Miriam Susan: You're listening to the Catholic Wives with Toxic in Laws podcast. Today's episode is about the digital front door you did not know was open to your toxic in-laws. Hi, Miriam Susan here. Welcome to ⁓ today's episode where this part three in a series that I have been doing in the month of March, 2026, ⁓ all about marital privacy. ⁓ And today going to be talking about a digital front door. that you didn't know was open to your toxic in-laws. Our scripture for today comes from the gospel according to Saint Matthew. It is from chapter 10 verse 16 and this is from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition and it says, "see I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves. So be wise as serpents and innocent doves." So my goal in ⁓ this series is to make you aware of the many different ways that toxic in-laws will kind of attack and infiltrate the privacy of your marriage. And so today is no exception. And most of us think of privacy as like a physical thing, like closing the door, keeping it locked. not sharing information, but there is an entire layer of your life, most likely, that is visible to anyone who knows where to look. And you may have no idea how much information is actually out there. And in case you can't tell, I'm talking about the internet. I'm talking about the digital world and things like your tagged photos, your check-ins, your public comments on community pages, names ⁓ and their school, visible in a background. These are out there for people who have ⁓ maybe ⁓ not the purest motives to exploit ⁓ if you this. ⁓ Now, I don't want to ⁓ bring about a level of paranoia because there really is so much out there and so much ⁓ fear-mongering that I don't want to encourage. However, there are ways that you can exert a level of privacy that perhaps you're not aware of, or perhaps you just haven't really taken the time to do so because it seems overwhelming or it seems like too much. But I want to encourage you that I don't think you're being careless. This is, you know, just kind of the world that we live in now. But chances are you've never really had a reason to think about online privacy before. So the digital landscape, like I said, it can be very technical. It can be very overwhelming. But I want you to just understand a little bit about what you may be inadvertently exposing yourself to if you don't have things really locked down online. So first, social media visibility. Even when you have like the friends only settings, they can be very porous when your in-laws have mutual friends with your connections. or when your husband's accounts are more public. When you are tagged by other people, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's on Facebook or other platforms, you can control what you post, but you can't always control what other people are posting about you. Also, location sharing apps like Light360, shared telephone plans, even metadata and photos, which is like the hidden data, like if you open up your photos app and you tap the I for info, that's the metadata. Sometimes even that can reveal where you are and when the photo was taken. I know, pretty wild, huh? And also our children's digital footprints. A lot of times their schools will post photos publicly, sometimes even tagging children with their names. And the schools might include updates or even in your own family group chats. That is another open door for your in-laws that you may not have thought about. And then your husband, we can't leave him out because he's part of the family, right? And so... our husbands can inadvertently share information that maybe we wanted to keep private because if he's sharing photos, if he's sharing updates and locations of where he's at or other details in his family group chat, that is another open door for a, like I said, a person who has less than pure motives to get information about you and your family. Now, you have a digital front door, but have you checked to see if it's locked? Now going back to the gospel reading from ⁓ St. Matthew, Jesus wasn't telling his disciples to be paranoid, right? Because fear is not from God, but what he was telling them was to be awake, to be aware because wisdom and innocence are not opposites. They work together and being innocent doesn't mean being naive. Now there is nothing about being uncharitable when you recognize that some people in your life are going to use information against you. Toxic people will use whatever they can, whatever information they can get their hands on against you. And wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit. We need to use that wisdom to protect our families and that is not a failure of charity. It is a form of stewardship. So we have been given, know, technology has given us all these amazing ways to connect with other people. to promote a business if we have a business, ⁓ to share information that is unlike any other time in history. But there are always drawbacks. And so for our family, we have a pretty locked down system. And like I've said many times, my in-laws are blocked on social media, period. ⁓ I don't share anything at all with my in-laws, partly because of ⁓ just I don't like how they used social media, specifically my mother-in-law and how she would use social media to spy on me, to leave comments so that she could twist and give her narrative to random people. that she didn't know, but she wanted to make sure that she looked good in whatever it was. And so I just don't share anything with my