I recently realized I was groomed by someone, and part of what happened is that I unknowingly hurt someone else as a result. The person who groomed me also normalized really disturbing behavior that I've had to unlearn on my own. I feel a lot of regret about the actions I took toward the other person. Is it normal to feel that way? And what do I if no one listens to me when I try to talk about it?

Thank you for trusting us with this. What you are carrying here is genuinely heavy, and the fact that you are tracing it back to its source and sitting with the weight of its consequences says something real about your honesty and your willingness to look at hard things clearly.

Yes, regret is not only normal in your situation, it is one of the most painful and also most meaningful parts of what you are describing. When we come to understand that we caused harm, even harm that was rooted in our own manipulation and abuse, a person with conscience feels that. Regret is a moral compass doing its job. And held in the right way, it can become the foundation for accountability and growth rather than something you carry forever as punishment.

Grooming, which is the gradual, deliberate process by which someone in a position of trust reshapes your understanding of what is normal and acceptable, does not announce itself while it is happening. By the time you were acting in ways that affected someone else, you were working from a framework that had been built for you without your knowledge or consent. Research on grooming consistently shows that one of its most insidious effects is that it can create a chain of harm. People whose sense of normal has been deliberately distorted often act out what was done to them, not because something is wrong with them, but because they were never given the real framework to begin with. The work you have done to unlearn those behaviors on your own, without support, is significant. It means you have been doing real work to become someone who understands what healthy looks like.

It is also worth naming something directly that you are allowed to hold both truths at the same time. You were someone being manipulated and harmed, and you caused harm to someone else. One does not cancel the other. Many people in exactly your position describe feeling like they are both a survivor and someone who caused harm, and not knowing which grief to attend to first. Both matter. Both deserve space. It is okay if that feels tangled right now, because it is.

The fear that no one will listen is one of the loneliest parts of this. Survivors of grooming often find themselves in a complicated position when they try to speak, because their story involves harm they received and harm they passed on, and not everyone has the framework to hold that kind of complexity with care. When people respond with confusion or silence, that is a failure of understanding on their part, not a verdict on whether your experience is real or your regret is valid.

There are people trained specifically to support you through this. A trauma-informed therapist, particularly one with experience in grooming or coercive control, can help you talk through this situation and the layers of harm you've experienced in more detail. You deserve a space where the full truth of what happened to you, including both parts of it, can be held without judgment.