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Episode 259: Standoff with Son, Lazy partner Wont Move Out, Evil Son, Problems with MIL
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all right well yeah we um uh apologies to the audience i lost my audio from the actual original recording of this this uh this show so we're flying solo again with jen uh without jen and notice how in the introduction i said dr lal's name first there's a bit of muscle memory so i'm sure jen will love that when she hears it sure yep oh good date that all is going well yeah and i was gonna say is you know jen's not here so we can just skip all the small talk and just go straight yeah god who needs that that you know that chick stuff we don't need that [Laughter] well i do i i hear that both you and jen did a splendid job at the national health association uh presentations i heard that from numerous clients so well done nathan i'll look forward to seeing it whenever there's a a process for me to be able to watch oh thank you dr dr dr hogg did fantastic i was looking forward to seeing her talk which was called it's not the pleasure trap not your fault but it is your responsibility reimagining the pleasure trap so i really had a good time she had some some funny uh funny videos in her slides and some really good stuff to say i really enjoyed it listening fabulous life all right well what else is happening what else we looking at well we've got some questions from listeners and so we'll just get straight to the meat of it or maybe it's not the right word but it's okay all right dear doctors our adult son who's 23 is still living at home to save money to buy his own place we charge him 300 a month and he buys some of his own food as he prefers hot dogs and pizza over the healthy vegan food that i cook this year he was riding his very fast motorcycle without insurance for short rides but since the consequences of his getting in an accident without having insurance and having no medical coverage could be extremely steep we chose to put a wheel lock on his bike until he gets insurance since then he basically ignores us more than usual and barely responds to us when we speak to him how can we get through to him and put an end to this standoff this is a non-negotiable matter and easily solved if he gets insurance we give him the key to the lock but he just won't get insurance i'm not sure what point he is making other than being stubborn could you please offer some insight um i would i have a couple of thoughts about this i want you to please nathan read to me the first part of this again just uh just read me the first you know couple three sentences okay dear doctors our adult son who's 23 is still living at home to save money to buy his own place we charge him 300 a month and he buys some of his own food as he prefers hot dogs and pizza over the healthy vegan food that i cook this year he was riding his very fast motorcycle without insurance for short rides since the consequences i got it okay yeah um i guess obviously there's there's follow-up questions that i would have for sounds like this is the mother writing and um the so it doesn't sound like otherwise necessarily the rapport has been particularly strained it is now as as the the sun is pulling a ridiculous uh sophomore stunt and he's getting away with it and um he's basically acting like he's the the queen of the genetic chess board and he's pushing his parents all around the board you know basically i.e bad attitude not talking to him giving him the cold shoulder all about this essentially a completely reasonable response to their actions about him being just flagrantly irresponsible so i uh but i'm not hearing other things about the you know how bad the rapport has been generally over the last couple three years etc the um in terms of getting through to him uh this is what i would do so i would uh call a family meeting with him uh between the two parents and there's your son and i would begin the family meeting uh uh by saying the the following type of thing and that is to say you know we've in this family we've always been uh we've always been there have each other's backs but this is a as a family that has worked hard and worked hard together and supported each other and there's families that don't do that but this is a family that does and so uh there are families that you know in the old days when a young young person would turn 16 or 18 whatever the the time was a father would walk out in the front of the yard and drop a plate on a rock and tell them that their son that meant that their son no longer had a play to the house uh that that was you know not an uncommon type tradition and we don't do that you're 23 years old okay you still live here with us you pay us a minimal rent uh we do that because it's a family that supports each other and we have a lot of confidence and respect for you uh and we expect uh that if you feel the same way that you need to act that way so we know that you're not happy about having your motorcycle locked up but on the other hand it's a reasonable response to what it is that you chose to do now we need to see an awful lot better action around here uh in terms of your your relationship to us and we need to see you get these chores done and we need to see you uh hustling and being a part of this uh group or you're not okay and so you know we're gonna be we will be talking behind your back about what we think we see and we're going to be uh monitoring uh whether or not you're able to snap out of this but what you need to know is is that effectively you you are either on your own team by yourself and which is fine if that needs to be the way it is we completely respect that or you're still in this team right now and and in inside this household so it's up to you and quite frankly you know 23 is a pretty old man to be living in their parents house and it can't work for everybody and you may be a little too headstrong and a little too much of thinking that you're grown up which