foo is coming

[silentrhino]

I don't have much contact with FOO but they are coming up for an important (to them) family event in a few weeks.  I'm already starting to dissociate as I know it will be awful.  I have not been strong enough to completely sever the frail ties that bind us together. In reality I'm somewhat scared of losing them, that last link to my heritage but so conflicted cause I know I will have to hide in my assigned emotion free box while they ride roughshod over me. I feel I'm going to lose my sobriety again, I've started slipping at just the thought of their faces and their judgments of me. Boy I sound like a whiner, sorry.

[radical]

You're not a whiner, SilentRhino,
I'd feel the same way.  Like you, I have minimal contact, yet even so, in the past that contact has been extremely destabilising.  What I found helpful was to take control.  I felt like the sky would fall in doing so but it didn't.  I stayed in a motel and made contact during the brief time I was in the same city, deliberate and conscious.  It made things much easier, but of course, finances permitted me to do so.

Are your parents planning to stay with you?  If so can you tell  them that they can't?  If you can't, could you and your family, if you have one,  go somewhere else or be doing something else, to a strictly controlled schedule so that the time you and your FOO are in each other's company is tightly organised in advance and manageable in quantity?

It was interesting as well as much more manageable for me to do it this way, it gave me some insights I wouldn't have otherwise had, and it was bearable.

I know what you mean about being walked over and feeling powerless in the face of that. Maybe some careful planning could help?  Just a thought.

Whatever you do or don't do, I think I know how you feel.
Take care of your needs, and make that your priority, if you can.

[Three Roses]

Here's some info on the Medium Chill response, from the Out of the Fog website: http://outofthefog.website/what-to-do-2/2015/12/3/medium-chill

It really works. Hope this info is helpful to you! 

[Blueberry]

Silentrhino, you don't sound like a whiner to me. You sound like you're really worried and with good reason. Our FOO riding roughshod over us is not a good thing, putting it mildly. The last two times I've had in-person contact to more than one particular family member, the results  were disastrous for me. I hadn't known this forum then. Had I, maybe I would've been strong enough to not even go. That's just speculation though.

I hope that what radical and 3Roses have written will help you be in control and take care of you.  Good luck to you.

[silentrhino]

thanks for the input, I did look at the toolbox, that was really helpful, I'm not sure how to access it other than through it's link.  Its my brothers that are coming, my parents are long deceased.  I try to avoid my brothers and their scathing wives but unfortunately I can't avoid it.  They even have expressed desire to stay at my apartment which I'm highly discouraging. Maybe I'll just get sick, so sick they couldn't possibly want to be around me. I'm gonna post that phrase medium chill on my hand so I remember that.

[silentrhino]

I love the concept of medium chill, that is a great suggestion.  I even have it on post it notes at work.  I am investing a lot of time and money into my therapy, I hope it is worth it.  I don't feel worth it being the victim of an environment where I was tortured.  I deformed my body due to the constant sexual abuse, I wish I had the money for corrective surgery.  No one knows what I have done to myself.

[Three Roses]

[Blueberry]