Hi again @Lesley ..... 👋
My story is different, but there are a couple of areas of parallel.
My MIL is / was super controlling ..... in fact most of my in-law family were my shocker introduction to passive-aggressive control behaviour. I married at 21 and didn’t know how to habpndle this at first ..... was a major learning curve, especially as my hubby hadn’t exhibited those characteristics when we were courting ..... he had seemed like the black sheep of his family in that regard.
Then my MIL stepped up to interfering, trying to control me at a micro-management level whenever my hubby wasn’t there, which was often .... he became a100hr/week workaholic almost overnight. I can now recognise this as an OCD behaviour, but at the time it seemed necessary to the fledgling family business that we were all involved in. It is also the nature of our industry to attract and reward that type of personality trait, and the perfectionist personality type in general.
MIL was sweet as pie when hubby was around, and it almost broke our marriage early on, trying to convince him of her Jekyll and Hyde carry-on. She was also trying to school him in (trigger his) passive-aggressive control behaviours. Long story short, I resisted, to the point of saying I was leaving, and he began to see what was going on.
We pulled it together, but have had a lot of ups and downs to ride over across the years, including many times of chaos that I can now recognise as a need for excitement that caused him to over-extend our management and coping abilities. Other things - like our first three kids born inside two years, one with intellectual and physical disabilities that were life-threatening for a time - were beyond our control.
Scroll forward to 8 years ago. We sold our business, recognising that it was a harsh industry that had served us well financially, but at an emotional level was abusive and would be damaging to our children, who had been raised differently to us, with different skill sets geared towards different career paths. Hubby turned his attention to weight loss and a recovery of his health. He haspd become morbidly obese and there were familial food behaviour issues driving this from the shadows.
Very quickly this resulted in a nightmare of cyclonic change ..... we have undiagnosed eating disordered behaviours in him .... control issues emerged at an entirely new level and went through the roof .... OCD moved in with that .... and emotionally abusive micromanagement delivered through passive-aggressive patterns that I was all too familiar with from extended family, but finding it now triggered in hubby was beyond my ability to cope. All of this was well hidden under a health life change masquerade, and still is, but cracks are emerging.
We now have five adult kids, two of whom are married, and all have been affected to varying degrees .... the youngest suffering something of a break down early last year. This flagged the attention of a mental health team, but part of hubby’s defences are a gaslighting of me any time I have attempted to speak up ..... but this is also part of his condition. He has no insight into his own situation. To him he has achieved the perfect life change and sees his austere daily regimen as perfection in terms of an ideal life balance .... so he can only perceive me as trying to undermine his “success”. His weight loss achieved massive health benefits in the initial stages, making it harder for health professionals to believe there was anything wrong, other than my perceived spousal jealousy.
S2 is finding his feet, but it has included relocating to the other side of Aus as a family unit (marrieds remained behind) with the anticipation of him moving out once he is re-started in uni here and has his life-skills management back on board. D3 seems to be much recovered too, and is starting uni here also. Hubby’s condition has stabilised emotionally as much as it’s going to for now - S2’s therapists called him on being too controlling, so that has gradually reduced to a more manageable level. The nature of his illness/s mean that he will continue to decline until it’s blatantly obvious how unwell he actually is, and by then he may have don irreparable damage to his system, but only time will tell.
I have had to disengage emotionally from mr.f&h to be able to exist in this environment .... which I am hearing you say you have done too. Self-care is paramount for me to keep my own health. Leaving prior to now would have meant encountering a firestorm that would likely have made things much worse for us long-term, but since S2 became unwell (now with an underlying personality disorder diagnosed, likely affecting many extended family members) and D3 still emotionally fragile to some degree, the cost of leaving is still too high. I have settled well enough now to staying, with boundaries that are seeming to hold.
I hope it helps you to hear someone else’s story, especially having expressed your own vulnerability so clearly. Some of us have our stories and ongoing struggles on other threads, and will be happy to tag you into them if you would like to follow along at any time.
You are not alone, and cared about here ......
🌷💜
