Is it possible for both parents to have NPD and OCPD?

[Call Me Cordelia]

I think this is my parents. I've been certain both are N for a long time. They each had an N parent. My father the more classic N, my mother the inverted N who lives to please him.

But the OCPD... I saw it more readily in my father. We couldn't do ANYTHING without being criticized harshly, from the way we washed a dish to the way we had the shades when he was watching TV. It was normal for him to stand over us breathing down our necks waiting to pounce when we did something "wrong." This has paralyzed my youngest sibling. When I was home from college he would refold all of my clothing because I did it "wrong," and then give me a lecture about it. He also has hoarder tendencies. Has boxes and boxes in the basement that haven't been touched for forty plus years and nobody's allowed to open.

But my mom, she is a little tougher. She organizes things obsessively, according to her to cope with my father's need for huge amounts of stuff. She keeps label maker companies in business. The level of categorizing is insane. In the kitchen there are labels for every type of foodstuff, which is in its own Tupperware, and each labeled. (E.g. Chips, pretzels, tortilla chips, popcorn, goldfish, BBQ chips...) Nothing is kept in its original packaging, and everything is always "in stock." Hoarding? Only particular Tupperware stuff was ok, and when they discontinued that line there was serious grieving and wailing. Every summer we would spend a week cleaning the whole house top to bottom with Q-tips. Not even kidding. Moldings, the roof on our plastic doll house, every possible crevice in the window frame. Q-tips. But most of the time, you could write your name in the dust on the furniture. But when I was sporadically instructed to clean my room, it was expected to be q-tip clean. She was not as harsh as dad to us, but she was harshly critical of other people's housekeeping and cooking habits.

Does this sound like OCPD to you folks? How do I know if I'm being normal? I have no idea whether I'm a slob or not, whether my expectations for level of good-enoughness are right, for me and for my kids. It stresses me out sometimes to think I'm being too harsh or too lenient, and having no idea if I'm doing it right.

[Call Me Cordelia]

Oh, and for both of them brand loyalty is part of their religion. When I had a new baby once, my dad decided he was going to make pancakes. I did not have Hungry Jack mix in my pantry!!!! Horrors!!! Don't I ever make pancakes??? Sure, but I actually prefer to make them from scratch.

Who in the world has time to do that? I've never heard such nonsense!!!  From both of them. They were double teaming me over my choice to defect from their preferred pancake mix. He never did make pancakes, but they left me a huge box of Hungry Jack on the counter as a parting gift. 

This is what was normal to me! I mean, how do I be really normal after breathing that air most of my life?

[WomanInterrupted]

To answer your question:  IME, YES!   

UnBPD Didi had the "brand loyalty" thing down - ONLY certain things would do, and I won't list them all, because I don't want to be a walking commercial.   

My  unNPD MIL is the same way and *neither one of them* understood the concept of making something from scratch, which is something I love to do  - I'm not quite mental enough about cooking to try out for MasterChef, but it's going to be fresh, tasty and free of unnecessary preservatives and it won't come out only certain boxes, bags, mixes, and cans, or be only a certain brand prepared frozen food. 

Didi was also a *hoarder* - a goodish portion of her hoard was little tiny things (miniatures - she was an "enthusiast" who had a "shop" that was really her own personal candy store), kept in plastic storage boxes that all had a white cardboard label taped inside the lid,  written in her own script.   

I think there were well over 10,000 of the damned things, in addition to a "hobby" (dollhouses) that had taken over the entire house, there was 60+ years of items she'd never thrown away - including stuff I HAD thrown out, and she rescued from the garbage!   

When I was trying to dehoard the place to make it safe for unNPD Ray, who was 85 and living in a place that really was a death-trap, unNPD C, the business partner, tried to put herself in charge of the process, just so she could fondle *every single thing* a couple of dozen times, before deciding what "we" would do with it.   

Literally - there's a plastic box marked "vases" - she had to pull them out, one at a time, unwrap them, fondle them to the point her eyes were glazed and she was on the verge of drooling, wrap them up, put them down on the floor, repeat the entire process for the whole box, then do it again, and again, and *again*  -  like she was getting *high*. 

One plastic box  could take her *eight hours*  - and she might come to NO decision other than, "Keep all of it!"   

