It is getting worse with age. Is this PD or dementia?

[Sidney37]

So I've been around for a while.  My parents are in their 70s and I knew eventually I'd "graduate" to this part of the forums.  I've been reading here for a while to get ideas of what I have to look forward to.     I'm thankful for some great advice that I've already used.

My question is about my mom.  She'd not diagnosed.  She has been diagnosed with severe anxiety.  Like many PD mothers, she has always thought of me as an extension of herself. Even living 10 hours away, before I was Out of the FOG, I would get lectured for anything that got back to her or her church friends about me that wasn't something she would have done or a decision she would have made.  I should do things just the way that she would.  I was certainly thought of as an extension of her for a long time.  Sigh...

So the new pattern is that she seems to think that whatever she knows about a person or situation, that I should, too.  I'm wondering if this is because she sees me as an extension of herself or if this is a dementia issue. 

She will tell me a story about someone from church or one of her senior social activities.  When telling it, she leaves out key details and I'm unable to really understand the story.  I typically don't know the people she is talking about very well because I haven't lived there in 20 years.  Things and situations have changed in 20 years.  When I ask follow up questions to understand what she is saying, she gets mad and insists that I should know.   I shouldn't need to ask questions.  She seems to think if she knows it, I should know the exact same facts and information about a person that she does.  I dig deeper and find out that I don't even know the person she is talking about.  Sometimes I've never met them.  Sometimes she'll tell me a story about a person and just use their first name.  Let's say it's "Barb".  She knows 2 people named "Barb" quite well and probably 2-3 others as very casual acquaintances.  She'll tell me a story about something that happened to Barb.  The story isn't making sense, so I ask some follow up questions and find out that it isn't one of her 2 close friends named Barb, it's a Barb that I don't know, know nothing about and have never met.  It's a Barb that she went to high school with and hasn't seen since before I was born!  She admits that I don't know them, but I should have understood everything about this story without asking questions because she knows this person!    

Is this a PD behavior or am I dealing with possible dementia?  If I am dealing with dementia, I'm going to need more help from those of you on this part of the form than I realized!  She's not showing any other signs of dementia.   She's keeping a very active social calendar, paying bills, doing her taxes, making reasonable and rational retirement decisions. 

[FromTheSwamp]

My mom does this.  Always has to some extent, but it has gotten worse.  I see it as a part of her extreme self-centeredness.  Everyone should be able to read her mind so she doesn't have to bother with pesky things like backstory.   

[Iguanagos]

So aggravating. Without knowing her and without a professional diagnosis it would be impossible to tell, but I think in general PD's lose their filter and their ability to smooth over their motives as they get older.

Your M is displaying very similar behavior to what mine has done, treating me as really nothing more than a mirror, whose purpose is to reflect back to her her own thoughts, feelings, experiences, and opinions. I'm not really an individual with my own brain and my own opinions.

So yours is failing to fill in the back story. Why should she bother? It's irrelevant, since your own brain doesn't really need to be engaged here. You're simply there to reflect back to her HER thoughts and experiences. It's very self-centered, as FromTheSwamp said.

Mine started sharing irrelevant and inappropriate details about other people I didn't know to me, and I had to start pushing back. I started asking her, "Do I know this person, Mother?", or telling her, "I don't really want to hear about someone else's health issues, Mother."

When that fails, I start making clanking dish noises or other household noises in the background so it's obvious I'm not really fully engaged. And then I end the call as soon as I can. It has gotten better with that, but the fact is she remains in her own little world. She NEVER calls me just to hear how I am, and probably never will.

Treating you as if you are supposed to either know these people (because she does), or be interested in their story (because she knows them), even if you don't, is just plain rude.

You can start stating the obvious." How would I know these people, Mother?", or, "Why would I be interested in the story of someone I don't even know?" It may knock her off balance a bit as she stammers for an answer. That's fine. Pushing back may at least make her think twice next time. You can hope, anyway.

