Thanks so much! You all have really given me some things to think about.

When my last therapist and I were working from a "parts" perspective, there were two potentially "evil" but presumably self-protective parts that I worked very hard to get to know, because a near lifetime of shutting them out hadn't worked.

Sounds a lot like your experience, too, maybe, Rayne?

It's also very interesting, feileacan, that your therapist takes it, and mine couldn't. But having gone through 18 months of darkness, including feeling a lot of hatred toward that therapist, and with the support of this forum, I am able currently both to love my female relatives, feel the enormous pain, and see how they behaved -- even if I first wrote about it with regard to my last therapist, for whom it is also true.