What to do if you are terribly annoyed by your husband's relatives
'11.03.2020'
Source: lady.mail.ru
Columnist lady.mail.ru Julia Verklova believes that irritation (anger, resentment) at her husband's relatives is a good reason to analyze ... herself.
The annoyance of male relatives in most cases is archaism. Few people now live in a patriarchal family and meet with their ancestors in the kitchen every day. And in a nuclear family, you can only get angry at each other. Or here's to the kids! Are the children also relatives of the husband? All the rest is a "far circle" and with them it is enough to simply observe the rules of courtesy.
How to live when children are enraged
Whenever our little sons do something that decent children should not do (or, conversely, don’t do what they should), they immediately turn into my husband’s children:
“Your children,” I say, “do not go to sleep again.”
“Mine would go,” the husband answers, “these are not yours.”
And that’s all. Satisfied, we are getting attached to watch the series, because everyone knows that everything is in order with his child, and let her husband (wife) rage for his own. Our children will go to sleep when they are tired.
In order not to turn this small chapter into a large article about the relations of children and parents, I will give out only one secret that allows me not to freak out about younger relatives. This method is constantly promoted by psychologists Dima Zitser and Lyudmila Petranovskaya. They say: "You did not give birth to children to pass the exam." Or even simpler: “Remember why you had children.”
We personally - in order to make them a “goat”, play tabletops with them, kiss their tops, tickle their heels, under the cover of kids go to the movies to the cartoons and ride a slide on the ice. If you think carefully, we never dreamed that we would drive the children to bed at nine o’clock.
We did not dream of yelling at them because of deuces at school or bragging about their fives ... The husband, however, once fantasized about a call to school for a false fire alarm - it came true.
In general, we did not expect anything from cartoons and desktops from children - because they do not infuriate us. After all, the infuriates are not the children themselves, but unfulfilled expectations. No expectations - no scandals. And even when we are threatened that in old age these little scoundrels will not bring us a glass of water, we are not enraged either. By God, we did not give birth to them so that they carried water. But they have already worked out the "goat" and ice flakes.
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How to live when parents are furious
The problem is that the nuclear family is a new, post-perestroika phenomenon for Russia (and families where at least one of the spouses is an immigrant from the post-Soviet space). It is a tradition in Europe to move away from elders and live with your own mind and your own home since the XNUMXth century. And we still have a tight separation, because the housing issue has spoiled us.
Until the end of the twentieth century, most even urban families lived patriarchally - several generations under one roof. It is not surprising that, until now, grandmothers, even living separately, demand that they be recognized as members of a young family.
But you admit - they immediately begin to dictate their terms “as elders”. They come when they want, criticize their sons-in-law and daughter-in-law, feed their children with forbidden products, check their notebooks, scandal in clinics if they are not recognized as legal representatives of their grandchildren ...
Naturally, this infuriates. What is “preservation of traditions” for the older generation, but for the younger generation it is a violation of borders. To be honest, I see no other way but to take a nanny for a child, and to visit my grandmothers on holidays - in that wonderful mood when I am not enraged by anything.
With grandmothers on the part of her husband, however, a separate problem. It happens that the husband’s mother always infuriates. And mutually. And this cannot be primitively explained by jealousy (especially if the husband’s dad is alive, with his mother and full of energy). It’s rather a battle with the Shadow. There is such a concept in Jungian psychology.
A fight with a shadow
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, Freud’s apprentice and ally, at some point created his own direction in psychology. A solid place in it was given to the concept of archetypes.
One of the archetypes - Shadow - a set of qualities that a person does not recognize and does not accept. They are, but he does not want to consider them his own. Therefore, either ascribes them to strangers, or, noticing his “shadow” in someone else, is terribly furious.
And the inevitability of conflicts between sister-in-law / mother-in-law can often be explained by this. After all, men, according to Freud, almost always choose a girl who somehow resembles a mother. Here is my mother, for example, at the time, having passed her children to kindergarten, she devoted herself to a career, but all her life she wanted (and was embarrassed by this) to stay at home and bake pies. And here the son of the daughter-in-law brings. Careerist, of course. Only she also bakes pies. And terribly annoying mom!
But mother is an intelligent woman. She cannot even admit to herself that she is furious about the pies. And then the protective mechanism of the psyche works - projection.
“I see,” says mother to her sister-in-law, “that I annoy you.” She deftly ascribes her feelings to you. And there’s nothing you can do about it. To argue is only to provoke. And even making pies is not an option, because without serious analysis you won’t understand that the essence of the conflict is in home baking. You just infuriate her.
And if the mother-in-law constantly accuses you of being annoyed, you will, of course, sooner or later begin to get a little nervous ...
You can, of course, persuade all relatives to go to a psychologist. But, for example, in my case the terry-patriarchal plot worked perfectly. The husband told his mother that his wife should not be hurt. And that was enough.
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Shadow Fight 2
It happens the other way around: you see in the mother-in-law those qualities that you hate in yourself (and, accordingly, you don’t recognize yourself).
For example, the inability to maintain order in the house or the desire to command everyone, peremptory judgments, increased anxiety, emotional coldness ... It may well turn out that you attracted your husband by this: he, unknowingly, was looking for a woman who looked like a mother.
But you are enraged by these shadow qualities. And, accordingly, the mother-in-law infuriates them, in which they all embodied.
But here, as Jung said, "everything that annoys us in others can lead to an understanding of ourselves." The best thing you can do is do your own digging and leave your mother-in-law alone. Are you crazy? Look for why.
