Yeah, it was.

I only twigged a few years ago that I have diarrhea all the time and that's not right. Most other people don't. I'm sure it's the fear and adrenalin that's caused it in my case.

I'm so disconnected from my body. I don't trust it and I'm scared of it, so most of the time I'm either trying to control it or ignore it.

That's the lesson dad wanted to teach me: sever mind and body, thought and feeling.

I obviously have a long way to go on this healing road.

Blue heron reading your story - very well written btw - is like a soap opera and i'm waiting for the next installment. A few gasps and a few (commisserating) giggles later... What are we at now. Has the funeral get-together happened yet? Sorry about the loss and also all the drama.
I am really surprised that in your mental health training you weren't briefed about psychopaths (or narcissists?).
I agree about keeping your eye on them, that their cold eyes betray them, at least a narcissist (MIL or ex-MIL - I'm really thinking they've done me a great favor, even though the loss is of my companion, or who I thought was my companion, is painful). My estranged husband has isolated me from friends, family and colleagues, ever since his mother pushed her way into my home when my baby was 8 months old and assaulted me for daring to ask her to take off her shoes in my home (with a baby crawling around). The city streets are filthy, and she doesn't drive.
My husband always took her side, no matter what she did to me, but I believe my grave error was speaking to his colleague at work and telling him to please tell my husband that his mother was over at our place and refused to leave. So potentially-reputation damaging word got out. That was more important than her (or his) appalling behavior to me.
The other "mistake" was calling the police when my husband assaulted me a year later for the same reason: a fight about his mother's behavior. She knew exactly what she was doing. So I can also commisserate about not being a violent person but wanting to brain her. My husband actually told the police I said I wanted to kill her. Well obviously I'm not serious, but who wouldn't want to cause serious harm to such a creature? She was standing in my front hall with my baby screaming in the bedroom, smirking at me, taking a deep breath of satisfaction with her elbow up on my filing cabinet (so in my personal space), and saying she wouldn't leave because this was her son's house. She was enjoying the "show" - my horrified reaction to her, while she called me names. Sick really. My husband does the same thing - likes to create a bad atmosphere so he can just see the horrified reaction in my face.
I also have a permanent injury because of him - a chronic pain, that also I think has an effect on my temper. It's shorter.
They can have each other. That's what she wanted. Didn't know I was going to be her great opponent for her darling son, and didn't realize the devotion was mutual. Last Easter I wrote a card to him and her - they are the ones united, why beat around the bush? But we also have a daughter so unfortunately I can't cut off from him. I would love to be able to contact people and tell them the real story about these abusers but social constraints stop me. They're his friends and family. Then I think maybe we just need counselling and can reconcile, but perhaps I'm just not ready to face facts. He left me, he doesn't love me, and that's it. It's the cold hard reality.
You can't beat them at their many silly games (and you are an enemy to them, and they can be very hostile, and vicious) so I'm not too keen on finding out what he's capable of if pushed. Yes, intimidated. I try and stay friendly but it's hard, especially when the manipulations and passive aggressive gestures start and don't let up. And they can always twist things around to make themselves look like the victim.

