Reply to Help me disengage from family meltdown

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That your sister is dragging this up again and trying to get an apology suggests she still has a long way to go in her healing. It's fine to tell people how they've hurt you, and to adjust your relationship with them depending on how they respond, but you can't force someone to give you the response you're looking for. Your mother is never going to give your sister what she wants, and your sister needs to find another way to make peace with that.

As do you. You need to find a way to stop getting crazy about your mother's refusal to apologize to your sister. As a first step, I'd suggest completely removing yourself from the situation. That your sister cc's you on all of these emails strongly suggests you and she are very much in need of boundaries, and it's time to tell her that you can't be part of these discussions anymore, that they're between her your parents, so please leave you off the emails. If she keeps cc'ing you, warn her that you will block her email completely if she continues, and then follow through on that if she does. And then everyone involved needs to know that you don't want them talking to you about it anymore either. It's their issue, you're not making it yours anymore.

If you're not in therapy yourself (can't remember if you said you were or not, but I suspect if you were you wouldn't be bringing this to DCUM), you should give it a try. For your own emotional health, you need to work on setting boundaries and on accepting your family the way it is rather than hoping for change.[/quote]

I actually AM in therapy!  But here I am on DCUM anyway.  My therapist told me to remember that I am not my sister and to maintain distance, but it's just easier said than done.  I thought it might help me to hear from people who had been in similar situations.  I appreciate your advice.  -OP[/quote]

PP here. My family history is nearly identical to yours (except my mom didn't become a pastor). What I will say with the benefit of hindsight is that setting boundaries is not so much hard as painful and scary. The actual act of setting them is fairly easy once you accept that you can't control the other person's reaction to them, and that they might get angry with you for doing so (which is only a reflection of their own poor emotional health).

The other thing I'll pass along, simply because everything you said is so eerily familiar, is that when I finally started to take care of myself w/r/t my family, I came to learn that my sister wasn't the ally I thought she was, and that was tremendously painful. She wasn't ready to separate herself from the drama and start really healing, and when I wasn't willing to continue going on that trip with her, she became extremely angry with me and lashed out. Hopefully your sister wouldn't react the same way, but it's worth being prepared for.[/quote]

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