Oh yes, there must not be deviation! 🙂

I guess I am missing the point, but I would mostly be thinking that I am crazy for thinking I might watch a movie with a lying liar who lies to me and then gets het up about it. That's just not who I'd put any socialising energy into. I'd just...idk...wonder why I thought we'd watch the movie. The lying - meh. People do it, mostly when they can't, for whatever reason, cope with their inner judgements about themselves - so they project it outward and make you the judgey one, and then lie to protect themselves from 'your' judgement.

Oh, and with my dad, who is impossible to buy for, I just buy him the same three things for father's day, birthday and Christmas - good marmalade, chocolate ginger, and a book.

Kids ask me if there is anything I want. Sometimes there is and they get me that thing - I wanted wireless earbuds this year and they got them for me. Sometimes there isn't, or they decide to get something else, and that's fine. I generally ask them if there is anything they want and hope that there is, because I can count the number of times I've succeeded at independent gift giving on the fingers of one hand. Generally, I loathe and hate 'expected' gift giving, and prefer to buy, make and give gifts randomly, as the spirit moves me.

I don't know what you mean by 'cute'.

Thanks for pointing that out Jean.

You could decrim personal recreational use but not recreational sales.

How were you able to function at work? I am always trying to catch up somewhere along the line on sleep, because when I work with a sleep debt, it's brutal.

Decrim of drugs won't lead to rapists and abusers being off the streets. I mean, I wish it were so. Drugs/alcohol are implicated in a lot of abuse. I'd be happy to ban cigarettes and tightly regulate alcohol. I don't really understand the argument, well, we already allow 90 units of harm, let's allow another 5 units, because it's all harm, right? What's a little more? Idk. I am not in the headspace to hear about how cannabis is groovy and harmless. I'm really upset about my young friend. The cannabis habit (legally though dodgeily obtained) came before her psychosis, that's for sure.

This. Regulate the heck out of the industry. 25+ (I'd be good with 25+ for a lot of things, including alcohol and active military service)

True on a population level currently, but the damage to a susceptible individual is immense. It's no small thing to develop a psychosis as a young person, and require hospitalization for that, and then deal with the mental illness that has been triggered as an ongoing condition. Most recent young friend was definitely treated for withdrawal symptoms in the early part of her hospitalization. And she will be discharged to a substance abuse program. That's not miniscule.

I thought this, and I recognize that alcohol does immense harm, but I'm now no longer sure cannabis does less damage, especially when used by young people at modern strengths. Not 'your 60's weed', in other words. It is illogical to criminalize one and not the other. I would want to know what the legal cannabis trade is like before voting - it's not only effects on users, but also what the industry itself is like - who is doing the growing, harvesting, processing? What are the labor conditions?

Forgot to say, not legal here for recreation, but there's been an explosion in medical use, and somehow people who do not have serious illnesses are accessing it through medical providers.

Against, but I'm not sure I have a good argument. It's a knee jerk reaction to the second adult child of friends being hospitalized with a cannabis-induced psychosis. Will be interested to read the arguments. I don't believe in criminalizing users but I don't like normalizing use in young people either.

She's already there. These interactions with her are so intense because they just trigger a set of thoughts and emotions that are already laid down inside of you. She is not going to change. But you can. It's hard, oh so hard, but it is possible to at least moderate this inner mom. I think slache mentioned distance - time or emotional distance. You might need literal or emotional distance from mom in order to address these inner dynamics.

And for anyone who is in the situation of not being able to prepare financially, the luxury is your current state of cognition. Prepare while your cognition is still functioning for one of the few alternatives. Carefully think through the age/stage of any age-related or other decline when you will choose to action these alternatives. It will likely be sooner than you might otherwise wish, but the danger is in waiting longer than you should. Plan while you have capacity. Resource yourself while you have capacity. Run mental rehearsal while you can to avoid procrastination when the time comes to act. We all have this luxury right now, regardless of our material resources.

Not Canada, but similar - universal health care etc. I contributed to a campaign in my state for assisted dying, and was beyond relieved it is now legal. There are so many things we need to be extremely careful of in having these laws, and one of these things is the intersection of these laws, the right to assisted dying, with existing ageism, ableism and sexism. I'm not going to lie - even being strongly in favour of legal a.d, I am worried about the direction. Yes, tangential. I'd love to discuss in another thread.

Some will, some won't, and its the weekend, and so it might not be possible to run this by them if the situation involves this weekend. ~ OP, I feel worried about your situation, mostly due to something you mentioned quite some time ago. Within the limits of the legal situation, do what you can to mitigate the risk/anxiety you are perceiving this weekend.

Call and ask for an earlier appointment. If the stakes are high enough to ask us here, they are high enough to ask your therapist.

I don't know what aged care is like where you are, but here, there are certainly real risks to the elderly in aged care, and for women, that includes the risk of sexual assault and rape by male patients and staff. Chemical restraint is another risk, as is emotional and physical abuse by other patients and caretakers. These risks have worsened here since Covid; the sector is underpaid and understaffed and quality of care is being compromised every day. These are unpleasant things to talk about, but the risks of being a vulnerable older women in a group setting are not imaginary. I plan to end my life rather than enter aged care, so I can see where she is coming from. I will not, however, burden my children with this knowledge, nor do I hold any expectations that they will provide my care in lieu of aged care. Generally speaking, it is possible to acknowledge the fear - it is frightening to get old and be faced with entering aged care - without compromising on your boundaries - you cannot fix the fear, nor the possibility she will end up experiencing what she fears. I have always found this board very harsh re attitudes to older people, and I understand it in some ways, but not in others, and I think it helps no-one to be in denial about what can happen in any institutional setting to vulnerable people (and the aged are a vulnerable population). My advice, such as it is, is that your role here is really to deal with your ambivalence about your mother - your conflicted feelings - 'I can't care for mom, but I can't cope with the guilt of not caring for mom'. Therapy is good for this sort of thing. It's really good for this sort of thing!

I will say that in highly conscientious people with anxiety disorders or trauma histories, the dangers around under-reacting are often minimized, not only by ourselves, but by others around us. We can be very keen to be seen as not over-reacting, to show we are not being driven by our anxieties, to the point that we may sometimes deny that a subset of our anxieties live in the read world, and require attention/action. I will emphasize again, like a broken record but I think it's important, that help on a forum can be thought provoking, or exploratory, or reassuring, or confirmatory - and all these things feel good and reduce anxiety in the short term - but these are big problems with potentially very serious outcomes, and you need confidential offline support to help you do things like assess for risk.

Seek an appointment with your therapist and run this past them.

I've had cause to imagine the worst, and I actually did come up with an idea of how I would survive in the event. It was helpful. In your situation, it's the kind of thing I would run past a trusted therapist or other trusted person. There are ways of assessing risk. I'd say in your situation, I'd err on the side of trusting your instincts, but if that has the potential for legal trouble, get advice first. Access to weapons and prior threats or violence are a reason to over-react and not under-react.

There are Quaker retreats like this, but not sure which state. There is one several hours from me and I am longing to attend.

Oh lordy, this is..not ok to me, this direction.