All this talk about Hanners never being able to heal is rather depressing and not necessarily true. Having scars is not the same thing as remaining wounded/disabled by your past. And truthfully? We all have our quirks.
I tend to see her current journey of self awareness simply to be an attempt not to let the damage from her mother's emotional abuse limit her life. She is trying to learn to make life choices on her own terms.
I'm kind of in a similar place right now—though I'm limited to many more responsibilities (and a budget) so I'm trying lots of new things at home. I can certainly relate to her storyline, though, and find it refreshing and even a little joyful.
It's really, really important to understand something about Hannelore. It is OK that she'll never get "well". The major mental illnesses are chronic conditions which can be usually be controlled through medication and therapy but can not be cured. In that, they're like diabetes or bad eyesight: they're just
things which you live around like you live around any other controllable but incurable illness. Me, I take one pill every morning and two every evening and periodically go to talk to someone or attend group therapy, but if I'm good about doing all those things, I function nominally. In fact, in my case, if I didn't tell you, you'd never notice that I'm mentally ill.
That does *not* mean that I don't have remaining symptoms. I will always need to lay out my desk in a certain way. I'll always have to straighten pictures on the walls. I'll never be able to cross a bridge without being dizzy with terror. For my part, I regret these things, but they aren't so crippling that I need to fix them. Instead, I structure my life so they don't happen often, and have coping behaviors when they do. As you say, they've become quirks, not not the crippling disabilities they used to be.
Hannelore is in the same situation. Medication helps her a lot, and on-going therapy and normal social interaction help her, too. The results are dramatic: she's functional. She has developed coping mechanisms like self-coaching to avoid panic attacks. She's not 'better', just functional...but that's fine. Most of us settle for functional in one or another part of our lives, it's just that some of us have to reach farther to get there.
In a way, though, this is the most optimistic message you can get. OK, so you'll never be 'normal'. That doesn't mean you'll be crippled, just 'not normal'. If you focus on that, rather than on 'getting better', you may find that there's a huge burden lifted off your shoulders. After all, if you have to get well, you can't settle for half measures. If you only need to get better, any gain is a win.