Sessions

Three months. The boots are still on, but the darkness has all but vanished from the rest of his body. Today he’s wearing white; it’s a new look for him. It’s the first time he’s worn it. It makes his face look brighter, despite the fact that he often looks mildly distressed or annoyed. His hair looks lighter too; its starting to grow out and the roots are showing – a much softer brown then the unnatural black its dyed. He pulls at it with his fingertips. He’s nervous. Far more nervous then usual. His thoughts are confused. She can see it in his face.

He’s decided something.

He’s worked his way up to fifteen minutes now and she doesn’t need to push him very hard at all. Some days he comes in and just starts talking to her. Other days he’ll ask her what she wants to hear, she’ll suggest something and then he’ll go off. She’s learned a lot. He’s more open about his father. He still calls him Pauli, but he recognizes what happened to him and he’s able to speak about it freely. Pauli doesn’t conjure a violent response anymore. Just sadness and regret.

Today there is something else.

She waits. The silence lasts for quite a while. Two minutes. Three. She doesn’t want to interrupt whatever is passing through his mind because it’s obvious he’s somewhere else. He is going to talk. He just needs to be ready. She’s patient. She can wait. She can dedicate extra time to him today if he needs it. There are no other sessions after his. It could take hours for him to speak, so she’ll wait.

A cough. He shifts again. He’s very nervous.

Then finally, “I’m ready to talk about Tuomas now.”

It’s so abrupt. She doesn’t respond physically, though mentally she’s glad to finally have this opportunity. She knows this name is significant. It has an effect on her patient unlike anything else. It intrigues her. She knows nothing of this man and yet he is very important to her patient. So important that he can’t even talk about it.

Hasn’t even wanted to until now.

She waits. “Are you sure?”

Words don’t form. A head nod will have to suffice. He’s ready, but he isn’t. Perhaps something has changed.

“Why the sudden desire to talk about him?”

He’s still shifting nervously, but he allows, “It’s almost Christmas.” It’s delivered as if this should be the obvious answer to such a question. Her eyebrows bridge the gap of her forehead to her hairline as she observes him. Then he continues. “I’ve been thinking about him all week. I...always spend Christmas with Tuomas.”

So this person has longevity. Always implies an extended period of time. Tuomas is a part of her patient’s past that he has been filtering.

“He’s...he was...my best friend.” The past tense hits her first and it hits her hard. Her brain latches onto it but she’s not about to speak now. He’s finally willing to broach the subject. She fears any interruption on her part might permanently silence him. So she listens. “We grew up together. Well, kind of. He was...I probably haven’t mentioned Jukka.”

She shakes her head but remains cloaked in silence.

“Jukka was a friend from school. We stopped being friends a long time ago. But when we were little...he was my friend. And Tuomas was his cousin. He lived in Espoo and he’d come to visit Jukka and his mom sometimes. When he came to town I got to see him, and I really liked him. He was sad. He was lonely like me.”

This piece of information registers with her. He’s admitting to sadness in his childhood years. And this person, this secret individual that is mentioned but never discussed has a similar aura of sorrow around him.

“We were really close for a long time. It got to the point where he was coming to see me and I was going to Jukka’s...to see him.” He’s embarrassed. He shifts again and pulls at the ends of his hair. They’re splitting; likely the result of frying and dying. He peels the shafts apart with his fingernails absently, breaking the split ends further in light of something else to do. This story is one he has to tell without making eye contact. “I mean the three of us hung out a lot but...Jukka wasn’t like us. If that makes sense.”

This brief prompt is given to elicit some response from her. She complies. “He didn’t have the same pain to carry.”

He nods. “Jukka has never been sad in his life. It’s a little ridiculous.” He speaks fluidly; a little angrily but he suppresses it. There’s jealousy in his tone. He envies this person his ability to be happy. It’s becoming clearer that the man before her is rarely, if ever, truly happy. And he seems equally aware of it. “But he’s retarded. We’re not friends anymore anyway. But Tuomas...well, when he got older he moved to Helsinki so I got to see him more. Jukka and I stopped talking but Tuomas and I saw each other a lot. He knew about Pauli so...I could talk to him. He’s...probably the only person I was ever able to talk to about those things.” He pauses and ventures a tiny glance in her direction. “Before you.”

