Husband making progress out of enmeshed dynamic with mom, but still struggles to enforce boundaries when she escalates -how do you know if this is real differentiation?

My husband (30M) and I (30F) have been together 8 years and married a few months ago. This year our relationship reached a breaking point because of what our couples therapist has identified as an enmeshed dynamic between him and his mother.

His relationship with his mom has historically been very emotionally exclusive. He takes on a caretaking/“pseudo-husband” role with her, feels responsible for her emotions, has difficulty disappointing her, and has struggled to set boundaries. She also takes on a caretaking role toward him that feels infantilizing to me. She has historically overstepped into our marriage, including giving strong opinions about how we should renovate our home/live our life, inserting herself into our decisions, and repeatedly pushing for information/access after we had said no.

There have also been more serious issues. She has said negative things about me to him, questioned my character, and created doubt about me during their one-on-one conversations. In the past, he responded to my hurt with minimizing, defensiveness, avoidance, gaslighting, and sometimes lying about or deleting conversations with her. This created significant emotional unsafety in our marriage.

We started couples therapy with an enmeshment-trained therapist, and he started individual therapy. There has been real progress, which I want to acknowledge.

He has:

• Started recognizing the enmeshment cycle in real time.
• Become more empathetic toward my hurt instead of minimizing or avoiding it.
• Recognized how his mother's emotions have historically driven his decisions.
• Started asking himself what he actually wants rather than automatically considering what his mom will feel.
• Reduced oversharing about our marriage and schedule.
• Started saying no to some things and not answering every call immediately.
• Recognized that there needs to be more emotional space invested in our marriage.
• Acknowledged that his lack of boundaries has affected not only our marriage but his work and other areas of his life.
• Told me himself that he does not want his mother's level of contact to become as frequent as it currently is.

I have also realized that I developed hypervigilance and was self-betraying in the relationship by accepting things that were hurting me and then monitoring more and more closely because I didn't feel safe. My therapist has helped me distinguish my own trauma responses from legitimate marital boundaries. I don't want to control my husband's relationship with his mother, and I don't want to become his boundary monitor.

The problem is that he still struggles enormously when his mom actually pushes against a boundary.

For example, after our wedding, we agreed that we did not want to share details about our wedding expenses/gifts with his parents. We both agreed on a simple response: “Don't worry about it.”

His parents asked us more than 10 times. His mom asked me directly when I was alone with her, in front of his dad, and at various points when we were leaving their house. Eventually his brother started asking too.

I told my husband during an emotional check-in that the strategy clearly wasn't working and that the repeated questioning was making me uncomfortable. He agreed and said he could see that something stronger needed to happen.

The next day, though, he said he wouldn't have a direct conversation with his parents because he “doesn't believe in it.” This triggered a huge argument because I suddenly questioned whether he actually shared the boundary with me. Eventually he clarified that he does believe in keeping it private; he just doesn't feel as strongly about it as I do and feels very uncomfortable directly telling his parents to stop asking.

We eventually agreed that if they asked again, he would directly say that we weren't discussing it and ask them to stop. But the fact that it took this much pressure to get there was upsetting to me.

Then the contact with his mom increased significantly after the wedding.

Before the wedding, she communicated with him a few times a week, and we felt like we had a good sense of autonomy as a couple. After the wedding and after visiting his parents twice, she started texting/calling almost every day.

He has told me he doesn't want communication to be that frequent. He has sometimes ignored calls and said he was proud of himself for not responding immediately. He can see that the frequency is increasing and has agreed that he doesn't want it.

But he still says he is uncomfortable directly addressing it.

There was also an incident where she invited herself on our night routine. Our afternoon/evening walk is a special routine for my husband and me, and he has repeatedly told me how much he loves this part of our life together. His mom knows this.

She called, asked about his day, asked what we were doing next, and he told her we were going for our walk. She said she wanted to join and asked him to wait because she wasn't in town yet. Luckily, the timing didn't work out and he wouldn't wait, but I don't see him being able to say no or hold the boundary if there isn't another circumstantial reason to.

To me, this was an example of how the boundary erosion happens: she doesn't necessarily make an outrageous demand. She simply asks for a little more access, and he accommodates it. Then the level of access gradually expands.

We recently had a productive conversation about this. He said he wants to explore what he actually wants, stop automatically oversharing our schedules, and consider how his responses affect our relationship safety.

Immediately afterward, his mom texted:

“Hey just checking in. Make sure you rest, take your vitamins and sauna, thinking of you both.”

He responded:

“Thanks appreciate it always mom”

This really bothered me, not because I think a mother is never allowed to tell her adult son to take vitamins, but because of the larger pattern.

She has been checking in almost daily, asking about his day, telling him she's exhausted from work, and he responds by caretaking her (“you need rest”), while she continues giving him reminders about things he already manages himself as a 30-year-old adult. He literally just talked to me about how he wants to work on his responses not encouraging the frequency to continue and is getting frustrated by some of the calls/texts.

It feels like she is moving back into a caretaker role and him back into the child/caretaker-son role.

I also notice that when his parents' marriage becomes strained, the pattern historically escalates: his mom's love-bombing decreases, she becomes more reliant on the sons emotionally, there is guilt/passive aggression/silent treatment, and eventually she has a larger emotional breakdown. My husband agrees he can see the pattern and has even said he is worried about where things are heading.

He has acknowledged that this is often when he slips back into caretaking his mom and feels pressured by his dad to do so.

My concern is that he is recognizing the pattern but still participating in it.

For example, he tells me he doesn't want this level of contact, but when she sends a caretaking text he responds warmly with “appreciate it always,” which I feel reinforces the exact dynamic he says he doesn't want.

When I said this, he became defensive and said:

“It's just a little text about vitamins.”

“Your parents didn't do that for you, that doesn't mean mine can't.”

“You're trying to control what I say.”

I tried to explain that I'm not asking him to use specific words or control his relationship with her. I'm asking him to look at the pattern, the role she is taking, the role he takes in response, and how his responses may reinforce something he has already said he doesn't want.

I'm struggling because I feel like we were making progress as a team, but now that his mother's behaviour is escalating again, it feels like we're no longer going through it as a unit.

I don't want to become controlling or hypervigilant. I don't want to monitor his phone or tell him exactly what to say to his mother. I also don't want to self-betray by pretending that something doesn't affect our marriage when it does. Knowing this behaviour is amping up, I know that it is his job to protect the marriage from what we went through earlier this year. I feel like he current state of "comfortability" with boundaries is very dangerous in combination with the increase in monitoring behaviours from her.

So my question for people who have experienced enmeshment/differentiation:

How do you distinguish between a partner who is genuinely differentiating but still learning and uncomfortable, versus a partner who intellectually understands enmeshment but ultimately isn't willing to change their behaviour when the parent applies emotional pressure?

What does genuine progress look like at this stage?

And how do you, as the spouse, step out of hypervigilance and stop becoming the “boundary monitor” while still holding legitimate boundaries around the marriage?

I'm particularly interested in experiences from people who have gone through this themselves, either as the formerly enmeshed adult child or as their spouse.