Thanks Perna, you always make so much sense! I appreciate the additional insight into your own experiences too.

You're so right that strong emotions are so often about something other than the surface trigger...it's always a deeper thing. I have huge rejection issues, which my T is helping me see go back as early as infancy, when I was adopted. I always picture myself being punted like a football from my birth mother and sailing toward my (incompetent and selfish) adoptive parents, who tried to catch me but pretty much dropped me on my @ss...I survived, but not undamaged.

I think you can experience things in utero too. My mother was very young and she must have been full of anxiety, knowing she was going to give me up. I must have felt something, internalized those vibrations somehow...

Lots of work to do. Anyway, thanks for the reminder that this is all about me and the deeper issues, not so much what someone else said or didn't say to me on a particular recent night.