More on Stephanie [Me]

I guess we can stop thinking of Stephanie as temporary. She doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But we aren't creating a separate space for her - she has been sharing space with Cherish, and it appears that is a good move for both of them. The two slaves sharing a room is working out fine.

She was out yesterday. It started with a shower, of course. We were taking a shower with Boss, and then next thing I knew we had switched. I knew it when I realized she was holding on to our left arm. I'm not sure when he realized it. But he had her wash him, and tried talking to her a bit.

I think she probably can talk, with some difficulty. It feels like the inside of her mouth is too big for the outside. I think maybe she has a speech impediment or a deformity of the mouth, or maybe an injury to her jaw at some point. I know she can make noise, and she can talk with Cherish helping her. But she 'knows' that if she tries to talk, the words won't come, and ugly noises will come out. She kept thinking "I'm not dumb." But in her origin time, dumb also meant mute, so I'm not sure which she meant - or both.

I've asked Boss to help teach her some sign language. Even if it's just pidgin sign-language that only works inside the family. We have some that we use. We have signs for when we play for safewords - 'red', 'yellow', and 'green' - and we use signs for 'water', 'coke', 'lie down'. I'd like her to learn 'master', 'bathroom','hurt', and something to indicate a safety concern, at the very least. I'd also like to see him use signs or touches to talk to her - 'come here', 'stay there', 'undress', 'pay attention', commands for her to understand. I feel like she could communicate better with hands than voice. Sound just doesn't 'click' well for her.

Touch, however, does work well - for all of us. Boss uses touchpoints to help us switch or to comfort us, some reinforced by suggestion under hypnosis. Holding our wrists tightly is calming, relaxing. Touching my nose is to bring out Stephanie, touching my left ear is a signal for Cherish. Tapping on my chest will drop me unconscious. Holding a hand on my chest will help me wake up. As a system, we've proved responsive to touch commands over audible or visual cues.

After the shower, Boss left Stephanie in the room for a while by herself. He told her to stay out and wait for him. For a long time, she just sat in one place on the bed. But when she started looking around the room, we urged her to investigate. She doesn't have any sense of the things in our room belonging to her. She touched some beads on the shelves, and then started touching the books. She doesn't appear to have any recognition of what books are. But she did enjoy running her hand (the right one) along the spines of the books, back and forth. I'm also curious about how she would react to stories on paper.

Another thing I noticed in the shower was that she was checking out our hands and arms, feeling distinctly detached from them because the skin isn't brown enough for what she expects. Not long ago, we did some searching through pictures to find someone that she feels she looks like. She got the best feeling from this picture here (-->) of a biracial teen.

Oh, and when she was washing Boss's hair, she had a sort of a flashback to several slaves washing each other's hair. She was much shorter, so I would assume younger, than the others, and the soap burned her eyes and nose. It was lye soap, being used to wash the bugs out of their hair, or else it had to be cut off. Apparently, Stephanie's hair had already been cut off, but she was helping to wash other people.