maybe you are uh for you to actually be here and if that's the way it is no no hard feelings it's just time for you to go okay so either way what it whatever whatever works for you is going to be the how this works because if this doesn't work for you uh if you have to maintain this sort of stony silence uh in order to try to punish us for actually doing a perfectly appropriate thing to answer your irresponsibility uh then that's fine that's no problem that just means that it's time for you to go okay i.e we are friendly but firm and we don't pull any punches and we hit them straight between the eyes okay and they they in other words this is this is sharp angle okay this is absolutely not buying into any silent manipulation we give voice to it we give words to it and we hit people right in the face unapologetically okay and now that young man has to look and blink at those two parents and he is realizing it's showdown time it's like well if he if he maintains this nonsense about his genetic queen of the chess board and he can just push you around if he wants to maintain that then guess what he gets his walking papers and he gets to go and discover what it is that he actually really needs which is that he needs to be calibrated so when you break down behavior all you're ever watching folks is you're watching a cost benefit analysis the behavior is nothing other than the muscles and the tendons as they move the body around move the mouth uh in response to the cost-benefit analytics that are taking place inside the brain so that individual uh is looking at a situation and he's got all kinds of evidence that he's got his parents by the genetic shorthairs and that's exactly how he's behaving okay and so i i am no fan of any of that any kid any person anybody starts to try to push me around with any kind of manipulation like that they're gonna get it right in the face okay i'm gonna call them out on exactly what it is that i see that they're doing what it is that i think that they're up to i'm going to give them credit where credit is due about who they are as an individual and what they can contribute and i'm going to let them know what's expected and i'm going to tell them it's not a problem if they don't want to answer the call it's no problem at all and what this is is it's actually negotiating from a position of power okay so whoever wrote this if it's the mom and you're like oh my god but but it's my son yeah it's your son what has to move three streets away into the back of his friend's garage and pay his friend 450 a month you know to live there it's like let him do it oh my god but he's so young he's not so young 21 year old men were jumping in the air in the middle of german fire over normandy for god's sakes okay that 23 year old can just learn to be a hell of a lot more respectful about what it is that he's got and if he can't he's going to have to learn the hard way okay now it is no terrible thing for parents to wind up with a showdown like this where you show a young person the door it's fine okay so i i've done it twice kids that weren't even mine and the rapport today is great i mean it's really good but did it go through an uncomfortable period yeah they went through an uncomfortable period where they found out that they don't just get to to to essentially uh exploit older people just because older people are kind and generous and emotionally stable okay they get to find out that there's the line and if you go over it guess what you just turned into more costs and benefit and see you later bye okay they'll come home they'll come back they'll come back with their tail halfway between their first of all they may come back very quickly manipulatively as hell giving you a bunch of tears don't buy it okay no that's okay you'll feel you'll we'll repair all this and everything will be fine by christmas time you just go out there and and face reality okay the reason why they behave this way the great mystery here is simply cost benefit analysis it is it is uh essentially he's leveling anger at you signaling to you that you have been unfair and he's penalizing you okay and he's saying well i'll just take me and my genes and my friendship and my and my life and my interesting life is in its development as i go towards reproduction and social success i'll just take that away from you i'll just abandon you as parents fine go ahead try it make my day okay everybody needs to watch dirty harry go ahead make my day these are the rules these are the expectations we both bought it through it's completely reasonable and if you don't like uh the constraints here that's not a problem it just means that at this time of life we aren't all meant to be living under the same roof and that's fine we're still friends it just we we've got a we've got an alteration in the landscape ridiculous saving for his own place means he makes plenty of money 300 a month way too cheap okay this kid needs to be gone that's the truth but you you give him the opportunity in case that what he needs is a cold slap on the face you give it to him okay you say i'm about slap you on the face you know this is what it is you got it coming to you but if you shape up everything's gonna be okay for a while okay and so we we give him one shot at it and if we don't see him immediately you know within hours come back apologizing and saying he's going to get his act together and etc if we don't get that then you you know no problem and mothers that cower behind this kind of behavior are you know you usually the wrong people to try to be making these decisions dads are better at this okay so you know not always i'm just telling you it's eight and a half out of ten times the dad is going to be a lot better at this yeah it's not your baby anymore it's a 23 year old man so uh that that young man can uh can face some reality because the reason you're getting the behavior you're getting is that he's miscalibrated all right that's wonderful thank you that's amazing so i think as a young man i probably