I know that for me the fear of being a nuisance was because it was always about my father's needs, and to a certain extent my mother's, my needs weren't important. When that is true, you get treated in such a way that when you make a need known, you will get some form of negative feedback. But the attachment is necessary to your survival and as a child you will protect it at all costs. So if something you do invokes a negative response, you learn to avoid it pronto.
So, your needs become something you must ignore in order to preserve your attachment. But how do you learn to ignore something so natural and insistent as your own needs? You get really scared of them. Nothing makes us avoid like fear. After doing that for years, even asking for the simplest things will invoke that response and make us feel like we're being a nuisance.
Essentially, we learned a lie long ago, that our needs were not legitimate, and we didn't deserve to have them attended to. Of course, it feels like we're going to get in trouble for expressing them. We probably did.
There's also an element of control involved in terms of the wanting to perform. If we're just good enough, maybe we can get what we need. Maybe if I could just fulfill all my parents needs (impossible though it may have been for the child that I was), maybe, just maybe, they would actually attend to mine. We believe we can only keep a relationship is we attend to the other person's needs and don't bug them.
It's an insidious lie but one that many people believe and have to fight hard to break. And then it still sneaks up on you.
And PL, I don't think you're cracked at all. My T gives me his business card with my next appt time on the back at the end of each session and sometimes I pick it up and run my fingers over where he wrote because I know he touched it. I feel like such a lovesick idiot sometimes. But this is primitive intense stuff. So if you are cracked you're hanging with the right crackpots.
AG