"My acute backlash is very, very strong. The way it works for me is that I get to the nearly-unbearable levels of the psychological symptoms very quickly, and then if it gets sublimated into the delayed form they get more manageable. But that means that right after dungeons I would always be—always am—very passive and apathetic and uninterested in anything, and since that's when I'm getting guided and seeing them most closely..."

Which isn't the whole story but, again, he is not comfortable telling a stranger the whole story yet. Even if that may make it... harder... to help him. But if this therapist can't handle that then they're not gonna have a great time together, are they.

(He notes to himself that this kind of defeatist attitude is not doing him any favours. He'll think about it later. Maybe with Haru.)

"Hm, that does sound difficult - it's not a problem with your current partner so far?"

"I'm more compatible with him than I've been with any prior partner, which helps. And—his backlash is also psychological, right, and he has a—reasonably healthy relationship with it, which extends to mine. He doesn't hold my backlashed self against me."

"Do you feel like you want to control him, or is he an exception?"

"—I don't want to control other people." For some reason the thought is almost offensive, to him.

"Control his reaction to you?" she amends.

Hmm.

"I did. At first. But not anymore. He got to see a lot of, uh, me, and he wasn't put off by it and didn't want to leave, so I don't really... have to?"

"Was that a relief, that he wasn't put off?"

"Not at the time, it was more—surprising, I wanna say. Unexpected? Novel? And it made me want to—invest more. Plus the guiding was so much better than my previous partners that I didn't want to lose him. Which made me more worried at first and less worried later."

"Less worried later, how so?"

"Because if he likes me without me having to manage it directly then there's less possibility for my fuckups to ruin it."

"Would you feel you worry about ruining things a lot?"

He huffs a bit self-deprecatingly. "Yeah."

"Is that the main thing that tends to worry you or are there more patterns?"

"It doesn't always get as bad as ruination but the theme that I might make a mistake that will do irreparable or at least very-hard-to-repair damage to a relationship is consistent."

(What even happened to his vocabulary use and speech patterns! He didn't use to talk like this before!!!)

"Relationships in particular?"

"Broadly construed. In the sense that covers image and perception and intuition."

"Has that happened before, a relationship being hard or impossible to repair?"

"I'm pretty sure my relationships with all of my past partners are impossible to repair. Not to be a cliché but so is my relationship with my father, though that one I will claim very little credit for ruining, the man did most of the work himself."

"Oh?"

"My father is Kang Jaehyuk from Kang Moon-il group. I'm his only heir, and he had very specific expectations of me, including the assumption that he would be the one to decide whom and when I'd marry like his father did for him, as well as that I would be always mindful of how my actions reflect upon the family name. If you've ever read those light novels or manhwas with rich magnate parents fucking up their kids, they're almost a textbook description of our relationship."

"I'm afraid I haven't. It sounds like you've managed to avoid at least most of those constraints affecting your adult life."

"Except for the obvious ways in which they've caused me to have control issues and lack affection in my life and all of those chewy things, yes."