My little sister has a whole slew of mental health problems. I don’t believe our upbringing is the direct cause of them. My parents have given her a great life. We were financially stable in a nice neighborhood, with private education, and we never went without. We have been very fortunate and blessed in those areas. They have given us many opportunities to better our futures for which I am extremely grateful for.
We will call my sister “Natalie”. Natalie and I have never been close. We have absolutely nothing in common and fought horribly as kids. In high school I put that aside and tried to be the cool older sister who would take her out to fun places and buy her food or coffee after school. She hated it and would always complain when I tried to do things with her. Eventually I gave up but stopped all fighting, picking on her, teasing, etc. We’ve had a strained relationship ever since but not for lack of trying. My many attempts at sibling bonding have been refused or mocked for the last 7 years.
My older sister and Natalie used to be really close but as Natalie grew older and her issues began, our older sister found it more and more difficult to relate to her as well and began to grow sick of Natalie’s toxic personality and constant lies.
When Natalie was younger she had constant friend drama, constantly starting rumors and excluding other girls. She would also lie about having allergies, needing glasses, fake phobias, what her real name was, and spraining wrists and ankles. She went so far as to buy herself braces at CVS to wear to school so she could complain about her constant sprained limbs. None of this was real of course and was likely a cry for attention. I can’t understand why though considering she is the baby of the family and got whatever she asked for in addition to plenty of attention. She had private tutors, dance lessons, martial arts lessons, expensive camps, etc. and she spent more time with my parents than I did for sure! She didn’t even have to work in high school like my parents made me! They gave her tons of spending money so she could focus on school.
Natalie is hardly ever grateful for the privileged life she has been given and does nothing but complain about it. She blames every problem in her life on my parents. From dropping out of college to gaining 80 lbs, it’s my parents’ fault in her eyes. She never holds herself responsible for anything.
I’ve been able to tolerate Natalie for the most part but the lying is getting out of hand and has reached the point where I worry she has become detached from reality and has begun to believe the stories and false tales she is constantly spewing. It’s like she’s living an illusion.
Her most frequent lies all surround her health in some way. She’s been telling everybody she knows that she’s been diagnosed as bipolar and that we have like 8 family members with bipolar disorder which is simply not true! She has never been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and the stuff she has been telling people about our family is a lie as well. Another notable lie is her claim to be narcoleptic. She isn’t of course, but that won’t stop her from very obviously pretending to fall asleep mid-sentence.
I got home to visit from school for Christmas break last week. On the day I arrived she suddenly decided her jaw had stopped working. She was pretending she couldn’t chew anything, couldn’t open her mouth more than half an inch, and couldn’t talk. I knew it was fake the minute she started doing it and ignored her. She tried to make a huge deal out of it and has continued to do so for the last four days. The problem is that she forgets her current lies all the time. So I will catch her talking, chewing, and moving her jaw normally constantly, especially when she thinks no one is looking.
The second day I was back she made up some story about how the pharmacy was late on her antidepressant and that she was going through extreme withdrawal from missing her dose by one hour. She was pretending to shake dramatically. Any time she left the room or thought I couldn’t see her, she would stop completely. The second Natalie realized I was watching she would start up all over again.
She had to work for a few hours on Christmas today and when she came back from work she had her fingers heavily bandaged and made up some ridiculous story about how she knew her fingers were broken and the bone was snapped. She claimed her fingers were swollen and purple and that her nails were falling off. My older sister and I called bullshit immediately. My dad did as well and suggested we file a workers comp claim and go get them x-rayed and she came up with a million excuses. A few hours later I caught her typing away at her laptop in her room without the bandages with perfectly normal and healthy fingers.
Today I went to print something off our family computer and I found a website my sister had made to showcase some poetry she had written. (It was left open in the browser. I did not go snooping on purpose.) I love poetry and at first I thought it was just a collection of poems my sister liked. I thought maybe we could bond over this. Then I realized these were poems she had written. I exited out once I made that realization because I felt it would be wrong to continue reading, but what I did read concerned me.
She was writing angsty poetry about her life that was definitely not true. She went on some dramatic spiel about how she is half Native American and proud of her heritage/culture and how white people slaughtered her ancestors and she can still feel the pain.
This is not true. My family is white. We have no claim to the pain that Native peoples have endured even if we have Native relatives because we have zero tribal affiliation and have not experienced racism or been subject to the many issues modern day Native Americans experience.
This is not the first time Natalie has claimed to be a different race. She told all of her coworkers at her last job that she was half Hispanic and fluent in Spanish. She left that job when they realized she couldn’t speak Spanish and had been lying. She has also claimed to be of Middle Eastern descent, specifically Pakistani, as well as Jewish.
She also wrote a detailed poem with a description giving the story behind the poem that was all about how when she was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. This is not true. That happened to me, not her! She had a normal and safe delivery.
Some other weird and untrue things she wrote about included multiple poems about how she’s an alcoholic and infertile. She isn’t even 21. Most of her alcohol related poems centered around how my parents raised her to be an alcoholic by giving her beer as a child and wine as a teenager at every meal. Neither of these happened of course outside of trying a sip of my dad’s bud light a few times while growing up or having a single glass of wine at holidays after the age of 16. She also wrote long tangents about how she wasn’t able to have kids because all of the women in our family have problems conceiving. This is not remotely true. I have 28 first cousins and my parents were both one of 6 kids. My mom had some issues because she has an oddly shaped uterus which is not hereditary.
She also broke up with her boyfriend of two years over the summer. She told me, my sister, my mom, and her friends all a different story as to why. I get this one kind of, because sometimes break ups can be a little embarrassing or hard to talk about. The issue I have here is that she had a poem that was about her ex boyfriend, his friends, and his family all calling her a compulsive liar and how she says that’s not true.
She also had a poem about how she is lying to her therapist and not telling him the truth of what is going on with her.
I’m at my wits end. Every time I visit home my sister has some new crackpot lie that she’s come up with. My parents have basically given up. They’ve paid for multiple psychiatrists and therapists as well as a stay in a psychiatric facility which she requested. They’ve been dealing with this for years and seeing hardly any progress. My sisters’ lies just keep getting more and more ridiculous, as well as obnoxious. It’s gotten to the point where we don’t believe anything she says and any time she starts up a new lie we just don’t pay it any attention. We’ve stopped asking about it or start straight up ignoring her when she does it. If we call her out on her lie and accuse of her not telling the truth or making crap up then she freaks out and screams or cries and defends her fib with every breath she has before storming off. Then she makes an even larger deal out of whatever she was lying about later on in the day so she can prove an imaginary point.
My parents get really angry when my older sister and I try to call out Natalie. They tell us to stop antagonizing her and just ignore it but I feel like somebody needs to say or do something. It’s getting out of hand and has really driven a wedge between Natalie and the rest of the family.
TL;DR: My sister lies about her health, race, relationships, etc. constantly in ridiculous attention seeking ways. Psychiatric services aren’t helping and my parents are just pretending it’s not happening. What should we do?
Submitted December 26, 2018 at 10:13AM by RedPlanit http://bit.ly/2EQy3Hd
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