Your whole life for 19 years was based on trying to fix your mom's life or at least not aggravate it. And although you moved away you have only countered a lifetime habit with a few months of worth of therapy.

That is not enough . You are going to have to go against everything you have learned , namely that your only worth is to be needed,that your needs are unimportant and that if you just try and please others you will be happy. Realize that none of that has ever worked , nor will it in the future.

Now you must force yourself to downplay the importance of the feelings of others until you can stand up for your own. And you must be able to identify them - instead of shrugging them off and hoping they disappear.You will find feelings are going to be the breadcrumbs leading you out of this forest.

Lets say you dedicate the next ten years of your life to eradicating those old habits, vigourously with a therapist, codepency groups and assertiveness training. And you must work on it every day because backsliding is so easy and will surrender you to the alcoholic mother you still carry inside your head.

You are young and probably hope this will just happen overnite but it won't.But every day as you reeducate yourself and act upon the new information you learn it will get easier.

You can't be passive and hope it happens to you- you will get what you settle for. You are going to have to wrest away the power but just imagine when you have it , you will be free to act from your own center, not react like a satellite from a dead planet.It is what life is really about.

I think a file may be more useful than a steak knife.

Although you can guarantee Rove will be the willing Bitch of the baddest guy there.

after running around the mess hall yelling Kill,Kill,Kill and getting juiced on video games in which they decapitate people with the touch of a finger. But they were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others so they could become "heroes",which evidently only takes dressing up in the right uniform to be designated as such by the MSM.

If these guys have PTSD and deserve a lifetime of disability benefits,therapy and medicine,the whole country of Iraq deserves to be treated with meds and platoons of psychiatrists for the next two generations.

After all, they were just bystanders caught up in the macho posturing of an administration with deepseated psych problems and an unlimited blank check presented them by the majority of the American people to make us feel power, instead of grief and regret.

I am uncomfortable with Cary's equating facist politics and being a mistreated child. People who willfully use their power to deny other people their rights to justice, freedom and economic participation and at times,their very lives, are not sick,not hurting themselves, but elites enriching themselves. They can change their behavior the minute they are willing to drop their greed and start to realize that all human beings suffer and hope, not just themselves.

On the other hand while alcoholics do great damage to others they are people who are themselves in great pain and extremely helpless against their own self destruction.This is why its called a disease.

We don't need to give the the MSM and the right wing excuses to denigrate those of us who oppose government secrecy and violence , not only for ourselves but for future generations. We don't need to give them any basis to equate our resistence to temper tantrums or the actions of immaturity.

We need to wake them up to the power of millions of thinking adults who demand that they be included in decision making and taken seriously.

At the same time we must confront the things within which reduce our ability to realize and use our own power to act in the world on our own behalf .

they will also be liable for the murders, suicides, wife battering, rape and child abuse that result from this trauma upon the civilian population .

And if they admit to the incidence in our soldiers who are trained and prepared for war , what will be their liability for the people of Iraq, who were civilians?

easier just to pretend PTSD is just a case of jitters, that will fade away with enough tranquilizers.