articles
China Elevator Stories
Why Are You Constantly Talking About Your Father?
I am not a fan of triangulation, and I have asked you to stop.
12/05/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Okay, so I told you I wasn’t interested in you or your father. Often, when I say that, the stalker shifts to talking about other people. If he’s not talking about himself, he’ll cycle through a list of people. If he talks about his father, he’ll blame you for not taking care of him or for not being kind and nice enough. If it’s someone else, it’s usually a person he’s spied on—my sister, my ex-husband, my children, or anyone else from my life—and he’ll start a smear campaign to my face against them.
It feels like a compulsion—obsessive thinking that never ends—along with the expectation that you should do the same. You’re never allowed to just exist in the present moment. You’re expected to listen to him complain endlessly, often about you, instead of being given time or space to deal with what’s actually important in your life. I can’t count how often he’s tried to trap me in his mental loops. I don’t like being stuck in someone else’s past, especially when it means being re-traumatized over events that had nothing to do with me (or be drawn into his smear campaigns about other people, people from my life he should not have spied on to begin with). Communication should have a beginning and an end. It shouldn’t go on forever, circling the same few toxic topics without ever resolving anything.
He’s constantly trying to force me into some kind of relationship with his father. Instead of leaving me alone, he keeps bringing his father up, making connections to me, trying to pressure me into admiring him or praising his successes. And not in a normal, adult way—but in a deeply dysfunctional, deranged way. His default is to push for me to form a bond with his father, and no amount of telling him that I won’t—and don’t have to—seems to stop his obsessive behavior. You need to have a high level of self-awareness to have a healthy, adult relationship with your father. Only then should you even think about being with another woman (and not me). If you don’t, you’ll never be autonomous—never truly your own person—just an extension of your father, projecting that relationship onto others and forcing them to carry emotional baggage that isn’t theirs. Your father is living his own life? Great. I don’t want to share mine with him.
When you ask this particular stalker to stop—because he’s violating people’s privacy and invading relationships he has no right to be in—he’ll ignore you, stonewall you, guilt-trip you, or gaslight you. He’ll accuse you of being selfish for spending time with others, for talking to others. Or he’ll label them narcissists, insisting you shouldn’t communicate with them. In the end, the only person you’re allowed to spend time with is him, because everyone else is “a narcissist.” Sure, there are plenty of narcissists out there—but when someone is clearly trying to isolate you from healthy relationships, it’s obvious they’re manipulating you to serve their own emotional needs.
He expects you to share his negative opinions—especially about women in your life. If he’s a particularly malicious incel-type stalker, he’ll focus intensely on female relatives. A truly extreme stalker won’t just stalk you, but also everyone around you. I haven’t yet found software that reliably removes spyware from my devices, but let me tell you—if I could, I would. Often, when I reinstall my phone, a few stalkers come right back. So most of the time, I don’t bother. It’s a waste of time.
One tactic he’s used involves making my computer screen go black—usually when I’m doing something important, like saving a document. It feels like he’s taking a screenshot (I could be wrong since I have never used spyware myself). The screen goes dark for a few seconds, then comes back. Other times, he freezes buttons on my screen so I can’t click on anything—again, usually when I’m trying to do important work on my computer. It’s one of those especially disturbing tactics where he’s letting me know he’s watching me, and that I can’t do anything about it and won’t be able to remove him from my life.
He also constantly accuses me to my face of doing something horrible—when really, he’s the one doing it. It’s pure projection. At least lie about me behind my back, so I don’t have to hear it all day long. Who stoops this low? Narcissists might be immoral, but some really take it to another level.
When it comes to his father, he tries to force me into a subordinate position—pressuring me to revere him. He even talks very negatively about my father (who passed away in 2021), as if it were any of his business. He puts me into imaginary competitions with people I have no relationship with. I’ve told him countless times to stop the emotional incest. It’s not healthy. It’s not adult behavior. But when I mirror his actions back at him, he denies it—throws it back at me like a ball that belongs in his yard, insisting it’s mine. It’s not. It belongs with him—and that’s where it should stay.
Emotional incest is a hallmark of narcissistic abuse. Many of them have deeply unhealthy enmeshments with one of their parents—either as a confidant or emotional substitute for a partner. And that parent often ends up getting entangled in your life too. Suddenly, you’re not just dealing with a narcissist—you’re also facing their enablers, flying monkeys, and unwitting supporters.
I flush those people out of my life—along with the narcissist. I’m not here to be anyone’s unpaid therapist, especially not someone who refuses to change and pathologically lies to my face.
Have you ever experienced this?