Stop reading my mail!

• Help me get through to my dad about respecting my privacy now that I no longer live with him. I moved out of my parents' house this past June in order to attend grad school about 20 minutes away. Much of my mail still goes to my old address, and some of it I've been able to redirect to my new one, but some mail that I receive has to go to a physical street address and not the PO box that I've set up. My dorm does not allow packages to be delivered. My father "forgets" and ignores the fact that I've asked him (for 5 years now) not to open mail or packages that are addressed to me. Recently he opened some mail addressed to me that revealed I was looking for a new therapist, and I spent half an hour on the phone listening to him rant about how he feels about therapy. He has also looked at my medical results if I receive lab tests reports in the mail as well. My privacy is violated constantly and I am not able to change where my mail goes for the time being. He also thinks nothing of rearranging different aspects of my car to suit him if I come to visit because he thinks his way is the best, and despite the fact that my room at my parents' house is still my room, he likewise has no problem rummaging through my things to find something he wants despite the fact that these things are not his to look for in the first place. How do I get through to my father about how frustrated I am when he reads my mail and goes through my stuff? Sometimes my mail comes addressed to me, my mother and my father all at once, and I recognize that that's a little tricky, but I have asked him to stop reading as soon as he sees that something is actually addressed to me. He often doesn't. I cannot even deal with the fact that he opens packages addressed to me under the guise of checking to make sure nothing has been "broken in transit". He actually went so far as to look through the books I had gotten my boyfriend for his birthday! It's not that I've never set up boundaries; it's that he ignores them. What do I do?

• Answer:

  It sounds like your father still thinks of you as a child, because of your financial dependence on him. That's what all the examples you give have in common -- you have a room in his house where you send packages and keep belongings, mail related to insurance matters (therapy, lab results) are sent to the payer. Why not just ask him if he recognizes this correlation? You are in an in-between time in your life -- an adult, but not financially independent. Together you need to decide how to cross that bridge. I would give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not quite seeing what he's doing (equating financial independence with adulthood, and how you are actually at that point in the middle and need his help to define your new roles as two adults instead of a child and an adult). He was almost 20 years seeing you as a child -- sometimes it takes time for the new relationship to become second-nature.