Thank you, everyone.
I don't think that telling her that "13 isn't forever" is going to be helpful. I was using that already, before it was clear what was actually going on. More explicitly, this is a lot more than routine bullying, so there is very little doubt that some kind of therapeutic intervention is needed. This was escalating emotional/verbal abuse conducted covertly at the hands of a peer who deliberately cultivated a very close (almost 'intimate') relationship with her and used that relationship exploitatively and utterly without remorse. I can't begin to express how malevolent and evil some of this abuse has been, but in just ONE example, this is a peer who took the time to call my child less than 48 hours before she took the PSAT... to
passive-aggressively mess with her head using everything he knew about her. Bullying is one thing-- this is more akin to intimate partner abuse in an emotional sense.
All of that to say that this was the pairing of a person with what gives every indicator of being NPD and my child, who is... well, she's like an ANTI-narcissist. Matter+antimatter. KWIM?
Yes, my child has some anxiety. Most of that is related to her disability, and it is by NO means "maladaptive" in the opinion of her specialist medical providers. "Fixing" her anxiety is not our top priority; in fact, if you keep reading, you'll see why we cannot possibly support an effort to make this a priority right now.
Fixing her confidence in 'reading' social cues, and her basic gifts in this area are the priority-- being able to read people and act in her own self-interests is a matter of life and death for her, and sadly that isn't an exaggeration.
We obviously also want to fix self-image damage, which is equally significant, but the gaslighting and crazy-making behaviors actually resulted in more problems for her personally. Well, because those are problems which are actually things that now place her in physical danger.
She can't be second-guessing what her instincts are telling her, because once she starts that, she doesn't act when she should, she becomes more willing to tolerate risks she shouldn't, and delay emergency treatment because she has become more concerned about seeming reactionary, and is questioning reality. We're already seeing some of these things come to fruition-- it's terrifying.
I'm very very angry, obviously. Y'all can probably understand why, knowing some of what I've posted about my child-- this is a child who had the social awareness/deft skills of a very sensitive and self-possessed adult by the time she was a preschooler. So this feels, to me, as a deliberate DESTRUCTION of my child's most profound gift. Like deliberately damaging the hearing of a musical prodigy.
I keep thinking; "WHY?? Who
does something like this?? WHO??"
And yes, we've gone (documented) No contact with this peer after a particularly virulent verbal battering which was (finally) witnessed by a third peer (who was shocked by the severity of the unprovoked rage toward my DD). But he's a pretty scary kid-- the anger and escalation of the abuse has been shocking. Even my DH telling him never to contact DD again didn't stop him from making several additional phone calls-- and now DD nearly jumps out of her skin whenever the land line rings.