needed to hear some of the things that you just said all right what else do we have all right dear doctors my partner is 44 and has never had a serious job for more than a couple of months companies have either let him go or he quit of his own accord he hates authority always complains about having superiors or work being dull he once started a private business but it didn't pan out i feel like he didn't give it his best shot he's an intelligent well-read guy but there's something about him that seems to make him unemployable aversion to authority disagreeableness and a fair share of introversion he mostly just wants to be left alone to read books and scroll through twitter i've been the main breadwinner for many years and i am fed up people tell me that i'm an enabler but the truth is he won't actually move out of my own home even though i've asked him many times the threat of losing the relationship has not pushed him to make amends like getting a real job spending less time online or trying to entice me with some vision of a better future together is he a freeloader he claims to love me but i honestly don't see how he never takes me out never buys me gifts we've been labeling like roommates for years basically just co-parenting with no romance the thing stopping me from throwing out his stuff and changing the locks is the fact that we have a 10 year old child that and the fact that my partner has a bad temper when pushed am i being too soft on this guy or is the ego or enlightenment trapped or both and also how do i get out safely interesting um enabler simply equals highly agreeable that's what that is codependent that just means highly agreeable so the the uh abuse literature uh substance abuse as well as you know domestic violence etc will make the case that somehow that there's this uh enabling quote-unquote process now these are just agreeable people operating under various uh cost-benefit analysis often secondary to physical intimidation or intimidation of various kinds and intimidation is motivation through fear so the uh and often that fear has a latent violent uh threat that sits underneath it so we hear that that's here here so uh in this case so i.e how do i get out safely well what what on earth does that mean that means that the person actually is in fear of physical violence that's what i'm hearing they're not saying how do i get out safely financially with respect to some legal proceedings that i might be responsible for this guy because we have a common law marriage and he might get a check from me for the next 30 years no no that's not what i heard my guy has a temper and he's uh gets angry and i how do i get out safely i.e i'm intimidated by the threat of violence that's the bottom line here so that does not make you an enabler and makes you a highly agreeable person with a lot of patience uh with with a lot of conflict in the game here you've got a 10 year old son this is his father uh he's not all bad he's got some he's got some theoretical assets uh but when it all shakes down the brains didn't turn into any money and it doesn't uh doesn't turn into any sense of responsibility for actually pulling his share of the load etc and when you've asked him to leave you won't leave etc so and you're quote fed up so i think it is certainly time uh for a change and it's probably long past time for a change but it is certainly time now for a change so there would be uh processes that we would want to go through to these these come to be every situation is a little bit different every state is a little bit different uh everybody's finances are a little bit different everybody's soon to be [ __ ] x is a little bit different and so all these little pieces have variables to them now one of the things that i would say is that when we when we start heading toward a potentially highly contentious situation we want to go at it um in degrees so that that that way we can tell how dangerous it gets almost nobody goes from zero you know to a hundred in in one process so uh people that are potentially violent they make a lot of noises and they give a lot of signals before they ever do anything and that's good that is almost always the case the reason for that isn't mysterious it's because it's easier to get what you want by threatening than actually doing anything dangerous and legally problematic so that's why we can count on him to actually make threatening noises before he would ever do anything so we're going to take little actions um for him we're going to take little actions for him to respond to for us to then to respond to those responses so the way i would do things i don't want to put too many channel factors or conditions up in front of you before you could start taking action so you would not have to do this first but it might be a good idea to do this first so it might be a good idea to get yourself a legal consult with a family law attorney and say okay here's my situation and what are my legal rights what are the rules of the game uh because i would like to request this man my common-law husband but we're not married and father of my kid uh and that we've been together all these years i would like you know this is my home apparently she's the owner and i would like him to leave so what are my rights and what are his rights and how should this transpire or if it if it had to get legal what is the process by which this would happen so find out the rules of the game this is one of the most important things that people need to do when they're in high conflict situations with an individual like this you actually need to know the rules so that you follow the rules to the letter of the law which puts you as they won't do that it puts you in increasing position of power with respect to court okay so i don't know what the rules are but um in it the family law attorney may say well who who knows what the judge is gonna say you know it's like okay maybe there aren't any perfect rules in this particular situation so let's suppose that there are not