SIL has stopped me seeing nephew

[Magmum13]

My nephew is 3 years old. My brother's partner has displayed some coercive controlling behaviours in his relationship, they split up regularly and she's often involved in conflicts with her family and sometimes ours too. I have managed so far to maintain a relatively good relationship with her. My nephew means the world to me, I see him and mind him regularly and have done since he was a baby including having him stay over with me.
My SIL has picked a fight with me, I should have seen it coming really and I'm cross with myself. It was over some wording in a message about a party invite. Very trivial. She thinks I was rude, I don't. She said some quite unpleasant things about me and blocked me everywhere so I can't reply. She's then asked my brother to get involved. I asked him not to and reiterated that to resolve the argument would need for her and I do agree to disagree and move on. In what I thought were private messages with him, I have explained why I think the enforcing of one party to capitulate in disagreements is a facet of control, I have also explained that her behaviour isn't in keeping with someone who wants a resolution and that instead my hunch is that he is being positioned to choose between us. She's then read those, and sent a rather explosive message to me saying that I am unhinged and dangerous and must therefore be kept away from my nephew. I've spoken to my brother who acknowledges that there's no truth in the suggestion that my nephew would be somehow at risk around me but considers himself in a difficult situation where he must prioritise the stability of his relationship with her. At a family get together this weekend where he would normally come and bring his son he didn't turn up. Other family members are reluctant to get involved as they say they recognise it will be them next and nobody wants to lose contact themselves,
I feel there is not much I can do here, and I'm not sure what kind of advice I'm looking for, rather it would be good to hear from anyone in similar circumstances and feel not alone with it. But if there is any advice at all I would be grateful. It breaks my heart not seeing him.

OP, if she thinks you were rude, and you want to see your nephew, then it was on you to apologise, whether or not you thought you were in the wrong. I can understand her being less than impressed to discover you think she is exercising coercive control, and also setting up your brother to choose between you and her - it would have been best not to involve your brother, but I can understand why you did. The person who is really in the wrong here is your dear brother - what possessed him to show her your messages?? I fear the only thing you can do is to send a humble apology and hope for it all to blow over. Moral for the future: if you have more to lose than the other person, get your apology in first - and don’t involve other people because it tends to escalate things.

You're right that there isn't much you can do here, unless you back down, which would be painful.

You could send her a non-apology? Something like "I'm sorry you felt I was rude. That wasn't my intention." And she if she accepts that.

A huge lesson here is that your brother is always going to side with her to keep the peace. Mine does it too, I have no relationship with him or his crazy wife .

im in contact with my niece and nephew through messenger and have met up once this year but didn’t have and contact for many years to due their parents. Bizarrely neither niece of nephew speak to their parents now!

no advice on how to sort it but I have been there.

Your SIL has zero to lose if she never speaks to you again. You do, contact with your nephew. Your brother will always side with your SIL, because he's terrified she'll stop access to his son. However, I have no idea what possessed him to share your messages with your SIL. It might be, that he didn't and she snooped. Regardless, you can't change the fact she read them, and has reacted badly. You may feel you were in the right, and you weren't rude, she thinks you were, and for your nephew's sake, you needed to apologise. You didn't have to mean it, but just went through the motions. I know it's not right, you having to apologise, and yes it goes against every fibre in your body. You shouldn't have involved your brother either, it was between you and her, and not him. You now know where your brother's loyalties lay, so in future tread very carefully. Other than sending an apology via your brother, that he can show her, there's very little you can do. No, other family members shouldn't involve themselves either, it's not fair on them to be in the firing line. Your brother is going to be stuck in this position until his son turns 18, that's a very long time, for him to walk on egg shells trying to keep the peace.

He showed her the messages because it IS coercive control. He isn't allowed to have private communications that she isn't party to.

I too have a SIL like this. Thankfully her children are my husband's blood relatives and not mine, so I'm not particularly sad about not having a relationship with them, but she has broken my PIL's hearts.

I didn't involve him. I asked him not to become involved.
You seem to be saying she can ask for whatever she wants because if she doesn't receive it she will remove a relationship from her sons life even when that relationship is loving, positive and beneficial.
I personally do see that as a facet of coercive control. It is the weaponising of a child. It's also a behaviour of coercive control that there is a need for one person to be fully to blame in disagreements and escalating the disagreement rather than agreeing to disagree and moving on. That's not just my opinion, it's the general consensus.

Thank you x

Thank you

I have a SIL like this. I apologised and went on to build a strong, loving relationship with my niece. She is now an adult and her mother turns on her frequently so they have a low contact relationship.

My moral for the future, don't feed the troll. She will have them all crawling on their knees begging forgiveness for all sorts of perceived midemeanors. I would pull back OP, painful as it is. She is used to conflict and will always win. You don't need that in your life.

I guess you either apologise profusely and hope she will allow you to see DN again, or you accept the result of your actions.

Well personally I don't see how OP falling all over herself to appease this woman is going to help things in the long run.
All it does is reinforce the SiL's behaviour and mean OP will have to bow to always doing what her SiL wants. It sounds as though the rest of the family are already dancing to her tune.

Personally I think OP should tell the woman she is sorry she upset her as it wasn't intentional and she should make it clear to her brother she is always there for him. But I wouldn't go further than that.

If OP has been useful to them in the past looking after their son then hopefully pure selfishness will drive the Sil into some sort of reconciliation with OP in order for her to be useful in a babysitting capacity.

