Dear Ryan:

Thank you for your empathy about me losing my post the other day and I am glad you took the precaution of using Word and coping the draft here.

Good to read that you will be working in therapy on unresolved issues regarding your mother. About using hypnotherapy to access memories from childhood, I learned that our memories of childhood events: what happened, who said and did what,  when, and where, these memories are unreliable. Some events are lost to us for good, other events that we remember happening in one evening, in reality happened on a few occasions over the period of a few years, and so forth. What I also learned is that it is not necessary to access memories of events,  emotional memory is way more reliable. A lot of the time your current emotional experience is the same as your childhood emotional experience, the ways you react to people and situations in your current life is often the same as the ways you reacted to similar people and situations as a child.

Congratulations for receiving a tentative offer for a job with a federal agency. If it is a better job than the one you have, I hope you take it. I am guessing the plan is that you move away from the small town where you currently live to a bigger city.

Regarding my suggestion that you judge your coworker a lot, I still believe that indeed you judge her a lot. I believe that you do so as a way to protect yourself from perceived rejection, and you have done so from the very beginning: in your original post Dec 5, 2020, right after the first date and her text where she rejected you as a romantic prospect, you wrote: “She isn’t without her flaws”.

From there on, you elaborated plenty on her flaws every time you felt that she rejected you, making the point (without stating it in this way) that she is indeed too flawed for you, and therefore her rejection is not a great loss for you. You are very, very sensitive to rejection and I believe, you see it where it is and where it is not, and you tend to over-react to perceived rejection.

This is what I believe, following communicating with you at length over time,  reading and re-reading your posts, incorporating new information into the old.

anita