I am having trouble coping with my mother's anger.

Don't worry about removing yourself from your parents and grandmother.
You have some choices to make.  Start disengaging from them and
stop allowing them access to your emotional buttons.  You don't have
to explain, they won't care.  They're unconsciously feeding off your
anxiety and wouldn't understand if you told them.
To a certain extent, there are lessons to be learned in having to
interact with those types, but after a point it becomes simply a
situation to get the hell out of.  You can't pick your parents, other
than use them as a way to get into this world and escape the 'crats.
But you can pick your friends, and hopefully use enough discernment
to hang with people who can be beneficial to your evolution.

It's a shame that your other forums that have caring and empathetic
people don't have the OP information or the concept of Tough Love
in their toolboxes. Oh well, maybe you can give them some pearls
of wisdom once you understand more.

Families are where the Matrix has the most opportunity to keep you
trapped.  With unconscious automatons hooking you into endless
loosh loss.

Good Luck!
TP

If there was anything I could relate to it would be this.  I was an only child and my mother was single most of the time so I got all of it.  And it is about feeding.  I was her own personal food machine as a child (and servant).  She would scream for hours until I cried.  And when I say hours I'm not just saying 20 minutes but it felt like hours.  The longest screaming rampage is clocked very close to 4 hours.  It was about the crying.  She needed to produce that feeling of hopelessness in me in order to feel powerful herself.

Of course, now I understand.  She was sexually abused as a child by her father.

I hated her for a long time, though.  She made my whole growing up time pure hell.  Every aspect including the spiritual.  But her overwhelming addiction to negative energy helped me a great deal.  For one, it pushed me to a different direction.  The other thing is what Tom Paine mentioned.  I learned how not to be food.

As skills go, that one ranks close to the top here on planet Earth (to me).  As far as petty tyrants go, parents are the worse.  You can't get away from them unless the abuse is so over the top the state agencies step in.  So in a way I'm thankful for getting the worse kind straight out the box.  It's rare now that I would not pick up someone trying to emotionally manipulate me.  That's not to say I don't still play along at times.  But seeing and stopping emotional hooks has become second nature to me.  Thanks to my mother.

Oh man.  I have a thousand things to say about this but (lucky for you folks ) I can’t seem to put any words together so I’ll leave my personal history out of this response.  Suffice it to say I hear you all loud and clear.  Great comments all around, everyone.

I think I’ll just pass these along from a link in the War in Heaven thread (the posts you may find relevant on that page are #245 from lala and #249 from Tom Paine about "Stockholm Syndrome"):

Basic Skills and Common and Not-So-Common Shields

I know you said you were a skilled empath but you might find those useful, anyway.  I used to do something akin to this naturally without even being aware of it.  I remember I always said “Shields Up!” half-jokingly to myself before coming in contact with my mother, if I was lucky enough to be forewarned, that is.  Then I’d wonder why I was so exhausted afterwards.  Sometimes it would take me days to prepare and days to recover.  Now I know why.

It sounds like you feel trapped right now, bodyandsoul.  Good news.  You won’t be forever.   You have the power to free yourself, especially if you are committed (forgive the expression) to doing so.  In the meantime, you could check these out at your local library to help get you through:

Verbal Self Defense and Feeling Good

Who knows.  Your step-dad might pick them up if he sees them laying around, too.  It could really cut down on the hostility in your environment.

ps

Don't mean to oversimplify things.  I'm sure my post reads overly simplistic.  But what I've learned is that the key is the ability for self-introspection (= self awareness....sentience....) and being able to understand another's viewpoint and taking responsibilty for one's actions.  (= empathy!)   

Self awareness and empathy.  Without those, interpersonal conflicts will grind to a halt and you'll be at an impasse, whether the person in question is real or not.  If they're real, but just very highly damaged, and sometimes feel bad and remorseful, but then keep behaving badly anyway, then the third option "shade of gray" is just to put polite distance between her and you and move on with your life, establishing yourself out there in the world, becoming your own person, which sounds like what you've already been trying to do.