Dealing with mental ill siblings

[Anonymous]

My sister is 5 years older than me, and is single without children. We are not in contact with her due to past situations in which she threatened our children. She lives on the opposite coast, and we can mostly avoid her. She had been hospitalized before for mental illness but I am not sure what her diagnosis is or if she receives consistent medical care. I would say that the symptoms visible to me as a layperson suggest a personality disorder but I have no real idea what’s going on. Anyway, the problem now is that she is harassing me and DH from afar. She signs us up for email and mailing lists (literally thousands of them), or submits our contact information to the kind of salespeople who don’t let up (fancy gym membership reps, aggressive real estate brokers, etc.). Because of my DH’s line of work, he cannot easily scrap his his phone number and can’t block, say, every call from a certain area code because it’s where many of his clients reside. We have no idea of how to deal, legally and practically, with the onslaught of calls, emails, mail, and general harassment (via third-parties) that she creates for us. We know it’s her because she’s told my mom that she does this. It’s getting really difficult to keep changing our emails and other phone numbers to avoid her, and we aren’t in a position to move and change our physical address.

Does anyone have insight into what her problem may be and how we can navigate it?

[Anonymous]

How do you know that your sister is the one doing this?

[Anonymous]

Never mind. I see that she told your mom that she's doing this. Can you block the emails and phone calls?

[Anonymous]

I’m so sorry, OP.

[Anonymous]

Read, PP! OP said the sister told their mom she was doing it.
My sympathies,OP. Think you should seriously consider the phone number change, even though it's a pain. It's a one time big effort, but then it's done.

[Anonymous]

Why do you have to keep changing emails? Is sister being giving new emails? That needs to stop.

[Anonymous]

DH has to change his phone number/email. He can send out a mass email to all his contacts letting them know the new one. I work in a law firm. Attorneys sometimes change firms after being at the same one for 30 years. This is how they deal with getting a new number.

[Anonymous]

You should both change your email and phone numbers and tell relatives to NOT include or forward them to your sister. No joint emails, reply all, etc.

[Anonymous]

Consider Restraining order, but that is an escalation that could make things worse at first.

You need to enforce boundaries otherwise this will only get worse.

Do not give your number or email to ANYONE she knows, including Mom.

I would setup a "burner" google mail and google voice account just for family, with the expectation that eventually someone will cc: you and your sister and thus it will be compromised.

If your DH has a webpage or such which she is scraping information, change contact info to a form submission rather than an email or phone number (many businesses do this now for similar reasons).

I would assume dependency or borderline personality disorder.

And I know she lives far away, but I would install security cameras and ensure she is on the DO NOT PICKUP list for your kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My sister is 5 years older than me, and is single without children. We are not in contact with her due to past situations in which she threatened our children. She lives on the opposite coast, and we can mostly avoid her. She had been hospitalized before for mental illness but I am not sure what her diagnosis is or if she receives consistent medical care. I would say that the symptoms visible to me as a layperson suggest a personality disorder but I have no real idea what’s going on. Anyway, the problem now is that she is harassing me and DH from afar. She signs us up for email and mailing lists (literally thousands of them), or submits our contact information to the kind of salespeople who don’t let up (fancy gym membership reps, aggressive real estate brokers, etc.). Because of my DH’s line of work, he cannot easily scrap his his phone number and can’t block, say, every call from a certain area code because it’s where many of his clients reside. We have no idea of how to deal, legally and practically, with the onslaught of calls, emails, mail, and general harassment (via third-parties) that she creates for us. We know it’s her because she’s told my mom that she does this. It’s getting really difficult to keep changing our emails and other phone numbers to avoid her, and we aren’t in a position to move and change our physical address.

Does anyone have insight into what her problem may be and how we can navigate it?

This troubles me greatly. What exactly were the threats? Any evidence?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
You should both change your email and phone numbers and tell relatives to NOT include or forward them to your sister. No joint emails, reply all, etc.

Don't bother tell the relatives, they will forget and it will only cause drama. The request will get back to sister, and that will aggravate the situation.

[Anonymous]

"Sell" your property to a trust with a non-related name, get a PO box and tell you're relatives you've moved to a new address and to use the PO Box, maybe even one with a street address like UPS Store offers...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Read, PP! OP said the sister told their mom she was doing it.
My sympathies,OP. Think you should seriously consider the phone number change, even though it's a pain. It's a one time big effort, but then it's done.

Yes. I saw that Op's mom told her who was doing it.

I'm not sure why Op wouldn't mark the incoming junk emails as spam and block her sister's email. You can also block calls on your phone.

Op can't just move so this junk will still be coming in the mail to her. I guess Op can mark it "return to sender" and put it right back in the mailbox.

[Anonymous]

My BIL has BPD and is an addict. It is very, very hard. No solutions but a lot of sympathy for what you all are going through.

[Anonymous]

Op here. Thank you so much for all the practical advice. I’m so grateful and feel a little bit less lonely and crazy today for being heard by you all. Really, thank you. I’ve tried talking to friends about the situation before and everyone seems to think I’m exaggerating and chimes in with things like omg, my sister is really annoying, too.

DH is an executive at a publicly traded firm so his contact information shows up pretty easily and can be inferred even when he has switched it up. He doesn’t have a ton of control over how and when it gets posted. We are going to set up the “family-only” burner accounts as suggested with the expectation that they won’t last. Based on some other suggestions I think we need to stop mail and package delivery to our house immediately.

To answer the question about threats: they were made by text and verbally (before we stopped contact) and suggested that if we didn’t do x, y, and z sister would do things to us/kids. She is smart so didn’t say anything that would stand out to outsiders or police, but as family we knew exactly what she meant.