This room mate sounds like she doesn't want any responsibility but she also needs to feel SHE has the control. Break downs tend to happen when a person is going along in a pattern of thriving and something happens to them that really impacts whatever their pattern happens to be and they don't know how to recover.

It sounds like this room mate tried very hard to create her own reality as I have mentioned earlier in your thread and she got to a point where she had to face the fact that her own reality was not actually a true reality. This can happen to anyone because a lot of people function based on their own reality and try to fulfill whatever they wanted to achieve. She wanted something to happen in her life, she tried very hard to make some "dream of" come true in her life. She did not get her "dream of" and things got to a point where it broke her down because what she wanted and tried to create failed. She did not get a normal child and her husband failed to fit into this ideal she had also wanted and she was no longer a young individual that could walk away from these disappointments and try again to create this "dream of". So, it devastated her and she broke down and withdrew from all of it. She withdrew and is hiding out in that room in mourning of not having achieved this "dream of" that had been very important to her.

When a person breaks like this, often they genuinely lose their ability to connect with others. And when they have to connect with others, they may only be able to do so in anger or can be so sensitive they can quickly sink into resentment or just want to run and withdraw. A person in this condition doesn't respond well to anyone who tries to push them into being whatever they had been or being functional. A person in this condition doesn't want to "see" any more reality and anything that contributed to whatever they failed to have or achieve.

What this woman needs is for someone to quietly come to her home and spend time with her to help her grieve. She needs a special kind of nurturing presence because she is a broken down hurt scared child in a middle aged body and she is very lost. What she needs is not a presence that constantly "replies" or in any way "demands or instructs" but instead a presence that can respond with "I understand, yes that is sad, yes that is hard, yes it's lonely and scary".

One of the conversations I had with my father that was important and something I needed to get older to a point where I was able to see how fragile a person really is at certain ages was something he needed for many years. I was sitting quietly with him at one of my sister's gatherings, I sat down next to him as he was staring into the fire that was lit in the fireplace. We ended up talking about things he experienced in the war (WWII).

This time however, I looked at him and said "What you experienced was a lot for someone who was really so young and just a boy yet". I made it a point to reach out to "that part of him that was really just a boy still". For the first time he looked back at me, not as my father in his late 80's but that 17 year old boy who needed to experience a presence that was "understanding" of what that time REALLY meant to him. He saw things at such a young age that I could not even imagine experiencing myself when I was that age.

I remember how others, including my sister would reply "yah, yah, I have heard these stories many times" and NONE of the people he sat and talked to had it in them to respond to that "young boy" that had to deal with things most young boys at that age never see or have to JUST somehow when they really don't have the life skills or maturity to understand or deal. In that one conversation I had with him, he finally had a presence that could speak to that lost young boy that spent his life trying to understand and somehow recover from what he saw that had such a big impact on him. I was not looking at my father anymore, but that young boy that needed someone to sit with him and respond the way I had that nite.

When a mass shooting takes place in some high school, it changes everyone that experiences it. It takes away "innocence" and sense of safety that can impact that individual for the rest of their lives. My father was on a ship and got to know a lot of other men his age that were also on that ship. That ship came home from a deployment and for some reason my father was left out of that ship's next tour. That ship was torpedoed and the torpedo hit the compartment he had been in with all these other men. All these men were killed. My father never really got over that, it had haunted him for the rest of his life. In reading about narcissists or individuals that had some strong traits, my father did have a lot of these traits. He tended to be in his own little world a lot and yet he did have some depth to him too. However, his lacks stemmed from never really experiencing another presence that showed him how to see "others" and empathize. Unfortunately, that happens a lot. That's why there is a lot of "hurt people hurting other people" taking place. And, if a person never got it and had to figure out how to function anyway, that person can actually resent seeing anyone else getting something they are not getting themselves.

Two women sharing a roof over their heads both hurting and one can afford to hide out with her heartache and the other one can't and neither of you got your "dream of" either. And neither of you want to have to care about someone else either. You are doing it because you have to and she can afford to withdraw and not care. That's quite a combination you have going there Blanche.