This statement startles her a bit though she doesn’t show it. So this Tuomas was also, in some ways, his therapist. Or at least his confidante. The only person he felt he could trust with the pain of his father’s abuse. It pleases her to hear that he has someone that cares enough for him to listen.

Had. This friendship was introduced in the past tense. Tuomas is no longer a friend.

“He understood.” His eyes are back on his feet. He’s watching his boots as they shift on the carpet, digging his toe between the fibres. “He had shit too. His mom...she was fucked up. Its part of why he moved.”

‘Part of’ sticks out too. She hears it in the delivery. Whatever the other part of his moving is significant, but he doesn’t seem quite ready to say it. His voice falls silent. The nervousness hasn’t left him and it’s stronger.

A little push. “What was the other part?”

He sniffs. Is he getting emotional? She watches his face for some indication. He’s distressed. The nerves get worse. His shoulder blades inch higher and higher into the arch of his neck, the tension building as he waits. Whatever the reason, it makes him uncomfortable. Then, “He...wanted to be closer to me.” There is a hint of discomfort at the edge of his tone. She does not speak again. “He...” His voice stops. He’s pained. His expression contorts to one of horrific emptiness. It’s a grimace. A heartbreak. It hurts. She can tell. “He...he loved me.”

She is not entirely surprised, though his voice implies something deeper. She waits for it to come. When it doesn’t, she presses again. “And you?”

He’s lost in thought. Her voice rouses him and he starts. His eyes glance up at her. “And I what?”

“And you? Did you love him too?”

The silence that follows this question is the longest silence she has yet had to endure from him. He doesn’t even move. He’s staring at the floor but his feet are stationary. His whole body is frozen. The only motion that shakes him is the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He’s still alive. He’s still breathing. It’s the only indication that he’s alive.

Five minutes go by. He sits. She sits. She has stopped moving for fear of disturbing him. He’s so still, so distant. She knows the answer. She ventures that he does too. But it scares him. It, like so much else, would require him to vulnerable. And if he has to be vulnerable it means he is opening himself up to hurt.

He’d been hurt enough by his father. He had no vulnerability left to give to another.

“I...didn’t want him to love me.” He doesn’t answer her question, conveniently. He’s not ready to admit it to himself yet. Though his answer indicates some depth of feeling for this Tuomas. He didn’t want him to love him. Why?

“But he did,” she says softly.

A soft cracking sound escapes his lips. The nervousness builds. He’s actually on the verge of something deeper; a realization that he is not quite ready to accept, but that just may force itself upon him like so many others. Not an explosion of rage like she’s used to. Right now he looks like he’s saddened, depressed. The pain is overwhelming. She can feel it from across the room. “He shouldn’t have. He was too good for me.”

It all falls into place. She recalls their session a month ago where this person came up before. He was described as not believing in monsters. Her patient thinks himself a monster. So his self-hate came before this person’s love. Self-hate that rose out of his father’s abuse? Suppression of the pain of watching someone you should love do horrible things and hating them because of it? Mental acceptance of verbal abuse? She wonders how early the self-hate began.

He’s stopped talking. Terror radiates off of him. He needs another push. Since the subject has finally been broached, she’s not about to let it go. This is something he wanted to talk about. Even if he’s afraid to venture further, he needs to. They both know that.

“He didn’t think so.”

“Well he’s stupid!” he snaps suddenly, though the appearance of anger is only a cloak to hide the fact that he’s miserable. And the words are also a cautionary measure. He doesn’t believe them. Even as he says them his face indicates the falsity of the words.

She shakes her head sadly. “You don’t believe that.”

“Yes I do,” he counters.

“No.” Her answer is firm but kind. “You know you don’t believe that.”

“I just didn’t want him to be in love with me. Because...you can’t love someone like me.” This also smacks of the automatic, and yet there is something different about it. While it’s delivered flawlessly there is an emotional pain attached to the statement. Regret? Perhaps even a little remorse.

“Explain what you mean.”

Emptiness. Pain. Sorrow. He’s fighting off the profundity of his self-hate. “I’m...a monster.”

“You aren’t.”