This was Didi's personal mess - C had her own.  She just wanted stuff, but had no place to put it, and was trying to force me into keeping *everything* at Ray's, like her own personal Annex Hoard that she could visit and fondle, any time she wanted, under the pretense of having some mythical garage sale in the spring, that I knew was never going to happen. 

Like Didi, C was used to being so bull-headed, that people would throw their hands up in the air and give up, in disgust - she didn't count on me.   

I tried to be nice, at first, and work with her, but when it became clear that everything she did was a passive-aggressive attempt to literally squeeze me out and show me who was boss - by ripping apart the staging area I'd worked so painstakingly on, to make an Amvets haul-away easy - that's when my claws came out, I put it back together, found what I thought was *every single little Precccccciousssss* Gollum could possibly want and hauled it to my car, for donation.   

Then I called and told her I'd done that - don't come back.  Have a NICE day.   

Can you believe a 70-year-old woman *tattled on me to my daddy* and made herself the victim?   

Yes, I think you can!   

UnNPD Ray had a thing for finances - really, he was quite good, and even became his Union Local's treasurer  for over 10 years, until he pissed off too many people  by always being right - even when he wasn't.   

Ray was *obsessive* about spending  - he'd often scream at me for blowing my allowance on candy, and Didi  at her OMG levels of spending - I'd be punished, Didi would spend MORE - and Ray was so cheap, he was wearing his deceased father's boxer shorts, as well as many of his clothes.   

Grandpa died in 1972 - Ray was put in a memory care unit in 2016.  He *still* had many of those threadbare clothes  I remember grandpa wearing - and the boxers looked bad enough to be from the same era.   

One of the reasons many people didn't think Ray was incompetent was his finances were *perfect* - without realizing he'd put every damned thing on Autopay, because his finances were going to be a thing of legend.   

Oh, they are, all right - "Saul" the eldercare attorney, couldn't quite get his mind around the massive amounts of money Didi was spending before she died  - just so she could HAVE and *not miss out* on something - and let it get lost and buried in her hoard, which I *know* was her final FU to me - after I started lowering contact, her spending went *insane* - like she going to prove a point.

She did - she was more mentally messed-up than anybody could have guessed.  All of them are/were - C, Ray, MIL. 

And thankfully, I won't be dealing with any more of it - MIL is still out there and will probably try to drop on us like a bomb  when we  hit retirement age.   

She's going to get a hell of a rude awakening with *iron-clad  BOUNDARIES*  - she won't understand them, but thankfully, we won't have to see her bounce-around hard surfaces like a pinball in a machine  performance  when *defied* - because we won't be meeting her.   

OCD and PD - HELL of a swell  combination!   

[Call Me Cordelia]

Yeah, it wasn't actually Hungry Jack lol. But everything from the peanut butter to the canned tomatoes had to be a certain brand. Usually an expensive one. I remember parroting them to a teacher one time at age 6 or so, we were shopping for a food pantry as a school field trip/project and were instructed to buy the store brand. We were treating the poor people badly by giving them inferior food! They deserve the good stuff! I had no idea what to think when my teacher told me she ate the store brand every day, and they would get half as much food if we spent money for a label.

My parents do make things from scratch, but for them it's an all day affair. My father would get it into his head to make soup in the winter. He would spend the time after breakfast closeted in the kitchen, and lunch would finally be served two hours later than usual. And we'd have to make a big fuss about his "homemade" soup, which was just frozen veg and rice in chicken stock. I think he was watching the stock pot simmer all morning. And we would have to be QUIET this whole time. And my mother's cooking always had a huge side of martyrdom, especially the holiday recipes. Guess they didn't have the energy for *that* on a daily basis. Last I knew they ate fast food at least daily, because it got to be "too much." Doing the cooking without histrionics is unfathomable. So me doing it regularly seems insane to them. Because their way is the only way. 

Any kind of PD seems to severely limit one's ability to live. Whether it's spending all day making a simple soup or drooling over old junk. One reason I get so frustrated with recovery is having to mentally sort through and process all the awfulness that made up my life with my parents, and feeling like I'll never finish. Like my memories are that hoarded basement of stuff I didn't know what to do with, and now I can't throw it out until I take it out and see what it is. So I can move on to other things more completely. Lighting my whole brain on fire and starting over isn't an option, too bad. But for the PD there is no possibility of other things! The obsessions and control take over so completely they define them. And that scares me so so much. Just understanding and looking from the outside at what I survived sometimes sends me shaking and weeping.