July 25, 2021:
"You want your home to be a fortress!"
She threw that at me like an accusation. Like a spear with a hard pointed tip of unanswerability. Triumphal in her eristic — definitive — precluding response.
This was her mode, through our entire time together. She combined pseudological manipulation with verbal aggression, where the pseudologic was like adolescent playacting at courtroom drama, and the verbal aggression was simply mean. Alternating on better days with charm, so that the dynamic as a whole reproduced that Pavlovian punishment-reward conditioning common in codependence.
"Yes," I told her. "Exactly. That's exactly what I want." I was serious. That was truth. It was unequivocal and factual and final. It was measured, unexaggerated, without dialectic. It was honest. I did want my home to be a fortress. Of course I wanted my home to be a fortress. I wanted to feel safe, except that with her inside the gates it felt like an occupied country.
Unsurprisingly, she stood, turned, walked away. Her argumentative mode was eristic — the type of victory-through-words which gave sophistry a bad name. Defeated, in this rare instance, through force of truth, she retreated in and into silence.