Identified a Childhood Trauma that explains one of my biggest and worst triggers:

So… in what ways did your family let you down during your childhood and/or teen years that SO negatively impacted you, it’s been fucking up your ability to process criticism/rejection healthily to the point where you now get defensive/anxious/angry over the smallest, DUMBEST things because you so easily feel accused, belittled, and/or attacked — and it also gave you major trust issues? And major anger issues when you’re thrust into a situation where you’re on the receiving end of a smear campaign (and not necessarily from a narcissist; just a smear campaign of any kind.)

Mine was back in high school, 10th grade, when some guy who acted like my friend was in an early morning computer study lab with me and decided to pressure me into letting him use my computer for a sec while I was away because I needed to use the water fountain. He then proceeded to use the internet to look up a buncha porn adjacent stuff on seedy websites, which caused my computer to crash because of all the viruses that were on sites like that back in the day. When the teacher was able to get the computer (that was signed out to ME) back up and running, the monitor had a million pornographic trojan horse pop-ups littered all over the screen, the monitor was frozen and unresponsive to commands from the mouse and keyboard, and they had to get an IT guy to come wipe the hard-drive so that the computer could be saved… that ALL got blamed on me, because when I tried to tell the Principal what happened, GUESS WHAT… the kid who actually did the porn surfing LIED to them and said he never even touched my computer, somehow NO witnesses were called in, and so they just automatically believed him. They didn’t believe me. My own adoptive family didn’t even believe me, they treated me like some scumbag fuckin porn addicted kid that can’t even control his own libido enough to not porn surf in a computer lab at school where I’m sure to get caught. I know that teenagers lie a lot, but I was telling them the TRUTH. And they didn’t believe me. And honestly, it felt like they cared more about the embarassment of what I “did” and how it reflected upon them than they did about hearing or acknowledging me or my side of the story.

I ALREADY KNOW it was stupid enough of me to give someone else permission to use my computer… that doesn’t make what HE chose to do entirely MY fault, though. And I have no idea how to navigate that trauma so that I can dismantle all of the dysfunctional effects its had on me, and the bad coping mechanisms I’ve allowed myself to adopt because of them.