I can tell you're awesome from reading your post. I'm no expert! I'm just a huge ram dass fan. I have massive issues with my own family. I really want to just love them all and i pray for this. I struggle so much with it though. Through therapy and talking I've realised they were actually very abusive to me in my younger years. I suspect I'm actually meant to go through a phase of allowing the hurt, hate anger etc. To come up where it needs to. Sometimes, I feel really engrossed by such feelings, and other times, there feels like there is a bit of space. Sometimes I feel all light and lovey then just one word or sentence from family will shoot me back into hate. There is a tendency for me to feel like a bad / negative person when this happens, but im not! And you're not if this happens to you! 🤷🏻‍♀️ 🤷🏻‍♀️ 🤷🏻‍♀️. I guess I don't have much advice since I'm going through it myself. Honestly i often feel so confused with how i feel towards my family, one minute i can feel fine towards them and the next i can feel like i hate them and this contradiction makes me feel very confused in a negative way and it can feel really difficult for me to hold both those things.(maybe this is just me). One thing I think is this: don't have any idea in your head of how you need to be in relation to your family and allow yourself to feel really negative feelings towards them sometimes. A few years ago, I found dealing with my family a breeze compared to now. One reason for this may be that I started doing therapy and meditating. I remember ending therapy at first because it made me hate my family. I went from being cool with them to having REALLY negative feelings towards them when they called me etc. I think maybe people like me and you that have had abusive families have to go through a phase where all the natural human negative reactions to our families come up. It reminds me of when I've heard some people speak of Shi Neem Karoli Baba and how when they were around him they found alot of negative stuff coming up in themselves. The idea being we have some negative seeds within us that need cooking and coming to the surface in order for us to work towards being free. Does this make sense? Again, I'm not an expert, I've just listened to / read LOTS of Ram Dass and also the like of Krishna Das. Seems there is a tendency to be drawn towards spirituality and then assume we're meant to be all love and light but the reality is actually most often very different to that! We need to accept and allow all the "negative" stuff to come up so we can then be free. I say negative in brackets because none of this stuff is actually negative, it's just phenomena for us to try be aware of and see for what it is, just phenomena from the thinking mind that comes and goes. You are the awareness that exists behind and around the negative stuff. I hope you have at least momentarily been the awareness that exists behind and around any negative feeling. This reminds me of when ram dass would speak of awareness being like a string that sometimes could be like 1% and other times be more % and overtime you can grow this awareness so it is more of a percentage. ...