Hi Gal, love your avatar (cat fan here)
Can I ask are you a Muslim convert? Your account makes so much sense.
Yes, I am, and it was for those reasons. After my super-dysfunctional, criminally insane, abusive parents threw me out on the street when I was 18, I was a hot mess. I went from relationship to relationship looking for someone to give me the love and attention I'd wanted my whole life. Unfortunately, the kinds of people who want to be around someone that insecure are almost all people who want to prey on your vulnerability, so I kept being abused.
Honestly, if someone like John Allen Mohammad or Charles Manson had swept into my life at that time, I probably would have ended up following them. Not because I am a bad person who wants to harm others; that's not it at all. I was a broken person who was looking for stability and love, and if I thought I could get that from someone, I'd have done almost anything for them. I had no sense of personal identity, never having been given a chance to even question who I was or what I wanted as an individual, and was very open to suggestion.
I was socially retarded, not because there's something wrong with my brain, but because I was isolated from everyone. I did develop language abilities and to a lesser extent mathematics abilities (with some problems; I can't answer a question given to me verbally in writing and vice versa), so I do not appear feral, but in terms of self-identity and social interactions, I had the abilities of a small child.
I was probably a bit of a language prodigy, and if I'd been allowed to grow up normally, I'd probably be doing something like being a playwright or a translator. My grandfather had the remarkable ability to learn the basics of a language enough to be conversational in a few hours (and he was almost certainly a spy; he was definitely a government official, officially he worked for the transportation department and went on hundreds of diplomatic exchange missions in that capacity; but I find it impossible to believe that he would have gone to the USSR during the Cold War and not done SOME spying). I could read books before my 4th birthday, and for the rest of my childhood tested for reading comprehension skills several grades ahead of my actual grade.
But emotionally? Socially? I was willing to do or believe almost anything if I thought it would make someone, anyone, like me. I had no sense of self, I didn't know who I was or what I wanted or believed, and I didn't even really understand that I had the right to decide those things for myself. In the years since, I went through the stages of emotional development that you'd normally see in a small child, usually in a pretty jumbled way and not in the predictable, linear ways you'd see in a child.
The approval and "love" (which was always conditional) of another person was more important to me than my own beliefs. I converted to Islam because I thought that it would make people like me, even if it wasn't popular people. And for a while, it worked. Then as I emotionally matured, I started to see the dark side of it, that people wanted me to be the "perfect" Muslim woman, whatever they thought that meant.
It's only now, over 8 years since my parents put me on the curb, that I can say that I'm actually starting to have the kinds of skills needed to cope in society, being able to think, act, and advocate for myself. To not be afraid of forming my own opinions and expressing them. To not need constant approval or validation, and to be ok with being alone. To not be emotionally dependent on others. To decide what I want to eat, what I want to wear, what I believe, what I think in regards to things like sexuality and gender identity (both my own and as social issues), etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpkz3W1QzcsHere's a video that talks about caring what other people think, from someone who wasn't quite as broken as me, but still has some interesting thoughts.
Edit: the edit is me trying to make the video embed properly, forgot how to do that.
Topic: Individualist v Collectivist culture