Words

It's been a few days since Buffy's breakdown and already she is back to trying to pretend everything is fine, even though she knows I won't believe her. In a way I'm amazed at how well she's managed to reorganize her behavior to conceal her conditioning. It's not like it's not apparent that there's something very wrong but now that I know what to look for I realize that she is doing a much better job than I had previously realized... and in a way I've unknowingly helped her conceal it. Almost from the start I tried to establish some sort of routine to provide her with some stability, with a sense of safety, and she transformed that routine into a shield. By following it blindly she made it into something she could use to avoid making choices or expressing her own thoughts without us knowing it... and that has to change. I understand now why she won't say 'no', why she panics whenever she's forced to voice even the most basic choices and I know there's very little I can do to change that, at least for the time being, but that doesn't mean I can't find a way to work around it.

So far I've been trying to work against her conditioning, trying to force her to choose, to say 'no' and that was the wrong approach. She was taught obedience and that's going to be a difficult lesson for her to unlearn... I can't just order her to do it. For now my best bet is to turn that conditioning against itself by getting her to say 'yes' as she's been trained to do. It's not about forcing her to tell me what she doesn't want but about encouraging her to let me know what she does want. It's all about finding the right way to turn the words around to give her back her freedom, about helping her turn negatives into affirmatives and encouraging her to express those instead... and in a way she's already doing it.

This thing I'm now facing with Buffy may not be something I was ever trained to deal with but I was trained as a strategist. I should have remembered that the direct approach is not always the best when confronting a powerful enemy... and the fact that the enemy here has no physical form doesn't deny that fact, it actually reinforces it. Her conditioning cannot be confronted, it must be ambushed and that's what I intend to do.

Funny how after all this time, after thinking it over for months, it was a seemingly innocent exchange that showed me the way to turn this thing around. She asked me to stay and I told her I wasn't going anywhere... that was all it took. Her request was affirmative, my instinctive reply addressed the negative she couldn't bring herself to voice.

That is the key word here: voice... and it is also one of the things I kept pushing her to do. I wanted her to talk to me, to tell me things even though it was clear she wasn't ready. In the past our relationship was mainly verbal, up until she came back I rarely ever touched her. That has changed recently as she now relies on my heartbeat to ground herself whenever she is confused or disoriented but the change goes deeper than that. She can express herself with her actions but often balks at the words. I can tell her to get herself something to eat and she will do it, she will obey, not realizing that merely by opening the fridge and getting something out of it she's making a choice, but if I ask her if she prefers the chicken salad or the Chinese leftovers she freezes. Extrapolating those reactions to a wider context I can now see that while she is not ready to face the question 'do you want this or that?' a request or command along the lines of 'tell me what you want' is something she can handle... or at least it is as long as I'm careful not to phrase it as a question.

I am not deluding myself, I know where her ability to express what she 'wants' --to say 'yes'-- comes from. I know it comes at least partially from the fact that she was trained to ask for her own punishment and I hate it, but that ability is there and it is still something I can manipulate to my advantage... even if it sickens me.

The truth is that while her inability to deal with kindness --to even recognize a request as anything but an order-- pains me deeply, I can no longer afford to obsess over what she's not ready to do, that will only make matters worse. I have to shift my focus toward building on what she can do. I have to create situations that will encourage her to voice her non verbal choices without her knowing it until she is ready to do more than that. I have to find a way to help her tell me what she really wants and help her realize that she has nothing to fear from doing so. I also have to make sure she has a way out of those situations in case she feels too overwhelmed and at the same time I must try to help her rediscover who she used to be and what she used to enjoy so tomorrow I'll do something I have never dared to do. Tomorrow I'll be facing my utmost fears, the Lord have mercy on my soul 'cause tomorrow I'm taking her shoe shopping.