We have been getting a lot of very heavy asks lately: people asking about cycles of abuse, death, trauma, etc. in their system and how to handle these situations. This is my general answer.
Is your metaphorical house on fire? Are you punching each other in the face and then insulting each other for making your fists hurt? Are you avoiding weeding the garden even as weeds strangle your flowers? Are you sitting in a pot of boiling water complaining about the temperature but never getting out of the pot?
Sit down. Ask where the problem comes from. Describe the effects that the problem has on each of you, learn to see how it strings between more than one of you: if I move this way, then you move that way. Ask what you wish were different. Ask what stops you from just making it different and see what you can do about those barriers. Weigh your risks.
Decide what to do about the problem. Follow through. Follow through.
Force is almost certainly not the way forwards, but empty promises will not get you much further. Choose solutions that you can follow through on. Choose solutions that let you help each other follow through, solutions that everyone wants to follow through on. Choose solutions that respect any factors limiting each of you. The cycles that you are trapped in belong to all of you, but each person needs to choose to step out of the cycle for themselves. Make the choice easier. Be kind.
Repeatedly offer your hand to the system member who swears that they will never accept your help, listen to the voices screaming or crying or yelling or fighting to be heard in any way that matters, meet your own eyes in the mirror, look into the hole that you have been skirting around, offer vulnerability to your monsters, acknowledge that there are things out of your control, accept that your system's needs are as important as your own. Ask what they need.
Process your own grief or rage or pain and come out the other side. Sit with the problem and notice it until something shifts. Feel the forbidden feelings, do forbidden things, see the chains that you bound yourselves with and learn to pick their locks. Decide that the status quo is not working and decide to work together to find something better than the cycles you have all been stuck in.
See the things that hurt you for what they are, and then decide together to do something differently. Stepping out of a cycle is not usually a passive affair.
Sometimes that means allowing more pain. You may have to make radical life changes, inside or out. You may have to confront your own weaknesses and flaws, confront that you are capable of causing pain to others, confront that you are the things that you refuse to accept in others. You may have to admit that your current situation is unsustainable and fight to change or leave it. You may have to admit that you are struggling in ways that you did not think you could struggle. You may have to accept that someone else is not ready to change. These are not easy things to do. They are still worth doing.
You have to choose to save yourselves. You have to choose to save each other. Change something. The only thing you cannot survive is death.
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