Sister with borderline personality traits

[Breakthrough]

Hi everyone.  I usually am in the inlaws part of the forum, as my MIL likely has NPD.  I am as close to non contact with her as I can get.  I only occasionally speak with her if we are seeing her in person.  The lockdowns make that impossible right now, one of the few benefits.

I have a sister that is very difficult.  I am the 3rd of 5 children and get along well with my other siblings.  My eldest sister is extremely difficult and Was abusive mentally, emotionally and sometimes physically to me growing up.  I have forgiven her for many things, but she still exhibits boundary stomping and inappropriate behaviour which I find very triggering.  She is very much my way or the highway, I am right and you are wrong.  I honestly just get along to keep the peace in the family, mostly my limiting contact.  Yesterday she kept texting our family group text with links to stuff she found interesting, at 1 am.  I kept getting alerts, despite muting the convo, my iPad is glitchy I guess so after the 3rd txt I ask her not to txt after 11pm.  I feel that's reasonable.  In the morning she txts how to turn alerts off, no apology. I had an extremely heavy work day and have a very demanding job, wher I work long hours when I work weekends, and I don't get much sleep because there is no time.  I told her I don't have the time to deal with this if she won't respect boundaries, so I will block her phone until next week when I can sort it out.  So then she sends me shared album alerts on my phone, the way one is labelled, it looks like she is sending me screenshots of her texts.🙄.  I really just can't with her passive aggressive behaviour anymore.  It's not good for my mental health and I will cut her out if I need to.  She found a loophole though, can't shut off those alerts or block her there .  I am just seeking some validation that she is being completely unreasonable and passive aggressive in her behaviours, as she likes to gaslight me into thinking I am the problem.  None of my family generally says anything to her because they don't want to deal with her when she gets like this either. My mom and dad tend to take her side and gaslight me because they feel guilty about how they treated her growing up (they were hard on us all, but hardest on her). They also enable her.  I guess it just makes me feel like I did as a young teen, like nobody is on my side.  She was a bully and said hateful things to me daily growing up, my parents never intervened.  My dad physically abused her and he did hit me hard enough across the face to send my flying in the air once, it was not the only time he struck me, much worse with my eldest sister, I guess they didn't see anything wrong with her behaviour.   When she left home, it was like I could finally breathe.  When she does things like this it's triggering.  We are in our 40s now, and I just can't with her.  I don't have the energy and I need to focus on my own kids and family.  I strongly believe in gentle and respectful parenting, and she believes her kids will only do what she wants if she yells and threatens them.  We don't have that in common either, but I know she definitely improved from how she was parented and I do love and respect the ways that she has grown as a person.  It doesn't mean I am ok with being her punching bag anymore though.  Sometimes I just need to put contact with her on pause (which she still doesn't respect or understand).  Thanks for reading, it helps to write this out in a forum I know I will find folks who get this.

[DistanceNotDefense]

Hi breakthrough - this exact scenario happened to me, the getting messages at 1 am and everything  (with uNPD/ASPD older sister). I blocked the group without explanation, I was just tired of the whole thing. And it came after a long string of other nonsense that I was so done with.

How is she sharing albums with you? There has to be some way to block notifications, it might be in the settings or something. Im almost certain.

[Breakthrough]

I looked at blocking that too, but nothing in settings.  I am just ignoring it for now since she's just doing it to get a rise out of me.  She also gossips about us in front of her teenaged kids with her husband.  And it's never kind things, just nasty opinions and assumptions, not necessarily even true.  We know bc my younger nephew has reiterated some of these nasty things to my husband. 🙄.  I am staying on the group txt, but I might just start my own and exclude her 😂.  It would honestly be fine with me.  I can't deal with that behaviour when I have so many other responsibilities.  I have decided healthy boundaries are the only way to deal with these kinds of behaviours.  I am just exhausted now, and she is only thinking about herself.  she would talk to her friends about how nasty and difficult I was in my twenties, because me having boundaries, or saying a nasty retort to her awfulness was me being difficult.  She is very good at this splitting and making me feel like and outsider in my own family.  I just do not care anymore.  While I can tolerate her for my family's sake, only in small doses.  I don't need to tolerate her in the form of txt messages.  A lot of the text chains she has made are just her spamming us with articles she found interesting.  I sometimes wonder if she has NPD traits as well, but BPD seems more likely.  Either way, having a PD means she is not respectful of boundaries so I have to enforce that.  She will try and find her way around that but I can ignore it.  Feeling better today, as I did get 4 hrs of sleep, despite a really busy work day.  I am just going to ignore her until I have dealt with work and also had time to recover.  Thx for the response.  It's good to know I am not alone in this situation.

