How do you discuss difficult stuff with a person who claims to not be able to handle hard subjects?

UncleDave: Hello?? What did you think it was necessary to repost the OP's message? I hope you at least copied and pasted. Good grief.

JesseBelle: I'm with you there! Read it just fine!

FirePretty, It is great to see so many helpful suggestions on this site. So the only thing I have to add is, and I know it is difficult to be bad mouthed to family after all your efforts, but try to keep in mind, they, I am sure, all know what she is like and why they keep their distance both figuratively and literally.
If your in laws were able to be such vacationers, might they be in a position to pay for assisted living? No doubt they are completely against it, but if you cut back on solving their problems they will have to meet themselves and make some real decisions. It is a hair ripper though, my husband is very manipulative, threatening to call elder abuse whenever he is thwarted - wanting car keys when he uses a walker, etc. I lately offer to call for him which shuts that topic down. I hate reminding him that I am his last bastion before a nursing home; It is so tricky dealing with personality disordered people who are weakening with age. Maybe give your MIL a phone number of a handy man to call when she needs things done, or the number of her "real" son; (roar! my blood is beginning to boil.) Then step back and wait for the storm to pass. Easier said than done, I know.

Yet some of us managed to read it just fine. We didn't need to have it broken down for us.

The only thing I see missing is some degree of acceptance that she is how she is and you can't expect to change her. The plan to end around her with the siblings is a good one, and you really did not even have to tell her that was in the works. Deal with what is, set limits, expect to be treated badly, and do not expect her to ever admit any faults or wrongdoing. She's basically right she can't handle hard subjects, most especially the subject of her own behavior. Give (or arrange for her to have) her what care you can - that she actually needs. as best you can determine - and don't bother recriminating with her about it. No use hitting your head on the wall.

FirePretty, ferris1 is right on the money. You need to get out of their lives for your own sanity. She isn't "sane", therefore you will never get her to act "sane". It almost sounds like he is still trying to get her love. It won't happen. If his siblings believe her, they will believe her. He is in an abusive relationship. He needs counseling himself so he understands why he keeps going back for more abuse. I would say, both of you could use some counseling to see why he keeps going back for more abuse. Your marriage is struggling, get some help.

This is why I'm glad my MIL lived 2 days away. Ur MILs husband is responsible for her. You r just banging ur head against the wall. If she can cruise, she can do for herself. I would do what u want even if it means moving. Ur husband has done what he can. My SIL just did this, gave everything over to her sister who went behind her back and got POAs for her Mom.

FirePretty: Yes, I know all about school-girl giggle act! Late mom was the same! Don't play into her "every beck and call." Only 75? Good grief! What she is doing with "her cocktail of meds" is going to mess up her organs!

Write her a letter outlining your feelings and concerns. Do not assign "blame" for her conditions. Then tell her you are no longer going to help her. She has a husband, so let the two of them work things out. If SHE chooses to stay in an abusive relationship, then that is her choice. Get out of her life for now, stay focused on YOUR marriage, and let the chips fall where they may. She will die with or without your intervention. The two of you need to stay healthy for your lives.

taking opiates. opiate addiction is rampant.. where is she getting opiates. Are they a factor in her behavior ?
she has some kind of illness....

Are you taking advantage of going to a support group?

She has no desire to get out of the house .... what sort of help is available from the management of the assisted living. ? Your saying she doesn't want to leave the AL ?

You are caring for someone, living at independent living? Is this person the MIL you are asking the forum to offer solution?

The original post subject caught my interest, However it was impossible to read since it was a massive block of text.
Sorry when people post blocks many of us cannot read the content.

Here is the original post again...
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My MIL is a narcissistic drama queen. We moved across country to help manage her health care. Her medications were so out of whack that she was acting goofy and she was in the hospital every month for one illness or another.

My husband has been taking the brunt of the work and has done an amazing job getting her back on track and keeping her out of the hospital. Last year, we realized that our marriage was suffering a lot due to the stresses that she put on him. She feigned illnesses and always found something "important" for him to do over at her house. We realized that she was creating drama and
that helped us a bit with our approach to her.

Since her illness, she has had to retire and doesn't have the social outlet she once had. She has no desire to get out of the house to do things other than shop for food on a RARE occasion. She over exaggerates her health issues and has now taken to making herself sick in order to go to the ER for attention.

