SIL manipulated and gaslit my brought to turn him against me
I’m going to try and leave out details so I don’t doxx myself 😊 this is also my burner just to be careful.
The short version: my brothers fiancé wanted to have a chat with me about some things that I had done or said that had upset her. I had been thinking for a while that she didn’t like me but my parents always said I was just being sensitive.
Well, the conversation was basically hours of her listing everything she doesn’t like about me, including her criticizing my relationships with every member of my family. Plenty of what she brought up didn’t even have anything to do with her and these were minor things that didn’t bother my family members at all.
Many of the things she brought up were related to my mental health but it’s like she just doesn’t care that that’s the reason? She made up her mind about me and that’s that. No matter what I do, she sees it through the lens she wants to see it through. She actually said to me in that same conversation that I might be making my adhd up. I had only been diagnosed like two years before that.
After the conversation, I was absolutely devastated. Even I underestimated how much this girl didn’t like me. She had no interest in figuring out a way to move forward either. She said in the immediate future nothing would change, she’d still be cold to me, and that it would take years to fix with no specifics on how or why.
I spoke to my brother about it and he just doubled down on everything she said and I had a mental breakdown. My brother and I were very close and he’d always been by my side when I’d been mistreated or bullied. Now he was basically siding with my bully. I lost my shit and said I wanted nothing to do with him. Then we didn’t talk for months, nothing else happened. I said I’d go to therapy with him and their response was to uninvite me from their wedding.
It’s been quite some time and no progress has been made. They’ve been essentially shaming me for my mental health for years. They make me feel as if I am some drug addict deadbeat parent that “needs help” before they can see their kids again.
She’s gaslighting and manipulating my brother but it’s super obvious to me. My parents see it too. I’m emotionally reactive because of my adhd, but I’m not an idiot and I’m not a psycho. She’s using my disability against me and it is so tremendously fucked up. And yet my family is telling me to just apologize and be the bigger person even if we think she’s crazy. Just to try and make things better.
And if you want to know what I “did” to her, again, without specifics, a lot of it was just reacting to her mistreatment of me. Some of it was her just not understanding my sense of humor or our family dynamics. There were a few minor things I felt fine about apologizing for, so I did.
This is VERY much the short version. But again, just being careful. Happy to share more over DM.
If anyone has dealt with something like this and has suggestions, please let me know 🤍