Am I doing more harm than good?

[SilentFrog]

So I was thinking today, I quite often reply to people's posts and I do my best to talk people through their situations and offer as much support and advice as I can, but looking through the kind of things I say, I was wondering, am I really helping people? Or am I doing more harm than good? Quite often people post on here in a panic, they're terrified that they might have caught a bug, or have food poisoning or that they might v* - I was thinking, does it really do them any good for me to be teaching them how to avoid getting ill?

Should I instead, be teaching people that you know what, it's ok to V*, it isn't all that bad, and it will be over so much sooner than you think. Should I really be encouraging people's phobias and encouraging the kinds of avoidance behaviour and OCD style cleaning rituals that tire us emets so much? Perhaps all this time, instead of helping people, all I've really done is cemented their phobia, taught them that the right thing to do is to wash their hands and bleach and do everything in their power to avoid getting ill. My calm, rationed answers belied the subtle undertones of my own phobic struggles, which through the imposter of advice, I projected onto others.

I'm truly sorry to those people, from the very bottom of my heart I am. I'm sorry that in my own selfish way I have tried to ink stamp my own habits and behaviours onto your lives, and in so doing put another obstacle in the way of your path to recovery. It was never my intention to hurt any of you in any way - but intentions matter not much when the damage has already been done.

It is difficult to find words that adequately express the depth of my regret, so I will simply repeat the only words I know, in the hope that may still have meaning, I'm sorry.