1. Zaire
“Would it be correct to say that the micro-dosing has been helping with some of the anxiety, Monique?”
“Just a bit, Dr. Booker. Not enough for me to want anyone to touch me, you know, touch me on my body. Just my hands for now. But I do like the feeling it gives me with I take one hit before leaving for work. I feel freer and less paranoid about the people on the bus sitting next to me.”
I nodded to reassure her that I was listening and added her update to her clinical notes. “That’s an improvement.”
Not hearing a response, I looked from my notebook and found her frowning down at her clasped hands. I’d been treating Monique for her anxiety related to human interaction and touch for over a year and while we’d made great strides, her tell-tell sign was hand clutching. When she was uncomfortable it became her crutch.
“You don’t see that as an improvement?”
“I don’t know how it can be. I want more and I want to be able to handle the touch of someone my heart wants.”
Touch was a vital part of human existence. Studies have been conducted on brain development rates in children based on the amount of physical contact made with them beyond necessary care. The babies held the most, tickled for play, and received any positive touch, showed signs of better social skills and self-soothing behaviors. The need for touch didn’t stop at infancy, however, and many thought that. Adults needed hugs just as much. The lack of healthy touch was one of the reasons I had a job.
“Have you considered something else is behind you not wanting the touch of the men you’re dating?”
There were still some things in Monique’s history that she hadn’t been willing to broach and I refused to rush her to it. She would get there in time.
“Like what?”
I shrugged. The possibilities were endless. It wasn’t my job to tell her what I suspected; not now anyway. There were aspects of her healing that had to come through self-discovery and rushing that process would make her more reliant on me. It was my job to guide her to her own answers so that she could rely on herself for them in the future.
“You always do this Dr. Booker. You never tell me what I want to know.”
I could hear the frustration in her soft voice. It was a frustration I was accustomed to when it came to this part of therapy. Often patients sought treatment for answers and my philosophy was that they would get them, but not from me.
“You know the answers, Monique. They are inside of you. My job is to help you discover them not just in session but in life.”
She nodded, seemingly to acquiesce because I had affirmed this many times before, and the proof of my method working is that when we started treatment she didn’t want to shake hands or hug, she was afraid of treatment being conducted in a closed-off room. We’d evolved from that because whatever she needed me to comply with to feel safe and secure, I honored her with, and in turn, she learned she could trust me as her therapist. Now, I had to get her to trust herself.
Her jumbo braids she wore fell in a cascade over her small brown face. “I suppose you’re right. I need to stop being so afraid of myself because I’m in charge of my own experience. You taught me that.”
“See, I do guide you, Monique…”
She cracked her first smile of this session. “Yeah, but I have to fight for it.”
“No one ever said it would be easy but I’m proud of you for fighting for you.”
“Thank you, Dr. Booker.”
“Anytime.”
The timer sitting on my desk sounded and I walked her to the door after she gathered her bookbag and purse off the couch beside her. Monique was a grad student at the local University and her sessions often fell in between her getting off work and heading to her evening classes.
“Remember what I told you earlier. Release the control you know you don’t have.”
I watched her until she rounded the corner to check out at the front desk and began to turn back into my office to complete my notes when a sassy voice said, “Finally someone who doesn’t reek of weed.”
A good percentage of my patients did consume weed. Some carried medical cards permitting them to purchase medical cannabis due to their anxiety, depression, or PTSD, but instead of following the letter of the law, they burned one before coming into session. It never bothered me. I was a professional but no stranger to lighting one up, especially in college. I only enforced the no smoking in the clinic policy. Monique was one of the few to vape or infuse her cannabis into oils and even her wine and never entered the building smelling like bud.
“I’m surprised you noticed with your nose so high up in the air, Nala.”
Dr. Jackson’s clients knew she wouldn’t approve of them smelling like weed, so they probably lit up after they left the sessions. I wanted to point that out but thought better of it. I’d rather her think her methodologies were somehow better and that listening to calming music and saying affirmations were all that was needed to heal. “Weed is from the earth. It was put here for you and me.” A wise man said that in the movie Friday and Smokey was right. Weed had medicinal properties whether smoked, vaped, consumed, or slathered all over the body. Weed was weed.
“Dr. Jackson to you, Dr. Booker.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Despite her snooty attitude when it came to marijuana, I’d still been looking forward to seeing her fat ass jiggle around the building today, but she’d been in sessions all morning. The huge pink tumbler cup with an apple green lid she had clutched in her hand told me she’d just filled it up with the spring water provided in the break room. She had gotten her nails done recently. They were a shade of soft pink that I would have associated with innocence. Nala was far from that despite the front she tried to put on with everyone else.
