> I've read everyone's posts, I really have, it's just that I understand what you're telling me, but I hate being talked down to like everyone else knows everything and I am an ignorant fool.

That's a severe misreading of my post, and I'm paradoxically even more confident that it was a misreading of Stephen's. Nobody was talking down to you. But Stephen's had life experience with what you're currently contending with, and made an admirable effort to convey the benefit of those experiences to you. He doesn't know everything, and you're not an ignorant fool, but let's face it: he's been through this, and you haven't. That makes taking his advice to heart the wisest thing for you (even if you don't ultimately follow it) and the courtesy Stephen is due for investing time and thought for your benefit.

As for me, I haven't been through this at all, but I do understand a bit about healthy familial relationships, and more to the point I understood what Stephen was trying to say. So when it became clear you were not understanding Stephen's post, I (evidently unwisely) took it upon myself to try to reiterate what he was trying to say from my own perspective. I believe I made it clear I had spent several days with those thoughts in the back of my mind before I committed them to words. I don't know what degree of progress I was hoping my post would make, but I certainly expected more than an "Er," a dismissal, and an immediate demonstration that you had essentially willfully ignored the crux of what I spent all that time saying. I accept your apology, but that doesn't mean I'm suddenly happy about any of this.

> I've had to deal with that my whole life, and I don't want to have to deal with it here, the only place I have where I can talk freely.

Let's also clarify this point too. The truth of that statement depends on how you define "talk freely." Maybe the way you mean it is ok. But for the two interpretations of "talk freely" I can come up with, it's not true at all.

(Consider the "you"s that follow "general" yous, not you specifically.)

You can't talk freely in the sense that you can be disrespectful of other people. You can't even be more passive about it and simply *disregardful* of other people.

And you can't talk freely in the sense that you can "open up" and "let your guard down." Whatever RinkWorks looks like, it's not a single close-knit group of friends. Yes, there are surprisingly strong bonds of friendship, and the community has surprisingly cohesion in places. But make no mistake: this message board is a broadcast to the entire world. You shouldn't say anything here that any single person, now or in the future, should be allowed to see. RinkChat is a little more enclosed, but only a little: you're still in a world of people you've never seen or heard and a great many you are not personally close friends with. You shouldn't assume familiarity. You shouldn't expect people to behave the way you want them to (offering advice or not, conveying the impression they know something you don't, and so on). The point I'm trying to make is that, as anywhere in life, it's not the place that makes one free or not free to talk openly, it's the specific people you've built up relationships of trust with.

You've not done that with me. I don't mean to be mean. I don't say this to be personal; rather, to be *impersonal*. I don't know you. I'll extend you the philanthropy and good will I'd give anybody, but we don't have a personal history of any kind. So my response to "I've had to deal with that my whole life, and I don't want to have to deal with it here, the only place I have where I can talk freely," is one of perplexion. Obviously I am only one person here, but I *am* one person here -- and so why shouldn't you have to invest the same effort of mature social behavior, and the natural give and take of social protocol, that you would have to contend with anywhere else?