so what i would do is i would um i would then uh probably do the following i would probably imagine that i would tell this individual that um that he i would give him like you know two or three weeks in advance notice and i would tell him um i'm gonna be gone over three day weekend here in in about two weeks and i'm gonna take our son on that three-day weekend and uh when i come back so i'm going to leave on we're going to leave on friday afternoon and i'm going to be back on monday evening so when i come back on monday evening you need to be gone so that gives you three days to you know make sure you hide your jewelry and your spare cash and get the money out of the mattress or whatever anything that's super important to you make sure that you quietly store those things away before you do this okay uh your secret diary whatever there's let's make sure that you've got this stored away at your mother's or in a storage locker or something and so uh once you do that then and you take take pictures of everything so that if he goes on a rampage and destroys everything in your house you can you can essentially you know show the judge if you need to but uh what but we're gonna do it just firmly and we're also going to do it not only are we going to do it verbally or you don't actually have to do it verbally if you don't want to face this you can do it by email don't do it by text texts aren't necessarily saved and it's problematic in court but you would you could send him an email and uh or you could do it verbally and you say listen uh and then you could follow it up by email that i'm gonna be gone and in an email you could reiterate as i said uh earlier tonight or as i said last night night i'm going to be gone on friday through that monday and this is the time when i need you to leave my home or need to leave the house and find your own place to live for the time being i need my own space and i don't know what the future holds but i do need you to find your own space i need you to leave [Music] okay so that's what we do now now you say oh my god i'm going to you know basically uncage the lion and here he comes and he's going to be angry and yelling and screaming great it's not a problem so if he yells and screams and threatens and how dare you and you feel intimidated you go get a restraining order okay and so uh no problem and you just tell tell the judge this is what i asked him to do and when i asked him to do that uh this is what this is the response that i got if you want have your cell phone ready a cell phone uh can be you know you can have it just sitting there with the recording on uh and or you can record the phone conversation or i don't know how that's done but the point is is that if he's yelling and screaming um that's great if you can get a recording great if you don't have to get a recording that's okay you can go in court and and fill out the little affidavit and say exactly what the situation is uh and you got your family law attorney and there you go okay so now we just uh there there's a there's there's a thing in the world that's a really good thing if you don't live in communist china in the united states it's called civilization okay so civilization is all about how we have a rule of law where we don't have to be intimidated uh and beat up and stolen by our fellow citizens we don't have to do that because we have a government that hopefully they haven't defunded our local police department okay so that's what that is and so we we basically step down through that process um having planned it in advance and again it's actually it can is basically a very safe process because they find out that they're being checkmated by the law and a lot of disagreeable people have to find out the hard way that they don't get to intimidate their spouses they don't you know if they break a bunch of stuff gets reported you just call the police so you come home and you say well this is what happened and it's very clear that you've got photos time stamped of your nice beautiful home and then you sent this email and then you went away for the weekend and then you came back and then this is what it is that took place okay so uh if you want to get really crafty i've had people set up hidden cameras and uh to to actually monitor that situation and record it so that's probably going more than you need to go but depends uh depends on what your situation is this sounds like this guy is lazy disagreeable probably not particularly violent so we don't have to worry about much of these things she's just worried because she's a very nice person she's worried that about his anger his anger is intimidating uh let's hope that she doesn't have any particular worries about her ten-year-old son and whether or not you know a breakup is bad for the son's development it is not okay so no sweat there and um yeah it's time and we don't have to tell this person that we're breaking up it's time for us to we need a break you need some time to yourself you need to simplify your life and to just you know get a feel for whether or not this is how you want to continue or not and so you need him to go get his own place and it's going to be you know you need a couple three months off and then you'll reevaluate you don't know where you're going to be in a month or two you don't know now that you want you want at least two months off and three feels more right and then you'll see where it is that you're at oh well then forget it once i leave here i'm never coming back i.e death penalty and you say well that's the way it works out that's the way it works out okay again uh just as in the first answer that we had we negotiate from a position of power people we've we this is a very important position to be in we have figured out how the game works what the rules are and what the worst case scenario is in the first case it's like oh my god my son won't talk to me and i don't know i just couldn't kick him out and what a horrible thing now he'll survive just fine and he'll go out in the world