My horrified reaction. She was enjoying humiliating me in my own home, and enjoying my powerlessness and inability to get her out. I finally figured out a way - by throwing her things out the front door. She was so PO'd she put her shoulder under my nose, as if for me to nudge it to get her going, so I looked at her like, "is this what you want?" and obliged. I nudged it. That was her excuse to shove me over on her way out. I was shocked. Just unbelievable.
My dear mother actually met her for coffee some time later for my marriage's sake, and the MIL told her that no-one had ever been as rude to her as me! Even my husband said that wasn't true. And what was her "spin" on the event even to me and goodness knows who else? She said she came over to "talk to me about my post-natal depression, to suggest I might talk about it with my gynecologist!" WT? I was on cloud nine when this long-awaited baby was born, and that suggestion was another hurtful blow and outright lie. She really came to put me in my place, as she saw it, and detrimentally affect my marriage, because that was a death blow to my relationship with her son.
As for her "beloved" granddaughter, the first thing she did when she had my baby in her arms for the privilege of giving her a bottle was to shake it roughly in her little mouth and say: "Come on, stupid." Just an appalling woman.
After that home invasion - she had been ringing the doorbell until I answered - no call to say she was coming over - just showed up during a much-needed nap after I'd just vacuumed and mopped the floor, and pushed her way past me when I opened the door, walked into my bedroom, sat on my bed (at which point I said she needed to learn some manners), and said: "I came to stop you spreading lies about me." I laughed at the irony, because I'm known to those who know me, for telling the truth to a fault. I told her that she repeatedly crossed the boundary line and to please leave. She refused. Even answered my telephone when my husband called, and calmly told him I was in an irrational state.
I also know more than I care to about "projection." They spew and project what they hate about themselves and put it on you. And they believe it! I became both of their scapegoat, and I'm not willing or strong enough for that. Not even a month after that I told my husband I was willing to go with his mother for an Easter celebration but not yet invite her home. He never acknowleged that (said I wasn't serious!), or that I was actually the first to try and make amends. Instead it festered for two years. He said if I moved an inch toward making up he would move a mile. Well he did - right out of the house. And had the nerve to accuse ME of withholding money (what money?! I hardly make any), of betraying him... Just so unfair. He was the one actually doing it.
I guess this is also therapeutic for me to write out. It was so flippin' traumatic and hard to get over. I guess other people have suffered worse though so I have to try and get on that other mental plane of counting my blessings. It's a lovely day. I need to go and pick up my daughter soon.

My husband continued the passive aggressive behavior and really turned it up when we were meant to go out with others, when his family or friends visited, or when my friends or family were coming to visit, including rages and manipulations, well after my MIL and I reconciled. I found a flash drive with "tiny apartment" layouts he had put together 2 months after I reconciled with his mother.

My gosh, Akeso, you have really been through it. Appalling is a good word for it. I'm sorry you had to. What you've described sounds so familiar. I can see it takes a while to "get over it." Or maybe never.

Thanks so much for sharing, it helps my heart.

blue heron

Wow, it's hard not to sound hateful and bitter, isn't it.

Well, fortunately, Dad-in-law's funeral was a tightly controlled, by-the-book service, so there was no opportunity for anyone to do or say anything to wreck it. Pretty much everyone was on their fairly decent behavior. But I don't expect that to last. Not at all.

I'm just going to keep spewing here. It's helping.

The more I read of other posts and resources here, the more I am convinced about MIL. So many people have mentioned the greed aspect and whether it is worth fighting back legally. Here's a classic for you. Eleven years ago husband's Dad loaned him some very special valuables to use for generating some income. There was a legal document drawn up with the conditions. (I hesitate to say what these valuables were because they're pretty specific to a certain kind of business.) At any rate, husband was able to turn the items on the market for a nice profit.

Years went by and nothing was said about this loan. Nevertheless, husband kept it all separate, principal loan and profit proceeds alike, just in case. He always was afraid his Dad would renege on everything and do him out of it all, as he had done in other instances in the past. (I don't see Dad as a psychopath, but perhaps a pretty nasty alcoholic.)

In 2007, at the funeral of MIL's oldest daughter, husband's Dad talked to him for a while and said to keep the valuables that he'd loaned him, just consider it a gift and not ever mention it again. Dad said that over the years he had given similar amounts of money to the other children, and my husband hadn't ever gotten any. So he should keep the things. Well, husband, being the wise man he is, asked Dad to please go dig out the old loan agreement and mark it up as no longer a loan, but a gift. But they were at the after-funeral dinner and Dad just kept stalling and stalling, until the bank where he had the papers closed up, and husband had to fly home without the gift being final.

Nothing more said until this past March. MIL decides after all this time that she wants "her" loan money back from my husband. Because she is "broke." We thought it had been forgotten. (In one of his lucid moments, Dad was surprised she remembered it too.)

