Rings true for me, too. Only in my case, it was very disconcerting and confusing when I was numbed out and sometimes couldn’t feel my love for my relatives, so I am glad to be together/integrated so that I know that I love my daughter even when I am angry with her, and my sister even if, for the time being at least, we can’t be close.

Love does make me vulnerable, that’s true. But if/when I can know and acknowledge my own “underground” I feel like I’m less likely to be taken advantage of.

Color-blindness is an analogy that came to my mind and I also saw it recently in an online article about people who are born without empathy. I’ve appreciated what I’ve read here about how Atypical and Underground experience life. Different from me, yes. But as I’ve mentioned before, I’m different from the norm, too, and have experienced a lot of rejection for things I either couldn’t help or hadn’t had the (extra?) training/acceptance I needed in order to understand how to both be myself and fit in.