Thankyou for all your replies.I have read them all.

I feel like for me, it is not so much the childhood stuff. It is more what my parents did after the age of 18 which is so unreal because I was told I was mentally ill and that I needed medication and all the medications did was bring on constant manic episodes, but I was always told I needed more. i wasnt allowed to pick stuff up the floor or have anyone in the house,(not that I knew anyone in the end) or empty a bin.It was a 'captivity' kind of situation.I now realise it was out of my mother's envy of my potential success as well as a punishment, and to stop me talking as I had said as a teenager I would tell people of the abuse that had happened there, so I had to be physically isolated to prevent me talking. It was madness. It sounds terrible but I would go through all the childhood abuse again rather than get stuck there for 8 years after I turned 18 because that seems like a movie.

I haven't examined my past with my therapist. I have told her facts, like the broad outline. I have a feeling she thinks that examining it could push me over the edge. I had a pretty strong physical reaction to sexual abuse memories recently. I have spent my whole life naturally using dissociative states to be numb. Therefore, it is quite possible that I am overestimating my capability to safely deal with processing details of what happened and the grief and loss of it all. I still don't think I really FEEL it much at all, and I guess there is a legitimate concern that if I really feel the enormity of it, I could find myself in a very dangerous position. After all, I did wretch actually feeling sexual abuse memories for the first time, so I could see that if I were to feel all of the stuff that happened there after I turned 18, (currently I don't really feel any of it,) I may surprise myself with the emotions that surface and the strength of these emotions. Even though I can't feel it right now, I can see that my past is very bad, and I think worse than what I currently know. I may be doing a mixture of underestimating what's happened because I can't really feel it/remember it all and overestimating my emotional capability at dealing with it.

Maybe my therapist thinks I'm doing that too, and she doesnt want to put me in danger which is understandable.However, I just wish she would give me some structure so I could feel like there was some rhyme and reason to it all, and so I could feel more trusting and safe in the therapy. I'm ok with learning skills first if that's what is safest, but there's no sense of goals or time planning, so I don't know how long I am going to spend learning these skills before moving onto the next phase of treatment. She doesn't seem to be aiming for a certain time, but it is costing me a lot of money and it has already dragged on way longer than we had both planned and there are never any progress checks.

She is a dbt/cbt therapist so that is very present/skills focused but not even the skills seem to be very structured. we go all over the place with the skills we are studying an don't stay focused on one skill at a time. One good thing I can say is that she is a very pleasant person though. I do feel she cares about me, but I am not trusting that there is a clear structured process

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