“That’s not how to talk to your colleague is it?” Her words were spoken through tight teeth. I smiled with pleasure knowing I could incite some reaction from her. It might not be the one I wanted right now but that would come.
“Was I your colleague last month, Dr. Jackson, or are we still acting like that didn’t happen?”
Her throat bobbed and she looked down at her cup with embarrassment.
That’s right! Settle the fuck down.
She collected herself and shook her head.
“Low blow, Dr. Booker.”
“Not as low as I want to go, Dr. Jackson, but since this is how you want it, I’m going back to what pays me.”
Her thick bouncy curls moved around her face as she shook her head in irritation before finally retreating into her office the way I knew she would.
Any mention of that late evening in the supply closet made her clam up tighter than her wet pussy and it was deliciously tight from what I could remember. The memory of pushing my fingers into her juicy flesh almost made me bum rush her into her office and beg for her to let me get some more but I had my pride after all. After the moment was gone and I finished sucking her sweet stickiness from my fingers, her senses came back to her I guess, and she decided all that shit she was talking about me being her fantasy, she didn’t want it anymore.
I would never pressure her or any woman for that matter, but I hated that we had to go back to pretending that I didn’t hear her whisper my name as I finished eating up her fat lips. That was some bullshit if you ask me. Just thinking about the taste of her on my tongue and the smell of pussy clinging to my beard on the way home that night, now had me stiff but I had a patient coming in twenty minutes which meant I needed to calm down and finish out my notes from my session with Monique. I needed to have a clear mind for Tabitha.
One of the challenging things about providing therapy that many therapists were beginning to speak up about is our need to deflate and have someone to talk to after listening to the issues plaguing our patients. It was nearly impossible to stay objective and unmoved after learning some of the reasons why people struggled with life and the human condition. Given I knew about the ways we go on to cope with pain and disorder, and some of those things being unhealthy, I made it my business to talk to someone outside of the clinic at least once a month to make sure I got out all the heaviness placed into my spirit. This brought me to one of the patients I’d been seeing since Dr. Patton opened this clinic in this community.
Tabitha’s issues were heavy, so heavy that I intentionally scheduled her to be the last session of the day so that I would have time to deflate before going home. I tried my best not to bring the terrors that my patients experienced home when I walked into my door. Sometimes it was inevitable, and I had to deal, but if I could help it, I would and that wasn’t always easy because they’d been through unspeakable things. Maybe that’s why I learned to be more patient with people, including Nala, because each person had a story and some of those stories could be filed under the thriller or horror genres. Those people had to overcome so much just to be able to sit in front of me and ask for help. Either way, it sometimes kept me up at night wondering about this world and why the people in it, seemed determined to hurt others, and then it made me reflect on some of my flaws and then I understood the cycle is just that hurt people hurt people until they heal and decide to heal people.
This is why Higher Pathways was created and opened here in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh. Dr. Patton felt that the people in the communities that were most underserved needed the most healing so when she received the grant to leave private practice where she made a shitload of money, she made it her mission to create a space that was about giving more, than it was about taking.
Last year, I was working in a local mental health hospital and found some of the methods of treatment boring, stiff, and not culturally sensitive if I was being truthful. Scrolling through Twitter, now known by the alphabet letter, I saw a video of a man recording a little bit of his music therapy session. Loud up-tempo and rhythmic music played while he swayed and bounced to the beat. He talked about how the two sessions with drums and the keyboard had pulled him out of a deep depression. His words slowed as his throat tightened with emotion. He spoke about how at the clinic, they accepted what little money he could spare and didn’t look down at him. His therapist, a dark-skinned woman with starter locs and cowrie shell jewelry adorning her ears and neck smiled and waved into the camera.
The next day I came in to see if more specialists were needed. Dr. Patton told me all her masters-level clinician spots were filled but she needed a few doctorate-level clinicians to provide supervision over the departments. I told her I’d just received my doctorate in Psychology the previous spring after already having had my master’s in counseling and my certifications in sex therapy along with four years of work in the field. Her smile spread across her mildly barely aging brown face. I ignored the resemblance she had to my mother and focused on the opportunity in front of me while I waited to hear if I got the job.
She hired me the following week after the background checks came back and the rest was history. I loved my time here and made long-lasting relationships with my colleagues, and most especially Dr. Patton. That was until four months ago when Nala Jackson came to work here to fill an opening left by Minnie Flagger, the Cognitive therapist who moved to California with her husband not long after she started. Unlike Minnie, whom I got along with well during her short time, Nala, was the only person in the building who could care less how wonderful I was. She seemed to resist everything about me except that one time.