I think I'm making progress. Long story short the P term was too low at 1.
I was probing like this. -.8V was after a few turns of the handwheel, maybe .8" of axis displacement.
I've increased P to 20 and now if I turn the hand wheel I get some resistance. The farther I turn it the more resistance I get. I got the REF voltage up to 6V. Is there a limit to how high P should go? Is there another way to scale the REF output?
EDIT: I originally mistakenly type DIR instead of REF, I'm editing it for future readers