@strangeling, I was responding to something that wasn't said. Fairly typical of me.
As for the rest,
When I was a boy, I discovered science fiction stories, and one of the first ones I read was a story about a group of galactic patrolmen who crash land on a planet unknown to them. Their captain dies in the crash, they can't repair their ship, and no one will rescue them. As they begin to explore their surroundings, they discover an abandoned city, desolate for a long time. However, one of the patrolmen is telepathic, and his mind accidentally "touches" the mind of an individual from a hostile warrior race in the city. He recoils in shock, and I very well remember the author describing the patrolman's reaction as being a result of him having been a prisoner of that race, before being rescued.
This struck a deep chord in me. My father spent time in the military, fighting. My mother is a narcissist and on some level, had been trying to mentally replace "me" with her corrupted version of me since I was small. I entirely sympathized with the mental "touchiness" of the patrolman. He had been through a very bad experience, and was now very, very sensitive to intrusions into the defensive boundaries that he had been forced to build in order to survive.
It was something I could relate to. That passage was one of the most memorable parts of the book, and I returned to it years later, trying to figure out why it meant so much to me.



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