The last time I was home, my mom went off at me for hours even after I was in bed at 10am to get ready for work the next day to tell me that Chris treats her and my dad “like dirt” and has zero respect for the two of them. The reason for this was that she claimed that Chris had never once in the last three years ever offered to pay for a meal for her and my dad, and that he just expected my parents to get the tab every time, except for that one time at In N Out Burger, which she says was a massive insult. The irony behind all this is that Chris has paid for many things for them, including vacations to the Grand Canyon and Vancouver, yet, she seemed to have forgotten all of that.

So given that this incident happened, I’m not sure I want Chris to see my parents before the wedding. He’s planning to go to San Francisco for work in two weeks, and he asked if I wanted him to go see my parents. My knee-jerk reaction was no unless he was adamant to pay the bill at whatever restaurant it would be at. He got annoyed at it, saying he refuses to play my mother’s games and that she always fights him for the bill anyway, and so it’s a lose-lose situation. “Why don’t you just do what you would normally do and not do everything as a reaction to your mother’s potential responses?” the therapist said today. It’s a valid point. So maybe I should just let him go see them.

We went through the DSM and came to the conclusion that my mother is almost a textbook example of paranoid personality disorder. She’s constantly distrustful of everyone and anyone, is hypersensitive and misinterprets compliments as backhanded insults. She holds grudges for every little thing that happens to her and always perceives herself to be the victim. Someone is always “hurting me so much,” as she always says. The examples throughout the course of my life are so many that I can’t even go through them all.

The therapist thinks that as part of my process for empathizing, I should keep this disorder model in mind when dealing with her and recognizing that it doesn’t make sense to act rationally with someone who is not rationale. But I’m not sure if I really think that will help me because Ed and I always thought she had some sort of disorder. With something like this, it’s nearly impossible to treat, and it’s even harder when the person doesn’t recognize that she has the problem. So it will never be acknowledged, treated, or cured. It’s an impossibility.