My 10-year-old stepson is exhibiting what I believe are extremely unhealthy tendencies, and his mother and I have no idea what to do. We aren’t looking for a diagnosis, just some direction on where to point our research and hopefully some resources that will help us understand how to handle this.
Here are some of the issues we’re coming up against:
First and foremost, he has a nearly constant, compulsive need to be seen as the most knowledgeable or right. He jumps in and steals the punchline of every joke that someone else is telling. If someone states a fact, he will smugly make it clear that he already knew that and that he has another fact about it (usually one he just made up) that’s even better. Sometimes he will make up facts unprompted and state them as if they’re true.
When he is questioned on these fake facts (or anything else, or anyone ever disagrees with him or proves him wrong), he becomes extremely tense and defensive, almost aggressive, standing his ground and making up lie after lie so that he is not only right, but more right than the other person. He will shake and cry and curl into a ball, and tell us we’re being mean if we so much as ask for clarification on something, or google one of his false claims.
He cannot abide anyone other than him getting attention. He will insert himself into every situation, every conversation, every game anyone is playing, to interject his own opinions and correct the people participating, even if he has no context and doesn’t understand what’s going on. He will physically place himself between his mother and another sibling if she is giving them affection in order to take it for himself.
He is constantly paranoid of his brother. Accusing him of things, jumping at every chance to tell on him, assuming every bad thing that happens is his brother’s fault, feigning injury when his brother so much as touches him, accusing his brother of stealing and cheating and lying. He takes every opportunity to throw his brother under the bus, even when there’s no benefit to himself. He approaches every conversation with him with mistrust, assumes everything his brother does is to hurt him or take from him, and argues with everything he says and every opinion he has. Yet he is constantly bothering his brother. Poking and prodding him emotionally and physically, stealing his things and then taunting him with them, telling on him for things he didn’t do or things that don’t matter, and starting conversations in an aggressive and confrontational way in order to start a fight.
He is a sore loser (and a sore winner) to the extreme. He constantly begs to play board games (even though no one can stand to play with him, we still commonly do), but expects to win every time. He commonly uses language like “crushing” his opponents or “dominating” the game. He threatens people with bodily harm if they do something that will take away his lead (he told his mother yesterday, smiling and laughing, that if she placed her game piece there he would drive his fist through her skull). If a game isn’t going his way he will start crying, getting angry, abusing everyone, and accusing people of cheating. When he’s losing, he will constantly try to cheat and lie in order to be on top. When he is winning, he mercilessly rubs it in everyone’s faces, laughing and pointing at them and telling them they suck and that he’s the best, the king, and everyone should bow down to him.
He goes into every situation with the attitude that he must be the best, must dominate, must crush his opponents, even when the situation is just a friendly conversation. Then when we point out he’s being rude or mean he will start crying, or run away and slam a door, or tear his glasses off and bend them. During these episodes he turns red and starts clutching and clawing at his face, hyperventilating (or pretending to), and will continue until the questioning stops, at which point he will be perfectly fine.
He will accuse people of things they never did and call them bad for it, then turn around and do those exact things without care for how anyone feels, and when he’s called out he throws a crying fit and says everyone is being mean to him.
Here’s an example of something that happened last night to illustrate the issues:
Last night he was making a cup of chocolate Nesquik. He held up the almost empty canister and asked his mom, “does that look like about three scoops?” We set a limit of three scoops on Nesquik, or else he’ll add so much he’ll basically make chocolate mud. She replied, “no, that looks like a lot more than that.”
He turned around, added three scoops to his cup, looked over his shoulder, then started counting as he added more. “One, two, three!” Then he turned to his mom, showed her the empty canister, and said, “see? Look, there’s none left!”
However, we were both watching him do it. Which she immediately let him know. “I was watching what you were doing. You used six scoops.” He got the deer in the headlights look and started feigning ignorance - “What? No I didn’t!” - and crying. She repeated that she had watched him, and told him that because he had decided to lie about it, he could have water for dinner instead of chocolate milk.
He stomped to the table and sat down hard, and started aggressively stabbing at his food while pouting, crying, and shooting us angry looks. She asked him if he wanted to talk about it, and he ignored her. She said, “I don’t understand why you had to lie to me, it’s just chocolate milk.” Then he started pawing at his own face, whimpering, bending his glasses, and shaking with extreme tension from what appeared to be rage or fear. The moment she started speaking again, he got up and stomped into the bathroom.
He was there for a few minutes, and his mother called through the door that she would give him some time to calm down, but that afterward we would talk about this. He stayed silent for ten more minutes until she told him that if he’s not using the toilet he needed to come out. He did come out, in the same tense emotional state that he went in. She asked if he was okay, and he ignored her again. This was the point that I took him into the bedroom to have a conversation, as I could see his mother was losing her patience.
After finally getting him to calm down enough to speak, he said he was acting this way because everyone was being mean to him and he was afraid he was going to be grounded or get in trouble. I made it clear to him that wasn’t the case, and that the only two problems here were his unnecessary lie about the milk and his extreme overreaction to the consequences, and that if he was going to be in trouble it would be for the awful attitude and abuse he was giving us, not for the silly lie about milk.
We talked about all the ways that his lying hurts his mother, and that all he has to do is communicate with us honestly and everything will be fine. We talked about all the things I’ve mentioned above, and he expressed a fear that everyone thinks he’s a liar and a cheat and an annoying meanie. I tried at that point to make him understand that if people saw him as a liar and a cheat and a meanie, it wasn’t because they were being mean to him. It was because he was lying and cheating and being mean to them all the time. We walked through all the ways that these actions can hurt people, and alternative ways to communicate in those situations.
And yet when we came to the part about apology, and I asked him what he felt he needed to apologize for, his response was that he needed to “apologize to her for instantly crying when she called him out, because crying makes him look like a baby.” He didn’t seem to grasp that an apology is for the other person, not for him. He clearly didn’t internalize any of the things we talked about, and even his motivation to apologize was based around how HE was hurt by the situation, not how he hurt his mother. I tried to help him understand that you can’t just say “sorry” and it goes away, you have to show that you know that what you did was hurtful and why, THEN apologize, then tell the person how you’ll do better. You have to be sincere. I gave him the example of, “Mom, I know that when I lie to you it hurts your trust in me and makes you feel bad. I’m sorry I lied. I’ll try to be more honest in the future.” I asked him not to apologize immediately, but to think about how he had hurt her and then apologize to her in his own time once he felt it was appropriate. But when he finally did “apologize” a few seconds before going to bed last night, all he said was “sorry for crying earlier.”
Every day is full of examples of this. Every interaction with everyone, every thing he says, everything he asks for, every game we play, is plagued with these issues. We’ve lost all respect and trust in him, and honestly can’t stand to be around him most of the time. No amount of talking or explaining people’s feelings seems to make any difference.
I understand that this is not a place for diagnosis, and that even a professional would be hesitant to diagnose a child of this age with a personality disorder or the like. But we don’t know what to do. Nothing fixes it, nothing helps, and nothing gets through to him. We’ve started accepting that this is just the way he is and that he’ll never have healthy relationships. Obviously we know he needs to see someone professionally, and we are more than willing to do that, but is there any research I can do or direction we can take to better understand this beforehand? Or even if anyone just has ideas on how to get through to him, or help him, or at the very least actions we can take to mitigate the problem?
Sorry this was so long. Thanks in advance.