in-laws. My children have their accounts pretty locked down, but not completely. And actually one of the pieces of evidence that we had for our court case last June was my mother-in-law reaching out to one of our girls who is an adult on a social media platform that she thought she had locked down and didn't. And my mother-in-law stalked her online and found her and sent her a message. And what's interesting is that the message that my mother-in-law sent was read in court when we took my in-law's to court for stalking. So with this lockdown of information with your digital front door that you probably have open, in some way and shape, there's cracks. It's really, really hard to completely close yourself off from the information that's about you online. Even if you have zero social media platforms, zero. There's so much information. If you search your name, you might be absolutely flabbergasted at how much information about you specifically is online and who you are connected to. Maybe your parents, siblings, husband, children, a lot. information is available online. And these are the kinds of things that if you don't become aware of them, they can be that front door or even a back door to your life that your in-laws can exploit and take advantage of. And that's what my in-laws have done. And we went to court and a judge agreed that they were stalking us because of all of the contacts that they made, all of the things that they had done to get information about us after we told them that we didn't want to have contact with them. Now one thing that you might not be aware of also, if you have just an inkling that maybe your in-laws are a little bit toxic. And they have access to your friends list. And they know who your friends are. Maybe you live near your in-laws. Maybe they know that you are friends in real life with certain people that you're also friends with on social media. They can exploit that. And that's exactly what my in-laws have done, specifically my mother-in-law. She has exploited social media to try to turn people that know us against us. And so these, this digital door that you have open is not just about your personal information and maybe what activities you're involved in, maybe what sports or groups that your children are involved in that you don't want your in-laws to know about. It's also about locking down your friends list so that they can't harvest that information and then begin a smear campaign behind your back with the people that you currently trust. And as sad as it is to say, some of these people will believe whatever story your toxic in-laws tell them. Maybe they have met your in-laws and your in-laws have just this amazing presence that everybody loves them and they can put on this performance for people on the outside to gain their trust and maybe your in-laws start sending friend requests to these friends of yours and because your friends met them and because your friends are very loving and kind and just very accepting people they accept that friend request and that's the end. and your in-laws can then feed them little narratives of, haven't seen Miriam in so long. Do you know if anything's wrong? We haven't seen the children in a really long time. We sure do miss them. Is something happening? Is their marriage okay? And it seems like maybe you would be paranoid if you start to lock down. your social media and all of your different accounts. But I can say from personal experience that it's not paranoia. If you have this ⁓ like the Holy Spirit is really kind of nudging you to ⁓ maybe a little more private. Listen to that. Listen to that because waited too long. And I didn't consider all of the ways that my own social media accounts, all ⁓ of my accounts, public pages, my personal account, my kids' accounts, I didn't, in my friends' lists, I didn't consider how that would be twisted and used against me in the future. And with social media, it is just so easy for someone to find your whole web and start contacting people and start poisoning them against you. Because toxic people are so good at what they do. They're extremely good at manipulation and deception. And so they will do what they can to poison people against you. And then... you feel isolated. Toxic people love for us to feel isolated and alone because they then leverage that. They leverage our love for family, our desire for harmony. They use that against us. So toxic people will try to isolate you, turn your friends against you, or use your friends as pawns, as my mother-in-law. tried to do with a woman that I considered a very good friend. And now the friendship is gone because I can't trust her because she knew my story and yet believed the lies of my mother-in-law and actually sent me a message that sounded very much like something my mother-in-law would say. Like she used the exact words. ⁓ So it's hard. It's hard to have these social media platforms when you have toxic family members because they will exploit them. They love to post things on public pages because it's very hard to block a person on a public page if it's for a business. And so they will post things that make you look bad. It's a really challenging thing, the times that we live in. Yes, it's amazing that I can have this video podcast that I can talk to you from my basement. And, you know, I have listeners all around the world, which is just absolutely mind blowing. But it also means that there's a level of vulnerability because your toxic in-laws, if they are even just a little bit savvy, can