I guess the thing is that I've always seen myself as an adult, even when I was a little kid - I was always super mature and wanted to be treated like a grownup, so everyone treated me accordingly. And I did some really crazy (anxiety crazy) things as a kid, so I can see why my parents would not have known how to respond to that and would have felt the need to physically restrain me or whatever...and if those things felt abusive to me, well, I was the one who provoked them.

I remember one situation when I had just turned thirteen, while I was still living with my mother - I had a theater program that I did every year which was really serious. It wasn't just an after school activity; it was for kids who wanted to be actors, and I thought that might be what I wanted to do. The director was super strict and the performances were really serious - we spent a whole year preparing for them. And I'd been going there since I was eight and had a lot of really good friends there.

And the night of the performance when I was thirteen, I had been doing a normal kid misbehaving thing, talking back to my mother or something, and she told me I couldn't go to the performance that night as a punishment, and I literally just freaked out, because the anxiety was just so bad - everyone was going to hate me, the director would never let me go back there, all of my friends would feel like I'd hurt them by not doing my part, everyone would think I was irresponsible, I wouldn't be able to go to the summer program because the director wouldn't think I was reliable, and so on, and we were in the car when my mother told me this, and we were driving down the street that the studio was on, and we were going probably 60 or 70 km an hour, and I was literally trying to jump out of the car because I was so anxious about everyone hating me and being disappointed in me and losing all my friends.

So I could see why my mother got so angry at me in that situation (although strangely, she was less angry about me trying to jump out of a moving vehicle and more angry about the fact that I'd terrified my younger brother and my crying had made him cry too), and when we got home, I can really understand why she made me go to my room and when I refused because I was still trying to leave the house to get to my performance that night somehow, she held me down and restrained me for a really long time.

I mean, is that a traumatic memory for me? Sure, because I had a grownup sitting on my stomach and I was having a panic attack and I was having trouble breathing, and I kept telling her to get off me because I couldn't breathe, and she said she wouldn't get off me until I stopped crying and went to my room like she'd said...yes, that was scary for me, but I can sort of see where my mother's brain was at, and how angry she must have been at me, for good reason in that case.

It's just difficult to reconcile the fact that other people hurt me, but they didn't hurt me for no reason, and I also hurt them, which is why the "it's not your fault; you were a child; you were a victim" mantra that my T has at this point really feels undeserved. And when I tell her all of this stuff, she's probably going to change her tune, and I don't know if I'll be able to deal with that...