I realized 1 of the reasons everyone hated me in school. Because I still do it today.

When someone says something to me that I perceive as an attack (usually everyone else disagrees with me that it is an attack and doesn't understand why it hurts me so much) I go into defense mode and say the worst possible thing I can think of to the person, then everyone hates me because of what I said.

This is a very old example, but the one I'm the most self aware of, and I assure you not much has changed about me in the past 13 years:

Once in 5th grade this girl made a comment about my clothes. I think it was something about why couldn't my mother afford better clothes for me. I went into automatic defense mode. This girl had recently lost her own mother and I responded with "at least my mother's still living".

I like the think that my mother abandoning me 5 years after was Karma for this. I felt bad about it of course, but I realized today that I still do this type of thing and don't even notice. Some people say you should just "walk away" when someone upsets you, but when you DO decide to say something back to defend yourself, how do you make sure it stays within the limits but is still effective?

My cousin says things a lot that hurt me but somehow my responses are always so much that I'm the one who ends up being labeled as "mean" because I went into defense mode. I never thought of this until today or understood why people always blamed me.

PS. I'm aware that my responses are wrong and hurtful and I don't WANT to hurt people. I want to find a better way of dealing with this.