I have felt this type of thing and am sorry to hear that you are feeling it and so intensely. First when I was doing intensive trauma work there were times when I feel what I was saying was too awful or bad to even continue; I myself felt monstrous at times. It is part of the effects of certain kinds of trauma in certain kinds of people. In other words, it is not just you. And you are not alone. And it is not your fault either.

But back to the way my therapist handled it. After one really intense session, he grabbed my hand, had this urgent, alert look, and said something like you've got to get as much of this poison out of you and into me. So he actually articulated that idea as a positive thing.

I felt weird about that and later said that something like what you are saying here, that I didn't want to poison him with my toxic stuff. He told me that he appreciated that I was showing compassion for him, but that I didn't need to worry about him. So he was saying that he could tolerate what was happening and that even though he said it was poison, he didn't say or think that I was contaminating him. It's like it was just poisonous to me, but once out of me, it became neutralized or something, if that makes sense.

So that's how I dealt with it. The other thing I did was try to understand how trauma works in my type of situation, which was being too young to understand. There is a famous article written by Ferenczi, who was the first to acknowledge the real effects of trauma in childhood. He describes all the different things that seem so hard to understand in really clear ways. Like that children blame themselves and often feel "bad" in some way or other, even to extreme degrees. He said children do this because it is easier to feel like what is happening is somehow due to them, because otherwise it doesn't make any sense and is too painful to bear. It is less unbearable to feel you are the cause and bad in some way. Then you can feel like you have some power when in fact in the situation you have no power.

Also he says that children are tender in ways that adults aren't. He considered an adult's taking advantage of this tenderness and manipulating one of the most cruel things possible. That how serious he considered the impact to be. The child at the time often continues to be tender and seek tenderness in response, even if the trauma is ongoing. So at the very deepest root of that "badness" or "contamination" is something very tender and worth protecting.