Quote Originally Posted by Serpentine View Post
That fits my mental image of how the question might typically come to be asked. And in that case, I at least tend to find specific concrete examples most believable, although wrapping it up in the general is a nice addition.
That's generally my approach. There's a reason I identified this as jerkbrain activity, and it's at least partially because it's the sort of tactic mine liked trying. It didn't get to the vocalization stage, but it did successfully convince normalbrain that nobody would ever take an interest in me and as such anything I was interpreting as signs of interest (which ended up including some extremely overt stuff that I was later explicitly told was overt signs of interest) I was misinterpreting, and that instead they were some other thing, with whatever rationalization it took to make that happen. Granted, I have a particularly hostile jerkbrain which has made an assassination attempt on me, but the point stands.

That particular question? That really looks like the sort of thing that tends to come up immediately after a big insecurity spike, whether it's of the "you have no worth, this person is dating you out of pity" variety or the "maybe you're just a fraud who conned them into liking you" variety, or one of the other fun jerkbrain weapons.