Reader’s Question

I have a problem which has only become more serious now that I’m married. I adore my husband’s family, but I am having a hard time getting along with my mother-in-law. She does not respect my personal boundaries, and I feel very uncomfortable around her whenever we spend time with his family.

My biggest issues stem from situations where I feel my privacy has been violated. My mother-in-law has looked through my mail and personal notebooks, my online bill pay accounts, and she once called the phone company and impersonated me to handle a issue my husband was having at the time. How she got my driver’s license info is a question I’ll never know the answer to, but I felt extremely violated by that.

This woman pressured my husband behind my back on where she thought we should get married even after I had told her I’d like to get married somewhere else. They brought it up to me at breakfast, and I felt attacked and like my fiancé was not on my team. She also decided that she was going to put together our wedding album and didn’t ask me if I wanted to participate. Again, my husband didn’t understand where I was coming from and thought she was being nothing but nice. Perhaps she was, but being left out of something so important to me didn’t feel very nice at all.

I want to be a team with my husband, and I feel like there is no room for me. I feel like that a lot. I feel like it’s the two of them, and I’m over on the sidelines while in the meantime she’s trying to step in and fill my shoes. She buys our comforters, picks out our thank you cards, wanted to take my husband shopping for our bed, picks out our rug and just sends things to us. These are things that I would really like to do with my husband, and when she does them without asking I just feel like I don’t count.

My husband and I have had several fights about this, and it’s just not going anywhere. I’m afraid that it’s going to ruin our relationship. I’d like to find a way to talk to her about this and tell her that I don’t appreciate her getting the passwords and checking into our bills, and I don’t appreciate her pressuring my husband about things that should be a decision between him and me. I wish she would butt out, and I wish that when she approaches my husband about things that concern only us that he would he would be more firm with her and say that we’ll handle it on our own.

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

Controllers don’t necessarily do things maliciously, they simply take charge. Nor do they take control to be “nice.” They simply love to dominate. And wherever there’s a controller, there’s usually a “passive” or unassertive personality not far behind who has become too accustomed to letting the controller handle everything. Your problem appears not so much with your mother-in-law, who will naturally tend to carry things as far as she can without resistance, but with your husband who has failed to step up to the plate with respect to his responsibilities and to enforce limits and boundaries with his mother. You also need to set better expectations, limits and boundaries with your husband. You can set them “politely” but be sure to set them firmly. It’s your marriage, and it’s high time that both you and your husband take control of it.