I think it is hard, sometimes, to separate out abuse from what one has grown accustomed to and which has been important in the sense that it takes up a great deal of one's consciousness. Trying to figure out whether you felt abused or whether because this was your life for so long, it is just a strong impression and how it relates to your depression; I can readily understand your 50:50 problem, Gwydion!

I know I had and still have a great deal of trouble teasing out my stepmother's abuse in some areas; I tend to try to go one way or the other when in fact it is probably "whole cloth" and not so easy to pull apart individual strands.

Have you ever tried jumping ahead and pretending to look back on your life? What do you want for this piece of your life? No therapy can remove or alter it. How would you like to feel about it, if you could imagine other ways of "being"?

My stepmother died in 2001. My therapist rightly predicted that things would get easier for me after her death. However, trying to think about my stepmother as a whole is still fraught with complications for me. When she died I went around singing "Ding dong the witch is dead" from the Wizard of Oz but now that makes me feel guilty when I slip and think in that fashion, almost a similar guilt to when I put myself down.

I think your experiences are part of you and help make up who "You" are. I guess, were your problem mine, I might work a bit from the "other" direction; accept de facto that I am all of-a-piece and look to see what I could see of my shaping that is "good" from this period of time. In other words, I'd accept in a way that didn't try to pull apart or leave be and move on but merely to understand?