[forty-two]

But see, that is just you. You just know things. I don't. I need to have things spelled out for me. That may be odd to you, but the idea of just knowing something or acting on a feeling is scary to me. I need facts. When I first heard of cio, it was at a shower for my sil about eight years ago. All the women said it was hard, but it was vital to fostering an independent child. And also, that not doing it lead to bad sleep habits. That made a lot of sense to me.

You're probably right that I don't really get Sensing types (I'm really trying, but I haven't found the right explanation yet, I guess). But there's a difference b/w being scared to go on a feeling and not even feeling it in the first place. You kind of confirmed my theory, in that they all said it was hard but necessary. That kind of means they felt an inclination to not do it - they just then dismissed it, b/c they were trained to distrust all feelings/instincts . But they *had* them, even though they didn't want them or believe in them. I get that over time you can dull them to the point of invisibility, as well as normalize dysfunction - but that takes a long time or serious dysfunction. If *multiple* people in your circle really and truly hit *newborns*, then wow, that was a really, really, really, *really* dysfunctional environment , and I'm not surprised that your sense of reality got seriously warped .

I've never been in a situation in which my sense of right and wrong got systematically trained out of me, that I really, truly *felt*, to the core of my being, that what I was doing was right when at one point I had felt it to be wrong. I've been mistaken, but part of me knew it was wrong, and screamed for attention (and trying to stuff it down and ignore it both didn't work and triggered years of depression). Even with my seriously skewed view of *how* wrong and messed up I was, I still knew I was messed up. And though I ended up with several damaging habits, that my go-to "natural" response was not good (deal with stress by mentally escaping), that my natural thought patterns weren't good (feeling like I wanted to die whenever I was stressed), I still knew they were fundamentally not good, even when I had no better way to deal with it.

I totally get the difficulty of having to retrain your "natural", go-to responses and thinking . I just really and truly don't get not feeling, at some level, at some point - whether you listen to them or not - that something about this is just not right . I get that a lifetime of believing that spanking is right would have you dismissing that feeling as wrong/misleading/Satan's-influence - you'd be pre-primed to ignore it. But it was still there, right?

And seriously, I do have a lot of sympathy for those unable to break out - I get why they don't listen to their instincts/common sense, and doubt I'd do any better in their shoes . Heck, given my personality, I can see doing it to myself, against my better judgement, with no extenuating external factors needed . I totally get not listening to your instincts when you've been taught all your life to distrust them . But that's still different from not feeling them in the first place .

ETA: I'm not trying to invalidate your experience , just trying to understand b/c it's really foreign to me .