That was a really tough revelation (updated)

Long overdue tears flowed like a river last night.

Now that a situation about which I'd been concerned has been resolved, I was able to look more closely at the question that my friend posed at the beginning of our chat yesterday, in a little different context than she posed it. It wasn't so much a question of why I took her non-responsiveness personally, as much as why it was so important to me to be sure I understood the reason for it.

Even though an earlier version of this post "promised" more detail, I'm still going to be vague. But when I was about 11 or 12 years old, and maybe as young as 10, I experienced a deeply scarring emotional trauma. My closest friends will have an idea of its nature; it was neither the first nor the last time I experienced this form of hurt, though it is the first one that I remember (my mother told me of the other one when I was about 36 years old and in therapy for the first time). There are several things that made this incident different from all those that came later, including my age and my lack of understanding. But the thing that is most pertinent to my recent emotional dynamic is that it was prompted in response to something I'd said, and connected with something else the previous day that I've since realized I should have done - someone I should have protected, but was too young to understand and therefore didn't, of which I have remained deeply ashamed. And being in situations in which I am certain that I must have made a mistake and not being able to nail down what it was, brought back the emotional dynamic of being scarred because of a shameful mistake that I had made. I wasn't able to evaluate what I had done to determine if I deserved the judgment I feared, and wracking my mind for anything that I might have done wrong along the way was wrapping me tighter and tighter around this situation.

That all released emotionally last night, so I hope I will be more prepared to avoid this type of thinking in the future, in other circumstances. After all, I learn from my mistakes, and shouldn't encounter the same circumstance again.