What year will you decide to stop blaming mom and dad?

Well, I thought I had stopped blaming mom and dad in my mid-twenties. I did begin withholding comments like "I can thank my parents for teaching me that."

Only I haven't really quit. My counselor heard enough about how crappy my mom was to me to say, "She Gaslighted you." It was pretty helpful to realize that my mom, who seems to have been a regular bitch that only very strong people could stomach, belittled me constantly, and denied me the right to my own thoughts as well. She called me a liar all the time, even though it was my brother who did the lying. I could say "I like chocolate ice cream" and she'd come back with, "No you don't, you like strawberry"--often just a week after the opposite had occurred. I can't even trust my own perceptions any more, and I'm in my fifties. "That woman was putting me down, calling my ambitions 'your little hopes and dreams'," I'd say. And she'd come back immediately with, "That's ridiculous, she was being your friend."

My dad was almost worse. An opposite-sex parent who had no value for me, didn't much like me, and rejected me all around. The most time he ever spent with me was to scream at me for getting between him and the TV. His big dream for me was to see me in a white bathing suit and a golden brown tan, standing on the high dive, with all the fellows ogling me. He said so, about twice a year.

Do these things still bother me? Can they ever stop bothering me?

Do I let them limit me? Well, I realized that I'm terrified to tell people "no". Does that limit me? Of course it does. I'm afraid that if I'm honest with them, they will turn around and walk off and I will have no friends. So I'm a people-pleaser who can't please anyone. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHEN I'M DOING IT. Does this affect me? I try not to let it. I try and I try.

I'm still trying, but I'm so sorry, I still don't have the skillz to stop people who are walking all over me. Last week I was in the grocery store, I wanted to buy a giant Washington Delicious Apple, and the other person took the apple out of the cart and put a bag of small red apples in the cart. I was even paying for them. I should have undone what she did, but I didn't have the courage.