[Breakthrough]

Also wanted to add, when I was a single adult, living by myself, she told me she was going to sign me up for an online dating service and pose as me to set me up on dates.  I feel like most non PD people would see this as a huge violation of boundaries.  She was going to do it too, I had to tell her repeatedly not to, and even then she was very insistent.  In retrospect, I feel like it's clues like these that help me see she really does have a problem, and it likely is a personality disorder.  I just never wanted to admit this about her, but she is that extreme.  No sense of boundaries.  I am pretty sure she can contain herself at work, but she is like this within her family.  I think my other sisters deal with these behaviours a lot less, she doesn't target them, but they still occasionally deal with it because she doesn't see it as a problem.  My other older sister put it this way, if you want to have a relationship with her, you just have to put up with how she is.  It took me many years, but I really don't see any benefit for me having a relationship with her besides keeping the peace in my family.  I am perfectly fine not talking to her unless a family group thing.  It really does take away her power if I ignore her and block her, partly why she was still trying to message me through the photo app.  I can't really tell the rest of my family this, because it will upset both my sisters and my mom.  That being said, I am not sure I need to, it just leads to more drama.  Easier to just continue as I have, not really reaching out to contact her, keeping the peace but also keeping my distance and protecting my boundaries.  I have also realized my personality plays a big role in this.  I am an INFJ, and I have always felt like a outsider in my own family and an alien in my own skin.  This is because it is a rare personality type and it's hard for me to find like minded people.  I experience most of my life in my head according to many things I have read, and this is somewhat true.  I am also a natural counsellor.  I honestly feel because I have had so many relationships where I felt it was one sided, I have retreated from many relationships.  I am sure it seems strange to people, but I don't feel I have any close friends I can really rely on, though we have been asked to help others many times and we almost always help.  I guess the boundaries to me just help me feel less used.  Not sure how much of this has to do with growing up in a big family and never being left to have any peace.  I think I am taking that opportunity now to let myself have space to reflect on many things that have happened in my life.  That way I can stay emotionally healthy for my kids.  I think they have also helped me have the strength to enforce boundaries without guilt, because they are my priority, so even a sister, I am ok with door slamming temporarily if I need to.  My MIL has pretty much been permanently door slammed, as she is very much a boundary stomper.  It took me years to feel ok with it, I had so much guilt for the first bit.

[Breakthrough]

So I just checked my email, and she sent me at least 6 nasty messages there.  Yup, so saying I am too busy with work to deal with this right now led to her bringing up every nasty thing she could think of.  She has uninvited me to Christmas and says she won't have my kids in her home because of medical choices I have made for them that she disagrees with.  I am not surprised, she has said this before.  She also uninvited me from our zoom family Bible study.  I didn't read the rest as the first few were very nasty.  I started to reply to one, but stopped.  I think the best thing I can do is to just ignore her and not respond.  It's weird, I didn't think I was going to choose to go no contact with her, but I am very much relieved too.  I don't want to deal with her drama anymore.  I don't have the energy to do it.  I would rather spend my energy on taking care of my family, and taking better care of myself.  I spend years feeling depressed and alone, in part because I could hear her cruel words in my head "why would anybody like you, what is there to like?" "You're ugly" "nobody would want to be friends with you".  She is a nasty person, she has redeeming qualities, but she rarely shows them to me.  I honestly see no benefit to our relationship except keeping the family peace.  She wants to cut me out of our family entirely.  Her weapons of choice have been isolating me and making me feel cut off from my family, and verbal, emotional and physical abuse to tear me down.  Why in the world have I bothered with a relationship with her at all for so long?  Mostly because my mom would be upset and she expects me to just take it to keep the family peace, because although it's unspoken, everyone knows I am reasonable and she's not.  I am not going to fight with her, but I am done being her punching bag.  It feels freeing, but it also means I will see my family a lot less.  I am just going to pray on that one.  It doesn't really matter now because of the travel restrictions anyways though.

I keep replying to myself as it's therapeutic to just write my thoughts down, and helps me process them.  I hope anyone reading finds them a bit helpful. 

Also, I think refusing to engage with her just makes her more angry, since she doesn't get to see the effects she has on me.  That being said, refusing to engage is also an appropriate boundary.  Just because she sends me nasty emails, doesn't mean I have to read them.  I am going to filter her emails to social so I don't see them, but they don't delete, just in case she does send me something important. 

I am really grateful for this forum.  I have learned so much about boundaries and no and low contact and tools to avoid getting sucked into someone else's drama.  I didn't feel strong enough to do that before.  I was too much of a people pleaser.  It was hard enough to do that with my MIL, but being able to even consider no contact with my sister, just ignoring emails and txts, and just completely disengaging?  It's super freeing.  The down side of not seeing my other family as much is sad, but I feel like I will gain a lot from just letting go of this very toxic relationship!