What did he say when you asked him if you could have therapy by email because you can't bear to look at him? I used to wish that I could have therapy by email for precisely that reason. Turns out that he is rather hopeless with the email medium, however. Bummer.

Yeah, I do tend to lose all censorship when I write. Partly because I tend to write at crazy hours (like three in the morning). Partly also because of the online disinhibition effect, no doubt.

I told him...

I remembered my earliest memory of feeling ashamed, you see. I really think that it is my earliest memory of intense, dysregulated shame. My mother tried to distract me from it instead of taking my feeling seriously and fixing it. It was that... She was big on letting/making me run around naked in public. I must have been 2 and a half or 3 or something like that. Starting to feel selfconscious. I remember crying and crying and crying and begging her to let me wear clothes. She would try and distract me so I'd stop crying rather than letting me wear clothes. I understand that you have to say 'no' to your kids sometimes, but my mother would say 'no' about things like that. I remember that I'd get distracted (eventually) then start running around and playing and stuff like that. And then... It would hit me all of a sudden and I'd start crying again. And she would distract me or whatever. Horrible horrible horrible. That feeling never went away.

I told him about that. Feel humiliated when I think on it, even. Ugh ugh ugh. My mothers bright idea was that the feelings of little people didn't really mean anything because they were so easily distractable from them. One habituates eventually I guess and so see, one doens't have to take their feelings seriously. Saving a little money from wear and tear of clothes on the one hand... Psychological trauma from unregulated humiliation on the other... For ****s sake. I bet she would be really very surprised that I'd remember that now. She had no idea, really. How sensitive I was... How easily scarred...