The specifics of this situation are very outing so in order to protect the people involved (and myself) I’m going to have to be a bit vague and I apologise now if it turns into a bit if a drip feed.
My husband’s family are deeply in-trenched in a very toxic dynamic which centres around my MIL who I believe has Covert Narcissistic Personality disorder. My husband is deeply affected by the trauma he suffered as a child growing up in a very toxic household. As a result he is or was until recently very low contact with his parents. They treat him like a child, he is pretty much incapable of asserting himself at all in their presence and they say hurtful and unkind things which completely undermine him and greatly affect his self esteem. There are other siblings (girls) who fawn over her and are enlisted to guilt trip my husband and by extension me into having more contact. The other siblings do not seem to realise how much fear, guilt and obligation is involved, everything is highly competitive and revolves around my MIL needing constant supply.
My MIL is a complete hypochondriac who has numerous mystery ailments. She has an undiagnosed condition which baffles her GP and means she has to be very careful what she eats- she is allergic to an ever growing list of things that seems to change depending on who has cooked. She seems to love nothing more than finding there is an ingredient in something you’ve cooked her that she can no longer eat especially if you’ve bent over backwards to accommodate her. If the focus is not on her, she will feign illness.
The latest drama is that my FIL has had an op- something routine. There have been some complications but essentially everything is fine. MIL has whipped everyone into a huge panic. Everyone has dropped everything (even flying home early from a holiday in one case) to support her because she isn’t coping. My FIL was discharged from hospital but she just won’t let him recover. She is constantly fussing over him making him feel that he is a huge burden. There’s suddenly a rota as there needs to be a (adult) child staying in the home at all times. He doesn’t need any care. This is solely because she is anxious. She is awful to him, berating him for changing his incontinence pads too frequently, telling everyone who will listen very personal Information about him and moaning about how it affects her. It’s horribly abusive and if the genders were reversed it would be widely accepted as coercive control but because she has formulated this persona as a vulnerable and anxious woman, nobody reacts.
The most alarming thing is that on two occasions when the family moral support team are changing shifts, she has called an ambulance and insisted that my FIL be taken to hospital due to chest pains. He has had extensive tests and there is nothing wrong. He does have an underlying heart condition but tests have shown it to be well managed and there are no markers to point to heart attack etc.
She is fabricating symptoms and giving the doctors at the hospital false information about the operation he has just had. She is asking for details of the will, everyone is incredibly worried about his health and feels like he could drop dead at any moment.
There’s lots more but is way too outing to post in detail. I have a really bad feeling about the whole thing. She just won’t accept that he needs rest and time to recover from the op and the many sleepless nights due to being ferried around A&E. She’s, at best really struggling with her own anxiety and needs sone sort of mental health intervention and at worst something really sinister is unfolding.
I don’t know how to bring this up. I don’t know whether to stay completely out of it or if I have a duty of care to try to get everyone to see what’s happening. There is a history of her creating a completely alternate narrative and the whole family just falling in line with her. She is a mater puppeteer whist simultaneously coming across as weak and vulnerable. Are has a history of not allowing him access to of healthcare on the past I was really concerned then. I voiced my concerns to a sibling in law then avd they managed to get help the help he needed but it was tricky avd met with a huge amount of resistance from MIL.
We have been low contact for ages because it is a massive head fuck and it’s so frustrating to see everyone enabling her. My husband has been completely drawn into this though. He can’t see the wood for the trees and he is incredibly concerned that his dad is about to die.
How do I navigate this?