Ask Eric: Flee manipulative sister

Dear Eric: My mother passed away a few years ago, before getting her assets in order. This resulted in my older sister gaining access to the majority of my mother’s assets. She has never had a career and has been supported throughout her life. Now 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 can’t afford to support her and myself. Plus, 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.

Eric says: 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.

Getting some distance and talking to professionals — an estate 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 he always “needs” me to handle for him. For instance, he will text me at work to order him a coffee from an app on my phone because he forgot to bring his wallet that day.

We have had many conversations about how I have a full-time job and cannot serve as his personal assistant. But he gets upset if I can’t just drop everything to help him out.

Recently, he was on a solo work trip and got into a huge fiasco with his hotel reservation, 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 and I was getting calls and emails from the hotel asking me to pay his bill. It was stressful and professionally embarrassing.

Eric says: The book “Dirty Laundry: Why Adults with ADHD Are So Ashamed and What We Can Do to Help Them” by Richard Pink and Roxanne Emery is a fantastic resource. 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.

A therapist can help you jointly explore where this stress is coming from and what messages your husband is telling himself that contribute to that stress. This also is a good place to get into why he won’t see a doctor and talk through the ways that his crises impact you. A neutral third party can help you both develop new strategies for communicating and problem-solving.