So it really kind of took a conversation with somebody else to realize that I have this habit of protecting others at the expense of myself -- when those people do really bad things to me, for instance. It might have started with my teachers (sort of saying, "Well, they weren't all bad", "I was kind of a bad kid", things like that) and continued over into the woman I talked about -- basically, she kind of had a hard go of it too. She's kind of talked about it. And it just kind of makes me wonder if I'm the bad guy (bad girl, in this case) for getting upset with how she treats people (she was and still is vicious towards people and had, and still probably has, a heavy misandrist streak on some occasions. Emphasis on "some", really. She and the others also had a fondness for acting like men were out to get them. And then there was her "joke" about shooting up a city that someone who'd angered her lived in). I mean, I hate how she treated people, and yet she had such a horrible background that I'm wondering if I'm somehow...just a bad person for getting upset.

Am I a jerk? (My therapist says I'm not, but I'm still not quite certain. I still kind of think I am) And...well, how do I stop "protecting" people, like teachers, who've hurt me?