triggers, and why I need to face them

I am determined to set my thinking straight by logic and by thinking myself out of this pit this time, rather than just by medication. I know that for biological reasons, I will probably be on medication for the rest of my life. I would love to stop taking it, but I don't see that happening. But I would like to be able to take the lowest dose possible without these breakthrough episodes. I need to teach myself how to snap out of it.

In the past, I've had to avoid environmental triggers. I told my mother not to mention any names from Roswell, or not to talk about my father in front of me. The littlest things could set me off:
-TV shows or movies with teenagers or young adults in college doing normal stuff - parties, dances, road trips
-The Christmas/New Year season: even seeing Christmas decorations could be painful. I think it has to do with feeling ashamed of not celebrating Christmas when we were growing up, and also memories of being stuck at home with my father, not getting out, not having anything to do, and just sitting in my bedroom trying to avoid him, waiting for him to burst in and start verbally harrassing me. I think of everybody else going out and partying and doing something fun on New Year's Eve, and me not being allowed to, even in college. This just makes me so ashamed.
-Driving through small, run-down towns. This could start those dreaded feelings of the incipient depression, and make me sad and hopeless.

These triggers are pretty commonplace and unavoidable, so that's another reason I need to get through this cognitively, rather than just relying on upping my SSRI dose if any of these innocuous things shoves me back down into The Abyss.

I think the one benefit of being averse to anything related to my father is my disgust with McDonald's. He loved that place, and I have these memories of him taking me there on Saturday and Sunday mornings when he wasn't talking to my mother, and badmouthing her and telling me that he would leave her and take me with him. He would make me go with him. I hated being alone with him, but if I didn't go with him, he'd get mad at me also, and it would be worse. He would badmouth her in the car on the way there and the whole time we were there, and I was always scared that he really would take me away and I'd have to go live with him by myself.

He saw it as taking me for a treat, but it was really mental brutalization. I think that most of the food at McDonald's is probably actually disgusting on its own, but the memories of going there with him are enough to turn me off to that place forever.