How do I deal with a difficult family member?

When a family member is difficult, the teaching points you first to your own mind rather than to fixing the other person.

Why the hurt is actually happening in you

According to this teaching, your mind is constantly collecting information from everything you see, hear and experience about the people around you. Over time, a whole set of fixed "data" builds up in your head about who that family member is, how they should behave, what they owe you. You live believing this picture is simply how they are.

When that person then acts differently from what this built-up picture says they should, it feels like a clash or a wound. But the teaching is direct about where the pain actually originates: it is not that the other person damaged you from outside, it is that the fixed information constructed within your own mind got contradicted. The hurt belongs to you, not to them. Seeing this clearly, with the kind of insight that looks into one's own mind rather than at the other person, is said to bring real relief, even if the difficulty can't be resolved all at once.

Letting go, rather than forcing a solution

The teaching also offers "letting go" as a practical art here, not as ignoring the person or the problem. It means stepping back from the incident and its underlying cause enough to create some space around it, rather than insisting that you must solve it right now. That distance itself often lets you see the situation and the person more clearly than fighting the problem head-on does. Chasing an answer to every difficulty is described as a kind of delusion, since problems of this sort never really end; but letting go opens the door to better directions than your habitual reactions would find on their own.

Not holding onto the old event

A related point: when there's been an argument or hurt with someone, what tends to stay fixed in our memory is the event itself, how it played out at that one moment. But people change, including the difficult family member, in thought, attitude and behaviour, over time. If you keep relating to them only through that old frozen event, you are arguing with a memory, not with who they are now. The guidance is to deliberately let go of the event itself, while keeping only the lesson it taught you, the way you'd eat the fruit and discard the peel. That lesson is what helps you handle the relationship more maturely going forward, and avoid falling into the same friction again.

Not waging war with the ego

There's also a broader principle here about not wrestling or arguing with what is ego-driven, in yourself or implicitly in how you react to someone else's ego-driven behaviour. The teaching says there's no use fighting or trying to prove a point to ego, since it only wants itself; the better approach is to quietly keep doing your own inner work, your own practice, rather than getting drawn into the battle. Left alone and not fed by resistance, that ego-driven friction tends to exhaust itself.

In short, the teaching's approach to a difficult family member isn't about changing or managing them, but about recognising that the sting lives in the gap between your fixed inner picture of them and their actual behaviour, loosening your grip on the old event rather than the person, and letting go as a practised skill rather than as avoidance.