Armchair psychology: Barb

Over the years, I've come to enjoy the occasional bout of trying to untangle Chris's motivations, but lately I've moved on to trying to figure out what's going on in barb's head these days (if anything goes on, that is).

I could unpack a huge post here about this, but I'll start out with the first question that comes to mind: Chris's new trans-persona. I remember Barb threw a fit over chris wearing women's clothes and threatened to kill him if he didn't cut his hair. Now she seems silent about chris sneaking hormones from her medicine cabinet, openly calling himself a tranny, and talks about the delusion of being a lesbian.

Barb's clearly a very proud, erratic woman, so I find it hard to believe she's just accepted chris's latest flavor of insanity. Such a 180 degree turn in opinion is unlikely in a normal person, but barb's a special kind of woman, the kind that allows her welfare-sucking son to sponge off her social security checks.

Finally, if you've kept reading this post, here's the question I've been edging towards: What do you think Barb's impression of current-day chris is? Particularly, his transgender phase.

 

I hope you've got a big armchair.

 

My armchair is hyuuge.

 

Barb just has dementia and that's why she doesn't care anymore.

 

Barb is dead and Chris just taxidermied her corpse.

 

In my opinion from what I've seen, I think that Barb can't do anything due to poor health or she thinks what Chris is doing is considered modern day normal or fashionable.

 

While Barb may not like new Tranny Chris, I think her acceptance of it doesn't matter anymore. She is to weak to really do anything about it and she needs Chris's Welfare money to fuel her hording addiction. If she pestered Chris about it, he might (in her mind) actually get a job and leave the house.

 

I have seen it happen with a lot of older people, they stop working and then their mental faculties take a big hit. I don't think we know when Barb starting her hoarding behaviour but It definitely went off the rails when she stopped working and they were living in Ruckersville. It's easy to rail against Barb because of all the hearsay and rumours about her, but the truth is we know very little about her.

 

Maybe, but we've seen she's very controlling of chris, so why put up with his new trans-sona?

I don't imagine she's changed her tune on trannies, old people seldom do, but if she threatened to kill him over long hair why let him take hormones? Perhaps she doesn't know he's doing it?

if she yelled at him about taking hormones or being a tranny, he'd be bitching his mom doesn't understand him on facebook.

I'm focusing on what we do know, and exploring what we can draw from that.

The hoarding is perhaps the biggest hint of her instability. According to chris, she's threatened to kill herself whenever th hoard was brought up by bob and chris, and has no doubt influenced his behavior. as well as Barb supposedly never cooking after messing up spaghetti. Its not a hard guess that she has anger issues, but compulsive hoarding is usually brought on by some trauma or unfulfilled need.i don't expect we'll ever know why it the hoard exists, but it shows she hasn't been in her right mind since chris's early days.

 

She's too weak to care.. She's wasting away and shriveling into jerky. She just wants to continue to provide her retarded son with cheap rent, (hoard income) and him to continue e-begging. shilling away... until she dies. Perhaps she can even convince Chris to co-sign on a few debts while she's at it.

 

Psychology implies that there's enough going on upstairs for her to even be analysed.
Joking aside, I don't think barb really cares about anything anymore, anyone functioning could look around that house and at her kid and realise that her life is a joke, maybe she's just sane enough to realise that too.

 

Barb sometimes gets angry at Chris when new aspects of his gender transition come to light. Like, she was mad at him when she found out about his legal name change.

He didn't mention it publicly, though - he mentioned being stressed in a video, and then the Arthur Spatchcock troll talked to him in private. I wonder if that's one reason Barb looked so dour in this video.

Other than that, Barb is resigned to Chris wanting to be trans. I think it's the only time Chris has ever successfully resisted her control. Ultimately, Barb doesn't care about what happens to him - she just wants access to his tugboat and for him to run errands for her.

I'm not sure if Barb knows about the Oestrogel. Chris didn't get it from her - he's been ordering it online from a shady pharmacy website. Marvin tried to warn Barb through a letter, but Chris was still using it afterwards.

 

I don't know if Barb has any psychological disorders but she is obviously a nasty person that no one but Chris wants anything to do with. Remember that she was the first one to stop going to church, possibly because everyone disliked her.
She's had a bad life and now near the end only Chris can be manipulated by her, and as Chris is mentally an 8 year old boy he doesn't dare cross her unless he knows he can get away with it.
Personally I think Barb is so far gone as long as Chris responds to her she doesn't care what he does. Also she wants money and doesn't care about the consequences of how she gets it. The hoard and controlling Chris may be the only things she gets out of life.

