Dear Prudence,
I love my sister very much, but she’s one of those people who thinks she’s the only person who’s ever right about anything. When she gets on a certain trend, her whole life revolves around it and she must give you advice. If she’s gotten hooked on a certain diet, all your life problems are because you’re not eating like she is. If she’s into manifesting this week, all your problems are because you are not committed to manifesting. Usually this is at worst annoying and I can ignore it, but recently it’s taken a more serious turn.
Three pieces of necessary context: 1. We had a very violent upbringing at the hands of both parents. 2. My sister has been able to overcome the trauma of our upbringing and be successful in life. I have not. 3. My sister has recently become a licensed therapist, and has been diagnosing everyone around her with random conditions, especially the conditions her least favorite group therapy clients have. I saw this coming because, as I said, this is How She Is, but I wasn’t prepared for how truly creepy it’s been getting.
I offhand mentioned an incident from our childhood as part of why I was scared to learn to drive (I won’t go into details but will say: angry mother, wet road, bridge over large expanse of water, threats of suicide) and my sister, who I know was there for that incident, got extremely angry with me and began asking a lot of questions about if I was hearing voices or seeing things. I was shocked because my sister got the brunt of the physical abuse when we were younger, until she got bigger than our mom and I stayed small. I told her this and she asked “why I thought that.” I eventually was able to change the subject and decided she was just being weird again … until later.
Apparently, she’s been going around telling everyone I have borderline personality disorder. I have never been diagnosed with this! I have never even had a mental health professional mention it! I am autistic and have OCD, and pretty severe PTSD, but nobody has even mentioned being borderline! And yet my sister is going around telling family members, friends, and people she works with that I am borderline, only doing anything for attention, and lying about abuse to smear our family. I’m not! I guess I can’t prove that mom beat us and that my dad was sexually abusive, because I’m almost 30 and any physical proof is long gone but like … It happened. I was there.
I guess my question is this: Is it worth asking my sister to stop telling people I have BPD and to stop asking me if I’m experiencing psychosis every time I make some sort of absurdist sarcastic joke, or “jokingly” threaten to institutionalize me every time I make some kind of comedic exaggeration? (Example: Me: “The next time someone takes my lunch from the work fridge I’m gonna eat them for lunch.” Her: “You know violent threats have consequences. I had to hospitalize [name of a guy she should not be sharing with me] for that yesterday.”) Or will expressing my annoyance with this behavior just make it worse?
For the record, I tried to have a one-on-one with her about it, but she just started crying about how I don’t respect her job. I do! I just think this particular “I know you better than you do” thing is annoying. Do I just need to wait til she gets settled into her new career and then gets really into paleo or something and her advice gets more manageable/less adjacent to slander? Again, this is not unexpected behavior from her, it’s just an extreme end of it. The diet or astrology stuff I can handle; the “I think you have a mental illness like the patients I refuse to refer to as human beings” stuff, less so.
—Not Her Patient