She looked him over and thought for a second before responding. He had been good to her, that was true, she still didn’t know what he wanted, and until she did, she was a little bit wary of saying everything that was on her mind.

“I don’t know why I told you. It just ended up making everything worse,” she responded.

He felt the urge to rush in and defend himself, but then immediately thought better of that idea. He knew she had more to say, and that by allowing for a little silence she would eventually verbalize the conflict that was going on inside of her.

“The thing was,” she went on. “Other kids were starting to tease me in school, saying I was in love with my dad, and it was making me really mad. I only told one person about it and suddenly everybody in the school knew. It used to make me so mad sometimes I would come home screaming, which is why I had to see you I guess. I don’t know what is wrong with my dad loving me, but everyone else seemed to have a problem with it, so I guess there must be something I don’t know.”

He looked at her and felt an intense pang of sadness, a part of him looking into her soul and seeing nothing but heartache in her future as a result of these mistaken beliefs about sexual betrayal. It would be an incredible undertaking to undo the damage that had already been done to her very impressionable young psyche, and he knew that to challenge her feelings at this point may have the very unfortunate side affect of making her feel an intense experience of shame.

The father-daughter relationship is complicated. A strong attachment to the father in youth could be predictive of so many things in a girl’s later romantic choices, yet in Kim’s case this attachment had been poisoned by repeated sexual assault. Would she ever learn to trust a man after this? She was already beginning to wear the scarlet letter of shame from her father’s activities with her classmates, and he knew from experience that this would be something that would continue to get worse.

“It seems like a part of you might not have been ready to have sex yet though,” John said gently. “You’re a really smart girl, I have always been very impressed by the great comments you make about things, but you also should get to enjoy a few more years of being a kid. Don’t you think? Am I wrong about that?”

“Well I never fit in with al the other kids, you know that. I always had the wrong clothes, the wrong house, the wrong toys, the wrong everything. Being the first one to have sex made me feel like there was something just for me. That there was something the other kids couldn’t have yet,” she explained sadly.

“Well let me tell you something honey, there’s a lot you have that the other kids don’t have yet. For one thing you’re one of the brightest kids I’ve ever worked with. I want so bad for you to grow up and do good things. The way you’ve handled all of this tells me you have an amazing ability to survive, I hope we can continue to talk, and maybe one day we can figure some more of this out,” he said resolutely.

With that she began to cry, softly at first and then in sobs. So much pent up emotion flowed out of this little girl, that he could barely contain his own tears, and soon he was crying with her. It wasn’t the best intervention he knew, but somehow he also knew it might be therapeutic for her to see that he was also vulnerable to. His words of encouragement to her had been something she clearly craved very badly. In working with children, John always reminded himself that, in the words of one of his favorite therapists Rudolph Dreikurs, Children “craved encouragement, like plants crave water.” He knew it was true, and it was his default mode not just with children, but with all of his patients.

They began the slow walk back to her knew house saying very little. At one point Kim tried to hold his hand, and he felt awful about having to tell her he didn’t think this was a good idea. She wanted to feel safe very badly, that was clear, but she had also embedded the idea that she had to reward this safety by providing sexual pleasure. It broke his heart.

As they reached her doorway she began to cry again, but this time he knew he had to be strong for her.

“I want you to hang in there my friend. You are one of the toughest girls I know and I am so proud of the way you’ve handled this. By the way I hear you have been going to a new school. How is that going? Have you made any new friends? “He asked curiously.

“Well it’s a relief that no one there knows about me and my dad. There is this one teacher who had been really, really nice to me. She told me a secret that she knows how I feel and that I could talk to her about anything that I wanted.”

John felt a sharp pain as she said this and then thought about what this feeling really was. It wasn’t pain exactly, but more like a murmur in his heart that made him feel short of breath.

“Umm Kim, what is your teacher’s name?” John asked, trying to mask his anticipation.

“Mrs. Corcoran,” she said.

“But she said I could call her Stephanie when we were alone.”