Extended-Family Relationships | Q&A with Dr. Jennifer

Conversations with Dr. Jennifer

Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

Self-improvement, Education, Mental Health, Sexuality, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

THE BEST SALE OF THE YEAR IS HERE! With the holidays ahead, many of us are getting ready for extended-family gatherings—and the fun, stress, and complexity that can come with them. Our extended-family relationships can be particularly challenging because they push directly on our differentiation. As Dr. Finlayson-Fife teaches, few things—aside from marriage—expose our difficulty with differentiation quite like spending time with the families we grew up in. In this NEW episode, Dr. Finlayson-Fife answers audience questions about common extended-family challenges, including enmeshed parent–child relationships, triangulation, intrusive or overstepping in-laws, sibling competitiveness, and families that resist change. She talks about how couples can stay steady in these situations by being clear about how they want to function, holding to their integrity, and choosing honest, grounded ways of relating—regardless of the pressures around them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The health of a family or of any group is measured by its ability to evolve without breaking apart.
0:17.6	Welcome to conversations with Dr. Jennifer, a collection of interviews on the topics of relationships,
0:24.1	sexuality, spirituality, and more, all featuring Dr. Finlayson Fife.
0:34.0	Hey, everyone, our best sale of the year is here and this year is even better than ever
0:38.8	because I have a brand new full-length course available called Sex Worth Wanting.
0:43.9	Through Monday, you can save 20% on this new course and any full-length course,
0:49.3	plus you'll receive a free printed workbook with each course, which is a $20 value,
0:54.0	and an additional
0:55.0	discount when you buy two or more courses. This is the only sale of the year where you can stack
1:00.4	these three discounts. Welcome everybody to this month's Facebook Live. And we're going to talk
1:07.8	a bit about in-law relationships and how to handle those relationships
1:15.5	well. And I will just say a little bit about this before I take on some of the questions that
1:22.3	were submitted. But I think that probably nothing next to marriage drives right to the heart of differentiation
1:33.3	more than family and in particular in-law relationships.
1:41.4	So that doesn't mean every in-law relationship is difficult or that everybody has
1:45.8	those difficulties. But a reason why I think it's a primary challenge is because it has to do a lot
1:53.1	with differentiation of self and how we handle ourselves when relationships are changing or are in evolution. And it can be tricky.
2:06.4	So I think just to set up as a kind of primary initial idea, this idea that when we marry,
2:13.1	we are, it's like right in Genesis, right in the beginning, we are to leave and cleave.
2:19.3	And it is not easy to leave and cleave for many good reasons. And I mean often it's not easy
2:28.8	for the parent to let the child go. Maybe the child's ready to leave, but the parent may have different
2:36.7	feelings about this because allowing relationships to evolve is often to let your sense of self evolve
	...

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