[DanaC]

Umm...Jack didn't seem to be saying Lauren was right to make that accusation. Just that it is understandable that her expectations may be skewed by past experience.

I can totally relate to that. As a kid I was bullied fairly relentlessly for most of my school life, because I had very severe and disfiguring eczema. Strangers used to stare at me. Small children on buses wuold ask their parents, in loud voices, 'what's wrong with that girl's face?'. As a very small child, I experienced the parents of other small children pulling their little ones away from me 'in case they caught it'.

When I was in my late teens/early 20s, though the eczema was no longer so apparent, and particularly not apparent on my face, if someone looked atme on a bus or in the street, it would never, in a million years have occurred to me that they might be looking because they thought I was pretty. Even if a lad looked at me, I'd assume he was looking because I was ugly, or because they could see the (by now very faint) signs of eczema.

It took me a long time to stop making that assumption of people.

You do become conditioned to the responses you've been used to from other people.