Today we talked to Kriss (friend from England), and are still a little stunned. We were talking through IM and S came forward to “please” him. Usually Kriss gently calls her out on it when he sees it happening and S laughs it off before returning from whence she came. Today for some reason Kriss didn’t call her on it immediately – he didn’t engage in it, but just let her go for a little bit. Then just gently asked her a few questions, starting off with the biggie:
“Why do you think I want that?”
S at this point called him several uncomplimentary names and told him to stop messing around with her. But she stayed around, she didn’t disappear which is what she usually does when she’s spotted and not wanted around. S is 13 and thinks very much in generalisations – “all men want to hurt”, “all men want just one thing” etc. So when questioned she threw insults at him with a force. But then something changed and she was telling him things that happened and why they happened. Why the mother isn’t to be trusted and how people around us covered up the abuse.
S cried for the first time ever. It was two tears, but it’s the most she has ever cried. As a result she now hates Kriss – how dare he make her say those things and make her cry. Yes, she is 13 so will blame him.
We’re all stunned. He listened, he asked gentle questions and tried to show S that not all men want to hurt. After S left he needed a break – funny that. We needed to be sick. But he came back and kept talking to us. He had some pretty disgusting concepts thrown at him – no real details as far as I know, just general statements. But he still wanted to talk to us.
After we checked that he was ok and didn’t hate us, we tried to divert the conversation to something “normal” – fixing his sister’s car, his rough week at work etc. Well did that hack him off or what! He wanted to know why we didn’t tell him how we were, if we were ok, if we were safe. We didn’t give him the chance to ask those questions and he wanted to know why. It’s an easy answer – we mean nothing, we’re worthless, so why would anyone care if we were going through something rough. If we divert the conversation, it might help him forget that we’re damaged and what we’d just told him. Also because of the compartmentalisation, we had no real awareness of what was said. We knew secrets had been told because of the nausea, but no idea what they were. So it’s easier to distract than to look at the reasons why the nausea is there.
As an indication of how well he knows us now, he then said we had to talk it out before saying bye for the night or else we’d worry about it for three days :) Actually in this he was probably off – it would have been closer to a week, and by the end of the week we would have convinced ourselves that we had to run so our dirtiness didn’t touch him.
