Cruising then crashing

Does anyone feel like they're in a good spot, and encouraged by it, then we meet our nemesis trigger and it all goes to crap?

Well this just happened to me yesterday. Mom is the Number One trigger for me, almost embarrassing for someone my age. So I call on Sunday and she says "did you get my message"? I tell her I haven't had a chance to listen to it and she gets on me about not listening to my messages, how disrespectful it is, etc etc. The usual rap. Then yesterday, I called to wish her a happy anniversary and without missing a beat, she asked me if I went to a wake for a friend of hers. I tell her "no" and she gets on me again.

I can avoid things like crowds, traffic, and such, but I can't ignore the people in my life that keep pushing me. It's discouraging.

Bleh! Maybe try just not calling her at all or listening to her messages either. Imagine giving her the finger in your mind you seriously don’t have to listen to that kind of crap even from your mother.

I’d call less often , she’s gonna give you grief anyway. Might as well cut it back yourself.

Can you set a alarm to go off after a certain amount of time ? Hell I use to open my front door quietly and ring my own doorbell so there was a reason to hang up lol

Ring your own doorbell! <3 Christina! Love it!

RJ, this sounds very much like what my BF's dad would do. He expected BF to immediately answer/get back to etc., no matter what, and would go off about how lazy, disrespectful etc. Also to immediately act on all aspects of the topic at hand. BF's not got BP, but does have mood and psych issues, so is not always in a good place for dealing with Mr. Type A Retired Phone Always in Hand.

Well, they had a BIG falling out (on another thing). When BF reconnected, he decided it would be a good time to deal with the phone issue too. So he set the terms. Text ONLY. He will try to answer in a timely manner, but it may not be right away. Dad had little choice but to agree if he wanted any contact. He doesn't understand it, but he abides by it.

Previously, when he didn't get an answer "quick enough" from BF, he'd start phone bombing me(!) Yikes. Something had to be done.

You will need to determine the particulars for your own situation, but it's going to come down to boundaries. You are an adult and your relationship needs a renegotiation on this.

I have an elderly sister who triggers me something fierce. She can't understand why I don't come to visit (she lives with other people in a house where they don't like me or my son) and refuses to acknowledge the fact that she has driven away everyone in the family with her negative energy. I feel AWFUL for her because she just lost her son in January and was evicted from her assisted living facility in the same month, but the latter was because of some bad decisions that she made. Her entire life is a mess because of bad decisions she's made. SHe's lied to me, lied about my son, trashed me on Facebook and I can't trust her. I can't handle her problems and my own too. Maybe that makes me a terrible sister and I deserve all her crap, but I can't help the way I feel.

My mom used to do things like threaten to bash my windows out with a bat. Threaten suicide weekly, often on voicemail, because she wasn’t getting her way. Set off fights between herself and my husband (she felt he should have been waiting on her). Assaulted people getting into disputes. She had been arrested a couple of times. I had to bail her out. Once I had to talk a cop out of arresting her and get someone to drop a complaint. She got addicted to Ativan so badly that she couldn’t walk or get out of “bed” (she slept in a cot because she was wetting herself). She screamed at me for weeks because I took her keys away and locked her in my house while I ramped her dose down (she had gone to multiple doctors to get the deadly doses she was taking) because she was going to die I’d I didn’t. It was that or go to the hospital, and she refused to go. It was a nightmare.

Her insulting me all the time was way down on the list of things I had to deal with.

My husband/his family couldn’t understand why I put up with her, but she didn’t have anyone else and she had very little control over herself. Believe it or not, deep down she wasn’t a bad person and I did love her and took care of her until she passed away. Most of the time, I could keep her under control by doling out her pills to her daily, the most important one being an anti-psychotic. But sometimes she wouldn’t cooperate and that is when everything would go off into a ditch.

If you think you can’t take it, you just look at the person flinging the insults or being mean. I came to see my mother as something of a child I was looking after. Take a different perspective. Look at who is talking to you.

I’m sure you’re not dealing with stuff like this. But, regardless, Don’t let it bother you. It only does if you let it.

My father and brother were those type of triggers. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, it got really bad. Now both parents are gone and I haven't heard from my brother in two years.

I don't need people who are tearing me down. Constructive criticism is one thing but verbal abuse is something else. Life's too short to be battered down over the phone every week.

Absolutely.. it completely sucks

(I’m sorry I don’t really have advice, I have no idea really why I’m even still here on this planet )

Thanks for all the posts. My mom is like one of those cyborgs that just keeps attacking no matter the issue or condition. I've mentioned before, we (my family) think she's an undiagnosed BP. She's been this way all her life, *always* looking for a fight. Ignoring her would make it worse because she knows I'm ignoring her so she just comes at me harder. At this point in my life, I don't need to be controlled by anyone. In fact, I swore I would put myself FIRST after my diagnosis so I could work on myself and work on getting better. Thus, why call mom if it's going to degenerate into some kind of fight? That doesn't help matters......but not calling doesn't help either. For the record, one of my sisters refused to talk to her for three years. They didn't speak from 2001 to 2004. We all put up with my mom for the sake of my dad.

Could you maybe just talk to your dad and not your mom?

I like my mum but she’s still a trigger for me.
I always bump her to VM and call her when I’m ready.
If possble I usually call her about 5min before I’m expecting hubby home, or 5min before I’m expecting a delivery etc.
It gives me a reason to hang up that she’ll always accept.