What Could Make My Mother-in-Law the Way She Is?

Reader’s Question

We just visited my mother-in-law who is 87. She never once showed enough care to remember our boys’ birthdays. She is widowed but lives with a man my husband’s age who worked for them years ago, stole from them, disappeared, came back, and repeated the same behavior. He is currently in jail for another DUI. Yet, she talks about him constantly and how wonderful he is. She only calls when she wants something, has few friends, and people generally enter her life for a short time and then disappear (usually after borrowing money and never repaying it). She has never had a relationship with one of her children, is not speaking to another, and complains about most of the rest of the family. Although she recently claimed that she and I “have always been close,” she’s never shown care for me and has ignored my children. She tolerated a husband who had an explosive temper and was controlling. My husband says he mourns the relationship that has never existed with his mother. We’ve been married almost 40 years, and we’re still trying to figure this woman out.

Today my mother-in-law told us her only sibling was born when she was five and from that point on her mother favored her sister and ignored her to the point she has no memory of the time between 5 and 15. She married at 16, had two children, divorced and remarried by age 20, and did not raise her two children from her first marriage. What’s wrong with this woman?

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

Each one of us has a unique “style” of perceiving the world, thinking about things, and relating to others. It is this style of relating that defines our personality. Sometimes, the nature of our perceptions, and the habitual ways that we think about things and relate to others is either so ingrained (inflexible) and/or maladaptive (dysfunctional) that our personality is a problem in and of itself. This is the very definition of a personality disorder.

Of course, it’s not possible to adequately assess your situation remotely, but from what you say, it seems likely that the traits that have been long present in your mother-in-law suggest some degree of personality imbalance.

Personality is shaped by a number of things such as biological and temperamental predispositions, early learning experience, reinforced habits, etc. And personality is generally fairly stable over time and across a wide variety of situations. At age 87, certainly, you would not expect personality to change very much.

Persons with unbalanced or disordered personalities are always a bit of a conundrum to others because they simply don’t seem to see the world like most of us do, and they don’t conduct interpersonal relationships like most of us do. The secret to dealing with them is coming to understand their various traits, accepting those characteristics, working as best as you can with them, and setting and enforcing limits and boundaries in your relationships with them. Relations are never likely to be “normal,” however, because it takes two people to have a healthy relationship and you only have power over yourself.