Dear Alison, thank you so much for your reply! So compassionate, so true, so healing I'm going to save your post into my phone so I can read it to remind myself whenever, wherever!

YES, time to become my own person!!! I don't even know who that is, but I'm going to find out.. And I do already know it's a good person, no matter what!

Also time to let other people see who I truly am and to trust that there are indeed people capable of loving me for ME

Time to learn how to take care of myself in ways I deserve to be taken care of!!!

It's not going to be easy and there's a lot of work to do, but I believe that where there's a will, there is a way!

Thank you for the link, ManOfConstantSorrow! This is exactly what my therapist has told me about - that suffering trauma in early relationships actually affects the neural pathways in a person's brain. She says that healthy relationships later on in life mend the damage and lead to the creation of new neural pathways.