Can one seemingly innocent or insignificant thought and/or prayer as a child change your whole take on life?

When I was about 15-16, I had a thought once, that if I imagined the worst possible outcome of any of my decisions, then the reality would be that if I went ahead with that particular decision, odds were the final outcome would never be as bad as I could imagine. Looking back I feel like I set myself up for a lifetime of total misery and self-destructive behaviours. Or was that thinking pattern already there because of illness, and would have just eventually manifested itself anyway?

What about a prayer? At 10 or 11, I asked God to spare my brothers and sisters pain and allow them a happy life (I think the constant family turmoil was weighing too heavily on me), and in exchange I would accept their emotional burdens upon myself.

What beautiful innocence, I often think to myself (at least about the prayer). But, I often think too, just how much of an impact these thoughts/prayers may have had on my psyche. Is it possible for a thought to have such a powerful affect like a traumatic event would? Or am I, again, just grasping at straws for another excuse for my illness/behaviours?

It is an eerie thought for me, though, as I have been in self-sabotage mode since. I wonder if my subconscious got hold of those thoughts and set about having them realized. On the other hand, maybe they weren't so subconscious, as I never forgot these two things (they mostly arose in my consciousness when I suffered bouts of deep depression and curiously, only after I found out I suffered deep depressive episodes - after sobering up at 29/30). Maybe I'm just looking for reasons to explain all this confusion, pain and suffering I bring on myself.

Yeah, I know, I'm probably just feeling sorry for myself again. I'm certainly not thinking very well, either. Just look at how back and forth this rant was?

Sometimes I just wonder, though...