My PhD supervisor basically stopped talking to me after I brought up workload issues, what do I do now?

Hey everyone,

I started my PhD in a country where PhD students are technically employed by the university and work under a PI, paid by the state. It started off fine, but pretty early on I noticed I was doing a lot more work for my PI than I was supposed to and not enough for my own dissertation.

At first, I didn’t really care that much because the timeline didn’t seem impossible, I did my own research on weekends, thinking that’s just how things work, and my PI told me she’d talked to other supervisors who said their students do the same.

Fast forward to this year (my final one), she wanted me to teach again, for the third year in a row. I started talking to PhD students from other universities and reading the actual regulations, and it turns out we’re only allowed to do “other work” (teaching, admin, etc.) up to 20% of our time — and only with our explicit consent, plus extra pay if it’s more.

So I told her about it, thinking we’d just clarify things. But she completely freaked out. She sent me a bunch of passive-aggressive emails saying I should have talked to her before “reading laws” or asking around, which was just… insane to me.

Then she ignored me for a whole month, and when we finally talked, we agreed that yeah — I had done way more than allowed for two years straight, so this year I wouldn’t take on extra work.

Since then, she’s basically been pretending I don’t exist. She won’t talk to me in meetings, barely even greets me, and only comments on my dissertation chapters when she has to.

I feel really sad and honestly kind of betrayed. Nobody took any accountability for what happened, and I feel like my education didn’t matter. I was just free labor for her projects (which weren’t even related to my own topic, since this is often the case in the humanities).

I just want to finish my PhD and move on, but it’s been emotionally draining and super isolating.

Has anyone been through something like this? How did you deal with a supervisor basically shutting down like this? Should I just focus on finishing and ignore her, or try to address it again somehow?