She is now taking advantage of my husband and trying to force him to manage her personal relationship with her abusive husband by saying that she was in the hospital because she was stressed out from her husbands abuses. When my husband attempted approach his dad, she got incredibly angry and said that she never told him to do that. My husband took her comment as a threat to her health. It's not my husband place and told her that he won't do it anymore.

Now she is even MORE angry and has taken to hiding dr appts from him, adding medications without dr visits, not eating and then taking opiates.

She has even taken to messing up her own medication dosage. This isn't the first time that she has taken advantage of a situation for her own personal attentions. She's manipulative and frustrating. When my husband tries to approach her and have an open and frank discussion with her, she tells him that she has some kind of illness that makes it so she can't handle stress, which includes having heart-to-heart conversations about relationships.

When we DO try to talk to her, she zones out like a freakin' teenager! She has NO problem handling the stress that comes with traveling for a 2 week cruise! We are at our wits end trying to figure out how to talk to this woman.

She can NEVER admit that she has done anything wrong. She falls into the "I'm the victim", but she has created the environment herself and refuses to see her part in it.

How can we tell her that she's being horrible and that we know she's being manipulative? How can we tell her that she is ruining the last good relationship she has by being manipulative?

How does one handle their sanity with a person who believes that they can do no wrong? MIL is 75.

This is the place for venting. Feel free to do it. I vent on here so much that the people probably say Here's JessieBelle complaining again. It helps keep me sane and lets me get rid of some anger. I think it helps other people, too. When I write, some people will say they are going through the same thing. We can't really fix anything for each other, but it helps to have someone to talk to. So vent away.

I'm sorry if my posts come off confusing. I'm treading on new ground. There is just SO MUCH to deal with that I have a hard time processing it all. Just when I think I've got it, something else pops up.

I don't really have anyone to talk to about this(other than hubs) and I'm just looking for some kind of direction. Sometimes I need to vent, this does not appear to be the place for it. Sorry. I'll try to be more tactful.

The most recent situation we are dealing with threw us for a loop and we are trying to figure out how to navigate. The suggestion about BPD was golden. I'm still researching but I hope that will help.

Thanks to all who supplied helpful and caring comments!

@churchmouse, Yes, you are wrong. We have no plans on moving. I like to daydream (it helps keep me sane) and that may have snuck into my previous post. I need to be more thoughtful when I write. IF we move again, it will be closer to my family.

I used my parents as an example. His parents did help us out, but help was never offered, we had to ask. Most people I know would offer or ask if there was anything they could do, but none of that came from his family.

His parents are married, but they do not have what I would call a "marriage".

In regards to the doctors, Yes, she has a lot but not 15, maybe closer to 7-8. All are necessary due to her comorbidities.

Um. I really hope I'm wrong. But going on what you say: this lady has plenty of money for far too many doctors and frittering on cruises. You and your husband moved house across the country 18 months ago and/but during a very difficult (it must have been a nightmare) operation were so short of cash that you had to beg your husband's family for money. Instead of accepting your parents' kind offer to come and get you.

Meanwhile, every time your husband tries to discuss finances or practical management with his mother he gets shut down. Nobody in the family wants to talk about it? - or talk to him about it?

And now you'd like to move back but you, kind of, have an inheritance to take care of.

You do realise how this sounds, don't you?

And for heaven's sake, are the parents married or not? "Married: yes/no" is not a qualitative datum.

LOL @ Churchmouse. LOL Yes. Our next move is to move closer to my family. I have 3 nephews that I hardly ever get to see. There is an inheritance that we are kind of taking care of, so we are a little hesitant to leave right now. But, yes. Leaving the area is our nuclear option. I laugh...I literally laughed when I read that...because we've had that escape plan since the beginning.

On our move down here a year and a half ago, we were 90 miles into the trip with a moving truck (him driving) and our personal car with three cats (me driving) when my husband got violently ill. We ended up spending 10 days in a town I had no idea how to get around in (good thing for Google Maps), with no money (we had budgeted just enough for the move), and hubs in the hospital. He was in the hospital for a total of 7 or 8 days, depending on how you count. I was stuck in a hotel with three cats! It was terrifying. During this stressful time, his family, parents and brother included, had the audacity to question us about how we were going to pay our bills when we got there. They offered no help (we had to beg for $$). His brother had the balls to offer to fly over and drive the rest of the way back under certain conditions. To top it off, they NEVER called to ask how he was doing! I can't believe the selfishness in that family. My parents were ready to drop everything to come help us.

