Hi Ruari,
Thank you for your post.
There's a lot going on for you, much of which was ringing bells for me too.

It's so easy to gather up all the negative input from other people and feed it so it drowns out the positive input and love we get later, however much we try to encourage and feed the positive later on. (Not implying that this feeding is either deliberate or your fault in any way, it's instilled in us very early)

I want to encourage you in the many efforts you are clearly making to find a way forward.
Keep up the good work!