20 - Vera
I was just finishing up a report when Dylan entered his office accompanied by a tall, graceful female. She widened her eyes slightly upon seeing me and immediately straightened up, striking what I was sure was her professional, defensive pose.?
“Here we are!” young Dylan beamed at me and my heart warmed at how far he’d come since I'd first met him. “Dr. Jackson, this is Luna Regina Haines.”
“Hello, Luna,” I bowed my head slightly in respect and could immediately tell she wasn't someone who enjoyed the gesture.
“Dylan, please. What am I Luna of exactly?” she frowned at him and then turned to me. “Please call me Regina, dr. Jackson.”
“You’re the Luna of my heart,” Dylan exclaimed dramatically, and I exchanged an amused glance with Regina. “Well, I have patients to see so I'll let you two get on with it. Feel free to use my office for as long as you want. Vera, we’re still on for lunch later?” I nodded. “Great. See you later!”
After he left, Regina’s jaw tightened almost painfully. She looked around the room, unsure of what to do, but she soon selected a chair across from me and sat down, motioning for me to do the same. I was somewhat amused at how she attempted to take control of the meeting.
“I must confess I have no idea about the kind of healing you do. Dylan speaks very highly of you, though, and I want to thank you for making the trip here so quickly. I don’t know where you normally reside?”
“I teach at the Medical School of the Shifter University in Massachusetts, and that’s where I live,” I told her and she seemed impressed by that. “No need to thank me, though. I rarely get the chance to meet a fellow mate killer, so I practically jumped on it.”
If she had been drinking something, Regina would have spat it out at my words. Her lips turned almost white and her throat quivered. I caught her off guard. Good.
“Did I hear you right?”
“Yes, unfortunately. My mate, Nicholas, had a rare neurodegenerative disease that affects less than 0.001% of shifters. He begged me to help him go when it was time, he said he was a wolf and he didn’t want to live like broccoli,” I smiled and sadly noted that the memory didn’t hurt so much anymore. “So I helped him.”
“You’re not a murderer,” Regina said with her fists clenched and her eyes wet.
“And you are?”
She seemed taken aback by the question, but there was a brief flash of guilt in her eyes that told me all I needed to know. Long before Dylan had contacted me about helping her, I’d read and re-read her trial transcripts so many times that I now knew them by heart. Yet, no analysis of the written word could replace simply watching her delicate features contort themselves in self-loathing. It was clear, three minutes into our conversation, that this female carried a tremendous burden on her young shoulders.
“As for the healing I do, it is the healing of the mind, through conversation primarily. Some wolves need the help of pharmaceuticals, but with your history of substance use and abuse, I think we’d better steer clear of that unless absolutely necessary.”
Again a brief flash of guilt. Again unwarranted.
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Okay, so maybe I'll tell you a bit about the work I do, and then you can ask me more about it afterward if you want?”
“That would be great,” she nodded, her whole body still rigid and on guard.
“After killing my mate,” she flinched slightly at my intentionally tactless and incorrect description of events, “I was in bad shape for a long time. That was twenty years ago. After several extreme episodes, I was sent to a big hospital far away from my then-pack, where I received therapy and counseling for the first time. It was life-changing. When I was well enough, I realized that I would like to do the same for others who were struggling.”
I was looking through the window as I spoke, but from the corner of my eye, I could see her leaning towards me, drawn in by my words.
“So, I spoke to my healer and she recommended going to study in the human world.”
“Wow, you lived among the humans? How was it?”
“Smelly,” I laughed, scrunching up my nose, and she joined me. “And loud. I actually had to do half of my program online – the laptop was less upsetting than being in the human world but harmful in a different way, so I alternated between the two.”
“Did you have a lot to learn from them?”
“I did. They devoted much more time to the study of the mind than we did. We rely on our wolf for many things, but in situations such as mate death, the wolf’s suffering actually becomes debilitating and drags the human down with it as well. What this form of therapy does, in a nutshell, is it gives you the tools to steer you into more positive or validating thoughts, to stop maladaptive patterns of thinking,” I saw Regina frown slightly, so I quickly clarified, “meaning thoughts that interfere with your daily living or ability to adjust to particular settings. It can also help individuals identify distorted thinking patterns, and change the thoughts that lead to bad feelings. So overall, it helps you feel better and improves your health, well-being, and quality of life.”
“That sounds awfully simple,” she said nonchalantly to mask her distrust of my words.
“It does, doesn’t it? Almost too good to be true,” I smiled at her. “Yet nowhere in my explanation did I say it was easy to achieve all that. In order to change those thoughts, one must identify and manage triggers, build healthy coping skills, and reduce feelings of anger, frustration, sadness, and guilt. Does any of that sound simple?”
“Not at all,” she replied quietly. “How would one do all that?”
“I would be your guide on that journey. First, we would work on establishing your goals for this process and determine what you'd like to see as the outcome of therapy. Then, you would need to gain a sense and understanding of the traumatic events that you’ve gone through, a realistic one,” I added as she opened her mouth to undoubtedly tell me she did have an understanding of what she had gone through.
