You were young and unhappy. How you were reared wasn't helping you in your social experience with your peers, from what you have written previously. You accepted the opinions of the social authority. You were, as you wrote, desperate. When people are desperate our survival instincts can take over. They just do that. It's a survival instinct. And listening to an authority, grabbing at hope -- even if something in us knows, or suspects, that it is "wrong" -- we can just do it. The way are living currently isn't working, either, so we listen to the authority. It's an instinct. I did it, too. And suffered for years trying to understand why what I did, that I thought was what I was supposed to do, didn't work either and instead hurt other people and my relationships with them. This has been the best I could come up with.

Shame and guilt are useful emotions. Shame can tell us that something we have done, or a way that we are behaving, is against a social group's standards. Guilt can tell us that something we have done is or was against what we now accept as our own standards. They are very painful. Again, for a good survival reasons, I suspect. They tend to disrupt our behaving that way again. But they can be extremely difficult to deal with. Sometimes it still seems impossible to me.

Despite my best efforts -- and the expectations of my family which I tried hard to fulfill (again, the instinct of looking to authority) -- I am not perfect, whatever definition of perfection one might use. I am an animal, among other things. That's not a put-down. In the last year I have watched a lot of shows on TV about zoos. And the zookeepers, who are around the animals all day and responsible for their care, are very observant and respectful of the animal social dynamics. They are not judgmental about them, just observant. I am trying to be that way more about myself and other people, too.

I hurt people in ways that I didn't fully know or understand (or care at the time because I was desperate? like an animal trying to survive?). It affected them in painful ways and my apology can't fully change that -- for their own survival reasons. It's a deep sadness that I have.

I appreciate your posts, didgee, and your story is an important one. I wish that therapists could read it and feel some guilt at the effects their actions have had on their clients and on the people they care about. Even therapists who haven't done things like that themselves deserve some responsibility, I believe, for making their profession better and less likely to harm people. I hope the therapist you have now can continue to help you, and it seems likely that she won't forget your story, either.