Chronic, when you say you speak about this regularly, do you mean that it's difficult to open up or why it's difficult to open up (i.e., your worries - that you experience on a feeling, not an intellectual level - about what he might do or how he might respond)? When I read the first part of your post, the first thing that jumped to mind was shame. I've been told in the past that the only way to deal with shame is to expose it, to talk about it over and over, until it loses some of its edge. Shame is about feeling bad to the core (been there, still doing it sometimes), and often carrying the belief that no one *really* cares. I've noticed over the years that I've been on kind of a journey with several different therapists. Through one especially caring therapeutic relationship I was able to downgrade the level of self-hatred I used to carry around with me all of the time, even though I doubted my therapist's caring all the time. Now I'm with a different therapist, and I still doubt her caring too, though recently (after almost 3 years with her), I have started to notice little cracks in the certainty of my belief that she *doesn't* care. I've gotten direct feedback from her as well that what I say *does* matter, and that I impact her in a lot of ways.