[WomanInterrupted]

UnBPD Didi had her own version of it that I called "onion stories" because she'd start somewhere in the middle, and I'd have no clue what was going on, so she'd backtrack, then backtrack again, then flash forward and backtrack, and a simple 5-minute story would wind up taking over an hour, and I still wouldn't know WTF she was on about!   

I'd often just tune her out with, "Mm hm..." in the right spots, while keeping one eye on the television, or if it was the phone, I'd play Solitaire and just let her ramble.   

Often, she'd get so wrapped up in the details of who wronged her or what she missed out on, that she'd never actually get to the end of the story, and completely forget what she was talking about, because she'd gone off on so many tangents.   

In her stories, somebody was always mean to her, cruel to her, said something nasty to her, out to get her, didn't like her, wasn't looking out for her, or didn't let her have her way, so she was the victim.   

It was like she was trying to get me to be her champion or say yes, you are a victim, life isn't fair, and everybody really is out to get you - but I never bit, even before I knew what Medium Chill was, I was using bits of it to deflect and diffuse, and get myself out of the hot seat. 

If your mom is anything like Didi, as she ages, her stories will get even longer and more convoluted, often full of details that don't make a lot of sense or are vague, because they've been manipulated, or are out-and-out lies, meant to FOG you into compliance - especially when she insists her doctor (a person of importance, in her mind) said something negative about you, but she corrected the doctor - or her doctor insists you do more for her, or take her to the casino for "relaxation therapy."   

Her stories may start to include the all-important THEY, as in, "They said..."  "They think..."  "They know..."   

Ignore it.  She's just blowing hot air and trying to make her opinion sound more important than it is.

If you stick to Medium Chill during these stories and give her *no* input other than, "Gosh."  "Gee."  "Hm."  "That's something." - she'll probably be in a hurry to get you off the phone, because you're of no *use* to her.   

In person, she may look disappointed that you're not more enthusiastic, but honestly?  How many more times can you honestly be expected to listen to stories about people you don't know and pretend that you actually *care?* 

The best advice I can give is to not ask questions and be a really *disinterested* listener.  If she's at yours, get up and start doing something else, to distract yourself.  At hers, keep one eye on the TV, or on a newspaper or you could suddenly remember you forgot to pick up something at the pharmacy, and have to go. 

And on the phone, there's good old Solitaire or Freecell.   

[openskyblue]

My mother has always done this -- even before she was a super old lady. She has a handful of people she tends to talk about -- all of whom are either saints or devils, not much middle ground or gray areas. It's really taken me until now to realize that she really has never had a deeper understanding or compassion for people, their differences, struggles. Mostly, my mother just wants to talk and have me listen. She's not interested much in my input. It took me a long time to realize that too.

Does it matter if this is dementia or "just" PD behavior? It seems like one solution for you is to stop asking questions about the people she's talking about. Medium chill/grey rock methods can help you with this. When I was preparing to leave my ASPD exhusband, I became a pro at grey rock, just letting whatever he was saying roll over me, only responding with "uh huh" or "that's interesting" or "that sounds hard", etc. It helped me unhook from his narrative - which was all about him anyway -- and protect myself from the inevitable blow-ups if I dared to have an opinion about what he was saying.

[Sidney37]

Thanks everyone.  I guess it doesn't really matter what it is, just that it is.  The only reason that it becomes an issue is that I'm an only child living 10 hours away and how I deal with this will likely have to change if it's dementia.  Ugh.  Then again, there isn't much I can do from 10 hours away and my husband can't relocate near to where they are, so we're not moving there. 

I guess the solution to this and to the other issue I am having with her posted on the parent's forum is to go totally gray rock again.  I slipped away from it due to what seemed like an improvement after she went on anxiety meds.  I hadn't even been around here for a while. Things were better, or so I thought.  There was definitely an improvement when she was less anxious, but now she's certainly getting worse.  She tends to shout at me when I do gray rock.  Demanding to know why I'm mad at her or treating her differently.  Do I lie and say that I'm not?  How do you respond to the direct demands asking why I seem distant, different, mean, etc.?

