I just made my mother cry.

[Aspychata]

And your mother is a master manipulator and she has used her sobbing to guilt you in behaving and offering sympathy by her playing the victim role, and you are sucked into her wormhole. She probably uses other emotional gaslight tricks to get you to respond. But now that you have learned to look for her manipulations, you have shut her down, she has very little control of you.

 

[Shevek]

I don't know if people like this turn on the waterworks just as actors, or if they arise from challenges to their self-delusions. I suspect that things like selfishness or altruism are baked into our genes as much as AS is.

 

[Hazel_1914]

Sir, you are best served by blocking her!

 

[Hypnalis]

@Metalhead

Are you ready to start changing the way you interact with your family and/or leave your current environment?
If not, plan first, act later.
:
:
A couple of things to add to the "grey rock" path (because there's more to it than being non-reactive):

It is absolutely (100%) essential that you don't participate in any kind of win/lose psychological games.
The goal is indifference, not achieving dominance/control milestones.
You'll get further by allowing her to "win" at that (barely relevant) level.

Also you don't have to tell narcs the truth, and you don't have to apologize to a liar for lying to them.

The first is obvious OFC. Start learning the second by watching how she behaves when she's caught lying: find the "Narcs prayer" online, learn it, and later on, use it - it works on them too /lol.

Why later on? Unless you've been doing this for a long time, you'll need practice.
Narcs practice their whole lives, and they make it look easy. But it's not easy for normies.

 

[paloftoon]

In any case, I just sent her a text telling her I am sorry she feels so strongly that my cousin deserved to take the rare and out of print video games he stole from me without facing any consequence, and that I was never going to renew this conversation with her ever again. My discussion of my cousin with her is now eternally over.

Rare and out of print?
That's like your one, potential solace out of all this and you don't even get that?

I don't think an "apology" from your brother would be enough. Getting the games back and still working or an estimated amount of how much they are worth now would be enough to accept an apology- but I think that will never happen unfortunately.

Maybe she supports your brother more because he is straight and not autistic, or more likely to care for her in old age?

 

[Rodafina]

I should stop talking to this woman altogether.

It might be useful to really examine and talk about what has prevented you from taking this step so far. You have a lot of good reasons to cut contact that you can easily verbalize. But, there is something that makes you stay in contact... understanding what that is could be helpful.