Miriam Susan: You're listening to the Catholic Wives with Toxic In-Laws podcast. Today is episode one in a series that I'm doing this March, 2026, all about privacy and marriage. And today's episode is titled, Your Toxic In-Laws Know Too Much and You Never Told Them. Hi, Miriam Susan here. Welcome to today's episode. Like I said in the intro, we're doing a new series this month all about privacy and marriage. And this was kind of prompted by an email that I got from somebody who heard an interview that I did ⁓ Hines' podcast, ⁓ The Persistence in Prayer And she was asking about privacy ⁓ and how our family went about kind of trying to ⁓ reduce our online footprint that gave information to my in-laws that we didn't really want them to have. So that kind of got me thinking that she probably isn't the only person who is running into this issue. So I decided to really focus on that this month. And for those of you who are watching on video, I have a new podcast room background. Yes, we have a little room in our basement that I have converted and kind of to be my podcasting space. ⁓ And my husband worked really hard getting it ready for me ⁓ put up the shelf and I have all my little things on If you have any questions about anything that's on the shelf, please don't hesitate to ask. ⁓ But ⁓ let me go grab something off my shelf. This is something that I have been meaning to have for a very long time and it is my bullseye about the proper order of a Catholic family. And I actually have it laminated because I don't want to mess it up because I know how long it took me to remember to have it. But I finally did it. Yay. Yay me. I actually remembered and printed it out and got it taken care of so that I can refer to it because I do talk about the proper order of a Catholic family so often. ⁓ And for those of you watching on video, it is helpful to have a visual representation. I am a very visual person. I tend to remember things photographically, like I can remember where things are on a certain page, like in a magazine or in a book. And so having this chart to reference in the episodes hopefully will be helpful. And if you want to get a copy of this, just let me know and I can create a download for it. So anyway. Let's dive in to today's episode all about when your toxic in-laws know too much and you didn't even tell them. So let me begin with our scripture reference from today. It is from the Book of Proverbs and it is from chapter 4 verse 23 and this is from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition and it says, Keep your heart with all vigilance for from it flow the springs of life. Now maybe this has happened to you, it has happened to me many, times where we're in a conversation or we were in a conversation with my in-laws and my mother-in-law mentioned something and I did not tell her. And it's something that, you know, it could have been ⁓ you know, a disagreement that my husband and had. It could have been a parenting decision that I had. It could have been about something with my parents, a financial worry. It could have been any of many, many things, or it could have been as big as a story that I shared before about how we were trying to list our house for sale on Craigslist back in 2010. And we didn't have a sign up in the yard. We had not said anything to family. And my mother-in-law just walks into her house and asks if we'd gotten any bites on our house. So there's this information that she just already knew about. But I didn't tell her. And my husband didn't tell her. So how did she know? And I just want to validate this feeling if you've had this before because it is very unsettling. It is creepy. It is an eerie feeling that you probably get when your mother-in-law seems to know information that she's not privy to. You didn't think she was. And really what often happens in many cases, unless your in-laws tend to be a little more stalkerish like ⁓ mine have been, Well, actually I say stalkerish, they have been stalkers. anyway, that's a whole nother episode. It's an information leak. where private details from your marriage and your family are somehow becoming available to people outside of your marriage and your family. And I'm not encouraging you to blame anybody. I just want you to notice. I just want you to notice when these things happen, when these circumstances come up, these situations come up, when somebody in your in-laws family knows things that you know for sure you didn't share with them. So the first thing you have to do after you notice these things are happening is explore what the sources of information leakage are. So first, and perhaps most likely, is that our husbands are what I would consider an unaware conduit, which means that he's not leaking the information from your family, from your private discussions, to be malicious. He's just doing what he's always done. And we talked about this last month, how our husbands are in this pattern of being this good son, this good son programming that I kind of named it, ⁓ where they just share information like they always have. Because sharing with mom and dad is a very deep rooted habit that he has been trained to do probably basically since he could communicate, since he was born. And chances are he doesn't even realize he's doing it. because this is just how conversations with mom and dad go. They ask me how things are going and over explain and share way more information than probably you are comfortable with. And so your husband unknowingly could be that information leak. He could just say things in passing. And that has been a very hard habit for my husband to break. And many times, When we knew there was a conversation coming up with his parents, we would talk about, don't say anything about whatever. Don't mention certain plans that we have. Don't talk about certain things that have been going on because they didn't need to know. They were on a need to know basis and a lot of the things they just didn't need to know. But it would feel uncomfortable for my husband to hold things back because of the habit that he was in of just sharing all the information with his parents. Now, it might not be your husband. In all fairness, it might not be him. It might be mutual family members. It might be your husband's siblings. It might be his cousins. It might be other people in that enmeshed family system who are feeding little bits of information to your in-laws that maybe you shared in confidence. Maybe you just shared in passing not thinking that sharing with that person was going to be basically a direct pipeline to your in-laws and sharing information that you didn't really want them to know. Now, here's one that maybe you already are aware of, but it could be your own children. Because kids answer questions honestly, and toxic in-laws know this. They know this and they will capitalize on this. And so toxic in-laws can be very, very skilled at working around you and asking your kids questions directly. So for example, let's say your mother-in-law has an inkling that you're pregnant, but you and your husband have decided that you want to keep it secret. You want to keep it private for the first 14, 16 weeks. But Maybe this is pregnancy number six or seven. Your older kids kind of know, okay, when mommy gets like this, she's probably having another baby. And if your mother-in-law has this inkling, because sometimes, I tell you, it's like these toxic people have psychic powers. And I'm not saying that because it's woo-woo or anything, but just because that's been our experience, where my mother-in-law just can figure