My entire four-year marriage was an in-laws from hell story. Truthfully my ex-FIL wasn't bad, he was a cool dude. My ex-MIL was a sociopath.

Here's a few nuggets from during my marriage and many years before I met my ex-wife.

-My ex-FIL retired young, he was a self-made man who's brilliant with machines and developed some of his own devices that he sold off and made millions from. In the late 90's when the family was living large, ex-MIL believes they need to sell it all and invest the whole enchilada in a cabin in the mountains to ride out the inevitable chaos of Y2K. They still have the cabin, ex-FIL came out of retirement about 15 years ago and is still working. I bring this up because it established a culture of fear and ignorance in their family by the time I got there.

-Ex-MIL has a community college degree in psychology; she thinks she's qualified to counsel anyone and everyone on all issues, including her own family. Usually it involves some kind of manipulation to get them to see things her way/comply with her wishes. This included her manipulation of my ex-wife against me on several occasions, planting fear in her mind about different situations and circumstances.

-Ex-MIL is a doomsday soothsayer. Never goes anywhere without her laptop and has 50 tabs open to different doomsday websites at any given time. She preaches doom and gloom about anything and everything on a daily basis. Since I didn't fall in line with her worldview, and actively disproved her claims on a daily basis, I was blacklisted in her family. It reached a point where she told my ex-wife I was no longer allowed in their home, and because my ex was ostensibly on my side in all of this, my ex-MIL reamed her for it.

That's just a few, I could name more but I wouldn't want to waste any more of your guys' time. Suffice it to say she was awful, and removing that tumor of a human being from my life was the only upside to my divorce.