Hey Pegasus, nice to see you too :-)

I was reading a lot last night. Therapist asked me how come I wasn't more playful / fun etc. So I started googling to find something that might resonate. Ended up with 'shame' as a key word. I found this article that was talking about three different ways in which someone can come to feel really very ashamed.

One was to identify with the shame that ones attachment figure/s carry. If ones parent feels a lot of shame and does the projection thing (building themself up by belittling another) then one can feel belittled and come to identify with the attachment figure/s projected feeling of shame. I don't think... That that is what happened with me. Maybe that happened for you?????

I don't think my mother or father were ashamed of me...

They were... Very caught up in their own pain, I think. And... I couldn't save them from it. So... Feel inadequate, I guess.

Misattunement... I guess I thought that there was something very wrong with me that resulted in that feeling of misattunement. My mother thought it was my fault. I guess I thought... That it must have been. That there was something very wrong with me indeed. That I couldn't promote happiness all round.

It isn't something that I want to own... But attributing it makes the best sense of some of my behaviour (refusal to look at therapist, intense fear that I'll see disgust / rejection / condemnation, lack of initiative and playfulness and flirtatiousness and fun). I can't think what other attribution would explain all that... Of course I can attribute it to my Mother and Father... I can attribute it to their behaviour and their responses / reactions to me. But I guess I needed to internalise / be affected by their responses / reactions. If I own it... If I own it as something inside of me (however it got there) then I can take some responsibility for it and work on changing it, I guess.

> Playful, spontaneous and fun- that's a childhood thing for sure. As a child I wasn't allowed to have fun, maybe the same for you.

I'm not sure what acerbic means...
I'm trying to have more fun, too. I guess... I do have fun now. Happy moments with other people. I'm not as slapstick as others tend to be, however. Other people have fun showing off / playing up to cameras and the like. Silly dancing etc. I always feel a little foolish... Tend to watch rather than participate. I guess... Gently does it.

> I don't know anything about the flirtatious bit though.

Yeah. I guess there is a difference between overdoing it and having a little harmless fun with it. It is a way of expressing... Liking, I guess. I'm not really. This struck me because my current bf was saying to one of the other people here (who actually looks rather similar to me initially) that we couldn't be more different. One of the things he said was that I wasn't flirty at all. He didn't know whether I liked him / really enjoyed his company or not. It was weird how we figured that in the end... But, yeah, I see how flirtateousness can help in those kinds of social interactions. Fun. Enjoyment. Harmless. What do I fear? Rejection. Humiliation. Jeepers those negative emotions rule my life...