This office wasn’t as intimidating as I’d been expecting, but it still had a few features that made it very distinctly a therapist’s space. A few posters of therapeutic frameworks speckled the walls, in between landscape paintings. Large, waxy-leaved plants sat in strategically-placed pots.
Most of all, she had that clipboard on her lap. She was ready to assess me, to note down everything wrong with me and boil it down to one precise diagnosis.
In my case, probably PTSD.
“Is anyone ever pleased to be here?” I had to clear my throat again after.
Dr. Jalisco reached into a discreet mini fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, passing it to me. I chugged half of it, but my throat was still desperately dry. My fingers dug into the flimsy plastic, collapsing one of the sides.
“It all depends on the person. Some are.”
“I’m not one of those people.”
She didn’t press for more information or say a single word. The silence spoke for her, coaxing my secrets out of me.
“What if I talk about what happened and it makes everything worse?” I blurted out eventually. “I’m doing fine now. I don’t need to be fixed.”
“I’m not here to fix you, Talia.” Her tone was achingly kind. “We can talk about whatever you’d like, whether or not it’s related to the incident that brought you here.”
My entire body stiffened at the mere mention of it. Without my alphas grounding presence, Benjamin rose up like a phantasmal force in my mind, taunting me.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I whispered.
She didn’t say anything. I was hyperventilating. Focusing on my breathing for a moment, I got it back to normal with a monumental effort and tried to pretend I was fine.
“A momentary lapse.” I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Aren’t you going to ask me questions? Assess me?”
“It’s best if the patient leads in sessions like this. I’m not testing you for anything,” she explained. “Sometimes, I have to go through diagnostic questionnaires to determine if a patient is a candidate for medication, but today I’m less psychiatrist and more therapist. Would you like me to explain why I think we should talk about your experience, even when you’re doing fine?”
I already had an inkling.
I was a nurse, for fuck’s sake. There was some amount of training in mental health involved in my profession, and I’d done extra study into therapeutic methods on my own time.
When it was applied to me, all my knowledge went out the window.
“Please do.”
“The issue with trauma is that often, we feel fine after it happens. That’s a normal, human response. The brain goes into survival mode and keeps you going. But survival mode isn’t acknowledging the trauma; it isn’t allowing us to feel our feelings. Without a healthy outlet, they’ll build over time. The brain’s trauma patterns become set, harder and harder to break.”
“And talking about it does what, exactly?”
“Allows you to discover how you feel. If you explore those feelings in a safe place, you can learn to manage them. Otherwise, you’ll likely be shown the emotions at a moment of stress, and have no idea how to deal with them because you’ve never explored them before.”
I chewed on my bottom lip and took another swig of water. “What if I’m not ready to do it?”
“I’ll never push you. We all work on our own timeline.”
I wanted my timeline to be slow. I wanted to talk about my childhood, my pack, anything but that horrible night with Benjamin.
Yet, I might see him at any moment. Emilia could track him back to wherever he was hiding out, leaving us with the option of grabbing him then or risking him running.
There was no guarantee I would have any warning before I was faced with him.
I didn’t want to be some meek, broken omega waiting for him to come ruin my life all over again.
If I left these feelings unchecked, they might swallow me whole when I saw him.
Exhaling shakily, I nodded. “Alright. I’m going to start at the beginning. The night I caught Benjamin cheating on me.”