things out. I don't know what it is. I'm not going to say any assumptions. I'm just going to tell you that's what it felt like. But anyway, if that's the case, and she goes up to your six or seven year old and says, I wonder, is mommy having another baby? And your child probably would say yes if they knew if they had that same inkling too. So my mother-in-law was very good at like circumventing me and going to my kids to get information. And to be honest, that's just really creepy. That should not be it. An adult should not go to a child to seek out information about another adult. Period. End of story. That is inappropriate. If she wanted information, she should come to me. or to my husband. End of story. But that's not how toxic people work. They like to weaknesses, weak points, and our own children to get the information that they want. Now, finally, it could be your own attempts to connect with your in-laws. Because I believe that most of you, if not all of you, listening to this podcast, do have this hope and this desire to be able to connect in a genuine way with your in-laws with the idea that it will foster a better relationship. But sometimes we forget. We forget that we're not dealing with people who think the same way we do. And we might accidentally share things in that effort to try to build a relationship not realizing that that information is stored away and can be used against us later. Just like in all the TV shows with police officers and they have, when they're arresting somebody, they say you have the right to remain silent, which we do, we have the right to remain silent. Anything you can and say, you can say, anything you say, sorry I'm getting it all mixed up, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Except. things that we say can and will be used against us in the court of our in-laws' own judgment. So keep that in mind. So knowing all of this, what do your in-laws know about your life right now that you did not directly tell them? What are the things that they know? Think about that. There's probably some things that they know that maybe you've brushed off and not really contemplated how they found out that information. But what is it? And if they know things that you now know that they know, if you're following me, what do they know? about you that you don't know and don't want them to know. So let's go back to Proverbs. The tradition of guarding our hearts is not, is not, is not about secrecy and being cold and closed off. It's about wisdom. It's about being wise. It's about being wise with who we share information with. The marital relationship is sacred. It is a sacrament. And what flows from it, decisions, struggles, intimacy, that deserves protection, even from our parents and our in-laws. Now, the church has always recognized that certain things belong within a relationship and not outside of it. And this isn't paranoia. This isn't, ⁓ like I said, keeping secrets. It's about being prudent and having this wisdom of knowing that, you know, our in-laws don't need to know about every single financial decision that we're making. Our in-laws don't need to know if we're struggling with fertility or that we're not struggling with fertility and struggling with the idea of having a larger family more quickly than we thought. Our in-laws don't need to know that. Our in-laws don't need to know about little fights that we get in or disagreements that we get in with our spouses. They don't need to know. Now your discomfort with this leakage of information is very spiritually intuitive. It's not just emotional reactivity. Because I think the Holy Spirit, at least for me, I'm speaking for me, when I feel unsettled in my spirit, there's usually a pretty good reason. Why? Either because I am doing something sinful or I have a sense that something sinful is happening around me and I don't want to be a part of it. And so when we feel these, you know, this creepy feeling, this ⁓ eerie sensation that, you know, are people that we don't really trust know information about us that we really only should be sharing with people that we do trust. I think that's the Holy Spirit prompting us to be aware of what is going on. Our little spidey sense, if you want to call it that, is prompting us to be cautious, be prudent, to be wise with we do with the private things that are happening between, you know, ⁓ us, and my husband and me and my children. I mean, that's, I think that's how the Holy Spirit tends to work with me. And I tend to downplay it a lot because of just cultural things, you know, we try to ⁓ discount a lot of supernatural. And that's one of the things that I really appreciate about the Catholic Church is that there is an awareness of the supernatural, the spiritual forces and miracles and happenings that are going on all the time that I didn't really get a sense of as a Protestant. And to be aware that these things are happening and then to discern what to do with them. Because obviously not, we don't need to be spending all of our time discerning, is this spiritual, whatever. Then we get distracted and can't live out our lives of what we need to do. But we need to have an awareness that these kinds of things are. happening and this sense that we can get this intuition if you want to call it that I think has a purpose so we have to pay attention when these things happen and we just get this uneasy feeling about something that our in-laws said something that they know and the fact that you didn't tell them that should be one of those things that triggers your spidey sense to wonder and kind of maybe dig in a little deeper and find out what is going on. How did my mother-in-law know that we were selling our house on Craigslist? It's because she was stalking us on Craigslist. That's the only logical explanation. Now she likes to use ⁓ spiritual explanations about how God revealed our address to her one sleepless night at 2 a.m. In my experience, God doesn't work that way. And so when you have these things happening and then on top of it, your toxic in-laws are saying things like mine have where they try to make themselves seem as though have a direct line to God, not that we don't, a direct line to God where God is feeding her information that she should not be privy to, That's your signal that there's some spiritual abuse going on. Now, I've gone kind of all over the place today ⁓ in this episode, but I want you to hold on to this, and that is that privacy in your marriage and in your family is not about hiding. It's not. It's about protecting something sacred. It's protecting the sacrament of marriage. Now, Again, I said this is the first part in a four-part series that I'm doing on privacy and marriage. And hopefully by the end of this month, by the end of this series, you'll have a ⁓ clearer picture of what is actually happening and why it matters. And if this has resonated with you at all, I invite you to come join the Catholic Wives with Toxic In-Laws community. and you can find us at ToxicInLaws.com. There's no dashes, just ToxicInLaws.com. And there you'll find a small group of Catholic women who it, ⁓ understand these issues that you're dealing with, all these things that you're going through, because toxic people have similar patterns. ⁓ tend to do very similar things and they tend to ⁓ the same reaction in us and in our husbands. And so if you would like to be part of a community that is growing and women who can ⁓ to what you are going through, consider this your invitation to come to ToxicInLaws.com and out more. Until next week, God bless you. Go in peace.