I'm feeling better. I've stopped willing the ground to open up and swallow me whole. But, you know, it isn't as if I'm going to start researching heart defects now, embrace the horrible with gusto. I'll just wait and see, those medical texts will still exist after we get into the cardiologist and figure out what's the what.

Huckle's Good Therapist has me using my Dog Training Voice when asking Huck for compliance. She wants me to "teach him how to be parented properly." The last session made a lot of light bulbs go off -- even though I knew what we wanted to accomplish, the getting there, even the direction, was hard to figure out. So now, I am to be authoritative, clear, loud, firm, and kind. GT thinks that commanding respect will bond him to me more effectively -- he trusts Dog Training Voice, the DTV is consistent and dependable and might be worth believing in and handing over control to, whereas the Nice Mommy isn't trustworthy, can't be counted on, is easily manipulated, etc. (Not just me, though I do let him slide on some things because at times I may as well be begging him to be nice to me, but his mom fell into the same pattern of letting him run the show during their last reunification.) Dog Training Voice is good, so far. 36 hours into it, I'm going to consider putting this in the "breakthrough" category. Yay for observant GT, who also talked me through my fear of sounding mean while using DTV.