After that ....interesting...encounter, we made sure to have an agreement. If our marriage starts to suffer, we are outta here!

Um. I'm not being entirely flippant: have you considered moving back across the country to get away from her?

Just read this, had to look to see if I wrote it. Short story similar mil, just passed but for years same story. It affected our marriage I told husband there are priorities, you have to pick one, if it's me I will help you manage stress with your folks. She was a manipulator and husband a narcissist dementia. We also had her write down things and email to us, found if she didn't have immediate face to face attention. It cut down the demands in half.

Yeah, I've been googling the s*&^ out of it. My husband is very cautious about putting a label on things. I need to find the right resource to share with him or he might think I'm trying to get her committed! LOL

Borderline personality develops early and is said to last a lifetime, because it's hard to treat. There's a lot about it online if you google it. Some people have really strong traits, though they may not have the disorder. I bet that people with this personality are avoided more and more as they get older.

WOW, JessieBelle! Thanks! That is very helpful! It does sound like her. She does exhibit a number of the symptoms. Thank you so much for pointing that out. I saw a number of posts about this BPD but didn't know what it was referring to. Does this seem to be something that appears with a lot of older folks? A lot of the symptoms also sound like dementia.

Here's something about borderline personality disorder on this site. I didn't read it all this evening, but with 90 messages, it must be pretty good. We've had many people dealing with this disorder on AC.

https://www.agingcare.com/questions/borderline-personality-Narcissistic-mother-142833.htm

I just thought of something. Could you MIL be a borderline personality? If she is, trying to set her straight won't work. Read a bit about borderline personality disorder and see if she fits the profile. My mother is a borderline personality. If I try to say things to her, she talks over me. If I ever get on to her, she starts crying and tells me not to fuss at her, that her mother and father never fussed at her, and that she and my father never, ever argued. The truth was that they rarely even spoke to each other. Borderline personality often includes narcissism and dependency. And it almost always includes blaming others, instead of taking personal responsibility. Borderlines can make you crazy. There's really no changing them. All you can do is stay back from the things they are doing. They love and appreciate you, then they hate you and think you're doing bad things. It helped me a lot when I read about it. My mother may not have the disorder, but she has so many of the characteristics. You may find the same for your MIL.

Fire, I know what you mean about your MIL not want to admit to things. It's like they have butterflies and bluebirds fluttering about when they talk about themselves. Everyone else is the bad guy. :-)

JessieBelle, you're right. It's not so much that we feel bad, my husband is beyond having any empathy for her/them. Maybe it's more that we see an issue and we want to fix it. Right now, the issue is more of her bad-mouthing him to the rest of the family and having to hear crap from all of them. NONE of them live close. We suspect that she's telling her siblings that my hubs is emotionally abusing her. We're waiting for the back-lash. He wants to address her disrespect and abuse towards him and she doesn't see that she's done anything wrong. Hubs suspects that if she admits that she did something wrong, then it opens the door to her admitting that she was a horrible mother. We're at a stand-off and have no idea how to process it.

Hubs and I try very hard to not let it affect our lives. We try to have a very separate life. We need to get out more.....right now he is so emotionally drained he doesn't want to go anywhere.

AMEN, Windy! Truer words were never spoken!!!

I deal with this type behavior so much. The way I handle it is by not making her too important in my mind. So what if she thinks I do something wrong? The world keeps turning and I wake up in the morning. This is not meant to sound snarky, but you have to give someone permission to make you feel bad.

The other thing I do is turn it on her. For example, she'll say her blood sugar reading is too high because I put so much stress on her earlier. I'll say it is more likely caused by that pack of crackers she ate a few minutes back. She has dementia, so it doesn't really stick, but it does back her off from blaming me for something that wasn't my fault.

Windyridge, that is an interesting way to think about it. Their parents lived a nice retirement but they are afflicted with illness and can't enjoy it. Well, they COULD enjoy it if they wanted to. Granted, travel is a bit harder now and usually discouraged by the doctors. They were global travelers before they got sick. We know that they are having a hard time accepting their sudden afflictions, but everything we try to help them gets rejected. We have suggested so many groups, hobbies, day trips....she wants nothing to do with them. She wants a social life, but doesn't want to do the work to have one. Again, fighting an illogical battle with logic. up-hill battle. It's just so hard to accept a complete lack of interest on her part when all she wants is to be healthy....and when she is...she's still not happy.