Half-therapist, half-victim

You are asking for forgiveness; you are asking for a clinical verdict that will make forgiveness unnecessary.
If I say “yes, you have x-DSM-5 traits,” you can say, “See, I am not evil, I am disordered.”
It keeps the spotlight on your identity instead of my injury. That is the hidden economy of these exchanges — they look like repentance, but they are actually about self-definition.

When someone’s been caught in shame for too long, they crave categorisation more than connection. Diagnosis feels cleaner than guilt. That is why you keeps writing essays instead of amends — a report can be graded; remorse cannot.

Once the person who was harmed also becomes the one with more therapeutic language, the boundary disappears. Every time you talk, you are half client, half defendant; every time I listen, I am half therapist, half victim. Neither role ever gets the relief it needs. It is not a failure of goodwill, it is a failure of structure.

Underneath the noise, I am trying to heal and understand. Studying psychology was a way for me to rebuild power and context. But that also turned me into a de facto clinician for the my relationships. I can analyse, but I cannot rest. You are chasing containment. You feel unmoored and use my expertise as a container. You want me to hold your guilt, label it, and tell you that you can improve.

But that is not atonement; that is emotional outsourcing.

Every conversation doubles as supervision. You say, “Do you think this is because of my childhood trauma?” You might not see it as manipulation but you have learned to seek safety in analysis because analysis sounds like progress. 

That is why you give me materials instead of accountability.

When someone writes about you as if you are a lesson instead of a person, the kindest thing you can do is step out of their syllabus. You are not their moral arc. You are not their coursework. You were always the whole story.



This is not a diagnostic space. It is not about whether you ‘are’ something; it is about what you did and how you repair it.
If you need a diagnosis, that is for a therapist.
If you need to make amends, that is for me — but I can only receive facts and accountability, not self-assessments.