You were a child then. A child is totally dependent on its parent. You thought your world would fall apart, if mother stayed mad at you. It more or less could have. A child has little power.

Now you are not a child. Asserting yourself is not only your right; it is your responsibility. You will always be sensitive to people's feelings. That can be an asset, used the right way. Often our biggest strength and our biggest weakness come intertwined with each other. We have to find how to separate them. That is hard to do. Live is meant to be hard.

I'll say it again: Life is meant to be hard. You could get a wheelchair and use it to get from room to room in your house. It might seem to give your legs a rest and feel good on a day when you have sore legs. But, eventually, you would lose all the muscle strength in your legs by doing that. And - in the end - pushing yourself around in a wheelchair is not easier than using your legs. The ways we try to escape the normal work of life actually make our lives hard. So life is going to be hard no matter what you do. But there is healthy hard and unhealthy hard.

Without some resistance to push against, we end up with no muscle. There is a man who is going into space for one year where he will have no gravity to make it hard to move around. That will feel kind of relaxing to him. When this astronaut returns to earth, strong men will be standing near the door of his space capsule ready to catch him when he comes through the door. When he does, he will have a hard time standing up . . . maybe not even be able to. He will be weak from not having to work against gravity for a whole year. You see, we need life to be hard, in order to have strength, or we turn to jelly.

Start small, and be your own person on some little small issue - like getting the mosaic kit. You'll gain mental muscle just from making that move and sticking with it. Then you add something else . . . not too big, just something. That's how you gain back the mental muscle that you have lost by being passive.

Some people don't bother saving a few dollars every week because it seems too little to matter. Then, one day, they look back and realize how much of a nest egg they could have had by just saving that little bit every week. Don't be discouraged that you cannot make big dramatic changes. Make little ones. They add up.

Or don't. It's up to you. Of course there are reasons for why you are the way you are. I knew that as soon as I read your first post here. There are reasons why your husband is the way he is. Instead of trying to decide if he meets the criteria for a certain label - like narcissism, take an interest in the story of his life. Let yourself wonder about the dynamics behind how he got that way. Wisdom comes from understanding people. Maybe he had too much responsibility when he was a child and had to make sure everything was okay. Maybe one of his parents role modeled this kind of controlling behavior. Maybe one of his parents was very controlling of him, so he rebelled. There is a story behind his personality (and, yes, it is a disordered personality,) but that is something that you are in a better position to explore than most doctors and therapists . . . because you know him.