BUt for you was the crossover of the 12 program enough to deal with being a victim of childhood abandonment and abuse?
It can be
provided you have a sponsor or work with someone with
direct experience with whatever it is you are "walking through", such as forgiving parents that abandoned or abused their children.
I see you had therapy but there is nothing about your age or what you got out of that experience at the time. So I am just wondering at what point there may have been a healing from being an abandoned and abused child by those who were meant to be the people who should have given you and been a safe place in this world?
I have done three stints in therapy I think, all were amazing, each had benefit but the most "lasting effects" were felt when doing therapy after doing the steps and in conjunction with reworking them, the steps removed denial it sometimes takes years of therapy to "get to", so the therapist and I could go straight to "solution" rather then the therapist spending months and months trying to break through my denial about certain behaviors.
Also, at what point may you have forgiven them? How and what was the process or was it an enlightenment during a specific step?
Forgiveness for me was a LONG process that occurred as a direct result of doing step nine ("incorrectly" i might add)
Forgiveness for me is not an event, it's a process with a lot of realizations and epiphanies, such as patience is not me waiting for something to change but learning to accept what "is", forgiveness for me may not mean the same thing as it does to you. Forgiveness for me is just "letting go" of the past and not carrying it around, sometimes it means understanding the behavior, it means different things at different times, but the end result is "letting go of the resentment associated with "the harm" that was caused to me.
It takes many forms, sometimes it's realizing the harm was inadvertent, sometimes it means recognizing the behavior in myself as well, like, many forms of the forgiveness are christian in nature, and some for me are more eastern religion style, like "what would Jesus do" accompanied with "What would Gandhi do"
It's accepting the past for what it is and letting go of what it "should have been"
Quite frankly, I also use Gandalf and Dumbledore to "model" behaviors sometimes, Dumbledore for his humorous and forgiving approach to stupidity and rudeness even in "self", and Gandalf for his loving and understanding of human frailty and recognition of the courage it takes to take up arms against "evil" no matter where it's found, but usually internally, if that makes sense.