I'd like to add one one more descriptive word to those you have used, Justice, about your family: to ruthless and cruel, I would ask that you add ignorant.

Ignorance is not stupidity. It is lack of education and information. They seem not to have much awareness about mental illness, human relationships, and human communication. Like many people, they are so ignorant that they don't know that they don't no, and isolate themselves within that ignorance.

I think seeing other people's ignorance -- including my family's and my own -- has several benefits for me.

First, it lifts me from the role of victim. I can see their actions not as something they are doing to me, but just as something they are doing.

Second, it allowed me to develop strategies with my T for educating my mother. I could see what was happening as a process between my ignorance about how to communicate and other people's ignorance.

Third, in this process, I helped myself by learning a little bit about how to be more effective about communication.

In sum, by depersonalizing other behaviors as due to ignorance, rather than cruelty towards me, I was better able to get un-stuck.