Chapter 2

We return to Bethany's session with Dr. Cohen, where she had just relayed some version of the preceding events.

"Thank you for sharing that report with me, Bethany." Dr. Leo Cohen turned the laptop on his desk around so that its display was visible to the fourteen-year old girl. "Now you are familiar with this readout – it is a multigraph of the biofeedback measurements communicated wirelessly from the headband, armband, and waistband you are now wearing, just as in all of our sessions together.

"Do you see this significant blip upward here ... and here ... and then I think you can probably make this one out, as well? Those correspond to moments when, while telling me your story, you felt a – shall we a say a 'twinge' – of sexual arousal. Arousal that you failed to mention, but nonetheless felt. Am I right?"

"Um, well, yeah, but I didn't tell you, 'cause it had nothing to do with what I was talking about at the time. It had nothing to do with yesterday, with Don face-fucking me in the family room."

"Ah, I beg to differ, Bethany, and if you will allow, one of us has slightly more expertise in these matters than the other. Privately circulated scientific literature, my own research, and several years of clinical experience tell me that in fact when a subject exhibits arousal during the retelling of an episode, those signals correspond temporally – that is to say, come at the exact point in the storytelling – when the subject had similar feelings of arousal or gratification during the actual event being recounted."

"So?"

"So you are improving, my dear! You are allowing yourself to experience pleasure in the course of your, um, 'unavoidable' intimate interactions with your stepfather."

"But ... no way, that's impossible. I hate it when he makes me do stuff. I hate him!"

"Perhaps that's true, in sum total. But there are aspects of those experiences that part of you doesn't hate. The part of you that is a healthy, young, female mammal. One that has reached sufficient sexual maturity to breed successfully, at least if we still lived in a hunter-gatherer society, that is. Our civilization has evolved significantly since the Paleolithic era, but our biology has hardly changed at all."

"So, your program here makes me dumb down to like a cave girl or something?"

"Oh, not at all. As I've explained before, the human brain is designed to deal with stress. In the modern era, our sources of stress are everywhere, mostly the result of cultural constructs – intangible fears and anxieties that stem from abstract concerns like money, spelling tests, twitter accounts. Our treatment process, therefore, is initially one of training you to control your brain's reaction to these stress impulses, to reduce their impact upon you. We accomplish this by training you to effectively employ biofeedback. This strengthens your intellectual powers; it certainly doesn't diminish them. During your first week – that is, for your first three sessions – you watched a video that I asked you to select and bring with you."

"I brought 'Pitch Perfect'."

"That's right. And as you watched it, whenever the system read anxiety or distraction going on – the system can detect that in your brain waves, with a little help from your breathing, pulse and blood pressure, all detected by those bands you are wearing – when it read that stress, it started to shrink the screen size of the video you were watching. You learned that you could dismiss the distracting anxiety and return the screen to full size. We practiced that over three sessions that first week."

"Yeah, it was weird ... the anxiety came at odd times, not when the movie was stressful, but out of nowhere."

"That's right. Free floating anxieties. They can be very debilitating. Some professional athletes use a similar treatment to improve their 'head game.' I beg your pardon – that unfortunate pun was unintentional – I don't intend to make light of your situation. In any case, like those professional athletes, you learned to master those random intrusions of stress and anxiety, and by the third session you were reversing those 'attacks' practically before they got started.

"In the second week's sessions, you will recall that the system played another movie you chose, it was something with a young Lindsey Lohan in it – now there's a girl who could have benefitted from my treatment, had she received it early enough in her career – but no matter, during that week, while your video played, the system inserted subliminal imagery, at random, right into the visual display."

"It wasn't subliminal – I noticed them."

"That's alright. You noticed some of them. The technical definition of 'subliminal' is that the insertion is detected no more than fifty percent of the time. For this biofeedback regimen, we like to be right on that edge. Sometimes you will notice the stimulus you are reacting to, sometimes you won't. But you will react, regardless."

"Well, I sure reacted, at least at first."

"Yes, you did. During this phase, we were no longer working on free floating, randomly arriving anxiety cues. We were introducing cues, in this case short images or clips of hard core pornographic material."

"Yeah, my video screen shrunk fast at those."

"That is hardly to be wondered at. After all, you have, for the past several months, been the repeated target of your stepfather's rather 'hardcore' molestation. Since that experience initially shocked you, and occasioned stress and anxiety in your adolescent psyche, the stark reminder of your sexual use by way of the porn inserts naturally triggered those reactions in you. Do you remember how you mastered that response, however, with the biofeedback training?"