I don't even know if I can tell you how ugly that got. There was no reasoning with her. She refused to believe the discussion that husband and Dad had in 2007. Meanwhile, poor old Dad is sitting over in the corner shrugging his shoulders apologetically. By this time he has level 6 Alzheimer's, and hardly knows what day it is. MIL is taking advantage of that big time. We had about three very ugly meetings about it, and I secretly videoed them on my cell phone. The scene where MIL hangs her head pitifully and whines, over and over, "I just want my moneyyyyyyy, I just want MY moneyyyyyy" is priceless. Ya know, it wasn't her money, it was Dad's.

Husband and I discussed refusing to give it back. Other family members advised us to tell MIL to stick it where the sun doesn't shine. But we realized that would be more trouble than it was worth, especially since they did have a signed loan agreement, and it was still legally valid. It would be my husband's word against an ill old man who couldn't remember what you said thirty seconds ago. And a vindictive, conniving poor little crippled old lady (who would spend endless amounts of money to make an example of us). Ha. So we agreed to pay Dad back the loan principal. We did say it was going to take us a few weeks to liquidate the items, because MIL insisted on CASH, not the items.

However, before we could do that, SOMEBODY called the police on us and said we had stolen these same valuables off MIL's dining room table. Holy crap! Those items had been in my husband's possession non-stop for eleven years! I videoed that whole event too. (Parts of it are almost funny now.) Fortunately, the officer had a grandmother with Alzheimer's and saw right through the entire ruse. He kept wanting to know when it was we were supposed to have taken the things, and finally Dad said it was just the other day; when the officer asked the date of that day, Dad called everyone an idiot and said, 2000, of course! That ended it for the police officer. I have never had the police called on me for anything! I was scared to death! I also know exactly who dialed that phone. Dad didn't have the wherewithal. It was MIL. She had that man out of his 24/7 pajamas and dressed in his Sunday best before she dialed 911.

We didn't get in any kind of trouble, but the police call did its job in convincing us there was no way to beat that old b***h at this game. So at great expense to ourselves, we made a cross-country trip to cash out the principal amount of these very specialized valuables and bring back her cash. We made sure we had everyone involved sign a paper agreeing that the whole thing was paid in full, and they weren't going to ask for anything more, and indeed they could not legally ask for anything more (like all the profit). I think they were too stupid to understand the legal language we had on the paper, so they hastily signed it, literally snatched the check out of our hands, and had MIL's daughter run straight to the bank with it. She ran out of the room like her tail end was on fire. They thought it was going to be a bad check. Idiots. A cashier's check doesn't bounce.

(They thought it was going to be a bad check because that's what they would have done? I guess! A bit of projection there.)

Huge check. More than a year's income for a nice middle-class family. Gone. Made me sick because we had been counting it as a nice piece of our retirement. We were thinking they might stretch it to cover Dad's care. Maybe they could be convinced to place him in skilled care now that they weren't "broke." There was enough to pay for almost a year, and we didn't see him surviving that long. Ha. He was more neglected than ever and that money was gone in two months. And nobody seemed to have any idea where it went. Two months! When pressed about it, MIL got up on her high horse and said she didn't have to tell people what she did with HER money.

And that's when my blood pressure reached it peak of 166/110.

Yes, some of the people here, including Dianne the admin, have learned to decide whether a legal fight with a psychopath is worth your time, your health, your sanity. No, it's not.

She's also correct in saying the only way to deal with a psychopath is to get the heck away from them. Completely.

Thanks for listening.
blue heron

Thanks again for this forum. It helps to write this stuff down, because it is helping me to see all the inconsistencies, lies, con jobs in that woman's behavior, which she has up until recently been able to distract us from seeing.

Oh, there'll be more ...

blue heron

Oh, remind me to tell you about my lovely floor.

