She's 14.

And I'm terribly frustrated because she demands all attention be on her all the time. Either because she's busy chattering away about things that only she is interested in - which is fine and totally OK by me - or by acting like she's going through some super life drama because *gasp*! AtMC YELLED at her for trying to physically hurt one of the animals!

FDH and I both agreed tonight that we wouldn't dwell on the BS at home and let SD derail our evening, that we would go out and enjoy our night together. And we did. But the moment we come back home? BLAMMO! SD drama overload. I'm over it.

Or, maybe she really is crazy and she's telling the voices in her head to shut up.

*Shrug*

Anger and jealousy are most likely.

But regardless of what it is, she's just gonna have to get over it because she's wasting her energy focusing on whatever is going on for her rather than doing fun things.

May not be advice I will act on, but I can fantasize and laugh quietly to myself when she's around!

That's my plan. I'm not even going to play into this with her. When FDH found it, I said nothing about it and just went about my business loving on the animals as I usually do when I get home. I'm not giving her the satisfaction of feeding into her attention issues.

I commended him on his reaction last night. I said "You obviously know her better than she will ever let me know her so I trust that you respond to things appropriately."

She's totally got narcissistic traits, and while all teenagers do to an extent, not all teenagers have spent the majority of their time with an NPD parent like SD has (GUBM totally has BPD NPD so double whammy right there, ugh). Hopefully she can learn how to work past her stupidity, though, because she's still young yet.

I'm glad FDH is aware of these habits of SD's. I can't remember what it was exactly, but there was something a few weeks ago...I think it was related to her getting up in the middle of the night and then being "so tired" the next day, but it was obviously something that was not that big of a deal. Regardless of what it was exactly, FDH knew that SD was complaining about something that was her own damn fault.

Unfortunately, my SD is a big deflector, so even if we openly discuss the behavior, she hangs tight to the fact that someone else is to blame. She doesn't ever take responsibility for her behaviors if she can help it. It's almost always someone else's fault that she acted the way she did because obviously she's not an autonomous being and is completely at the whim of other people *eyeroll* She's rude to someone? It's the other person's fault. She had to lay hands on my dog to get him to lie down? It was clearly HIS fault because he wouldn't listen to her snotty, half-assed attempt to get him to do so in the first place. She gets in trouble for doing something she shouldn't do? Oh, well, it's obviously not HER fault, it's the fault of the person who made the rule that she broke in the first place. How dare someone make a rule that SD can't follow?

I told FDH this morning that her inability to take responsibility for her actions and choices - along with her tendency to lie - is what worries me the most about her trying out therapists. Because we don't know who these therapists are or what they're like. And, unfortunately, in the great state we live in, SD is now old enough that she will have to sign a paper to let her counselor tell FDH what she talks about in her sessions. She's lied about things related to me in the past and has made some outlandish accusations about me and I'm worried now that she's going to do that in counseling rather than focus on herself.

SD does what your SS does. She acuses FDH of ignoring her, even when she was the one ignoring him. She would only ever contact him when she needed something and on the rare occassions when he would see her, she wouldn't want to spend time with him and then cry about not spending time with him??

The part that flummoxes me is that GUBM ignores her unless she's screaming at her or treating her like a baby. We don't ignore her. But clearly there's something she wants that she's not getting and my gut instinct is that she's still not over whatever problem she had with me back in June last year that made her tell FDH to break up with me or she wouldn't see him anymore.

It's an extremely remote possibility as the typical onset wouldn't be for another 11 years (schizophrenia shows around 25 in women) and SD doesn't really have any other signs that would point towards that being a greater possibility. But I will let her counselor reserve judgment on what, if anything, is wrong with her.

I told FDH that he should mention it to the counselor today so he could talk to SD about it, although I bet SD is going to have some ridiculous story for writing on her arm and will be all about showing the counselor.

FDH said he's going to warn the counselor about SD's need to manipulate, embellish, and lie for attention so hopefully he does that today because it's really obnoxious at this point. Like, seriously? Get over yourself, SD. One concern I have with counseling is that SD is going to reject any counselor who challenges her perceptions of herself and try to pass it off as them judging her. That was her complaint about the counselor in NJ that she thinks GUBM made her see. Honestly, I question the validity of her account. The kid feels persecuted anytime anyone tells her she did something wrong or even so much as disagrees with something she says so it's completely plausible that she might think that anytime a counselor tries to get her to change her perspective that they're judging her.

And I told FDH last night that as someone who is recovering from self-inflicted violence, that it's a little insulting that she pulled that to seek attention. Unlike her stunt, my SIV was NEVER about attention. It was about being in control of the pain that I felt every day growing up in an abusive household and being in abusive relationships. I couldn't control the pain inflicted on me by others, so I controlled my own pain. Nobody found out about it until I was well into recovery. I didn't walk around flaunting it to my family to rile them up or get attention because it was a totally personal situation. She absolutely talks about things like that to be cool, too. Because it's just so damn trendy >:(

Just too bad for her that she's still not allowed onto the social site where all of her lame ass emo "friends" are without FDH being home, so she'll have to wait to be showered with attention by them.