Wow, I've been away from the message boards here for a long while so it was a shock when I dropped in and saw this post here! It was amazing to read that message I wrote in July of 2005.
Since that time, things have gotten so much worse for my daughter...she is now much, much sicker and extremely delusional - she believes that everyone she meets is part of a conspiracy to kill or ruin her.
Nowadays I have come to a place of peace regarding her and I fully accept she is a very sick, very broken person who I cannot fix.
In addition to the hellish string of events of the past two years, she has started something new. Lately she has begun to threaten me. She even called the police on me in an attempt to get me in trouble. Tonight she phoned with more veiled threats against me. Needless to say, all my attempts to get help for her have failed miserably. In the country where I live, people who are seriously mentally ill have so many rights that they have to either kill themselves or someone else before they can be forced into medical treatment against their will.
Tonight I decided that I will have to use the same detachment and boundaries with her mental illness that in the past I used with her drinking.
How much can a mother detach before there is no relationship left?