I have finally realized, months after processing my last therapy, that I have lived in a fantasy most of my life -- the female relatives in my family of origin did not care about the other female children, but pretended they did, and so I did, too, believing the pretense because it was pleasant and tolerable rather than the reality.

I don't see how a 60 second questionnaire could have helped me come to this realization earlier. But maybe -- if it helped identify how I was picking uncaring, snobby female therapists like the women in my family of origin, to reenact, so that I could erupt in anger at the disrespect and then they could put me down, over and over again. As I have written before, I had that anger cut off and shut down in order to get along in my family of origin. Therapists early in my 50 year journey with therapy encouraged me to "get in touch" with my feelings, and I worked very hard and did, only to have the therapists react like the women in my family growing up.

This is insanity. Well, yes, mine "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." But here's the thing -- I went to the professional "experts" in insanity, among other things, for help and just got re-treatment like the way I was as a child. This may, in many people's view, be "normal" female-to-female behavior but IT SUCKS. I don't want to live in a world where people treat each other like this.

This is a SYSTEMIC problem, because many professionals, in my experience, are living in their fantasy world, too. "Wounded healers", only they aren't -- they are perpetuating the toxicity of their own growing up life on other people who are living in denial but don't know it, of course.

There's an analogy I have mentioned before. Before the discovery of the germ theory of disease, physicians in Vienna were going to examine women in the hospital who were about to or right after giving birth. They examined them with THEIR BARE HANDS, UNWASHED right after doing autopsies, again with their bare hands. And many more of the women cared for by the physicians got ill and died, in contrast to those cared for by midwives who did not do autopsies. A doctor named Semmelweis noticed this and instituted the procedure that examining physicians had to wash their hands before each exam. The death rate dropped.

We need some science here, folks! Not just "empathy" -- which is a word coined in 1909 by a psychologist who was trying to develop a scientific psychology. It's a useful term, but if it's that necessary for social life, how did we get along without it for so many centuries?