What do I do next? Part 3

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I want to hug her and I want her attention, but how do I do that without driving myself nuts?

Yep, painful. Sometimes WAW will "try on" being nice to us. Think of it like putting your toe in the pool. They want to see how it feels, try it on. They're also gauging your reaction and how "safe" it is to be nice to you without you smothering them.

Often, they will catch themselves being nicer or more affectionate than they meant to be, they'll get scared that you will now think everything is OK, and they'll retreat or be mean again to let you know you're still not back "in".

This is the roller coaster -- a little affection followed by ice, followed by affection, followed by ice. Really works you over if you don't understand what's going on.

Your job when this happens is to make it "safe" for W to be affectionate with you. How do you make it safe?

1) Don't escalate -- if she hugs you, don't kiss her in response, don't say "I love you", don't make any overtures that take things up a notch.

2) Let her lead -- if she hugged you yesterday, don't think that means you can hug her today, you can't.

3) Don't shine a spotlight on it -- don't point out that what she's doing is new, different, feels good, or anything. "Act as if" you expected it and it's just normal and no big deal. Let her hug you and be relaxed, don't tense up or pull back, just roll with it.

4) Don't expect -- Don't expect it to happen again. If it does, great, if it doesn't that's OK too. She's doing an experiment. She may want to experiment again and she may not.

If you approach this the right way, SOME people have found that the affection gets more frequent and slowly escalates. This is torture in its own way as once you feel you're starting to make progress you're going to want to race for the finish line.

Given how things are going, the fact that she hugged you is a good sign, she's thinking about being more affectionate. Don't read anything more into it than that.

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