Tolerating crap?

Rinse and repeat

Myself and my daughter were at home visiting my parents today. It’s a farm. My three brothers happened to be there too. They had a story, there had been an incident.

The background

There’s this guy who lives around the corner. He’s 64, he’s never worked a day in his life, he’s dirty, unhygienic, he smells, he has chronic social anxiety, he’s a hypochondriac. He’s super annoying, gossips about people and talks utter nonsense all of the time. Everybody in the area knows him. Nobody really dislikes him, they talk to him in small doses but they don’t fully engage with him. There’s no real badness in him, he doesn’t have addiction problems, he’s generally harmless aside from tricking people into buying cigarettes and other things for him on the promise of money forthcoming which may or may not come.

My youngest brother had recently completed the restoration of an old Ferguson 20 tractor, a tractor from about 1950 or so that has been in our family for three generations now. It took three years to restore and a lot of money. It’s looking so good now that it was used as a prop at his wedding recently. He plans to participate in ventage shows with it. Among the items bought as part of the restoration were two back tires costing 300 euros each.

The incident

A few days previous, the guy took an angle grinder to one of the new tractor tires cutting two significant notches out of it. He didn’t puncture it, just damaged it. He also took the angle grinder to the concrete floor of a shed and cut a small groove into it.

Bizarre stuff, completely out of character, odd as hell, totally unexpected. No logic or reasoning behind it. He never did anything like this before.

The fallout

My farmer brother went crazy at him and banished him from our property in no uncertain terms.

The fallout continued

A few days later, today, my brother who actually restored the tractor was happy to make it clear to the guy that this was unacceptable and to express his disappointment. End of. My farmer brother was also backing down a little by now and returning to his more general lack of tolerance for the guy.

My middle brother however noticed the guy wandering up the driveway and immediately went out to confront him and run him off our property. The guy refused to go, he downplayed the incident and apologized. I was really hoping for an explanation but it never came. The guy still refused to go, still playing it down and quite rightly saying that he’d been coming in here all his life. My brother aimed a water hose at him, sprayed a shot across the bow. The guy left, my brother perusing him to make sure he left.

The normal perspective

My water hose brother and I were cordially speaking afterwards. He was completely bewildered that I would not have done what he did. He could not understand how anybody could allow this guy to wander into our yard as though nothing had happened. He wouldn’t back down, he was adamant that he’d continue to evict him again if he as much as set foot in the yard again. He was happy with his choice and in no doubt about it.

The empathic/codependent perspective

My perspective.

The guy never did this before, he probably won’t do anything like this again. When it was pointed out to me that there were other suspicions hanging over the guy I kinda didn’t want to believe that he could be up to no good. I mean, I’ve known him all my life, he’s annoying but he’s not bad.

I’m sure he just wanted to try out the angle grinder to see how cool it was to use it. It’s not like he gets the opportunity to use these cool tools ever because of his depravity.

I can forgive him for cutting the tire and the concrete floor. He lives in total squaller himself, his small rundown house is filthy beyond belief, he lives alone, it’s his family home, the house where he grew up, but he’s never once cleaned it, ever. It’s nuts. So, why would anybody expect that he’d understand the value of a tire or understand that cutting a groove into a concrete floor was not acceptable. It’s perfectly acceptable for a man of his disposition.

He’ll be back in the yard again tomorrow anyway and my water hose brother won’t be there to run him so banishing him was pointless needless conflict.

When the guy was confronted, he looked frightened, worried, upset, he looked to me for support, it broke my heart not to give it. I stayed neutral. I actually had to walk away.

And I wonder why I’m with the narcissist?

Is my amount of tolerance (codependency) unhealthy?

I can see now that it is but I still have it, it’s not going away unless I fix it.

So, when I see the bad narcissistic behavior happening right in front of me and happening to me. What do I do?

What do you do?

My water hose brother is clearly more centered than I am. He’s healthy in the middle between codependent and narcissistic exactly where we all would ideally be.

Codependent disorder

He is just one of several people in my life that consume my time and energy. They annoy the crap out of me but I continue to tolerate them.

The hard truth here is that I am equally as responsible for being in this abusive relationship as my bitch narcissist wife. I am her enabler. I am her facilitator. I allow it by forgiving, excusing, tolerating, fixing, minimizing and dismissing.