You love your partner and the life you’re building together. And yet you can’t help but feel annoyed by your in-laws getting over-involved in your life and you’re starting to wonder how to deal with enmeshed in laws.
If this is the case, your partner is likely enmeshed with their parents and lacks the healthy boundaries that separate your new family from his family of origin. It’s good that you recognize the signs of enmeshment.
But, it’s also important to handle this situation carefully because your partner has likely always had an enmeshed relationship with their parents. These 20 tips can help you deal with your enmeshed in-laws while caring for the relationship between you and your partner.
This post is all about how to deal with enmeshed in laws.
DEAL WITH ENMESHED IN LAWS:
1. Accept your negative emotions without focusing on them
First and foremost, you’re dealing with a lot. By researching how to handle family enmeshment, you’re already doing the hard, necessary work. However, this also makes it easy to get bitter and angry when you are trying to heal generations of family trauma on your own.
Maybe your partner isn’t ready or doesn’t see it, so you’re researching an enmeshed family system for the sake of your family.
While it’s normal to have those feelings and you need to feel your negative feelings, you also can let them control you. Feel your feelings without feeling entitled to anger or resentment because that makes the healing process harder.
2. Work through issues from your family of origin
Think through the family relationships you grew up with among siblings and parents. The best way to help someone else develop clear boundaries for strong family bonds is to understand how your family unit impacts you and start doing work on your family of origin.
You may not have an enmeshed relationship in your family, but you may experience other issues that you haven’t even uncovered until you start asking questions.
3. Identify when your in-laws lead to marital discord
It’s frustrating to get into an argument with a spouse and know it was caused by something else. They might overreact to a minor problem, which means they’re probably misplacing their anger onto you.
The first step is to notice when you and your partner argue and something doesn’t feel right. In the moment, you two will be too argumentative to have a rational conversation about it.
But, it’s worth noting to bring up later and ask. Approach this conversation with curiosity because the argument may have nothing to do with their family of origin.
4. Focus on building mutual respect between you and your in-laws
Healing is most effective and long-lasting from a place of love. Hurt feelings don’t lead to healthy relationships and the creation of healthy boundaries. There’s nothing wrong with setting boundaries and cutting people out of your life if that feels right to you.
But, when you’re talking about your spouse’s family, you have to respect their connection to them.
They may struggle with traumatic events or an enmeshed parent, but that’s still their family. Respect the role they want their family to have in their life as you work towards helping them heal and fulfilling their emotional needs.
5. Notice and call out abusive behaviors
Call out abuse. Let your partner know when they are mistreated or when you are mistreated. Neither of you deserves to be yelled at, berated, or excluded. So, when this happens, let your partner know that it’s not okay even if they’ve learned to accept it as normal.
Approach this from the perspective of a loving partner instead of a resentful son- or daughter-in-law. Calling out abuse from your in-laws is about reminding your partner what they deserve and what a healthy family looks like.
6. Prepare yourself for the hard work of breaking generational cycles
It’s painful to be the first one to recognize generational trauma. It takes effort and strength to break that cycle and it’s especially hard when you’re breaking that cycle for your partner, who may or may not see it. This is when personal boundaries come into play and self-care is crucial. Not only do you need to take care of yourself as you navigate all sorts of destructive behavior, but you need to remember that you’re doing this to help your partner because you love them.
7. Remember that mental illness can exacerbate family dysfunction
There’s no excuse for someone to mistreat a family member. However, you can better understand someone’s actions by putting them in context. This may look like talking about the way your parents grew up and using that to understand why they raised you the way they did.
This can also look like recognizing that a parent’s mental illness affects the way they raise their children sometimes through no fault of their own.
It sucks to get hurt and put that hurt in the context of mental health issues because it feels invalidating. Keep in mind that contextualizing someone’s actions is designed to help you heal because your pain is real regardless of the context.
8. Talk to your partner from a place of compassion
When you talk to your partner, avoid name-calling and labels. Let them know what you’re noticing and speak from a place of compassion rather than anger or fear.
Whatever negative impact your in-laws have had on you, remember that you love your partner and you want them to find a healthy way forward.
So, that means you ask questions, get curious, and give them an outside perspective. They may not be receptive right away, and that’s understandable. Give them time to process.
9. Identify your needs and your partner’s parent’s needs
We all need our needs to be met. It’s fundamental to being human and to develop fulfilling adult relationships. So, identify your needs and the needs of your in-laws. Enmeshment can result from many factors.
But, it can be as simple as your in-laws feeling unloved and unseen in the face of new family dynamics. While it’s normal for kids to leave home and create a new family life for themselves, it’s also a hard transition for parents.
Identifying your needs alongside your in-laws’ needs can help you to set boundaries while meeting their needs.