 

Ok, I'll get serious for a moment.

Barb is an unpleasant, toxic person who has systematically isolated herself from everyone she's ever known. Her husband is dead, her eldest son has not spoken to her in years and even excluded her from his wedding, and none of her living relatives will give her the time of day. I think it's safe to assume that the exile did not begin with Aunt Corrina's death, but that she was the last person who put up with them/insisted that they be included in family events. Being cut off from your entire family hurts on a base level. It doesn't matter how callous a person you may be. Since people hoard to fill a void inside of them, my armchair psychologist diagnosis is that Barb has replaced people with things, filled the absence of meaningful relationships with the comfort of being surrounded by a hoard that will never leave her.

I don't know if Barb has any friends, but considering what we know of her as a person I'd be shocked if she did. Evidence does seem to suggest that the hoarding started after she stopped working which lends credence to my theory. Jobs (for the most part) force us to socialize, and people will put up with grating personalities for longer than they would outside of a work setting in order to avoid drama. Retirement cut her off from easy access to people, but the more negative effects of this were offset while Chris was in high school. Parents are still expected to be an active part of their child's school life at that age, what with parent-teacher conferences and the like, so there was still some easy socializing to be had. After he graduated we see shit start to get real in the hoarding department.

Bob's death is when it really went off the rails. However strained their relationship may have been, he was still her husband and a key member of the Chandler household. As the 2013 house tour attests, Barb has filled the void Bob left behind with even more junk. Chis has inherited alot of these behaviors too, which is normal for young children (or, in this case, a child trapped in an aging man's body) raised by hoarders. Only he's filled the void with toys and video games instead of cheap junk from Goodwill.

 

I completely agree that Barb is using the thrill of impulse buying as a substitute to a social life. Chris has learned to do this too, which is why he buys toys and games and never really uses them, he just has a mini hoard of his own.

 

You hit the nail on the head. That;s the kind of post I wanted.

I posted this thread to try and get a deeper understanding of barb's mindset. Obviously, Chris is only half of the equation. I want to understand his mindset, but I cannot do that without exploring Barb's own behavior as children look to their parents and pick up their patterns, and you and i previously stated that chris has picked up many of barb's bad habits. In effect, I wanted to establish what chris defines as normal family/human behavior. Taking what you layed out and combined with chris being autistic really helps put things in perspective.

Someone who's socially blind being lead by someone who is social poison? I don't think the trolls really did much to chris compared to the long-term damage his parents inflicted on him. It's really enough information to establish a great deal of pity for chris. I think he will never, ever be a functional human being after what he's been through, and I think with this new information we know who REALLY made the man we call Chris Chan.

I need some more time to process this, reread some things on teh CWCKi to bring some things in a new perspective. I admit, there's information revealed elsewhere in this thread that I'm not aware of. Chris, I've contemplated often, Barb not as much.

 

I have to wonder if she really pays much attention to Chris anymore, she looks way too dead inside to know what's going on with her surroundings, and Chris seems to be by himself more-so than usual. But I'm more-or-less curious as to what her thoughts on his incestuous fantasies are, if she were to find out. It'd probably destroy what's left of her psyche.

 

You two made me realize something. I kinda wondered why Cole Smithy turned out relatively neurotically vs. his half brother who has had multiple websites and forums erected in honor of his insanity. After they have some of the same genes and were raised by the same mother. Sure Chris has Autism, but so do a lot of people. To me it's always seemed like bad parenting, but like I said Bob and Barb's other kids didn't turn out nearly like Chris. So why did Chris turn out different?

I think its because Barb's mental condition has been deteriorating for a while and Chris got the tail end of it. While Cole doesn't recall Barb as being a particularly great parent but is adamant that Barb became a worse person after he moved out. While Cole is under the impression that it was due to Bob influence, I find it more likely that her circle of friends has been on a steady decline for Chris's life and that it made her a very different parent. It's why she never forced Chris to grow up either, she wants Chris to be a part of her hoard. She knows that he will outlive her and that she can keep him under her thumb until she dies. Everyone else she knows may have pushed her away but she will always have Chris.

 

Someone said that when Barb and Chris were spooning together, Chris did it wrong once (?) and Barb lashed out at him? Which prompted him to buy his own bed. What exactly did he do wrong? Did he get an erection, or soil his pants or something?