I have this friend or a former friend but she’s also my sister-in-law. In fact, I met my husband through her as she’s married to his brother. She was my best friend for a good 8 years but over the past 6ish years things have been unraveling for us.

I’ve always been someone who likes to put things out in the open but she isn’t as much so I’ve never felt comfortable being as honest with her as I am with most people. I think we both started pushing each other away a few years ago and my husband separately had a fallout with his brother, a really bad one. So now everyone is mad at us for not going to their family events but we just don’t feel comfortable.

My SIL and I have been reaching out via email, always dangerous, to try to heal things but I feel like we’re just going in circles. I’m not willing to take all the blame and she’s not willing to accept any for herself, or at least that’s how it feels to me.

I can’t keep doing it, it’s causing me a lot of anxiety and stress. I think we, all 4 of us, should get together face-to-face to just put it all on the table and find a way to move past it but last I asked they weren’t interested, they feel that meeting together is dredging up the past but quite honestly the email I’ve been having back and forth with SIL is drudging up the past in a very toxic way.

I want to repair this but I get the feeling they just want to pretend it didn’t happen. They have hurt us so badly and sweeping it under the rug for me is just allowing it to all happen again. My husband wants an apology and I’m not sure it will ever come, it hasn’t in the past year or 2.

Part of me just wants to walk away again because it causes me so much anxiety trying to work this out with her via email and honestly I’m kind of afraid of her, she has quite a nasty temper.

I am not sure how to deal with this and maybe in the end, what I’m doing is just prolonging the inevitable but curious for thoughts.