You put it very well.
There is quite a literature dealing with grief, loss and anger. Perhaps the best known is the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, based on her study of Chicago patients near death. She then tried to extend her 'stages of grief' model to include drug withdrawal and job loss. She lost the plot there, I think, and ended up with some vague generalities about the 'five stages of grief'. When challenged, she said that not all stages were necessary (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) nor did they have to be in that order! Durr!
But it was a start. A recognition that a new subject area had emerged.
Since then George Bonanno has pointed out that many people acquire 'resilience' to these challenges which at some point will reach us all. The U.S. military like the resilience model and believe that it can be taught to troops, thus saving money on PTSD counselling. There is a useful article in Sci Am (March 2011) entitled "The neuroscience of true grit", which attempts to deal with all this. Alan Leventhall has some very critical observations about the vagueness of all this research.
Your report deals with your own experience in detail and makes no claim to be a general model of treatment. It has integrity and consistency because of this.
What you call your "moment of illumination" remains rather numinous but I share your joy that it arrived in time to 'save' you. Is 'save' an exaggeration, am I distorting your words? Apologies if so.
For me, the key section of your post (17) concerns the healing role of grief. Yes, it absolutely must be dealt with. It should be invited in, tears, rocking sobs, snot and all. Only when that lake is drained can we move on, IMHO.
My view is that we do not know what we feel, and what we feel, based on a childhood of conditioning is that we each feel like the worst person in the world, that we do not know it, don't want to know it, and don't want to know we don't want to know. We acquired these feelings by being put down as children, by being threatened by the withdrawal of parental support and love if we didn't behave differently, if we continued to express feelings, continued to be alive in the fullest sense, and thus bring out our own parents self loathing and self hate and fear of failure. They needed to protect us from their own contempt for themselves, to mold us into little automatons that would be accepted and never told we are worthless, to make of us successes. We were taught that what we feel is not acceptable, that what we feel is evil.
The mind of a child can't remain conscious of such rejection and has no choice but to conform and repress those feelings he or she dare not feel, anger and rage, say, at the parent, that can bring the roof down on you.
The result is that we grow up with a deep need for acceptance and love, and a terrible rejection of it when it comes, a 'come here get away' reaction, a need to test our relationships, an insecurity that those who love us must in fact be fools. One can see this in the badly broken. It's not so easy to see it in oneself, particularly if one is perhaps gifted and or successful. We all retain some breathing tube by which we stay alive.
So, if as I say, we have deeply hidden feelings that we are the worst in the world, and this feeling creates unconscious behaviors, we will act unconsciously to events in the world that trigger this feeling.
A person in cuts in line reminds you that he feels you are too worthless to stand behind, some donkey cuts in front of you with his car, somebody doing violence to another. Perhaps you have seen people so unhinged with self contempt that if you look at them they will accuse you of disrespect, perhaps with violence rather than a verbal complaint. So much of what we do is to protect us from feeling how worthless we feel, but real grief, feeling our real pain, can awaken memory.
When a person in therapy of the kind that allows feelings to come out, one is transported back in time and awakens to real events, the actual situations in which those feelings first occurred. It is when one brings the adult back in time to see what happened that the world can change, that ones deepest pain can come from some simple thing, a feeling perhaps that you were the cause of your parents divorce, on the reason your sister was punished instead of you, so many seemingly insignificant things that were once so huge. It is the real memories of what happened to us that can be used to integrate, to see that what one feels one had to feel but which were total lies, that there was never anything wrong with us at all.
Meanwhile, I try to remember, very unsuccessfully, most of the time, that a soft answer turns away wrath and the meaning of turn the other cheek is to be glad you only got hit once. When I see a person cut in line, I know that what he is saying is that he feels worthless, that he can't accept the fact that he should take his proper place in line. He doesn't have the personal dignity to do that, that he is in an inner state of hurt and misery, one that nothing I could do to him would compare to. People act in worthless ways because that's how they feel. If I feel contempt for them it tells me I feel that way too, that I hate something in me that reminds me of them.
I call this the futility of rate, all these feelings I feel, all this need for justice and equality, all this witnessing of evil in the world and not a thing I can do. I see only the crucifixion of Christ, that one must carry the cross if one wishes to awaken, that there is nothing one can do with ones rage but forgive.
Unfortunately, I'm not very good at it. Perhaps I will have to forgive that too.
If you haven't seen it, I would recommend the film Red Beard directed by Akira Kurosawa and staring Toshirô Mifune, I think it would be right up your alley.
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