Confidence, part II

So I know all the things I said in that previous post are true. I know my Daddy, Paw-Paw, and brothers love me. (Mommy, Granny, Grandma, and sisters, too) I know they don't just love me because they changed my diapers (or in the case of Nettie, I changed hers). I know I'm smart, not hideously ugly, kind, loyal, easy going, thoughtful, etc. (I sound like a Labrador Retriever) I know all these things but I don't always believe them.

I had a therapist once tell me that I needed to stop focusing on the past so much (Stop me if I've told you this before). I never understood exactly what she meant. It seemed that mainly she was telling me to stop expecting what had happened in the past to happen again. How do we build our expectations for social interactions than by building on past experiences? I tend to down play the good and focus on the bad but even when I take this into account my past doesn't look so rosy. I know the people I meet now are not self-centered adolescents but I don't know how else to expect people "my age" to behave. I've hardly been around any in the last 10-12 years.

I said I hope things will be better. I do. I just hope that somehow one day it will be different, like magic, because I don't know how to make it different. Meanwhile it is exhausting to wait to fail, again.