By 'not responding properly' I mean that I failed to internalize positive comments, or even to acknowledge them. My reaction to praise has been even worse. Several times when T did say that I had done something well, or was getting better, the next thing that I did was to confess to hurting myself. Since I insisted on punishing her for giving me praise, she stopped. I wasn't thinking it through, of course. Most of the time I had been really struggling for a while, and had been pretty self-destructive, but was afraid to tell her what I was doing. By the time I started to improve enough to get some encouragement, the self-destruction had already happened and the encouragement made it easier to trust her again, so I confessed. The effect of it was to negate any praise that I got with a display of not really being deserving of it. That is a pattern that I have been aware of for a while now and have been working on as much as I get the chance to, but I did it so many times that now I don't get that much praise and encouragement to react to.