It took me some time to get up the courage to start telling my ex, "Have your attorney contact my attorney." Like you, I feared setting him off by seeming to escalate and revert to contact only through lawyers, but our "discussions" to supposedly settle issues always devolved into crazymaking.
I finally saw that if we were able to have a rational discussion about safety concerns due to his drinking behavior, we wouldn't be in that situation. Everything out of his mouth boiled down to him not being willing to quit drinking, period. The rest was just noise and nonsense. And you know, he never once had his attorney contact my attorney. Once it cost him actual money to harass me, he lost interest in doing it.
I couldn't control his reactions, but I didn't have to make it easy for him to take his stuff out on me.
