Dear Crystal:

You wrote in the last line that you can change the way you react to your parents. This has not been my experience. However I tried I was not able to do that. When around my mother I automatically got angry, intensely so, enraged. And I couldn’t help it. I was angry in between seeing her.

After no longer being in contact with her and continuing therapy, healing, that I calmed down. It was slow.

If you have automatic reactions to your parents, reactions formed and established when you were a child… then you cannot easily, if at all, change those reactions. It is not a matter of a choice when emotions are established early on and over a long period of time.

I do hope you do what you wrote you would like to do and move out of your parents’ home.

anita