginary enemies my whole life.

Now as Dad loses his ability to remember, learn, and even reason or follow instructions, he needs to rely on other people - all dementia patients find this frightening but someone who has never appreciated the ability of his wife and daughter finds it extremely impossible to cope with.

He simply cannot believe us when we answer his questions. We can't be trusted to know what day of the week it is if he doesn't know. We can't be trusted to know if the bills have been paid if he doesn't know if they have been paid. He repeatedly asks questions (a hallmark of dementia) but one reason he has to keep asking is memory, but a large part of the reason he has to ask them repeatedly is because if he doesn't believe the answer he ignores it. He won't take in information he does not trust. And we have never been as trustworthy, capable, or good as him.

He has always doubted and ridiculed us. I was called a slow learner when I had trouble with my homework or left the hardest math problems to the last moment because I didn't want to have to sit there with him and be screamed at for an hour. If I were to treat him as he treated me it would be elder abuse. 

He cannot remember being told he cannot drive, or the medical reasons, so with great hysteria and paranoia he battles us almost daily to extreme duress by all parties involved. 

The cute show offy habits he had before? Well now I will be out walking my dog and total strangers will tell me "oh your dad is the artist, he invited me around to see his paintings one day" OH MY GOD. Please do not come to our house!

Now he can't always conceal his real personality - I was in the middle of Bunnings one day with him waiting for Mum to return to our waiting spot and explaining to Dad that we need to wait here so we don't lose Mum and he screams "I don't like listening to you!" in front of all the people. 

I know Dad, I know. Whenever I open my mouth he has two responses - one if, I can see his face, is to pull a horrible face that is bitter rage and irritation that I would dare to speak, and the other if I'm behind him is to screech "Who's talking?" He is reverting to the "children should be seen and not heard" mantra and basically my role here is to be the servant and not have any say in anything. But if he needs an audience he will stagger all the way down the hall and into my office to talk to me, and then get cross at me, end up shouting, and leave in a huff.

One day I had some new photographs taken to be used as profile pics and just in case pics for my business and he wanted to see them. He took one look and said "you've gotten ugly". That stings a bit whenever you hear it from anyone, but from your Dad? When your profile pics look so much better than how you look with no makeup and shitty house clothes on? From the person who even if it was true, would be the one to say "you look beautiful to me?" And then I look up and realise he didn't have his glasses on. I let out this huge sigh of relief and said "you can't see properly. You haven't got your glasses on and you have cataracts" (this was before his surgery) and he screams at me "don't show me any more photos then! Agreed. I wouldn't want to anyway.

And this dementia phase of his life is the final stage of my mother and I becoming completely invisible.

It took me a long time to grow up, learn to speak for myself, learn to enjoy my personality, and I don't much care for being invisible and I definitely don't look kindly on comments that strip me of my identity or feelings. So I don't enjoy the sympathetic response of actual professionals in this industry when they say"it must be so hard for him". All I want to do is scream "he was always a cunt!" He has the same personality he always had and to treat him like an unfortunate victim is to spit in the face of the actual human baggage he leaves in his wake. Dementia patients are human beings, they are not saints. They come from all walks of life. They have all kinds of personalities, and have done all kinds of things to all kinds of people. 

Sympathy is belittling and dismissive and assumes entirely too much. Empathy is finding out what a person is going through and reflecting that back to them in a way that indicates to them that they have been witnessed and acknowledged. Empathy brings someone who feels invisible into the light and warms them with your kindness. 

Ask, explore, nurture... don't assume. Care. 

I wrote this to help people understand dementia in people with narcissistic personalities because I see hardly anything about this online, and to support people who are carers for parents or partners and family members of narcissists. Fight hard not to be invisible.