What you wrote was really fine -- real feelings are what I'm trying to accept in myself, I certainly accept them in others. I hope my reply was OK to you? I was trying to say that now that my mother is gone, I'm somewhat relieved of the need for her acceptance, because it's not available at all, even on a conditional basis. Not that I would have wished her death to come sooner. I would have wished that we could have come to a place where I felt unconditionally accepted by her, but we didn't. That's the painful part, the source of feeling rejected for much of my life, and possibly an important part of my emotional regulation deficits.

But being sensitive to being rejected -- that also means I'm sensitive to being re-wounded in therapy. And saying that I can choose not to be in therapy is like saying that I can choose not to go to a doctor when I'm sick. Yeah, sometimes that's a good idea, too. But we usually don't reject people because they're sick. Unless they were lepers before it was called Hanson's Disease and they had treatment for it.

OK, maybe society has to protect itself from emotional lepers -- by rejecting the people who have been rejected and are therefore emotionally dysregulated. Maybe that makes it easier to understand -- it's not PERSONAL that people reject me. (Huh?)