“You say that,” he answers her softly, with just the hint of a dark laugh at the edges of his voice. His tone is controlled. “But you don’t know what I’m like.”

“I can venture a guess,” she replies in an equally controlled tone, though hers is laced with compassion and understanding. His eyes glance up at her once more. There is fear deep within them. Hers are kind but he can’t look at them for too long. He fears her kindness. He also fears that she may be right; she may know exactly what he is like. “There are only two people you have ever described that way.”

He is silent.

“Your father.”

He pulls into himself. The white sweatshirt that covers his arms becomes a shield. He pulls it up further around his neck, covering his chin and jaw line. Hiding. He knows what she will say.

“And yourself.”

“Are you saying I’m just like Pauli?” he growls under his breath. Again, the fear surfaces. But he’s not really out to fight her. He’s cornered by the truth and he’s responding automatically to what he already knew she would say.

She is unshaken. Her eyes don’t move from his face. “Are you?”

The chemistry of the room changes. It’s charged. Electrified. He can’t look at her so instead he focuses on his feet which hold such intense interest to him. His eyes are wide. He’s turning the thoughts over in his mind. Subtly it’s always been there. Pauli is a monster. He is a monster. He is Pauli. He has become that which he hates the most. But he won’t accept it. “That doesn’t answer my question,” he snaps evenly.

He’s being avoidant and this time it’s intentional. She’s hit a nerve. Internally he realizes that he’s become everything he despises, but he doesn’t want to accept it. His heart holds no forgiveness for his father. If there is no forgiveness for his father, there is no forgiveness for himself. So either he needs to forgive his father, or he needs to re-evaluate who he is and what he has become.

He’s not ready to forgive his father.

“I am not like Pauli,” he adds after the silence holds them for a while. “And I don’t want to talk about him.” He’s angry again. The darkness has come back and settled in his shoulders, holding to him tightly. He sits uneasily on the chair, slouching backwards into the cushions. The pulse of his fury increases. The potential for rage is there, though she does not fear him. She can’t. If she fears him he won’t get help. He’ll gain control of the situation and all the work of the past months will have been in vein. She remains unmoved and watches him.

He doesn’t want to talk about Pauli. That’s fine. They won’t. She’ll go back to Tuomas. That’s what he wanted to talk about to being with.

“Tell me why you and Tuomas are no longer friends,” she prompts seemingly out of the blue. It seems to pull him out of the building rage and into sadness once more. For the moment he appeared to have forgotten the topic at hand, but once the name sounds in the small room he clings to it. The anger drops away. It gives way to the pain that is always there underneath it all.

“He said no,” he breathes softly. And that’s all. He doesn’t want to say anymore.

But she needs him to pull further away from the anger of his realization about Pauli. She needs him to keep talking about this Tuomas. So she presses him. “No?”

“To me.”

“What would he say no about?” She is genuinely intrigued, though again she can venture a guess as to what the no was about. Pauli abused his mother. He watched it happen as a child. He hated Pauli for that reason. Tuomas loved him, probably with the same kind of intensity that his mother loved Pauli. He saw himself a monster, and eventually this Tuomas said no. Her patient must have been hurting him. She knew it without him having to say it. It was the only thing that seemed to fit.

He’s shifting. Miserable. The anger is melting away into despair. She recognizes this feeling but she gives him space to answer. If he can’t, she’ll understand. But they have time. And he wanted to talk about Tuomas. There is more inside him. He just needs to get it out.

“He...” His voice is breaking. His face is breaking. He turns in the chair so his face isn’t entirely directed at her. He doesn’t want her to see him like this. It’s too painful. He doesn’t like to be vulnerable, but right now he is. It can’t be helped. His feelings for this person were deep and she can sense it in his mood. “He...he said...it hurt too much.”

Hurt. Pain. Abuse.

He inhales. He’s trying not to be emotional but he can’t help it. “I don’t know why...I mean...it’s what I wanted...I wanted him to say no,” he admits quietly, though his statement comes out more like a question. What he thought he wanted and what he actually wanted are two different things. “He should have said no from the beginning.”

Beginning. A time frame. Rejection. “Jan...did you date him?”