“Sometimes we cannot see things for what they are if we are standing in the middle of them or too close to them. Sometimes a complete picture is visible only when taking a step back and observing from a distance.”
“Like not seeing the forest for the trees?”
“Exactly. Then, I would like to help you process those traumatic events, grieve your losses, forgive yourself, and give you the tools to live the rest of your life without fearing that something similarly awful would happen again.”
She blew out a breath and, for the first time since Dylan left the room, let her shoulders relax a bit.
“I’m not trying to be difficult -” she was clearly choosing her words carefully, the way a diplomatic Luna should. That was the first thing that needed to go in therapy, she'd have to be honest and direct. “I just – I don’t see how you could help me do all of that.”
“Regina, imagine your mind as a thick jungle. Your thoughts move through your head all the time, and if they always walk the same way, the bushes and branches on it get broken, trampled, or removed, thereby creating clear pathways that allow them to travel through the jungle. Now, if every day you think something like “I don’t deserve to be happy,” then that path gets used regularly, thus getting bigger and wider, whereas the rest of the jungle continues to grow. So when your brain needs to move a thought from one place to another, the “I don’t deserve to be happy” path becomes easiest because that’s the clearest and widest path in the overgrown jungle.
After a while, normal thoughts start traveling down that path as well, which is what causes negative feelings and anxiety. Therapy would help your thoughts clear new paths in that jungle, by slowly and persistently forcing them to travel through a different path than they normally do. With time, at least part of your thoughts would go down the “I do deserve to be happy” path, and over a longer period of time, you’d slowly clear out a new path for your thoughts. In short: time, effort, and patience can achieve a lot.”
We sat in silence for a while as she mulled my words over.
“How long would the therapy take?”
“There is no fixed time frame for this type of healing, every patient has his or her own timeline. I can offer you three months of my time, and at the end, we'll see where we are with our progress.”
“Why would you do that?” she looked at me with those forest-green eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful,” always grateful, always polite, “but I’m sure you have much more pressing work to do.”
“I have three reasons for doing this. One is that you are absolutely worthy of love, help, and care, and there is no work more pressing than helping a fellow living being.”
I paused for a moment to let those words sink in as she chewed on the inside of her cheek, probably to stop herself from crying.
“The second reason is that this is how I am honoring the memory of my mate, through helping wolves who are in pain, which you are.”
Pause.
“And the third reason is that I see parts of myself in you,” I said and took off my glasses to blur my vision. I’d never shared so much of myself with a patient before. “The shame, the guilt, blaming yourself, the loss and the devastation, I’ve lived it firsthand and I know how it feels, which makes my urge and need to help you even stronger.
But in order for therapy to work, you have to decide if you can trust me enough to let me in. I know this is a big ask, and I know that your sense of trust has been severely eroded, but I hope you can see and feel my honesty and openness.”
I could hear her heart accelerating at my words, and I knew she’d made a split-second decision.
“I trust you,” she blurted out. “I don’t know why. Maybe because you’re the only person I know who’s been through something similar, maybe it’s your eyes, they’re so kind – I just – I do trust you, and I would like your help.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
“Wonderful. I suggest meeting twice a week for now and we’ll see how it goes. The first sessions can be raw and I would like you to have enough time to recover emotionally between them.”
“Alright.”
“Do you have any questions for me?”
“Do I need to prepare somehow?”
“Not really. For some sessions, I’ll ask you to consider a particular issue or to read some materials. There will also be some journaling if you’re up for it?”
“I’d love that, I’ve always loved writing in my journal.”
“Perfect. I’ll also ask you to write lists and letters occasionally,” I said, taking out my journal and opening the page for this week.
“For our first session, which we can schedule for - tomorrow morning if you’re free?” I looked up at her, and she nodded. “At nine?” Another nod.
“Okay,” I made a note in my journal and then continued, “so, for the first session, I’d like you to write a list of the goals you’d like to achieve in therapy. They can be as specific or as general as you want them to be. You can write down one goal or a hundred, the important thing is that they’re yours, okay?”
“Okay,” she seemed a bit excited now.
“And lastly, would you consent to our sessions being recorded for my files? The recordings would be labeled with a patient number only until the end of our time together, then I would have them transcribed for my records, after which they’d be destroyed.”
“It’s alright, I guess. I mean, I testified about everything in front of all the Alphas in the country, so - ” she shrugged as she trailed off.
“I would still respect your refusal, you know? You may have testified about what happened, but you had to in order to defend yourself from criminal charges. Also, you mostly discussed events, not personal fears or feelings. I get the sense that you hate disappointing people, but I need you to be honest with me if this is something that you are not okay with.”
“Does the recording device bother us like other electrical devices do? That's actually what I’m most worried about.”
“You wouldn’t believe how long I’d searched for the perfect one! Trust me, it’s the least invasive device I could find – it sounds as if there was a fly on the other side of the windowpane, trying to get in. A low buzz at its worst, and after a while you get used to it.”
“Okay, great. That’s settled then.”
“Thank you, Regina, I’m looking forward to our session tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Dr. Jackson. See you tomorrow.”