The woman who went no contact with her Mormon in-laws

Today’s guest is Carli, and if you’ve spent any time online lately, you may have already seen her multi-part series about going no contact with her in-laws. (I made myself stop after part six so I could hear the rest of the story fresh, right alongside you). Every part pulled in hundreds of thousands of views, and somehow this is the very first podcast she’s done about it.

Carli met her husband right after she graduated high school, they got engaged three or four months later, and she married him at 18. Her mother-in-law was completely on board with the wedding, but the warmth didn’t last long once Carli became a mom. Suddenly every decision was up for debate, from her son’s three-hour bedtime routine to what went on his plate to whether he should be in therapy at all. Then came the Thanksgiving when they drove down from Idaho to Utah, arrived at the time they’d been given, and found the whole family downstairs playing games with dinner already over.

What followed was a three-hour phone call, an apology that got taken back days later, and a sentence from her mother-in-law that Carli still can’t shake: that she withholds love from people she doesn’t agree with. We talk about the role their Mormon upbringing played, why it took her husband so long to see his family clearly, the spam accounts that flooded her comments after the series went viral, and the one condition they’ve set for ever speaking again.

I came into this with a lot of questions, including how much of this was her husband’s responsibility to shut down, and Carli answered every one of them honestly. If you’ve ever had a hard relationship with your in-laws or your own parents, I think this one will make you feel a lot less alone.

Tell me in the comments how you’ve handled family boundaries in your own life.

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Watch this episode in video form on Spotify or YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjmevEcbh5h5FE