"Onion stories"!     That's exactly what they are.  Why is she telling me partial stories about people I don't know anyway?  I hadn't really thought that there might be some PD reason for it.  She must be getting some PD fill out of it.  But certainly they are getting longer and leaving out lots of necessary details to understand the story.   Gray rock once again.  I need to just use it even on the phone. 

Thanks again for reminding me of the necessity of gray rock and that I need to use it.  It's so easy to slip back to old habits, especially when it feels like they have changed. 

[openskyblue]

She tends to shout at me when I do gray rock.  Demanding to know why I'm mad at her or treating her differently.  Do I lie and say that I'm not?  How do you respond to the direct demands asking why I seem distant, different, mean, etc.?

Grey rock is a great tool, but like anything it can only go so far. My recommendation is that when she yells at you, leave. If you are on the phone, state once that you won't continue the conversation with her if she is yelling at you, say goodbye -- and hang up. Immediately. Don't wait for her response, which will be to say she isn't yelling or you are insensitive, or whatever. If you are in her physical presence, just say you have to leave now -- and leave the room, the house, wherever you are.

My sense is that the early days of grey rock are the hardest, as the PD person senses a dynamic has changed. If you make yourself as boring as possible, however, that passes. The most important things you can do is be a grey rock -- either sitting there as benign and uninteresting as can be -- or a grey rock that leaves when the PD person gets abusive.

[Zebrastriped]

Sidney37, as my uBPDmother aged, I found the dementia techniques and philosophies useful.  You will never drag them into your reality, so stop trying and save aggrevation for everyone.  Don't argue, see above.  I did not try to determine the cause her making less and less sense.  I didn't have the mental energy for it, or frankly, interest.

Honestly, I rarely asked questions.  No reason to give her an opening to drag out an antique injustice or some other bizarre reasoning.

Grey rock is awesome.

[doglady]

My mother has always done this. She's now in her late 70s and this lifelong trait  has worsened over the past few years -  only in the sense that she now tells the same story over and over, sometimes within a span of five minutes. I now grey rock or medium chill but she purports  not to notice. And then tells flying monkey friends and family members that I don't care. She's right about that.
The focus is always on someone I may know (or more often only vaguely know) and that person's particular health issues, many of which are gone into in minute detail, details I would presume the person involved may not desire to have spread about, eg. who is 'wearing bags'  , who has cancer, who's had various invasive surgeries, etc etc.
Often the person will be identified as someone living locally but the assumption generally appears to be that I'm already privy to all the information in my mother's brain (a horrifying thought). Anyway, when I do occasionally question something -  so I can kind of get a grip on what's actually being talked about - I am met with irritation that I can't somehow read her mind. In fact, more than once over the years she has said 'You should just know what I'm thinking without me having to tell you.' Yeah, right Mum ...I'm good, but I'm not that good. 
Basically I think as people age they just become *even more themselves* if that makes sense. So the formerly 'moderate' (being kind here) interest in others' health, say, and the tendency to expect you to fill in the gaps, as it were, escalates to almost towering proportions with the encroachment of some of the memory problems associated with old age.
Anyway, it's all truly bizarre of course But what can you do other than let it wash over you. And get off the phone quickly. 
I also think the narcissist personality has a tendency to assume you are 'in their head' with them... because, well, why wouldn't you want to be?   

[StayWithMe]

Is this a PD behavior or am I dealing with possible dementia?

My  mother would do the same with me a lot back when I sucked up all her shit.  She would mention people and expect me to know who I was talking or else, judging by the tone of her voice, I was stupid.  Both my parents would be come angry because according to them, they already told me something or I should know it.  I now think that that was a calculated routine.

These days though, I can't be moved.  I'm not ashamed of not knowing something that she expects me to know so she doesn't get that feedback loop that she's looking for.  I am also VLC with her which has improved her behavior when we do speak.