I was having severe anxiety yesterday regarding this situation and I am trying to bring more peace to it today. I know it will be a back and forth type of thing; I expect one day I will be more at peace with it than the next.

I think I will ruminate on why I have become a people-pleaser all these years, though I am learning to stand up for myself more and more (a benefit perhaps of being in my 40s!) I have a wonderful support system in another of my sisters-in-law (my brother’s wife) and she has been a gift to me right now.

I appreciate your advice about sitting down with my husband and deciding are we are on the same page with this or not. It is his brother, after all.

As for myself, I can’t really see going to visit them in the future and they will not be welcome at my house (unless things change drastically). Luckily they live 16 hours away so we don’t have to bump into each other at the grocery store. My parents live half an hour from them so if my husband wants to take the kids over for a visit, I can stay at my parents house.

Thanks again for responding, Anita, I appreciate it.

Not only am I a people pleaser, I am known in the family as the “peace maker”. I am very conflict-avoidant. I’m not sure why but I suspect a bunch of reasons have contributed. I was bullied by some classic Mean Girls in 6th grade when I started at a new school. One day they would be my friends, the next they would pull my hair, flush my socks down the toilet in gym class, etc. I think I learned not to trust people from that experience.

At some point after I learned that if you don’t make waves, that if you make yourself small, don’t give anyone any reason to not like you then you can get through life without too much pain.

But the pain comes anyway, no matter what you do. I often fantasize about running away from home, living alone in some cabin in the woods with no contact with the outside world, lol.

As an update to my BIL, he emailed me yesterday to say that he done a deposit of $2,500 and I see it has appeared in our bank account. So, we are down to $9,100. At least it’s less than half of what we loaned out. My husband says he is going to call his brother to discuss my freakout and explain my anxiety disorder to him, etc. So then I started to feel bad, like I made a big deal about it and maybe this whole thing is my fault. If I had just left it alone they would have paid something on the loan, and no one would be mad at me.

I don’t know what to think. Maybe my anxiety disorder made me over-react to the Facebook post showing their latest purchase? It has been years of expensive purchases (I forgot to mention the $750 designer dog they got a year ago). Was I wrong to get upset about it? Am I the crazy “bad guy”here?

You are right about my husband not being assertive. He is a “keep the peace” type of person too. He rarely lets other people’s behavior upset him. His feeling is “well, people will just be people”. In some ways that lets people get away with poor behavior and act without integrity.

I just watched a video by Mel Robbins regarding money and integrity. She says in a case where you have to choose money or integrity, always choose integrity. My BIL and SIL have chosen money over acting with integrity. I feel like I know who they really are now, and it was actually something I had already known – they like nice things. Nice things come first. I saw the writing on the wall with this loan and I am disappointed to be proved right.

At least I have a good excuse for denying a loan to anyone else ever again: bad experience! Basically if ever approached for a loan again I will just say, “I’m sorry but we are not in a position to help out right now.”

This situation is not the only difficult one I’ve had in recent years and my anxiety has not been significantly improved with self-help and self-care so I am going to see a counsellor next week. I’ve been off anxiety meds for 11 years and vowed I would never go back on them, but this thing is really impacting my life in a negative way and I think I need help.