Reply to For people with anxiety

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "For people with anxiety"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I hope this isn't a weird question. I'm trying to get a handle on my anxiety with meditation and therapy and exercise. I'd like to avoid meds, however, and just come up with practical solutions to uncomfortable stress-inducing situations.

If you know there is something coming up that will really stress you out, how do you handle it? Do you just avoid it ?

The specifics are that DH and his brother are in a feud. There's been a lot of mean and nasty things said to each other over the last few years.  Both are at fault, but if I'm going to be honest, more of the fault lies with my own DH.
Now, DH's mother likes to act like everything is normal, all the time. No one outside our immediate family even knows anything is wrong. My SIL (DH's brother's wife) is pregnant with her first child - I try to keep a good relationship (though very surface level and dancing around the elephant in the room) with her. They live 90 mins away, and we were invited to the (co-ed) baby shower, where other relatives will be present. For the last few years, we've been more or less avoiding each other, and while perhaps cowardly, I'm thinking if two siblings can't get along, maybe its best if they minimize interactions so everyone has a bit of calm.

Anyway, I get seriously stressed out around the anger unleashed by the two brothers at each other, and I'd like to just avoid the whole thing. Its not good my kids to see, its not good for SIL's unborn child, and its not good for me. But if we don't go, it will probably set off WW III with DH's mom, who is sort of the whole reason why relationships are so bad to begin with. She treated them really unequally growing up and now there's just a ton of resentment. If we don't attend, we will hear about it for the next 10 years. And THAT will stress me out.

As you can see, its not really the event at all, its just the stress of being around dysfunctional family members. But as someone on this forum said, my DH/BIL/MIL can't make me feel stressed - I do that to myself.

What say you? Any advice on doing the right thing and also dealing with my anxiety around this?

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics