Thank you for the clarifications. On the large scale I do mostly agree with what you're saying here. Yeah we disagree on the finer details, and yeah it's still going to vary from situation to situation. I don't want to get off track here, so I'm not going to reply to every question you had.
I will close with my own experiences. To say my mom and father were religious is an understatement. Needless to say, they were not accepting either. When I was 16 I started to grow a backbone, and by the time I was 17 I was confident enough to disown my own father. By the time I got out of the Marines my confidence was solidified even further. I believe this sort of personal confidence makes a HUGE difference in getting others to accept me for who I am, even when they don't understand me. After all, when you don't know what you want, how can anyone else....
When I approached my mom about my diapering needs after I got out of the Marines she was still very much against it. I effectively told her that didn't matter any more. I knew by then they were a part of me, and if she was to accept me at all then she couldn't push me out of her life just because of that one part. There is still the rest of me, and I would always be her son no matter what. With that in mind, I asked her what would she gain from pushing me away of this one little part of me. Versus what she would loose for pushing the whole rest of me away at the same time.
I also made sure that I would be as discrete as I could with them, and that she in no way need to openly recognize them- let alone participate in some way. I continued on to explain what diapers meant to me, that they were neither illegal, immoral, nor hurting anybody at all- but they do help me greatly. Yeah it's an odd thing for sure, but the world has no reason to know, let alone care.
I know I went on for a good hour, and included a LOT more that I had written down before hand (though I didn't read any of it to her- maybe I should have). I also stopped at various points and discussed it with her and answered questions. By the end of our conversation I know my taking the lead absolutely helped. In the past she had always come to some worse case scenario conclusion, and by the end I had belated a great many of her fears and concerns. In the end, she also said she still could't understand why diapers meant so much to me, but she at least could accept this was just who I was. She didn't want me out of her life, but did want my compulsion for diapers gone. Since that wasn't possible for either of us, she had finally come to the next best conclusion of ignoring my diapers and focusing on the greater whole that is me instead.
So yeah, I know taking control of a situation absolutely "can" help. Will it, maybe only a slight bit, maybe not at all. But trying to pretend a bad situation you know will happen, isn't going to happen. Well that's next to a guarantee it will go bad. So I keep asking; what's better, a maybe that it might be a slight bit better, or giving up before it has begun with the certainty it will go bad?
