>How to respond to Abusive texts

[Tried and tired]

My daughter in law will send message after message when something I say sets her off and it can be a compliment from me but she sees something sinister in the text somehow and she just goes off , it hurts my feelings and she sends me very verbally abusive texts  , lately she has added lies saying I said things I know I would never say and I don’t know how to express how this makes me feel and I see this as very unacceptable I am not going to tiptoe around her and act like it’s ok but I want to be civil and I want her to be civil ! Any suggestions of how to word things ?

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[CC43]

Hi there,

My advice is not to respond to any abusive texts.  I'd say, treat them like spam, because they are spam. If you reply, you are basically feeding the fire of her ire.  Don't dignify it with a response.

I bet that once she has calmed down, she will regret having sent you those mean texts.  If you don't respond, you can pretend that you didn't even see them, and she can pretend too.

You can take the unwarranted and distorted texts as a sign that your DIL is experiencing stress or disappointments in her life right now.  Surely you're not the real cause of her dysregulation.  She's just blaming you because she's not coping well.  Blame-shifting and rage texting are typical BPD phenomena.

All my best to you.