Therapy was a big hit-or-miss for Mari Matsuda. Her last few sessions consisted of frustrated discussions about how her progress plateaued. Brian Her Therapist had decided that it was now time for the nuclear option.
“Let me get this straight, just to be totally sure I understand what you’re saying. You think the best way for me to overcome my perfectly reasonable fear of homicidal werewolves…is to go to one of their dens and ask to be part of their pack for a little while?” Her brow knit and her mouth hung open in confusion.
“That’s 100% the most bonkers thing anyone has ever said to me,” she felt her face start to ache from holding the same expression, “and I am including the first time someone said ‘werewolves are real’ to my actual face.”
“I understand your hesitation, Mari, I really do,” he said, “but I think the best way forward for you at this juncture would be attack the problem using your own methods.”
“My own methods. What are those, exactly?”
“It has become clear to me over time that you prefer to immerse yourself in a problem to solve it to your satisfaction. Would you say that you generally take a more hands-on approach to problems?”
“I guess,” she crossed her arms and frowned.
“Will you consider my suggestion? If you decide you don’t feel comfortable or safe with this option, then we will find something else.”
“Fine,” she stood at the sound of a chime. The hour-long session was over and she was free to dwell on everything he said for the rest of the day.
In the summer before senior year, Mari's biggest worry was application deadlines. She was a normal teenage girl worried about college and excited for her last year of high school. Then werewolves attacked her and that normal life came to a stuttering end. A year later several people died who should have died and several people who should not have died were dead. Her plan had been to ignore what happened and move on. It tue we put to be a terrible plan that did not work at all.
She had chosen the furthest university with the best financial package and left as soon as she could.
Her parents convinced her try therapy after a breakdown in the bathroom of a train station on a fun day out in the city. It was pretty damn inconvenient to get a whiff of Chanel No. 5 and break out in huge, heaving sobs on public transport. They gave her an ultimatum: find a therapist or come home. It took months to find a therapist who could accommodate her special circumstances. Most therapists didn't have training to handle young women hunted by werewolves.
Brian became her therapist almost by accident. Their meet-and-greet session was a dud and she would have dropped him if she hadn't noticed the bricks. Someone had put fresh protection sigils onto one of the bricks on the side of the first step. She couldn't make most of it out but there was one specific to wolves that sent her right back into the office. They got off to a rocky start but he was her best and only choice.
At first she resisted his every suggestion and ignored most of his advice. She had calculated the exact amount of time it would take to recover from happened but her math was a little off. To be fair she did base it on theories that focused on how long it took a heart to heal post-breakup. There was a myriad of theories that floated around on internet forums and she couldn't rule any of them out. In the end, she made a sliding scale time frame that could account for all possible theories. It annoyed her when every deadline passed without her total recovery.
Brian was not amused when, after a year of weekly sessions, she expressed her frustrations. He wasted a lot of time being English and delicate until she rolled her eyes one time too many and he got blunt.
"You didn't exactly plan for a bunch of monsters to terrorize you for a year, right? So, you can't expect to plan your recovery down to the second, for heaven's sake! Mari, you got blown up and almost died–I reckon you're allowed to rage and cry about that for as long as you want."
Mari didn't want to rage and cry. She didn’t want to need therapy. She hadn’t wanted to kill a homicidal maniac and a bunch of crazy werewolves.
What she wanted was to stop being so sensitive and get on with her life. Two years on, she still struggled to train herself out of what Brian called her ‘trauma response'. She had a list of sensory exercises to do when reality began to move away and a purse full of junk for flashbacks. It was a huge chore to micromanage every second so she could make it through the day. She never had to do any of this before and that made her angry. She used to move through the moments of her life without thought or effort. Now she needed a gargantuan amount of energy to exist at all.
Brian's suggestion was something, though. She would never admit it had value to his face, of course.
She spent the week after that session in contemplation. Well, not exactly contemplation. She spent a week ghosting her friends, ignoring her responsibilities, and stuffing her face with cheesy puffs. She considered calling Brian to tell him that she was in a rut, but he was the reason she was in a rut. Calling her problem to solve her problem didn’t seem to be the best course of action. So, there she remained with her cheesy puffs and silence.
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