I appreciate the detailed rendering of your session and the aftermath. I clipped this phrase out, de-contextualized it really, because I think there is much to unpack there. Clipped like this, I'd first of all say that I wish less suffering for a human beings, you and otherwise. If why I go to therapy can be crystallized in a short phrase, this is it. I want to suffer less.

Because the suffering is always there regardless of what anyone did or didn't do to cause it. If I punch someone in the face and they punch me back, my swollen eye and bruises hurt just as much as theirs.

The Buddhists say "things as they are." At least in my own life it has not been easy to see what happened to me that caused me suffering (multiple things, including many that were my choice or due to my actions) for what they really were and how they affected me.

I don't know if this is in the same ballpark as what you are experiencing, but I have felt that I deserved to be punished for the things that caused my suffering. If I'm honest, this not only included things that happened because of my actions in adulthood, but to to CSA that everyone would agree could not possibly be "my fault." Maybe this is different from your version of you don't deserve to feel bad about what happened to you, but I'm not sure.

Because that is what I think trauma does to people. Skip the specifics of the things that cause the suffering, whether it's an act of G-d (people who are in floods or other natural disasters also have PTSD and they also suffer from feeling that they have and should be punished for their badness-- or whether it is child abuse or abuse of any kind-- trauma makes people feel bad. In my version, the "bad" is really large, a kind of deep and dark hole I am still climbing out of. Part of it is recognizing just how bad I felt during and after the traumas. But the stickiest part is seeing how much I felt a "bad" person, that I was lucky enough that anyone chose me as a person in their life and I should be grateful for whatever crumbs they scooped my way.

Trauma is such a trickster too because as soon as you can pin it down-- kind of like catching a tiny feather floating down on the wind, it morphs into something else that you have to deal with. At each piece of it, what it feels like to me is that I have to break through all the things about it, if you like the term defenses I think that's what this is, that lead me to try to distort the trauma into something it wasn't. It is so hard just to see things for what they really are. To admit, this thing that happened, it was terrible and the pain from it has lingered. Because that is what trauma does, and our enormously creative brains do not like something they have tidily put away coming back to roost in our conscious life. From the way our culture wants traumatized people to be silent to the neurology of "resolution" of the trauma, there's a lot of pressure for people to deny their pain.

Sometimes I think in the popular media there is this sense that people "enjoy" claiming "victim status" or "enjoy being a victim." I think that is horse doodee. While what happened to someone will undoubtedly be scrutinized as to whether the proper label such as rape would apply IF you make a public FB post or you file a criminal/civil complaint, in private this notion that people want to be victims doesn't apply at all.

This might be a crazy analogy, but about 8 years after we were married, my spouse decided to become more religious (his "religiosity" shifted). He went from someone who went to services once a year to someone who embraced a very conservative group that I would not join because it was against my larger values. It took many years to come to a place of acceptance about it, but for a long time I felt like I had been betrayed, and everything that women said when their partners cheated on them was exactly how I felt. Except G-d was the person he was cheating on me with. No, I "shouldn't" have felt betrayed or victimized by him changing his spirituality and how he practiced it. I could say with a deep respect for logic that this was about him and what he needed to grow as a person, not about him rejecting me and seeking something else with another being.

But it wasn't until I could admit how I saw things ("you are cheating on me with G-d") and how I felt about them that I could begin to get my head around the real problem.

And for you, LT, your description of your reactions or suffering feels connected somehow to the issue you've raised before, about how difficult it is for you to ignore the noise about what people think about you. This issue seems to sit pretty squarely on it, because this time you are looking at how you think about the trauma you've experienced. If you need validation that what you went through was terrible, you've received it from your T and in this thread (from me too, fwiw). But I think the most important piece is that you see your traumas for what they really were and how they really affected you, and that has nothing to do with what other people think.