Thank you for a thoughtful response, Jessica. It seems like this topic touches so many, yet we don’t talk about it enough. I empathise with you — I really think we have had a very similar experience with the internalized guilt planted in us as children. The only explanation for it that I can find is, as I wrote, that the adults that were teaching us these things were afraid of “hell” and “punishment” themselves — an so they couldn’t offer us any alternative way, precisely because of this fear.