find out. a lot of what you're doing. ⁓ one of the proofs that I that my in-laws were stalking us is that this name that I go by, Miriam Susan, is not my common name. That's not the name my friends know me as. ⁓ It's not the name my parents called me or my siblings or my husband, my kids. It's not a name that I use. It is my name, but it's not my common name. ⁓ And ⁓ my in-laws, ⁓ to kind of like, that's like a jab, definitely was a jab, ⁓ left a letter for someone to give to me that had Miriam Susan written on it. And I explained to the judge that this is a name that I've never gone by, not ever in my life. And yet I knew that they were stalking me because they use this name. And this is a name that I adopted online after we no contact. And when I started this podcast to allow me to distance myself from my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. And so things like this are, it's just part of our lives, my family's life. We think about everything that we post online. We think about names that we use, platforms that we're on, how public, ⁓ anything is that we share because we know that my in-laws are stalking us. I have no doubt. I have no doubt that my mother-in-law is still stalking me online. Just because there's a court order and that it's considered felony stalking and she could go to jail for 10 years and be fined up to $10,000, I know that hasn't stopped her. It's just stopped her from reaching out because she knows what she's doing. So I don't say all this to scare you. I don't say all this to make you paranoid, but just to become aware. We live in a very online public world and if we don't stop and think about all the different ways that exist for people to come into your life. then what we have in terms of privacy can be ⁓ very limited, actually very, very limited. wisdom is all about knowing who has access to your life, to the, you know, everything that you're doing. And we need to, especially for those of us who value privacy, who have toxic family members, we need to make a conscious choice rather than just accidentally allow these things to be available to anybody who knows how to dig and wants to get information about us. Now, at the end of this month, I'm going to be hosting a live workshop. And I'm a little bit nervous about it because... ⁓ live events are kind of stressful. I mean, in a good way, but they are stressful for me. And so I don't enjoy doing them because of the adrenaline ⁓ that my body does not tolerate well. And so I know pretty much the next day I'm going to crash. But I feel like this topic is just so important that I need to do it. I had somebody reach out actually within the last month about privacy and how, ⁓ you know, what steps did our family take in order to protect our privacy from my toxic in-laws. And so I'm going to be holding this live workshop. It is going to be a paid workshop because I don't want my in-laws to come in. Plain and simple. ⁓ And they won't pay. to get in because then I'll have all their information and I'll know their IP address, I'll know all the information and I'll know that they showed up and that would land them in jail. So ⁓ anyway, I would love for you to consider coming to this workshop. If you go to desiringpeace.com forward slash workshop, you can learn more about what we're going to be talking about, but it's all going to be centered around online. privacy and all the steps. Well, not just actually not just online privacy, but privacy in general. All the things that my husband and I have learned through the years about privacy, working with a private investigator, working with attorneys and things that you can do steps that you can take for very little or no money to protect yourself online. If you decide to move to a new area, I can explain some steps that you can take to hide your location. If you currently are just wanting to kind of, you know, lock things down, I can explain a little bit about what we do. And we do a lot of different things. We live a very different life than most people because of the issues we've had with privacy. And privacy is important to us. our family and the lessons that we've learned I think could be very important for you to learn as well. So go to desiringpeace.com forward slash workshop to find out more. Also, if you are a member of the Catholic Wives Plus Toxic In-Laws community, if you're not, you need to join, go to toxicinlaws.com. Those members will get a discount. on the workshop. So if you want to get a discount, community aspect of that ⁓ Wives + Toxic In-Laws that community is free. There is a paid upgrade that gives you access monthly training ⁓ and those who are in the paid upgrade ⁓ will a significant discount to this workshop. So if you want to attend the workshop, you have a couple options. You can get on my mailing list. that will get you the highest price for the workshop. If you join my community, you'll get a discount. And if you are a premium member of the community, it's just $17 a month, you will get a even greater discount on this workshop. And then you can know all of the different ways that you can protect your marital privacy online and in real life. So... Consider this your invitation to join the community at ToxicInLaws.com. And I look forward to sharing more next week when we talk about how family members actually need less access to you. They do. Toxic family members want a lot of access. And it's just, it's not a sin. It's not a sin to desire privacy within your marriage. God bless you. Go in peace.