Effective intervention in boundary violations by extended family needs to be thought out collaboratively.

Collaboration helps couples clarify shared parental values that will determine their boundaries.

Resetting helps a couple work as a team after a painful but necessary boundary setting.

Rachel didn’t expect the question to come from her eight-year-old.

They were folding laundry together when her daughter asked, quietly, “Mom, are you and Dad going to hell?”

Eli heard it from the hallway and stepped into the room slowly. They both knew where the question had come from.

This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Rachel’s parents had visited the weekend before. They had brought books again—Bible stories “for the children,” her mother said, smiling. Over dinner, there were comments about how confusing the world had become and how children “need strong spiritual foundations before it’s too late.” During bath time, Rachel overheard her father asking their son whether he prayed at school.

Rachel felt uncomfortable and angry. Then she told herself she would address it later, the way she had told herself many times before.

Eli had stayed quiet at the table. He had learned over the years that pushing back too quickly only escalated things. But being quiet had started to feel less like patience and more like swallowing his feelings and pretending.

Rachel was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. Eli grew up in a Jewish family. Neither of them practices religion now. Early in their marriage, they agreed their children would be raised secularly. They would teach ethics, curiosity, and respect, and leave spiritual choices to their children when they were older.

Despite Eli and Rachel describing their spiritual decision to Rachel’s parents, Rachel’s parents never accepted that decision and instead pushed their ideas onto their grandchildren. They framed their concerns as love. They said they were “just planting seeds.” They insisted that eternity was too serious to leave to chance. When Rachel gently redirected conversations, her mother would nod and then circle back later when the children were alone.

Over the past year, the pattern had grown more pointed. There were whispered side conversations. A small cross was left in a bedroom drawer. A warning that “confusion about truth can have consequences.” A suggestion that children sometimes need guidance when their parents are “still figuring things out.” Each incident on its own could be minimized. Taken together, they formed a steady undermining of Eli and Rachel’s parenting choices.

The comment that changed everything came after dinner that weekend. Rachel’s father had pulled their son aside again. The next morning, their son repeated it.

“Grandpa says you and Mom are confused,” he said. “He says you’re raising us wrong, but he’ll pray for us.”

It was the clear overriding of their authority.

As this was the Nth time something like this had happened, Eli felt heat rise into his face. Rachel felt mixed intense feelings—anger, frustration, shame, and the old reflex to want to defend her parents even when she disagreed with them.

That night, after the kids were asleep, they argued. Eli accused her of minimizing her parents' disrespect of their authority and parenting choices. Rachel accused him of moving too quickly toward cutting her parents off. Beneath the argument was a full of fear and pain: fear of choosing sides, fear of losing family, fear of failing their children. The rupture wasn’t only between them and her parents. It was between Rachel and Eli.

They decided not to decide anything that night. Instead of escalating further, they agreed to stop. They would revisit the conversation the next evening, when neither of them felt flooded with anger or frustration. They chose to do some intentional self-care and talk to their closest friends about it the next day, and then revisit the topic again. That pause prevented further escalation, a potentially impulsive decision born entirely of fury. It created space for clarity.

When they sat down again, the tone had shifted. Rachel spoke first. “When they start talking like that,” she said, “I’m not 38. I’m 14 again. If I push back, I feel like I’m betraying them. And if I don’t, I’m betraying you as their father and abandoning myself as their mother.”

She admitted she had hoped the behavior would taper off. She had minimized her parents' disrespect of their parenting choices because confronting her parents felt like tearing something permanent. She didn’t want to believe they would choose their certainty over her boundaries.

That was her accountability—not agreement with them, but acknowledgment that avoidance and being in denial had protected her from conflict with her parents while leaving children exposed to fear and threat repeatedly. Eli listened.

“I’ve been angry at you,” he said. “Not just at them. At you.”

He explained how humiliating it felt to hear their son repeat those words. How it stirred old memories of being shamed for questioning authority. Speaking up had once carried consequences. Staying silent now felt like reenacting that pattern in his own home. He admitted he had expected Rachel to fix it because they were her parents. He felt resentful towards Rachel and his in-laws. That was his accountability—not for being upset, but for letting resentment build instead of expressing it sooner.

They weren’t solving the problem yet. They were naming their parts in the distance between them. The room steadied.

After the anger cooled, the focus shifted.

“What do we want to do?” Eli asked.

Rachel looked at him.

“About the kids,” he clarified. “Not about your parents. About us.”

They realized they had been reacting to her parents without fully articulating their own stance. They talked about what they wanted for their children: freedom from fear-based messaging, freedom to explore belief without pressure, and trust in their own parents’ authority. They agreed that spiritual exploration should never be framed as a threat or warning. This wasn’t about rejecting religion. It was about rejecting coercion based on fear.

“If we let this continue,” Eli said quietly, “what are we teaching them?”

Rachel felt the weight of that. “If we let it continue,” she said, “we’re teaching them that we accept my parents’ fear-based ideas.”

That clarified everything. During collaboration, they agreed that their children’s emotional safety and their unity and authority as parents came first. They outlined steps:

A direct, explicit boundary conversation with grandparents

Clear written expectations

Immediate consequences if those boundaries were crossed again

They moved from reacting to responding based on the outlined steps.

Rachel told her parents clearly that religious instruction, warnings about spiritual danger, and private conversations undermining their parenting were not acceptable. If it happened again, visits would be put on hold. Her parents said they understood. The next visit was careful; one could say, controlled.

Then, during a quiet moment in the kitchen, Rachel overheard her mother telling their daughter, “Sometimes grown-ups don’t see the whole picture yet. That’s why God gives children wise grandparents.” It was gentle, and it was soft. But it was the same pattern.

Rachel did not freeze this time. “We talked about this,” she said. “If it continues, we need to take a break from the visits.” Her father responded, “We can’t lie to them about the truth.”

They ended the visit. Two weeks later, another call came. It was another warning framed as love. Still, the experiment had answered the question.

Eli and Rachel decided to take a break from having the grandparents over for three months for now. Rachel grieved the parents she wished she had—the ones who would respect her parenting choices and could separate belief from fear-based control. Eli grieved the extended family his children would now see less of.

Reset did not erase the grief. It helped them carry it without turning on each other. They reminded themselves that this decision was not about punishment; it was about protecting their decision as parents. They revisited their values when doubt crept in, and they supported each other when loneliness surfaced.

No contact for three months was not impulsive. It was a deliberate decision made by both Eli and Rachel.

In our book, Love. Crash. Rebuild., our conflict resolution model (PACER) does not prescribe no contact. It supports couples in slowing down, acknowledging their reactions, defining their shared values, coming up with healthy boundaries thoughtfully, and working as a team afterward. You cannot remove the grief from a boundary like this. But you can prevent that resentment and grief from breaking your marriage.

Borg, M. B., Jr., & Miyamoto-Borg, H. (2025). Love. Crash. Rebuild.: Alternatives to distance, destruction, and divorce. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press. https://www.centralrecoverypress.com/product/love-crash-rebuild

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