Dear Danielle:

No need to keep punishing yourself over that  so to prove to yourself, again and again, that you are a good person. It is better for you in each and every way to stop suffering over that “childhood mistake” (title of that thread). You can still trust yourself to not repeat that behavior while you are no longer suffering over it.

Yes, you were innocent, the child that you were. As children, it takes time and teaching, correct teaching, to learn to control our impulses, within reason. No child is born with that sense of control. If a child is taught nothing, the child will behave like any other animal- impulsively do what it feels like doing.

I believe in thinking what is true, what is congruent with reality. And reality is you didn’t know yet, at the time, that it was wrong. There was no violence involved, for one, no signs of pain (you probably knew at that point that inflicting pain was wrong), and it was not anything you heard of or were told that to be wrong.

So how could you possibly have known…

Stop suffering over it, if you can: there is no reason or purpose for it, no benefit to it in real life.

anita