and it'll get recalibrated and he'll find out that his parents are given five times better deal than anybody else would give him so he he will eventually get his head on straight and then we'll have a perfectly fine warm relationship and 10 years from now we'll laugh about it that's fine okay that's not a problem you just have to be in a psychological position of power where you are prepared for what looks like a terrible thing but isn't the same thing is true here okay we have to be prepared for every nasty wrinkle we have to know exactly where we stand legally and we are we've got it all mapped out okay and so uh he is not going to go from zero to 100. he's going to do little threatening things and we'll see how bad they are if they're bad enough restraining order court etc that's how we do it god forbid if you've got a bunch of money in a mutual bank account make sure that you get it all on your side okay you can leave him a couple hundred bucks just get control of the situation uh in every way that you can and then this is what uh alan always said he goes i would be a benevolent dictator and he probably would okay so uh reasonably benevolent so you you get as much control of the situation as you can and then you can get benevolent at that point once they have behaved appropriately if they earn their way back to a good situation precisely as we had in question number one you are in control of the situation you are a benevolent dictator if they don't behave properly they have consequences no problem okay eventually they will calibrate uh around the new realities and then we'll have whatever relationship we have at the end of it that makes sense so that's how we deal with it wonderful dr lyle thank you so much yeah all right good luck to this particular listener you bet absolutely all right dear doctors i'm writing about how to handle my relationship with my son my son is 14 years old his personality is not very charming he says very mean things to me he's violent towards me and things and he has a hard time making and keeping friends he's selfish in a way that is ruthless our dog is terrified of him he seldom listens to me or his teachers he doesn't make an effort in school he's actually very smart but he only does the minimal amount of work just to pass his classes i have never pushed him to do more either i blame myself for that his personality turned out this way his dad is also not a very nice man and when my son was little i lived with his dad and it was not a harmonic household but i can't turn back time and now here we are i live alone with my son and my dog and it's not a good life i don't know how to deal with him anymore he does not respect me or other people he doesn't respect animals and not nature i've tried so many things i'm so embarrassed to have these feelings towards my child and when other people see the way he treats me i'm also embarrassed i'm responsible to give my son a good life at least four more years before he's an adult and is responsible for his own life but i worry about his future i can't see him creating a happy life with this personality please give me some advice on how to be a better mother and how to cope all right being a better mother and how to cope are two very very different uh ideas the this is obviously we could call this disagreeable night this is the disagreeable genes uh as we watch how problematic disagreeable genes are as they push around agreeable people uh and try to secure resources and and and basically are are very costly uh emotionally so you know our first kid was isn't necessarily that disagreeable it sounds like it was a fairly decent relationship between mom and and dad and child the uh the second one this guy is quite disagreeable again uh probably not as bad as this one so our little 14 year old here is winning the prize uh of the night so far and uh so i think that that what we have to understand uh first first of all that you don't owe this kid anything other than a roof over his head and you know 2 000 calories a day so the talking to an individual with one child i mean it's it's heartbreaking to uh to look at this situation and realize if you wanted to have children and this chill child was a wanted child this was something that you wanted to do as a important part of your life experience that unfortunately you went 0 for one this is just how it goes in in the jeans so the jeans are a crapshoot and you never know what you're going to get which is my my friend from 20 years ago uh anna real had uh had a saying that said don't breed with freaks so this is uh this is what happened she had a child with a very disagreeable man apparently and uh these genes uh came to dominate that section of the gene pool uh in in her in other words they dominated her uh the genes that she has sitting on on those gene sites so the child wound up with an awful lot of his father's genes in terms of personality so that's what we've got and you've gone over one and you've already given it a tremendous amount of energy and given it your very best shot uh you've tried to accommodate and hope that this was a you know that there would be some way to bend the twig so that the tree would grow a little bit differently but that's just not how it works personality is for all intents and purposes 100 genetic it isn't 100 genetic because you can change somebody's personality by putting an ice pick into their head and having them survive and then have it that turns out that that disturbs all kinds of things and they manage to change their personality probably for the worse the uh somebody could have a stroke sometimes that changes it for the better but the truth of the matter is is that the the essence of who the person would be barring uh a traumatic brain injury or or injur injurious processes secondary to drugs uh of some kind this is a this is not going to change and so your son is going to go through this life being a disagreeable uh difficult personality sounds like he's you know if he's very smart and very disagreeable