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How to deal with father's lack of responsibility?

NAS71657

Hello all,

I have been recently diagnosed as being on the spectrum and for the present, because of the pandemic, I am living with my father who is in his 90s. He is diabetic, has had a stroke and heart attacks and damaged his leg a few weeks ago in a fall. He looks much younger and fitter than his age, I should add. I do not keep too well myself. I end up having everything to do at home and my father takes no responsibility for himself or for locking outside doors. When I remind him he refuses to listen -point blank. Several years ago he maintained this attitude and we were burgled because he had not locked a door. He did not and still does not accept responsibility. He wants to do very energetic work in the garden, exhausts himself and takes it out on me afterwards. He has diabetic hypos because he claims he does not need to take extra sugar supplies with him. He had a fit last year and collapsed. The onus is placed on me. How do you think I should react or deal with this? I have been getting increasingly angry and upset (which does not help my own health!). I am not able to change my physical location at present and I have no  'authority' to change aspects of my situation. My father presents as 'very reasonable' when speaking to a doctor and thus I am cast in a bad light. 

  • Even though your father presents as very reasonable to doctors, he's not even following anything they say regarding his health. 

    Your father's main flaws is his stubbornness (almost like he knows his health better than the doctors do) and his tendency to blame others and remove responsibility from himself. These are probably traits he's always had, which probsbly helped him early in life to protect himself and to get what he wants, but later in life it just gets in the way. 

    However your father seems motivated by physical activity and nature, and perhaps instead of gardening which is labour intensive, taking him on walks to see nature might be a better idea, he will get mild physical activity and seeing nature is good for his mental health. Also, perhaps you can convince him that to have enough energy to go outside more often, that he needs to be in better health by following the recommendations from doctors. This might be good enough to curb some of his stubbornness. I mean it might still be hard to get him to do housework and lock the doors at night, but tolerate it until you can leave. 

  • Although not exactly the same we had a somewhat similar situation a few years back with my grandad who had to move in with us because he wouldn't look after himself etc. 

    What Adele said sounds right to me, speak to his GP about it (without him there), explain what he's doing and also how you are finding it increasing hard to handle. For us what they did was arrange in home nursing assistance and we found he was much more responsible when a medical professional and someone outside the family was the one tell him what to do and they also did all his med checks ets when they're there as well as make sure, they even too him into rest bite when he had a fall so he could heal with more care and give myself and mum some time off to regenerate.

    If you think the doctor won't believe you I'd suggest keeping notes for a couple of weeks and note down any issues, both medical and personal/safety issues. And we also recorded some of the interactions with him, I installed a voice recorder that would start by shaking the phone discreetly (think it was called GOM recorder) so whenever he got abusive I would record it and then the doctor had info to work from.

    Sorry to hear your in that situation but I hope some of this advice can help in some way.

  • oh you this situation sounds awful --- i dont think you can do anything since i assume he owns the house ( this is a guess ). 

    If this was me I  would leave for a day. Leave a note somewhere  important.  Just go for a long walk  to try and work out what u can do.