Oh wow. We've also had something similar insofar as a manipulative half-sister (my aunt) got our grandmother to sign over a house that was meant to be divided among all the children while she was in a state of dementia. It's gone.
Also thank you for reassuring me that what I have been through was actually as appalling as I believe it was. I get the feeling sometimes I'm just over-reacting, but these things really are horrific.
As for the gift and the money, that's tough and I hope you have enough so that your retirement is comfortable. It didn't sound like "Dad" was all that concerned to get the loan changed to a gift either though, but maybe he wasn't counting on his wife going so far as to do what she did. Unbelievable, calling the police on you! THANK GOODNESS the policeman saw through it, thank goodness you had the foresight to tape it!!! I never have such thoughts until well after the fact.
Also very scary about not getting involved in a court battle with a psycho. I just keep thinking, if the MIL did that to me for asking her to take off her shoes, what will her son do to me if we are in dispute about anything regarding custody / visitation of my daughter? Scares the bejeezus out of me, truly. I hope for fairness but you just can't trust someone who thinks of you as a complete enemy. I pray a lot and hope for the best.

Akeso, sending you a hug this afternoon.

Looks like in every family, the psychopath has at least one person who either protects and shields them, or is totally taken in by them and believes everything they say (even when confronted with the truth).

Just a mish-mash of further junk.

MIL probably completely wrecked any chance we might have had to get any closer in 2009. We were here visiting (hadn't moved here yet), and there was a family get-together. I caught her over in a corner instructing her great-grandkids. She was telling them about her job (long ago) for a [utility] company. She said she fast-talked her way into that job, as administrator for the supervisor. Said the job required shorthand and typing, and she said she didn't know either one, but she promised the boss she would get the work done somehow. Because the job also involved overseeing other workers, and that was what she said she was good at. So on those provisions, she was hired.

Then she proceeded to tell the kids that she "got" some other girls to do all her typing and shorthand, and the boss was pleased with her because she was able to get those workers to increase their work. (Yeah, I'll bet she did.) She got so good at it, that the boss turned hiring and firing over to her. I think she was there for 25 years.

But the clincher was when she said, "See, children, you don't have to have any kind of an education at all to go and get a good career. So don't you worry about how bad you're doing in school. You just have to figure out how to get everyone else to do your work for you, and you'll do fine."

HUH!!! I wanted to go over there and smack her! I could hardly believe it.

But I know just how she did her work. She found everyone's weak spots and either exploited them, or pandered to them until the person was in her debt. They then probably had to do whatever she said, reasonable or not, or lose their job and get a bad reference.

For her family, she has tried buying everyone. That has served two purposes: not only is money a potent bait, her ability to "buy" so many people fulfills her desperate grandiose need to appear wealthy, and thus superior. That was one of the first things I ever noticed about her long ago. About three people are so "indebted" to her that they are pretty much her slave. They are miserable and cannot break away from her. They can't afford to. One is so snared by MIL that suicide appears to be an attractive option. MIL hasn't ever been able to snag me with anything -- money, flattery, trying to shame me into doing things I don't want to do -- not a thing. I'm of no use to her, so she doesn't pay me much mind. (Except when she's giving me another random try here and there.) In fact, I guess I'm not part of the family, because this past summer when my husband had a birthday, MIL invited several people to go out for a steak dinner in his honor, and I was NOT invited! To my own husband's birthday! "Close family only," she is reported to have said. I guess she thought THAT would bring me around. Didn't work.

Mishmash number two -- It is interesting about the vocabulary and speech mannerisms of a psychopath, as I read in some of the resource material here. MIL has long had this strange hem-hawing stutter as she appears to searching for the best way to say something. Yes, now I see. It's an attempt to find acceptable wording and keep that mask up. Once she gets started, though, on a track that she scrambles to come up with, then she will blather you to death with what I call the con-man bluster and misdirect.

Mishmash number three -- I'm not sure why personality disorders and psychopathy was not so much covered in the mental health training I got. I know a lot about bipolar, major depressive, schizophrenia, schizo-affective, obsessive-compulsive, and those other disorders that can be treated with medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy. I know some about borderline personality disorder because I kept running into so many of those, so had to go do research. I knew something about what a Psychopath was, but it was never equated with being a psychopath. I'm just as guilty as the next person in thinking a pyschopath was like Norman Bates in "Psycho," or the woman in "Play Misty For Me," or "Fatal Attraction." Perhaps the trainer didn't want to waste time on me learning about personality disorders and psychopaths because usually they can't be helped and don't want to be helped.

Well, I'm learning a lot while reading here, and thank you all for sharing. And for letting me get this out.

blue heron