he's doomed to success in in high tech so anyway the uh so the next four years before this child you know walks out the door and we we shuffle him off to some situation with his uh you know fafsa uh package from the government to get him off to some school that you know he doesn't have to live under your roof um before that happens we've got four years to go and my best advice to you is to essentially as much as possible extricate yourself from his orbit and don't try to get him to really do anything so there's there's no reason it sounds like he will go to school and he'll pass which is all it is that we want him to do which is great if he doesn't pass that's fine but he probably will if he's very smart he'll do the minimum i would see to it that or i would i would certainly make sure that we don't push him to learn anything difficult god forbid he takes a chemistry class or a math class he doesn't need his entire curriculum should be the absolute minimum if he wants to play video games all day long and all night long that's fine if he wants to eat twinkies and m m's and drink coca-cola that's fine just let him do whatever the hell he wants so long as you know you're able to keep your distance i wouldn't put any parental controls on this kid um just the uh this this is not this is not a nervous system that's going to do well if he's sufficiently threatening and potentially violent and the dogs afraid of him um this is you know this is uh obviously if he ever gets violent with you and grabs you and shakes you to intimidate you in some way or does something actually physically possibly dangerous to you that's an entirely different story okay at that point you have to uh you know you you have to basically face the possibility of having legal action involved and having him shipped off and he can just spend a few you know a couple of months in juvenile hall and get uh basically you have to understand he won't be damaged to juvenile hall okay uh he there isn't any damage done he just gets wide-eyed just how bad it is there and he'll never want to go back okay so um i don't know what they have these days uh in terms of of this sort of thing i i know i've been involved in the criminal justice system and i've had worked with a lot of youngsters uh 18 years and under that were locked up for periods of time because they were violent to their parents so no problem if he needs to go to a little state mental hospital because he got violent with you um you know if we have a little sequence where that happens fair enough let him go get shipped off and let him deal with uh all the losers that are there the um but he probably won't particularly if he gets his candy and gets his computer games etc uh the conflicts of interest could be me want to play his music loud in case we're going to get him a nice set of headphones so we can put it on the headphones uh basically what you want to do is you want to get as much disagreeable distance in your own house that you can and you've got only so many days to go okay so there may be places that you can ship them off to during the summers uh i don't know what you can afford and what's reasonable but there may be some place where he can i don't know go count turtles on the galapagos islands somewhere um i don't know what might be possible but if i was a parent of that individual i would look at my resources carefully and i would see whether or not i any any avenues at all where i could get myself a break uh if he was also again resources you know this lady probably doesn't have the resources to do this but you never know you never know who who might what relative what grandfather might have some resources this kid is a prime candidate to get shipped off to a boarding school that would be the best thing for you as his mother it would be perfectly fine for him uh no no no worries at all he'd probably get kicked out of there so it might not work but uh but then he sent him to the next one so there's always some greedy school somewhere that could use money so that's probably not you know that would be my ideal situation to literally get you away from him and have this kid be a kid that you see on the you know holiday weekends and two weeks in the summer or whatever but that's probably not practical and that's probably not going to happen in these circumstances so we are down to 48 months or 46 months or 44 months or you know whatever it is that we're down to uh we're down to a couple hundred weeks and then it's over okay and we'll never have to redo those 200 weeks again and so we we make them as peaceful as we can we set up the minimal of rules and we basically take our life as much as we can away from this young man and go play co-ed volleyball and you know go to movies with friends and go to you know go on some dates and basically separate yourself as much as you can that is actually uh the best advice that i've got for a situation like this wow thank you dr lowell all right you have a way of putting you know tough situations into you know reasonable reasonable solutions and i really appreciate that this um sounds like this is a tough situation for for this lady yeah it's a tough situation so we we make the very best of it and then it's over so it's not it's not going to be the rest of her life it it it only you know this is mathematizing the misery so we uh sometimes it you know you you might even get a you know a calendar you know on the computer or something and you get to mark off the weeks give yourself a little check mark you got 200 weeks to go sometimes that's a that's a useful thing to to do something like that so uh but one way or the other we're we're not trying to somehow rescue this relationship or rescue this individual from their future it just is what it is and we make the best of what we've got yeah amazing wow that all right all right well for one more dr one more juicy one sure all right dear dr lyle uh dear doctors i am perhaps unsurprisingly having a major personality clash with my mother-in-law she's