"Yeah, by the third session, the screen never shrank. And I think I actually noticed more of the random cues, too."

"That's right. There were more of them each session, and they remained on the screen longer. I increased their 'liminality, ' in technical terms. Well, what you probably didn't notice is that the porn imagery selected all contained young girls who looked something like you, engaged intimately with much older men, men who more or less shared your stepfather's general phenotypes."

"Phenotypes?"

"Physical characteristics. They looked like him -- build, hair color, size and condition of genitalia."

"No, I didn't notice that then, but it makes sense you picked them that way, considering the next week."

"Now you're following me. Yes, for the next week, the generic porn was replaced by subliminal flashes of your stepfather himself. His face, his body, his turgid penis, him stroking his penis, his penis coated in his masturbatory spend. Naturally, being so concerned about your treatment, he was happy to provide that material."

The cute middle-schooler snorted at that, and blushed slightly. The doctor smiled at her, with an avuncular air, before continuing.

"You really reacted to those images with negative anxiety flashes, but yet again, by the third session that week, you were able to use your biofeedback training to reject anxiety, even in reaction to prolonged displays of your stepfather's erect penis – the very instrument of your molestation – filling the video screen, for several seconds. And this despite your own report that throughout this treatment period, your stepfather was continuing his unwelcome penetrative abuse, using your delectable young body for his sexual gratification several times per week"

"Yeah, Don kept right on fucking me, almost every day. Or face fucking me. So what if I'm in treatment – he doesn't care about that if it gets in the way of his 'pumping a load into me' as he puts it."

"Oh, about that, I'm afraid I'll have to beg your forgiveness, but Don's continued sexual depredations were fully encouraged by me, as part of the process. Admittedly, he didn't need any convincing. But it is really for your own good that this treatment regimen proceeds with all the required protocols. One of those protocols is that the experiences that brought you into treatment continue, unabated.

"But about that, let me ask you to recall – didn't you report to me, even then, that those experiences were actually less horrible and revolting, from your perspective, than they had been before?"

"Yes. You said the biofeedback was helping with that."

"Indeed ... indeed it was, as it has with all of my patients, my dear. So, last week, we moved on to the next phase. Don – I mean, your stepfather – was kind enough to provide additional material for subliminal insertion, material that included you."

"Yeah, fuck, I didn't even know he was taking those. Well, at least most of them. He took some phone shots, stills and clips, of me looking up at him with his cock in my mouth, I knew where those came from. But the shots and clips of him fucking me, those must have come from the camera on his laptop. He set it up to record us."

"Yes, most probably. Except your favorite bit; that one must have come from his phone, too, since it clearly was shot from your stepfather's point of view."

"My favorite bit? What are you talking about? I didn't have any 'favorites'. How can you think that! Gross."

"Science, my dear. Measurement." He tapped the laptop again, which continued to scroll three biometric graphs of the processed readings emanating from the apparatus she wore about her smooth brow, her flat tummy, and her pale upper arm. "I can, and did, immediately identify which cue produced the least negative reaction in your brain and nervous system – in fact, this particular insert produced a positive reading right from the start – prior to any specific biofeedback conditioning at all. Would you care to guess what imagery led to an immediately positive response?"

"I have no idea."

"Now Bethany, this system isn't designed to act as a lie detector, but I can easily read prevarications as blatant as that one in these graphs. You certainly do know which imagery was so positive for you. Now describe it to me ... it will help you move forward."

"Um, well ... was it the one from his point of view, the video action, of him going into me?"

"Going into you how?"

"From behind?"

"Yes? Describe it more fully, please."

The eighth-grader's face was beet red. "It's from above. Of my back, and my ... my butt. I'm on my hands and knees. You can see my hair, but not my face, 'cause it's from behind."

"Yes, that does describe your pose quite well. What else is happening in that clip?"

"Don is fucking me. Not in my ass, in my pussy. I can see him going in and out."

"Yes? Tell me about his movements, his actions. Be specific, try to tell me what is happening in the clip that makes you like the 'scene' so much."

"He ... he is pulling out, slowly. Almost all the way. His long cock slides out of me, and it's shiny with my ... my juices. He leaves just the head inside me. Then he pauses, like he's making me wait for it. Then he slams back in, hard, deep. He just keeps doing that, over and over again, practically knocking the wind out of me. Pounding me good."

"And why do you think you liked that video clip?"

"I don't know. I just did, I suppose."

"You don't expect that you responded to the video clip because it recalled to you real-life experiences that you have actually enjoyed?"

"I don't think so..."