Reader’s Question

My mother-in-law is bipolar and has decided to “start over” — again! She ran away from home at 17 to be with some guy, and she’s left many relationships to be with someone else.

She has been with the same guy for the 12 years that I’ve known her but only got married three years ago. But since then, she has been complaining that he’s become an alcoholic (which I’m pretty sure he isn’t), can’t keep a job and just sits around. This is the kind of thing she always says before she leaves a relationship.

What she doesn’t see is that after she leaves, the men she’s been with go on to lead successful, happy lives. She fails to recognize her pattern of behavior and can’t see how she drags people down when she’s with them. She even tried to do that with my husband a while back, and went almost out of her way to make him dependant on her. At first, I thought it was just me — that I was the crazy one. But last week, when she decided out of nowhere to move out, I knew different. She asked for my husband’s help moving her stuff, but he said he didn’t agree with her decision and didn’t think helping her was the right thing to do. So, she recruited my brother-in-law and fed him full of lies to get him to help.

Both my husband and his brother have hardly ever stood up to my mother-in-law. Everyone can see what’s going on, but she will hang up the phone or start crying at the slightest negative feedback you give her. We have been EXTREMLEY nice in how we’ve dealt with her, but she just lies or evades the subject when we confront her.

Her whole life, people have allowed her think it’s okay to be like she is. Ending a relationship you aren’t happy in is perfectly normal. But abandoning a life and creating an entirely new life just because you’re bored doesn’t seem healthy. She has kids and grandkids that she seems not even to care about. She is already living with a new boyfriend (poor guy!), and she told my brother-in-law not to give us her new phone number.

I discovered a while back that when you do what is morally and logically right, life is a lot more fulfilling, even though making bad decisions is an easy out. I stopped talking to a friend who was exactly like my mother-in-law, and my life has been great since I got rid of the negativity that surrounds these kinds of people. But this is family, so I don’t have a frame of reference for how we should handle this.

I also think that she can take her medicine all she wants, but that isn’t a fix-all for her problems. She has to genuinely accept help before this pattern can change. But how do we confront her? She will literally run away screaming if we stage some sort of intervention. So, I wonder if we should even try, or if it would be better to just stay away from her. I really don’t think cutting off family is right, but my kids don’t need to be exposed to this sort of thing.

It’s got to be a miracle my husband and his brother turned out alright, as unstable and erratic as she is, and I don’t want her to be a negative influence in their lives. And when reality catches up with her, I don’t want to have to deal with her being angry and crying and asking them for sympathy or attention.

This is one of the few times when following my conscience might not be the right thing to do. I need a little help to figure out what to do!

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

Folks with an unremitting Bipolar Disorder can be prone to periodic self-destructive, impulsive behaviors. But you don’t need to be Bipolar to exhibit patterns of sensation-seeking, boredom-intolerance, and relationship instability. Sometimes, such tendencies are part of a person’s personality style. And such a style can be influenced by several factors, including early trauma that can make the prospect of a stable relationship the most anxiety-evoking experience a person can have. That’s not to say that intimacy anxiety is at the root of all relationship-jumping behavior patterns. An unquenchable thirst for excitement and a lack of mature self-discipline can also be factors.

In the end, if your mother-in-law is to benefit from any “intervention” (be it a family confrontation or the services of a professional counselor), she will need to be in enough distress about the pattern to acquire the motivation to change. The best concerned family members can do is to make an extra effort to avoid any and all behaviors that “enable” her pattern of conduct.