Would you attend family counselling?

[Autumnflakes]

DP and his parents have hit an awful period in their relationship. DP has realised in the last nine months that his parents (DM in particular) has an unhealthy expectation on how DP should be a loving son. I think there’s an element of her not accepting that DP is an adult and has an unmeshment mother-son relationship. FIL has jumped on the bandwagon and has said some unforgivable comments when DP has rejected their demands.

A few things that MIL often says:

• You don’t love me or you wouldn’t be making me upset…
• Putting your family first… don’t forget who was your family first…
• You know heart trouble is in the family, can you live with your conscience if I die…
• we used to be proud of you but you’re not the son we raised.

MIL has caused so many problems we’ve had to cancel our wedding (a whole thread here: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4741117-eloping-is-disrespectful-to-parents?postsby=Autumnflakes )

PIL have been absolutely awful the last few months with threatening to disown him/causing chaos. DP has had to start counselling to deal with it and has asked PIL to attend. The last month or so DP has generally ignored PIL as he just cannot deal with them but has said on numerous occasions that he would like/needs to go to family counselling/mediation to discuss what’s happened properly. PIL want to ‘move on from all this upset as quickly as possible by putting it all behind us’. Flat out refusing outside help.

I’m just curious if parents who aren’t toxic would be willing to go to counselling/mediation with their adult child?

I absolutely would (because I'm hopefully not a toxic parent!) but we generally don't see the toxic parties in a counselling room I'm afraid.
If they're not willing to even try, then do they know that they'll have their behaviour called out? All your DP can do is give them the opportunity to get together in a neutral space and if they refuse, then go from there with how hard he wants to carry on fighting.

Oh goodness!

I think that parents that aren't toxic would go, but they sound massively toxic and a total nightmare. Personally. I don't think you'll ever changed them.

I'm fairly certain non-toxic parents would go, even if they didn't like the idea, purely because they'd want to support their child.

I'm not sure it will work with your DP's parents, there's a common belief that you shouldn't go go counselling with emotionally abusive people. Which they sound.

I’ve not heard that counselling isn’t for emotionally abusive people before. Do you know why that is at all?

We both knew it was very unlikely that PIL would agree to go but this is the only time DP has refused to dance to their tune and has gone low contact (which they hate and keep begging him to put all this nonsense behind).

Counselling can essentially give abusers a nice little toolkit to use against the person being abused.