10. Approach your in-laws with a strength-based mindset
Once you start considering the needs of your in-laws, you can start asking yourself questions like “What can I offer them that maintains good boundaries?” This can be as basic as changing the language you use when you talk about your in-laws.
Instead of saying, “We need space from them,” you can say, “Let’s choose specific times to spend with them during the week.” You gain control over the situation while deliberately meeting the needs of your in-laws.
11. Think of different ways to engage with your in-laws without sacrificing your health
Get creative with the ways you interact with your in-laws. You always should prioritize your health and the health of your family. But, you can also find ways of developing healthier relationships with your in-laws while taking care of yourself.
This might look like you defining how long you spend with them and what times of the week. Maybe you invite your in-laws over for dinner and request that they come right when you finish instead of helping you to cook.
Whatever it is, focus on creating a safe environment for them to join over cutting them out of your family’s life.
12. Prioritize your and your partner’s emotional well-being
The more you involve yourself with your partner’s family, the more painful it might get. It’s easy to get locked into an enmeshed family system when you’re actively trying to heal it.
This means that you and your partner may get too emotionally involved with your in-laws and lose sight of what a healthy relationship looks like. Be vigilant and keep you and your partner separate enough to notice when your in-laws are negatively affecting your emotions.
13. Pursue your own interests outside of the goals of your family and in-laws
Stay focused on your own goals and desires regardless of what happens with your in-laws. You may make progress with them and you may help your partner to see the important issues in their family.
However, this also may not happen and you will end up using all of your energy on a goal that’s difficult to achieve. This is why you need to focus on your own goals as a way of prioritizing your health and well-being.
As long as you have good intentions, you’re attempting a challenging task. Give yourself credit for that without becoming obsessed with it.
14. Remind yourself that unconditional love is impossible to achieve
You do deserve credit for the effort you’re putting into creating a healthier relationship between you and your partner. However, you also have to recognize that this is sensitive territory.
You’re likely to create conflict within your family unit by telling your partner that they have an enmeshed relationship with their parents.
When this happens, the most important thing to remember is that you and your partner are on the same team. You need to put the work into your love and choose each other because it won’t happen if you don’t do the work.
15. Help your partner unpack their enmeshment trauma when they’re ready
You can’t force your partner to do anything they don’t want to do. That is especially true for healing from trauma. You can’t do the work for them, but you can encourage them and help them through it.
Keep in mind that the only people qualified to help our family therapists and mental health professionals, so you don’t have to do it all on your own.
However, you can support your partner as they realize that they’ve grown up in an enmeshed family. It’s hard for your partner to realize they need to do some work on themselves to break out of that cycle and break out of that emotional involvement within their family of origin.
16. Work with your partner to develop healthy parent-child relationships
Remind your partner that they can still keep their parents in their life and maintain healthy relationships with them. But, to keep them in their life, they all need to change the way they relate to each other.
This means your in-laws need to understand that parenting adult children is different than young children and their child, your partner, needs to make their own decisions without the emotional stress of growing up in a close family.
17. Consider getting professional help from a family therapist
It’s hard to change your close relationships and break out of a close-knit family. Your partner will feel a profound sense of loss as a result of differentiating from their family of origin. That’s normal, but it means they’re still going through a hard time.
A family therapist can coach them through this process slowly over time. This means that a family therapist can help them recognize the importance of being authentic to their own identity and understanding their own needs outside of their family of origin.
18. Prioritize your own life and your own family but not at the expense of your partner
It’s easy to see how unhealthy a family is from the outside. People on the inside may recognize it too but struggle to find enough motivation to break out of it. It’s comfortable because it’s familiar, even if it hurts them.
This means that you’re going to see signs of enmeshment within your partner’s tight-knit family and be able to do nothing about it because they’re not ready. That’s okay and it’s something you will have to accept.
They will be ready to change their behaviors eventually, especially if they see the unhealthy way their family affects your relationship and the new family you have created together.
19. Create a system of emotional support for you and your partner
Identify friends, extended family members, and other loved ones who can ground you and your partner. This means that you find people who remind you of the new life you’ve created.
You have friends and family who see what you’ve created. They can help remind you of your what your goals outside of the enmeshment you and your partner experience.
These people won’t understand the intricacies of family therapy or enmeshment, but they can remind you of your individual identity and what healthy families look like.
20. Encourage and educate your partner on healthy boundaries
You are never responsible for acting as a therapist for your partner, even if you have the training. However, when therapy is inaccessible, it’s important to have resources and tools regardless of access to therapy.
Boundaries are the single most important tool you can use when dealing with enmeshed in-laws. They’re difficult to create and hard to maintain, but they’re important and they can help you and your partner differentiate from your partner’s family.
You set boundaries by letting people know when their behavior hurts you and how you’ll react to future behavior in a way that protects you from getting hurt again.
