Dear Eric: I am in a predicament with my older sister. My mother passed away a few years ago, before getting her assets in order. This resulted in my sister gaining access to the majority of my mother’s assets. My sister has lived in the family home for much of her life, most recently since 2010. She feels it is hers, but she has never had a career and has been supported throughout her life. She expects me to support her, and while she’s been nice to me lately, she can be abusive and manipulative.
I am recently divorced and hope to stay away from abusive family dynamics and also hope to remarry in the future. I feel that my sister would sabotage my life, health and future in a new relationship, should I find one. I also can’t support her and myself. Lastly, she wants me to have a baby with IVF and raise the baby with her, in a cult she is a part of. I just want to run.
— Sister Obligation
Dear Sister: Lace up your running shoes and get going. A healthy relationship with your sister is possible, but it’s going to require internal guardrails that you’re diligent about maintaining. Physical distance, at least for a period, will help.
Please consult with an estate attorney regarding the disposition of your mother’s assets. It may not be too late for a fairer distribution. But with regard to everything else — the house, the baby (?!), the cult — do the 100-meter dash. It sounds like you’ve fallen into unhealthy patterns with regard to your relationship with your sister, many of which may not be your fault. Getting some distance and talking to professionals — a lawyer and a counselor, to start — will help you get one of the greatest inheritances: healthy perspective.
Dear Eric: My husband struggles a lot with executive function, especially when he is stressed. For the most part he’s fine with work but personal stuff — anticipating how much money he might need for something, keeping track of where his driver’s license is — he always “needs” me to handle for him. We have had many conversations about how I am his wife with a full-time job of my own, not his personal assistant. But he gets upset if I can’t just drop everything to help him out.
He will text me at work to order him a coffee from an app on my phone because he forgot to bring his wallet out that day and then call me if I don’t respond. Every time one of us is away, he totally falls apart and major crises happen that require a lot of my attention.
Recently, he got into a huge fiasco with his hotel reservation when on a solo trip, in part because he lost all his bank cards the morning he left. I ended up having to duck out of a conference I was helping to facilitate multiple times throughout the day because he was texting me torrents of messages in a panic and I was getting calls and emails from the hotel to pay his bill, etc. It was crazy stressful and professionally embarrassing.
This stuff doesn’t happen all the time, but it always happens when he is feeling particularly stressed or vulnerable, and always whenever we are apart, which feels manipulative to me. He sees a therapist, but he won’t consider speaking to a doctor about medications or even admit to the severity of the problem. It’s hard not to get resentful. Where do I go from here?
— Spouse, not Assistant
Dear Spouse: The book “Dirty Laundry: Why Adults with ADHD Are So Ashamed and What We Can Do to Help Them” written by married co-authors Richard Pink and Roxanne Emery is a fantastic resource for couples. While it will help you both, your husband’s pattern of panicked helplessness, and your compensating responses, point to a larger issue that may not be solely to blame on neurodivergence. You’ll want to work this out in couple’s therapy.
It’s, generally, good that he sees you as an escape hatch from feelings of stress and vulnerability. But he’s gotten into a pattern that, I suspect, creates even more stress and vulnerability. If you’re the only one who can solve the problems — panic is sure to follow.
A therapist can help you jointly explore where this stress is coming from, and what messages he’s telling himself about being apart from you that contribute to that stress.
This is also a good place to get into why he won’t talk to a doctor and talk through the ways that his crises impact you. A neutral third party can help you both safely and productively unpack behavior on his part that reads like a blatant disregard for your time and help you both develop new strategies for communicating and problem-solving.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at [email protected] or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)
Originally Published: May 4, 2025 at 4:30 AM MDT
