QUOTE : In the years following my first hospitalization and my first explorations into myself, I determined to become someone I could live with, if not, in the words of the therapist, someone I could love. My first efforts were based on my blanket acceptance that I wasn't a very good person, and that I should change those parts of myself that could be changed. I hadn't yet realized that I'd simply internalized all the verbal assaults that characterized the first eighteen years of my life.