I think I was buying time to know how to respond. She looked betrayed. I could plainly see that she felt ridiculed and shamed. She turned away from me and refused to finish telling the dream. I immediately and overwhelmingly regretted my response, but I knew its source.
Little girls have crushes on their fathers.
Intellectually I know that, but nevertheless my response was a gut reaction from a lifetime of negative conditioning. Expressing anything related to one's own sexuality was strictly verboten while I was growing up. I remember clearly two particular incidents from my early childhood. In the first I was playing with our collie, Babes. The whole family was in the room, laughing.