(excerpted from a longer article here:
http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/narcissism.php#5)
.... a mother contacted me hoping I would mentor her son (many details in this section are fictionalized to protect the identities of the participants). I had lost interest in this activity so I politely declined.
But mom refused to take no for an answer. Against polite demurrers from me, she persisted in her requests for seven months, then brought her son to a place she knew I would be and forced a meeting. Her son was very bright, socially isolated for a reason I couldn't sort out, and I should have run from the room. Instead I accepted her son as a friend.
For the next year I acted as mentor for this boy, changing his perspective on himself and his substantial gifts. He was remarkably bright but very insecure for a reason I didn't understand at first. I encouraged him to see himself as an intelligent person, but this wasn't difficult — he was very talented, starved for any kind of encouragement, and his personal development took off.
I hadn't figured out mom's motivations yet, but I was soon to discover what they were.
Her personal grasp of the world had the distinctly narcissistic property that everything was either true or false, and there was always a convenient unimpeachable authority to tell her which was which, e. g.
she possessed a very shallow and fragile hold on reality.
She had been told that her son was gifted, and it had come to her that she would eventually lose control of him as he passed her up in intellectual development. Mom's uniquely narcissistic solution to this "problem" was to insist that her son was mentally handicapped, something she persisted in saying against overwhelming contrary evidence.As time passed, as her son came out of his mom-imposed shell, as he realized he had a rightful place among gifted children, the day of reckoning finally came. Increasingly frustrated at her son's accelerating personal development and my role in it, mom finally thought of a way to force an end to the threat I posed to her control — she began to invent imaginary crimes for me to be guilty of. Most of them were too poorly articulated to bother with, but when she claimed that a child sitting on the lap of an adult constituted molestation, then refused to discuss this belief, I knew I had to leave. Because she was a narcissist, possessed of no common sense or personal restraint, I realized she would say such things to anyone, anywhere, therefore my leaving might serve to minimize the harm she could do to her son. I offered a weak and false explanation to her son (that she and I had important philosophical differences).
I stayed in touch with her son by e-mail, hoping I could prevent his relapse into the clinical depression that had preceded my appearance on the scene, but mom realized what I was doing and arranged a civil court hearing in which, as I expected, she abandoned the original issue of e-mails and made a series of vile claims that might have impressed someone with an IQ below 70, but that had no effect on the seasoned judge who heard her recital. I pointed out that mom's claims were a fantasy, the judge agreed, but mom got her way, no more e-mails.
After the hearing, in conversations with a mutual acquaintance I discovered to my shock that this woman had made similar false accusations against someone else. I thought this would have been useful to know when mom was trying so desperately to get me to meet her son, and it would have come in handy during the hearing, but I didn't think it mattered any more, since the judge had ruled against her. As it turned out, I was wrong about that — six months later, mom arranged another civil court hearing and tried to hold me responsible for her son's return to clinical depression, a depression that resulted directly from her decision to exclude me. In her new claim she had the temerity to describe her very bright son as "developmentally delayed," which some of my readers may know is a euphemism for "retarded."
At that point I realized this wasn't going to stop.
Unless I shut her down, mom might try to hold me responsible for each of her many dissatisfactions, possibly for years. So in a prepared statement I explained that mom's assessment of her son's mental abilities was at odds with reality, she had tried the vile-accusation tactic on someone else, and the entire sequence of events resulted from her seriously dysfunctional personality.
This woman was served with my position in advance and had time to consider any rebuttal she cared to make, but I think she realized what would happen to her if she disputed any of it (I came prepared with detailed evidence), so at the hearing she silently accepted my position without comment, thereby turning my claims into stipulations (matters on which both sides agree).
At that point the judge had a clear picture of this woman,
but in case any doubt lingered,
mom ended the hearing by asking whether I could be punished even though I had done nothing wrong.
Under the circumstances the judge exercised remarkable restraint and, saying "no," gaveled the proceedings to a close.
This woman was a textbook narcissist — completely self-absorbed, unable to foresee the consequences of her own actions, predatory, truth-challenged, oblivious to how she looked and sounded to others, and absolutely incapable of accepting personal responsibility for anything.As to mentoring as a pastime, I had naïvely assumed that, because I can encourage most bright kids to develop their gifts, it was a worthwhile activity. I had not seriously considered the possibility of such a dysfunctional parent, but now that I know they exist, I won't allow parents to arrange such meetings. The parents have too much control, they are often the real problem, and they sometimes don't understand themselves well enough to accept an excellent outcome. In the final analysis, they victimize their own children.
