Thanks Johnny. And that was lovely how you responded to the young pt. You are right, more people need to be showing loving kindness towards others. Me included I am sure!

These stood out for me, I feel a need to respond, to explain myself somehow.

Yes, **** happened to me, pretty horrid ****.(I'm sorry, I swear a little when super stressed. Swearing is not such a big deal here in NZ as I understand it may be in the states, so excuse me if it offends anyone. I don't intend to). At the moment it did, each and every moment...... I let it happen. I guess I learnt very young to not fight back, not speak up...so I blame myself for that, but can see how maybe I could try to come to terms with it not fully being my fault.....but I am not there yet.

You mention coping in times of stress. I am actually pretty good at that when it involves situations not impacting me emotionally I guess. In my last role, just last year, I had a client arrive at the office with what appeared to be stab wounds and carrying what appeared to be a rifle. This client locked themselves in our bathroom. I managed to talk them into opening the door and convinced them to not take the various narcotics they had on them, at the same time trying to ascertain if it was in fact a firearm, and convince the client to allow me to call an ambulance. The client became overwhelmed and I had to co-ordinate my colleagues to call the police, liased with the armed offenders who came to minimise the harm to my client and to anyone else. It all ended fairly well. No one got hurt, the client did have a rifle with them and had been shot, not stabbed. I lost some of the trust my client had put in me, because I called the police, but that came back. I work well under pressure in these sorts of situations.

When I talk about the way I behaved after, I am not meaning just then. Or in the day or 2 after. I am talking about behaviours that developed that endured for periods of time....that I see as intensely shameful. These patterns have repeated at times of huge stress, and I can not stand myself for them. I can't even bring myself to write about them here, I sat here just now and tried to type the words of just one....but I can not. I wrote them and gave them to my T though. I hope, in time, to come to understand why I did these things, and find my way to forgiving myself and being able to go forward and be less affected by them.

Johnny, your intense fear of people finding out that you had been in a psych hospital, I think may be similar to how I feel. I have told one of these things to a couple of people in my past and have ended up being intensely humiliated and hurt each time. I hope to get past this.

ps. what does fubar mean?