So I'll keep these as short and to the point as I can.  One of my siblings has heavily mentally ill.  She suffers from Bi-polar disorder and also Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  Our family life was hell, for lack of better word, while growing up and, for me, there is a lot of bad karma that comes from that.  

My question/predicament is twofold.  The dhamma has made me much more confrontational.  I meet challenges with much more vigor than I used to.  So this has made me less afraid of my sibling's raging psychotic episodes.  While I do not intend to trigger this person I do not seeing avoiding them as a viable option as their intense anger is bound to hurt someone, if not the person in their immediate space.  

Anyone who has experience with psychotic rage due to heavy mental ilness:  What have you found is the best approach?  My gut tells me that I used to run away, and now I may be too confrontational and now its time to start fine tuning towards the middle way.

Now to the second fold.  I am getting married next summer and my parents (who have a broken relationship with this sibling) want to invite my entire family and their close friends and exclude my mentally ill sibling.  They wish to exclude this person because family functions become problematic and tend to trigger episodes.  I understand that they wish to have everything run smoothly.

I have sat with this notion and my heart cannot allow it.  After all the dhamma is about reality as it is, not as we want it to be right?  This person is family.  I cannot help but see this as an attempt to ignore reality and pretend like this person is not apart of our family, this is running away from the truth of a potential difficult situation.  I may be wrong but I also see this as an inability to recognize our own faults as a family to properly learn to deal with this sibling with grace, humilty and compassion.  If she is destined to spin out of control at my wedding than that is just how it is, and it shows us that we have not yet learned how to deal with this person yet.  To exclude them is morally weak and just plain wrong.  This is what my heart tells me.

This is really complicated and hard to write about so I hope this makes sense.  I'm not looking for a simple yes or no, more like some advice from anyone who may have been in a similar situation?  

This world is truly crazy!  After reading this section of the forum it makes me think about how this teaching fits into our actions in our daily lives and if the teaching can truly give peace regardless of circumstance.

Wishing you all well,
-C

Hello Conner,

you have the best intentions towards the well being of your sister and family, and that is really great. But your situation seems to be very complicated, are you seeing a psychologist for advice? In my experience a trusted professional's opinion can be very useful in this kind of situations.

For example, about this passage:
It is very hard to give advice without knowing the specifics of your situation, but what you write seems to be a little irrational to me. You start from a moral imperative and try to deduce how you must act, based on absolute rules. I see how that can be tempting, because if you act based on absolute moral rules you have done what you must, and if anything goes wrong, well, then it won't be your fault. However, this inflexible approach often does not work in practice, and can lead to unintended consequences. In general, it is better to start from goals instead, and to predict which possible course of action is most likely to further our goals.

So inviting your sister to your wedding sounds like the right thing to do on general grounds, yes, absolutely. But it might not be the best course of action in practice, given the specifics of her illness, the relationship between her and your parents, how the other guests are likely to deal with a psychiatric emergency, and so on. The generally moral thing to do might not be the best for anyone's sake, including your sister's. There may be workarounds you have not considered. For example, off the top of my head, multiple ceremonies. Your sister might be better able to deal with a smaller, more private ceremony than with a big party, and closer friends and family may be more able to deal with her in such a context. Also, you may need time to convince your parents to have your sister at the wedding and / or to help them fix their relationship in a way that this becomes possible in practice, not just desirable. The time you have may be enough, or not, based on a lot of things that are hard to gauge by forum.

So, again, I think a professional can give better advice on all of this. The dhamma is very cool and it gives great guidelines in general, but how to apply it in practice is another matter entirely. You might have come to the wrong place for advice after all.

With lots of metta,

neko

Well that best mind set at any times, IMO, and especially when all heck breaks loose is to be calm and not sucked in.   Another person can rage and that is that person's choice, but as long as no one's physical safety is threatened, then you can just watch.  This may sound cruel, but its like dog training, sometimes when training a difficult dog, that dog may freak out, throw a tantrum or whatever in some situations, the trainer just has to keep cool and have patience, the trainer may be able to help influence the situation but sometimes the trainer will also just need to wait it out a bit.  Sometimes a dog just needs to go through something that hard way and then get to the other side.  The last thing a dog trainer wants to do is get sucked into the drama by getting angry, frustrated, confrontational, intimidated, or any other emotions.  A bit of compassion can help but not to the extent that it weakens you.  You don't want to get manipulated by the situation, neither intimidated nor angry.  You want to be the calm observer that is calmly waiting and watching for opportunities to help but also understanding that you can't control everything either and you may not be able to intervene or help in all situations.  The more you are calm and serene yourself, the more that influences what happens around you even in ways that are not obvious, so just doing that can effect the situation, the freaking out person may calm down more or may even at first try to freak out more to try to get a rise out of you, but over time the calmness will still tend to influence towards more calmness.  Of course this is not always easy in practice, to stay calm, to not be angry or upset or frustrated or personally hurt by what another is doing, to be able to accept them as they are.  But it works if you can do it.  

For the wedding, I would say it is your and your fiancee's wedding first, you'd want to discuss with her carefully and you two decide what is most important to you both.  IMO, other family members can run their own wedding but you run yours.  And look at scenarios.  What if person in question comes and does indeed have a freak out?  Can you take a mindset where you accept it as just another one of those things like rain or a power outage? Are there some ground rules you can set for other members of family to make it easier for this person like maybe no nagging allowed, etc?  Can you think of game plans to handle potential freakouts more easily?  If you have a game plan and a good mindset, then a potential freakout won't have to be a big deal if it happens and then if it doesn't happen, that's fine too.  Whereas if there is a strong mindset that a freakout would 'ruin the wedding' then that is a different way of looking at it and you could spend the whole wedding fearing the risk of it or regretting it if it did.  There are not 'right' answers to things like this, instead it's a matter of how you decide to set your priorities.  To invite a person with mental instabilities is to invite the whole person, both the stable and unstable aspects, it's not realistic to hope you can invite only the aspects you like better.  ;-P 
-Eva 

This is all great advice.  I found myself challenged and also agreeable which is good.  I'll have to sit with this and see what comes up as the best option.

I welcome more on this thread if anyone has anything to add!