Peaches, I also think that untill we become automous, we are very much bound up in guilt. Althought you'd think our first desire is to be automous, theres also something very scary about it, especially for those of us with "abusive" backgrounds", we don,t individualise successfully like "normal" adults from "normal" childhoods do and we have a very young unworked through fear that we will destroy the hand that feeds us, once we become automous and adult in our minds, then I think it becomes a lot clearer, whats theirs and whats ours, But of course the "hurt" child is afraid to "blame, criticise, talk?"..