extremely religious and insists on praying for me and my husband regardless of what we are up to or going through every success we have is owing to her prayers and every failure she complains she she claims is in spite of her prayers when my husband recovered from cancer she told us it was because she prayed for him but when i started a million dollar company she says this is because she prayed for me now with lockdown's ending and families being brought back together i'll be facing her soon and i will no doubt hear myself that i am only successful because of her instrumental god communing she has been a major point of stress for me since getting married three years ago her brand of undermining theological interference really bugs me do you prescribe some disagreeable distance or perhaps something else i want to be a pleasant daughter-in-law but i find myself feeling nothing short of hateful for her godly gaslighting yeah uh well ungodly as a listener who's yeah ungodly gaslighting yeah well this is a listener that that knows our lingo and this is disagreeable distance all the way so the it's important though to actually identify the core conflict that's involved so the core conflict is actually not between you and your mother-in-law it's between your husband and you and your mother-in-law so there are three individuals in this equation and so there's dynamics all around the chess board so the um so we need to uh in order for us to understand how to best play this thing we have to have a we have to have a pretty good open discussion with your husband about how he feels about the whole scope of scope of all of these elements so um uh and and as i said before with a previous question every single situation here has the nuances of personality and and many other factors in the situation uh that are pieces of this so all i can do is i can i can take this as a scaled down sketch of a situation and then say how it is that i would proceed i can't tell you definitively through the answer because i don't know what the questions would be what the answers to my questions would be if i started asking so i would need to ask the husband he obviously does he see this conflict what does he think about it what does he feel about it where is he conflicted about it and i need to understand why so uh to my way of thinking that it would seem difficult for me to see what value the man's mother has to him the when there's a conflict between your mother and your uh your wife then there isn't any conflict there shouldn't be a conflict in other words it's pretty well mom can just go to the guillotine and needs to know that that's true the wife overwhelmingly comes first so sometimes people need to get clear on that the now what does that mean we don't tell we don't give our mother the finger and tell her don't bother sending me a christmas card no we just disagreeable distance the lady that's how we do it so i also don't know about this particular family's set of circumstances i.e when kovid's now ending and now families are going to get back together well i don't know about you but my family never got together with anybody so i don't know what this means on the other hand i have clients you know from all over the world that come from different cultures and some of those cultures uh i have a good friend named rakish and from india and they have all kinds of family and extended family and incredible amounts of family action that takes place every weekend there's a wedding or a funeral or or something you know is going on uh so birthdays anniversaries there's just no end to it in other words they're just extraordinarily large interconnected social group so everybody's circumstances are quite different i would assume most people are not getting together with their mother-in-law very often so therefore if you're getting together with your mother-in-law you know if you're bumping into her you know uh every two weeks that can be every two months instead and not only that if the husband feels like he can't move it down to every two months then he can just go once a month and you can go every other month okay so that would be we try that out for a while the in other words we whatever the poison is the first thing we do is we dilute it for goodness sakes and then if that if that it doesn't work then we dilute it some more and what we what we want to do at the end of the day is basically have the following attitude that like like i said there's three people in this drama and there are many relationships i haven't really thought through how many there are but there's quite a few some mathematician would tell me there's a mathematical formula for this but there's the relationship of husband and wife that's one there's a relationship from husband to his mother that's the second there's a relationship with mother mother-in-law and and daughter daughter-in-law that's three then there's the husband and wife versus the mother-in-law that's four then there's the husband and the mother versus the white that's five then there's the two women vis-a-vis you know potentially which they are not an alliance that's six okay so i think that's what it is so we want to know uh we we want to actually look at this thing harry brown style which is this that the relationship between the husband and wife should we should be thinking uh as golden as we can and that is that my job is to figure out in a relationship how it is you know i'm going to be happy if you're happy and so i'm going to be wanting to figure out how i can make you happy so because by seeing your happiness i am happier that's that's a the core of a great relationship so two people both with this perspective this thing plays out like this that if the husband loves his mother it despite the fact that she's a you know worthless [ __ ] but the point of the matter is if he loves his mother and he wants to spend some time with her and to signal to her her importance and enjoys the interaction then fine for god's sakes have a relationship with your