He shakes his head fervently. “No.” His voice is low. Dark. Lined with the empty realization of what he did to this person that he cared so much for. “It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. We agreed.”

Whatever he’s talking about is lost on her. She has no frame of reference, and this cryptic ‘it’ has no logical replacement in her mind.

“He promised. Because he was fucking stupid.” The words flow out with anger, though it’s directed at himself, not his friend. A promise about something, this nameless ‘it’, that wasn’t supposed to mean anything.

Silence follows him. This promise is very hard for him. Even harder than his father, even harder to talk about than Tuomas. She waits. It lasts forever.

A gentle nudging. “Jan.”

“No, I can’t talk about this.” He turns so he’s facing the wall and drapes his legs over the arm of the chair. His feet dangle over the side, almost a metre above the floor as he slouches back in the chair. He’s fidgeting again. Uncomfortable. His thoughts are rapid and wild. But he can’t speak them aloud. He’s already said that.

“Jan, you wanted to talk about Tuomas,” she says quietly.

“But not about this,” he replies so quickly that it cuts into the end of her words, their voices blurring together for a millisecond in time. To feel the terror that he feels, just thinking about it, whatever ‘it’ is. It’s horrible. It must be or he wouldn’t be so averse to thinking about it. And he doesn’t want to, though she ventures a guess that, in spite of how hard it is to talk about, it’s likely something he thinks about all the time. He has to or Tuomas wouldn’t come up so often and then be brushed aside. And Tuomas wouldn’t have so much pain attached to him as he does.

“Jan,” she says softly, her voice lined with compassion but with just enough of an edge to indicate her seriousness. He doesn’t respond positively to her tone and sinks even deeper into the chair. He’s playing with his hair again. It comforts him.

When she doesn’t speak again and it’s clear to him that he’s expected to respond, he answers evenly, “What?”

“I think you do want to talk about this,” she continues. Her pen hasn’t scratched a note on the paper but she’s cataloguing all of this in her brain. Its one of the more significant conversations they’ve had in weeks and she knows it will be a breakthrough for him if he continues. So she needs to prod him, even if he’s unwilling. Once he is able to accept whatever it was that he did to this person, he can look at it from outside himself and assess it. Regardless of how horrible it may be, she needs to be able to convince him of his own humanity. That is paramount. He can’t go on thinking himself to be the monster that he visualizes in his mind.

But he’s not going to come willingly. “And how the hell would you know? You’re not me.” And just as quickly as he slipped into humanity, he slips out of it again and back into persona. It’ll be a difficult habit to break, but she has faith that he can do it. He’s already doing so well.

“You wanted to talk about Tuomas.”

“But not this.”

“This is an important part of your relationship with him, Jan.”

Only seconds pass and his feet swing around in front of him and slam on the floor. He’s glaring at her. Angry again. Not at her, at himself, though the anger is, for the moment, directed at her. “You. Don’t. Know. Shit.”

She remains unfazed and sits back in her chair calmly. “Then tell me.”

“I can’t talk about it!” He’s shouting now. This anger is a cover for fear. An intense fear. Perhaps even horror at what he has done, whatever it was, however horrible it was, to this person.

“Jan.”

“No! You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! You don’t know anymore about monsters than he did, even though – ” And just as suddenly as his voice rose it suddenly shuts off. He’s almost revealed something, but caught himself in the act. He shuts his mouth and sits back in the chair, still seething. Visibly. Internally? He’s shaking in his boots. They make him feel larger than he is.

But they don’t make him any larger than he is. Really he’s very small, inside and out.

Again the silence hangs. It’s heavy. He pushes sound out of his lungs occasionally in huge, earth shattering sighs of release, but other than that he can’t speak.

A thought occurs to her.

“I have a suggestion.”

He mutters something under his breath but none of the words are discernable. It’s likely vulgar and insulting so she doesn’t pry into it.

“Let’s go back to the monster from your childhood for a second.”

The statement seems to shock him and he responds visibly to her statement. He raises an eyebrow at her. “...why?”

“Just trust me,” she says. She says it a lot with him, and though he makes it quite obvious that he’s not sure he can, he usually follows what she says.

“...okay...”

