Living with Toxic Relatives

Sabotage

Anyone who's come out of a long-term toxic relationship knows that a manipulative, vindictive narcissistic ex can all but ruin your life. They'll at least do their best to try. My husband's abuser managed to sabotage his career, basically setting him back to square one. She did this even though taking away his means to support himself also meant taking away his means to pay child support to her. An emotionally healthy woman with a handful of kids will look for a job to help support herself and her children. An unbalanced wreck in the same situation will spend all of her time plotting and scheming until she succeeds in cutting off the only source of income she does have.

To me, this is one of the most baffling aspects of psychopaths and the personality disordered. When they perceive that someone has wronged them, they will go out of their way to harm that person, even when it is inevitable that they themselves will be negatively affected by the outcome. I truly believe that many of them do have the foresight to understand that they will suffer consequences for their own actions, but they go ahead and implement whatever malicious plot they've devised, because they so badly want to cause someone else's suffering.

Trying To Put The Pieces Back Together

My husband was in the military, and we were living all the way across the country from ex-BPD when she strategically tried to destroy his life. (In hindsight, the distance was the biggest blessing). We packed up and temporarily moved in with one of his relatives who lives in between our home state and the one we had just moved from. My hubby had a job prospect in the area; it didn't pan out, we wound up staying with the relative and her family longer than we had planned, and she turned out to be highly manipulative which made an already stressful situation almost unbearable.

Tim eventually landed the job that he would have for the next several years, and we got our own place. He was quickly promoted to a management position, and eventually I was hired on with the company too. The owners turned out to be the most heinous, emotionally manipulative, abusive people either of us has ever worked for, and maybe I'll get into that some other time. Eventually, this company wanted him to move back to our home state, and they promised him a promotion. He never got it, the work became intermittent, and we wound up staying with his parents for much longer than expected.

More Of The Same

The idea was to move in with them for several months while my husband set up his surgery (to correct an injury and improve mobility), recover from the surgery, and give us time to search for a rental property. However, The Universe rarely takes our plans into account, and things got crazy almost as soon as we arrived back home.

Which brings me to the reason I started writing this post. I recently wrote a flash fiction piece that was inspired by our stay with the in-laws, and I figured why not supplement it with a blog post summarizing what really happened. I've started reading back through my journal entries and will post soon.

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