OP it depends what your priority is. You can’t stick to your guns AND have a relationship with your bro and nephew.

if you want to maintain that contact you need to apologise profusely (for whatever she thinks you’ve done) and grovel. You can then secretly hope your brother leaves her and you can very covertly let him know you’d support him in that.

she won’t be the gateway to nephew forever, but whilst she is, the only way to see him is get her back on side. It’s galling but true

What did the message say? It's hard to know if she's being unreasonable without context.

If she pressured your brother to see his phone then it is controlling. But could he have shown her because he was annoyed with what you were saying his partner and their relationship himself?

Do you want to be right or do you want to see your nephew,? it seems you can't do both

I’m afraid I’m going to have to go against the grain here. If you apologise this time just to make it go away, it will be something else in a few months. Those people who are desperately trying to keep out of it (understandably) will fall foul of an infraction too in the future. Appeasement never works.
I’d tell your brother you are sorry it has come to this and you are devastated you will no longer see your nephew and you are more than willing to welcome everyone with open arms at any point. Then resign yourself to not seeing your nephew for the foreseeable.
Don’t avoid family get togethers or put yourself out in any way to accommodate her unreasonableness. If she removes herself because you are there, that’s on her. I would also assume any communication going forwards, to anyone, might be shared with her and work on that basis and discuss her as little as possible and never negatively.

@Magmum13 Here are a few lessons learned from my situation with my SIL.

A couple of years ago we learned that my SIL was apparently very upset with us over something we had done, and that was the reason why we hadn't heard from her and BIL recently. We did not understand why she was so upset about something we considered trivial, but we reached out on multiple occasions to try to talk about it so we could reconcile and move on. She completely refused to engage with us, preferring to remain completely no contact with us. On the rare occasions we managed to get my BIL to talk about it with us, he just repeated her stance and said there was nothing to be done, even though he could not articulate why what we had done was actually a problem. The situation has continued to escalate and in recent months my BIL has been largely no contact with my PIL as well, who are no longer seeing their grandchildren as a result.

If I could have my time again, this is what I would do. I would send a message to my SIL and BIL together, saying I was very sorry she felt the way she did, and that it had not been in any way our intention to upset her. I would then grey rock her as much as possible, doing absolutely nothing to aggravate her, being pleasantly boring when we were required to be in the same place, and essentially non-existent otherwise. And I would try to maintain communication with my BIL as best as I could.

You cannot negotiate with terrorists.

You cannot change the person who is the aggressor.

And you cannot resolve conflicts in this situation, because that is not the point.

I no longer believe that my SIL was actually upset by the thing she claims to be upset about. And that is why our attempts to talk to her about it were completely stonewalled. Because she did not want an apology, she did not want to reconcile and move on. It was a completely manufactured conflict which she always intended to maintain over the long term. The entire point was to go no contact with us and in doing so, isolate her husband from his family so that she could have total control over him.

I feel in retrospect that we played into her hands by trying to fix it and getting angry when she wouldn't engage.

If I had apologised for inadvertently upsetting her and then just engaged with her as little as possible and led an entirely blameless life from that point onwards, she would no doubt have continued to rant and rave about how my husband and I are the devil incarnate, but maybe somewhere my BIL would have been thinking, "But they apologised for upsetting you and since then they have done absolutely nothing to you. Why are you still angry?"

Unfortunately, because the situation has escalated, she now has more to work with when trying to convince him that we are evil people and that none of them should ever see us again. And because my parents in law eventually stuck up for us, she has accused them of favouritism and now she won't see them either.

There is nothing you can do with people like that. All you can do is grey rock them as much as possible and try to keep lines of communication open with the person or people they are abusing.

Hate hate my fellow women weaponising their children. My boys grew up without their dad (death) and it hurt my heart. I cannot understand women withholding extra love from their children.
If you do this, shame on you
Op, I understand you love your dn but do not bow to this hideous woman. Tell your db to grow some balls

Without knowing what the messages were and what you said to SIL then it’s hard to comment on as you may have been particularly nasty. I wouldn’t cut someone out of my children’s life lightly so maybe read back through all the messages and see where you went wrong and perhaps apologise.

OP you’re not at fault here. After the best part of 20 years with a coercive, controlling sister in law, I’ve understood that there is literally nothing you can do to avoid the conflict. It didn’t matter what you said in that original text. She’d decided she wanted an argument, because it’s a way of getting attention and creating ‘connection’ with people. You couldn’t have avoided it if you’d used different words, or reacted differently in the moment. It’s exhausting and depressing to feel like you can never win. But it can be liberating to realise that you don’t have to second guess what you’ve said or done.

Unfortunately, my experience would suggest there’s nothing much you can do right now. As you clearly play an important role in your nephew’s life, there’s a chance your SIL will realise she’s missing out on the help and may back down, but I don’t think you can engineer a reconciliation. And tbh, if you did, it would probably just happen again a few months down the line. I would sit tight in the knowledge that you have done nothing wrong, and wait for them to come to you. Maybe let your brother know you’re open to a relationship with all of them, and how much you love and miss your nephew, but that you don’t want to push them when your SIL clearly feels so strongly about something you can’t fix alone.

It’s really tough. I’m sorry you’re going through it.

This is what I think. Thank you x

Some people do it for absolutely no reason at all.

It's pointless thinking about what you would or wouldn't do and trying to apply the same logic to a narcissist.

Thank you so much. This is comforting to read. x

I have wondered if there's something happening for her that I don't understand. The anger in her response was so disproportionate that something seems to have happened, I don't know, maybe a trauma response but I'm guessing. I can't help her with that though. Not least because I'm blocked everywhere