You know - being surrounded by mean-spirited people, I'm really beginning to UNDERSTAND why they're mean, and it's REALLY helped me to learn to just anticipate it, instead of walking into a hornet's nest unprotected. People are angry and rude for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with me, or sometimes have to do with me indirectly, but I can't help but set them off because I remind them of someone who's tortured them all their lives or something. And maybe I say things inadvertently that irk people, but I'm not sure HOW I could be more careful than I am, and I certainly never GO OUT OF MY WAY to just HURT people, or even retaliate if they've hurt me. I don't get it. And I do have all these wonderful self-help techniques, and I've actually got the courage to go onto this other website on which someone has really seemed to attack me and try to straighten it out, and there's ALL this ugly ugly abusive junk in my past, so it really does hook me, but I just have never really had a good healthy forum of which to ask this question: How do you guys deal with mean people? It's just such FOREIGN behavior to me.