Reply to This week is the worst week of my life

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I’ve been living this for a couple of years and I can empathize.

It’s good that you recognize it now. Take care of yourself, maintain your own space, and let your parents handle as much as they can. Recognize that you are in good company. Don’t let them hurt you if they get into an episode. Talk to them like young children. You can check in over the phone and at brief times weekly or biweekly or monthly and that’s plenty.

You’ll get used to it and over time it won’t be so intolerable.[/quote]

Yeah it’s really important to maintain some emotional boundaries. For a long time I would talk to my mom and it was like her emotions were my emotions. If she was anxious and spiraling, depressed, then I was anxious and depressed. My parents are mid 80s and may potentially live another ten years and I just realized I can’t be anxious and depressed for the next ten years. I can be sympathetic but have to work really hard to not get sucked into the drama, the conflict. They were always difficult people and I did a good job of being polite, cordial but not close to them. The hardest thing about this stage is having to spend more time with them, to absorb the cruelty and abuse of an unfiltered old persons thoughts and the emotions.[/quote]

How were you able to do this?[/quote]

Not the person you are responding to, but I also detached and stopped getting sucked into drama. It helped that I saw what became of relatives who got sucked into everything revolving around the anxious and angry elder. They were rewarded with cancer-both of them. One had a heart attack first. There are sadly parents who will eat their young if you let them. Some were better people before, some were always abusive. You have to chose to take care of your health and sanity. There is no reward for destroying your own life trying to do what you think your elderly parent expects.

So you decide to survive this. You make sure they are getting decent care. You hire outsiders or access volunteer networks or do whatever you can to be able to lead your own life too.You accept that we all have our challenges and some of us have harder aging parent experiences than others. You can't change this. All you do is focus on the things under your control.

If they turn abusive, you don't even have to absorb the abuse. I leave. I don't care if the parent has dementia. They see to understand I have no tolerance and they shape up when I ship out. I won't allow even a second of abusive behavior toward or near my kids. There is a lot of BS online about working around abuse. No thanks. I have too much going on to dance around abuse.[/quote]

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