This is another one of my long rambles, but if you're the one feeling guilty, I hope you'll read it and get something useful out of it. I'm sleepy and don't have time to edit, so hey, take whatever you can use:
One of the things I want you to understand in dealing with your guilty feelings is that what happened to you is part of the brain washing technique used to break the victims---in this case, used to break you.
What they do is try to sucker you into a morally complicit act. They try to sucker you into a very small, seemingly insignificant act---an act that makes you part of what they're doing to you, by you doing it to others---and then build on it. It's like how you boil a live frog: Plop a frog into boiling water and it will jump right out. Put a frog in cold water and heat it up slowly and the frog will stay in the water until you boil it to death.
The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood is a good book for showing some of the classic patterns of brainwashing. The "ceremonies" the Gilead men made for the rapes---they made the wife be in the same room and hold the handmaid's hands up during the rape. The handmaid had to do various stuff, etc. They suckered people into the brainwashing and into the system by making them complicit in the system.
It's like the Nazi internal concentration camp operations run by the Judenrat---they got Jews to do a lot of the work of actually running the camp, making them complicit in the system that murdered them.
It's a classic and very deliberate technique used in breaking human beings down into beaten, compliant, shattered wrecks.
It even works on full grown soldiers who have gone to SERE* school to learn how to resist it.
A teenager, any teenager, whose mind is not mature and who has none of the experience to ground him in the solid sense of self a healthy adult has----a teenager wouldn't stand a chance.
There are a few who break to a lesser extent. From what I've seen, those seem to have mostly been the ones who were close to turning 18, so they had more maturity to use to resist with and they could pretend and play the game until the clock ran out and they could leave.
Even they didn't come out unscathed. To some extent the mask you wear in such a situation becomes another face of you---cult dissociative disorder is one of the names for that (which also happened to you---that "other you" you're talking about is a cult-implanted alternate personality)
Hardened combat vets who have been through SERE* school get damaged by the same techniques, and broken if the people holding them have enough time.
You were a teenager. You didn't have a chance.
You didn't do horrible things to other people. The people running the prison you were in did horrible things to you that, against your will, distorted you into a tool they used to hurt other people. It was the people pulling your strings, after they broke you, who did the harm to those other people.
It feels to you like it was you doing those horrible things. That's a mind game of the monsters who broke you, still playing out in your mind. They were pulling your strings like a puppet, and you had no chance not to be their puppet.
What you are responsible for is, now that you are out where nobody else is pulling your strings, how you behave. You are responsible for the actions you take or don't take to recover from what happened to you so you can treat others well today and tomorrow.
People who blather about your moral responsibility for whatever "you" did while you'd been broken and were a puppet on strings (even though it sometimes felt like you had free will, it was a deliberately fostered illusion of free will to make you feel complicit in the bad things they did)---those people don't know what they're talking about, because they don't understand how experts break captives.
Sometimes they break them for interrogation purposes, sometimes just for the hell of it, sometimes to make them behave compliantly after release, sometimes as an object lesson for people who will see the broken result. It happens in virtually every nation in the world, in some more than others.
In this case, secret police and military intelligence interrogation techniques have been turned to the use of breaking kids to order into compliance for parents with enough money to pay for it and enough naivete or callousness not to ask too many questions about how the results are obtained.
You didn't stand a ghost of a chance. What you did while you were still under their direct influence, and under the indirect influence of the cult-implanted personality, was entirely the moral responsibility of the people who were pulling your strings.
A long time ago, I was raped. Like almost all rape victims, I blamed myself a lot for certain parts of what happened. As part of recovery, I had to learn to internalize that the rapist was completely and wholly morally responsible for the decision to rape me and, therefore, for the entirety of the rape.
People who are in a near death situation where they survive and others don't experience survivor guilt. They have to learn to place blame for whatever happened wherever it really lies, and not on themselves.
To recover, I want you to learn to place the blame for the things "you" did as a puppet on strings squarely on the people who had broken you and then were pulling your strings.
They deliberately pulled your strings to make "you" do those things. They made you do those things because it broke your resistance further and made you even more firmly their puppet, and because it had the divide and conquer effect of setting you against the people in the same boat as you---increasing their control over them, too. It was 100% intentional on their part and you had zero chance against it. You were a minor child. You had neither the tools nor the capacity to resist what they did.
Just like a rape, it was all the puppetteers' fault, and none of yours.
What you do today and tomorrow is your responsibility.
In this life we all have enough karma to deal with making amends for what we are responsible for without taking responsibility for the intentional, deliberate, premeditated bad acts of others.
Leave the puppetteers to the damnations they've earned and focus your own efforts on your own todays and tomorrows.
Julie Cochrane
* SERE -- Search, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. It's a very tough training school in the military that trains soldiers in certain specialties in how to resist and survive the techniques that are commonplace in these behavior mod facilities. SERE school does things to attendees that they're almost never willing to talk about, most say they would never voluntarily do again, and that would be criminal offenses if done to the same people anywhere else in the military. The things that makes SERE school justified are that the people who go are volunteers, are in the occupations most likely to get them downed in enemy territory and/or captured, and SERE school has a proven track record of helping more than it hurts by helping soldiers stay alive and get out of horrible situations. A soldier in SERE school knows that the purpose of the school isn't to break him into compliance, but to help him fight against people who really would want to break him.
