I’ve posted before here about some issues with my mother, who is a wild conspiracy theorist. I won’t write a super-long post about her conspiracy beliefs.
What would help, though, is if she could accept people who have credentials on the matter. But she refuses to, especially if it’s family members.
One of my brothers is a doctor, but she won’t believe his word about vaccines.
My other brother is a CPA and financial analyst, but instead my mother’s opinions about finance always must reign supreme.
Even when it comes to something minor like airplanes, she can be extremely obstinate. She once got very angry and heated - on multiple occasions - when I told her that “airliners” refers to the airplanes owned by the airlines, whereas “airline” itself refers to the air transport company. She also cannot believe my word about Boeing, radars, etc. or things of the sort even though I have, quite seriously, 20x the knowledge about airplanes that she does. And it doesn’t matter that I have a degree in international politics, nothing I say can hold a candle to some wild Fox News-ish talk about how Russia is really the good guy and the real victim in the ongoing Ukraine war.
The ongoing issue with her conspiracy theories could take up another thread in itself. But what’s a good way to get her to acknowledge that other people do have more credentials about Subject XYZ than she? Nothing we say or do can hold a candle to the YouTube videos that she watches, or “some person told me this.” I am not exaggerating when I say my brother could be a neurosurgeon and she’d probably still believe some strange wack YouTube video about the human brain than what he had to say.
Ever ask her why she chooses to believe junk on youtube rather than people who years of training in that specialty? I mean, just ask … I’m curious.
She sounds like someone who is very defensive about her lack of expertise, and/or her lack of ability to sort facts from fiction. Defensive being the operative word. You aren’t going to get through to her with logic, it will maker her think you are attacking her with logic.
I suspect you can’t. What you and your siblings might be able to do is acknowledge that she said something (so she doesn’t need to get louder, more entrenched, and more polarized), then drop the subject. If there’s an action that needs to be taken about the topic, do what you all think is right.
my mother’s opinions about finance always must reign supreme.
If it’s just about her opinion, don’t engage with it. So what if she needs to have the winning opinion? If it’s about an action, focus on that.
Any time we did confront her about it, she simply continued spending wildly but did so more discreetly. She ran through a considerable amount of my father’s retirement savings in a short time.
As best I can ascertain, it’s two things: 1) she seems to take a perverse delight in making the bad side good and the good side bad (such as making Russia and China out to be the victims), and 2) she has a great ability to seal out anything she doesn’t want to hear or believe. If you were to tell her “You hurt Susan’s feelings,” but she doesn’t want to believe it, she can believe that she did not, in fact, hurt Susan’s feelings.
I would encourage the OP to distinguish between Mom acceding to the expertise of her children versus the expertise of others.
Many parents have a very hard time adapting to their adult kids being experts at whatever. My now-deceased first wife was a finance lawyer. When her otherwise sensible Mom needed legal or financial advice, she’d ask me. Despite me having zero relevant professional education or experience. If wife answered, the info would be dismissed out of hand.
So our M.O. was that I’d get Mom’s questions, tell her I couldn’t answer without some research, and I’d get back to her. Then in private I’d ask her daughter/my wife, get the professional quality answers, then tell Mom what “I” thought. Worked a treat.
Mom and daughter otherwise got along fine and Mom was otherwise darn sensible. If we needed these sorts of workarounds for Mother / offspring issues, imagine how much harder the OP & his wackjob Mom have it.
Once the OP is dealing with Mom versus other experts not just her kids, well …
If anyone figures out how to de-program CT beleivers, they will be in line to make Mark Zuckerburg look like a pauper.
If so, can you get her to see a doctor, and discreetly suggest to the doctor that she be tested for dementia?
If it’s not new behavior, I doubt that there’s anything you can do about it. There may not be anything you can do about it anyway; even if it’s new it may not be dementia, and even if it’s dementia she may refuse treatment. And if she won’t see a doctor, there’s nothing you can do about that refusal; at least, unless she becomes way further gone than it reads like.
IMHO, there’s no way to convince CT’s to think rationally about expertise. The fact that someone with no training in a field makes outlandish statements that run counter to every expert is not a bug - it’s a feature. For a CT’er, this just illustrates that all the experts are “in on it.” It really requires an outsider to discover the real truth.
It is a bit like the old joke: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change. Unless your mother is willing to work through whatever has got her to this place, there is little you can do except work to save yourself aggravation and try to protect the retirement money. It’s an awful situation, and I wish you courage and luck with it.
Right. IME CTers believe CTs because they want so much for them to be true and then they become emotionally invested in them being true. The CTs are part of their identity now. Fighting that is generally a losing battle.
This is at the heart of believing CTs. It isn’t about facts or figures, experience or knowledge. It is about belief that, while not looking like a known religion, works like one for the holder. So, you approach that conversation as you would a conversation about religious faith: what does mean to you? What question/problem does it address? How does it describe the world? How does it figure in with your relationship with [person]? This may take you to a very dark and disturbing world that she lives in, but it also the place to introduce positive religious concepts: renewal, reconciliation, hope, finding a purpose, finding her place in the world, finding peace.
Yeah, the issues in the OP go way beyond “Mom can’t believe that the kid who used to pour spaghetti over their head is now an adult with an education”. If she’s not willing to listen to any of her own family, on any issues, despite those people having degrees that took years to earn, and prefers instead to listen to You Tube and the like, there’s nothing that can be done for them. On some level, although she’d deny it if confronted, she thinks her kids are “in on it”.
A corollary involves the (slightly) less disordered thinking whereby someone with seemingly good training and experience espouses wackoid ideas that are nonetheless held up as impeccable.
“They’re a Harvard-trained PhD, so they must be right!”.
“But the vast majority of their equally expert colleagues disagree, and there’s abundant good evidence that they’re full of crap.”
(crickets)
You can’t reason with such people, unless there’s a life-changing event that opens their eyes.
My heart goes out to you. We had a family member who kept giving money to everyone who wrote her, sometimes multiple times a month. We tried various interventions and finally had to say, as it stands now, you have enough money for your later medical needs. If you keep giving this much away, you won’t. This required all siblings to agree to this approach. The situation is different because she was in early dementia, but her belief in the correctness of her actions was just as firm.