mother you don't have to have a relationship with your daughter-in-law that is not necessary it's not written anywhere okay well what if the mother-in-law wants to at relationship basically a dominance hierarchical relationship with her daughter-in-law well she doesn't get to have one okay so you don't get to have relationships with people that don't want to have relationships with you it's real simple happened to me my whole life all these beautiful intelligent interesting women they didn't want to have relationships with me and i wanted everybody to let them [ __ ] out of luck there's just no way it's gonna work too bad okay so we all learn that you don't just get to have relationships that you might want to have and so the husband needs to get this clear in his head that he might like his wife to have a relationship with his mother but that's absurd he needs to be looking inside of his wife's head and say what would make you happy okay does it make you happy to see my mother the answer is no actually the truth is i i don't okay well would make me really happy if you would just you know okay well what others we want to uh i will choke down a little bit of that behavior on the on the on the part of the co of a valued coalition member gee i'd really like you to come to this thing okay but we just we just have an agreement in this discussion that um you're calling in a chip [Music] [Laughter] okay just to let you know okay so i remember i did this with with rep esselstyn a couple three years ago that they were going back and forth on their uh their plant stock thing and and they uh they normally would have me speak twice and they're gonna have me speak once and it was a long flight and and i and i wrote to him and i said listen guys um i see you only have me speaking once i see you got a lot of people on the docket um you know you don't have to have me and but if you want me there i will come but i'm just letting you know uh it'll cost you a chip [Laughter] and they cracked up they were really uh they were they were super cool about it and they said listen you know we've our docket has grown and we know it's a long ways for you to come for one one speech and it's not the way you usually do things so we're quite frankly we're fine either way but you know whatever whatever you want doug and i'm like you know what no sweat at all no harm done i i'm passing on it and that's it no problem so in other words we you're but i i let them know with that language and it was humorous and it was entertaining but they knew exactly what that meant in in stone age terms and so the same thing would be true with this wife in other words the husband needs to be clear you don't want to have anything to do with this lady now the right way to disagreeable distance somebody is you just dilute them down to you know to the point where you can tolerate it and you can realize gee if i only have to see her three times a year for you know if i'm only interacting with her for about 15 or 20 minutes at the party so it's about one hour a year so that means you know then we're you know there's a good chance somebody moves or dies or gets distracted in the next five years so basically five hours for the next five years can i handle that yeah i can find a way to do that and so if we can if we can essentially dilute this down and and get get a reasonable agreement with the husband husband may say you know what you don't need to do it at all and quite frankly uh i'm going to move the same direction so i'm going to move this down to an every other week thing to in every six weeks thing and just fade to the background and you don't need to come at all maybe you come a couple times a year and that's that and uh we just basically ghoster out of our existence fine let's talk it over let's let's reason through the parameters then let's run experiments on on our estimated parameters about what we think and realizing that we're not quote making agreements we're we're making agreements to run an experiment and that's an important consideration when people are contemplating negotiating changes and trying to think these things through so we you know whether it's with your teenager and the noise and the drum playing or whatever it is that the idea here is is that we we have agreements that we think that are going to be are going to work for us but we also understand in principle that they might not and that we have to renegotiate and if we do we do that's fine so that's how it is that i would uh do this this is a disagreeable distance all the way and the first thing you want to do is to to understand that the the relationship that counts where the joy comes from is your relationship with your husband and he needs to understand that the same is true and we have really no need for any third party like that in the mix and if they're in the mix we want to dilute them down to the lowest amount that that continues to serve interests and that's how we deal with it amazing i really like this dilute the poison yeah you chuckled when you first said it yeah that's what we wanted to do yeah it's amazing dr lau because i really appreciate this uh this approach uh because nowhere in your answer was well talk to her about the religion and see if you can get her head straight about how she's you know it's not really this or that it's like it's this direct alternative where just it's irrelevant right she believes and you're not trying to change anybody's mind just kind of accepting them for who they are and just recognizing that yes absolutely direct alternative position of power we we we don't want to have our outcome dependent on what somebody else does whatever it is that they do we have an answer for what it is that they're gonna do so that's the that's the theme of everything that went through all four of these questions tonight uh it's the same you you're going to find the same principles that work no matter what the situation is love it it's uh excellent you
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