Zamboni, have you done any reading about how to cope with people with personality disorders?
I'm obviously not diagnosing her, but I suspect that personality disorder management strategies would be very helpful.
The problem with dealing with people with personality disorders is that you see their behavior through a lense of expecting them to be able to act reasonably. Everything they do that's so egregious feels like a massive deviation from what you know to be acceptable. But to them, it is *totally* acceptable behaviour. In their warped world view, they're not at all "bad" people breaking the rules of interpersonal conduct, they're totally reasonable people doing what's best in any given situation. What's reasonable to them is horribly calibrated.
Everybody lies, but we have an understanding of what lies are reasonable and what aren't. So when someone lies beyond what we consider to be reasonable, we see them as actively breaking the social contract. Someone with a personality disorder knows they're lying, but feels like it is actually within the limits of reasonable even if to everyone else it's a massive violation of the social contract.
It's not that they can't tell that they're being manipulative assholes, it's that being an asshole is fully within the limits of totally reasonable behaviour. Again, we all lie, we all manipulate to some degree, their degree of what feels like an okay amount of lying and manipulation is just broader.
What happens is that a personality disorder can create a person who consistent feels like they're behaving absolutely reasonably, but in reality, they're perpetually engaging in what everyone else perceives as totally unacceptable behaviour. But because they truly feel their actions and reactions are reasonable and proportional, everyone else's outrage and attacks feel unjustified and persecutory.
So how do you deal with that?? Well, it's really fucking hard.
It's a lot easier to deal with someone who is just an asshole be ause they've decided it's worth it, because at least you can intuitively understand their behaviours and motivations. But with a personality disorder, it's extremely destabilizing because you can't Intuit based on your own understanding of what's normal. So a lot of behaviour is seriously shocking and distressing and hard to make sense of, because well, you can't really, not unless you get so intimate with that person that you truly grasp their world view. But why would you do that with someone who treats you and your loved ones like garbage?
The advice I give to people who have to deal with someone with a personality disorder for the sake of someone else is to try and treat them like a series of behavioural patterns. Try to take the morality out of it, because they're not doing the things they're doing for the same reasons that you would if you did them.
You cannot really understand them and no amount of outrage or consequences is going to change them. All you can do is try to understand their patterns and work within that system of patterns. What stimulus triggers them to behave in ways you prefer and what stimulus sets them off more? When they are set off, how much time usually lapses before they circle back and reengage?
It might be absolutely true that she's like this because of her mother. If her mother was abusive, her foundational understanding of how people behave with one another could have been fundamentally warped. Again, this is not an excuse, people can choose to seek help and work on their warped world view instead of choosing to scam everyone around them.
My point is not that you should give her a pass, my point is that you shouldn't let yourself get sucked into getting constantly outraged at her, because that is just a heat sink of suffering that is essentially meaningless.
She may not have a personality disorder, she may just be an epic asshole and fully, accurately aware of how much of a prick she is and exactly how harmful her behaviours are to the people around her.
Either way, her behaviour is extreme and confounding enough that resources on how to handle people with personality disorders is likely to help you develop strategies to stay more sane in your dealings with her.
I'm currently coaching someone on how to manage encounters with a woman with severe BPD from childhood abuse. She hates her and is dealing with her for the sake of a young child in distress who needs support. Every few days I have to remind her that this isn't about the woman with BPD, it's about the child. The woman with BPD is just a collection of behaviours to manage, it's not worth focusing on her at all as an object or moral outrage. Shell never subscribe to that outrage, she will never be able to even understand it, so it serves zero purpose.
Your outrage with your step mom served a great purpose of curing you of a sense of responsibility to your parents financially. That's cool. But now comes the hard work of trying to contain her in your own mind if you are going to choose to stay connected to your father.
Try to start moving more towards perceiving her as psychologically deranged. When she does something fucking awful, try to imaging how bizarre her sense of normal must be to do such insane shit. How mangled must her experience of the world and the people around her be to get caught lying and then pull this shit to your face?? It's actually kind of unfathomable. It would take balls of steel for someone neurotypical with no personality disorder to consciously and cognizantly do that shit with full ability to anticipate how others would perceive it.
She likely cannot. She likely cannot anticipate how a "normal" person would feel in response to her actions, which is probably why she's able to do them.
It's truly horrifyingly fascinating when you look at it through that lense rather than the lense of what it would take for YOU to behave that way.
