Mowtown, you are slowly identifying your set unhealthy patterns. You were pretty much held captive in a situation where you developed ways of thriving in that dysfunction that were not healthy for "you". However, your entire family also had to develop patterns of adjusting to this very dysfunctional man too.

The good news is that you have been slowly able to articulate the pattern of dysfunction and what it meant to you emotionally. So, what you have been doing is identifying an injury that has lead to your troublesome thinking/emotional reactions that became an auto response in you that you were not totally consciously aware of.

Ok, you finally have a chart that explains your challenge much more accurately. In that list you have learned that it is known that you do not "imagine" things, but you have reactions to "real scenarios" instead. The reason you were so "grateful" and relieved is that you got to see it articulated in a way that is how you were "injured" and that yes, you are dealing with an injury instead of a mental illness where you are simply fabricating things that are "not real or fact".

If you have laid out the way you are challenged, you don't have to keep talking about it every week. You are now ready to learn "how" to develop better reactions and as splitimage has mentioned, that can come from DBT, or a therapy that helps you "learn" how to build skills to calm down with reminders instead of feeding into them. You don't want to learn how to feed into "injuries", instead you want to learn to recognize them and not have a big emotional reaction to them. It would be like seeing a math error and then knowing how to fix it so your work balances out right.

OE