She smiles, softly, but it only raises more questions on his face. He’s not ready to trust her, but he’ll go along with it. He usually does. “What I want you to do is visualize the monster.”

He snorts. The mental image has always been, and continues to be, a source of amusement for him.

“Can you see it?”

The snort turns into a suppressed laugh. “Yes!”

“Alright. Now,” and she pauses. This part will be trickier for him, because up to this point the ‘monster’ of his childhood was something he used to protect his sister from Pauli’s violence. It’s safe to use it on Pauli because Pauli is the person that hurt him. But right now she’s going to ask him to use the monster in a different way. To use it as a way to separate what he did from who he is. Apply it to the monster so he can talk about it without thinking about it. “I want you to use the monster to tell me what happened to Tuomas.”

He doesn’t like this. His expression darkens. All the humour of visualization slips away.

“Don’t think of it as yourself. Think of the monster as a separate entity.”

He’s unconvinced. His eyes don’t venture from her face. They’re locked on her.

“Just try it,” she presses, adjusting the glasses on the bridge of her nose and watching him carefully. “Start with the visual. What do you see?”

It is a ponderous silence. Then, “A shadow.”

“Can you describe it more?”

He looks deeper into his mind; he’s truly seeing something, though describing it comes with great difficulty. “It has talons.”

“Like a bird?”

He shrugs. “I guess,” he says absently. “I don’t know. Shit.” It’s not important, though he seems to have an obsession with them. The talons. The feathers. The ability to fly.

Something he wishes to do, but can’t seem to be able to.

“What else?”

“It’s mostly a shadow. It doesn’t really...have a shape.” He’s grasping at words. He sees it, but he can’t seem to make her see it with him.

So his monster is different from the one of his father, already. It’s shapeless. More birdlike, and yet nondescript and vague. Something that cannot entirely be seen. This must be how he sees himself. Something without form, but with talons.

Weapons. A faceless shape with weapons for feet. This is how he sees himself.

“Tell me what this monster does.”

A sharp inhalation. He doesn’t want to. He can’t quite separate himself from the monster, despite the fact that it certainly has its own visual characteristics that he does not share. Clearly he is not a nondescript shadow. He has features – dark hair, blue eyes, a youthful face, a small body that’s average build, a musician’s hands, a tenor voice.

But this monster is nothing but weapons and darkness. There is nothing more to it then that.

“It...” He wrestles with the image for a while. He can see it. She can tell by the look in his eyes. But she can also tell from his expression that he doesn’t like what he sees. His hand is clenched on his thigh. The nails bite into his palm again. Sharply. Digging. He seems unaware of what his hand is doing; it’s all unconscious. “It...I don’t know. This is hard.”

Sympathy is clear on her face. It is a struggle for him and she understands. Separating himself from the monster has become impossible. But if he can caricaturize his self-hatred into something else, perhaps he can set it aside and move past it. “Try. Let the monster do what it does. What does it do?”

“No, I don’t want to do this,” he says suddenly. He looks distressed.

“Why not?”

“Because.” It’s a word, not a reason, but it’s all the reason he has.

She sighs. It’s not out of frustration, nor a lack of patience. It’s more out of understanding for where he’s coming from. He couldn’t watch his father do what he did without experiencing a lot of internal sadness, pain, anger and aggression. Watching something that he did, himself, to another person, being outside of his body as an objective observer only, must be horrifying. He doesn’t want to see it. Because, despite the fact that she is trying to get him to separate himself from the monster, he still sees himself in that way. He is the monster, and what he sees is what he did. “What might make it easier?”

There is a moment only where he looks up at her and admits, “Nothing.”

It’s sad. He’s caught between a rock and a hard place. If he holds back, he goes nowhere. If he goes forward, he has to confront his past mistakes. He wants to move forward but he wants to avoid his problems.

He can’t move forward like that.

“Then give yourself a minute.”

He takes her too literally and gives himself three. She waits, and takes the respite as a cue to make note of their conversation. The desire to speak of Tuomas, the obvious level of importance this name holds, the correlation of monster Pauli and monster Jan, and now the visualization of his own violence. She isn’t even looking at him when he speaks again; she’s still focusing on her paper. It is his voice that brings her back into the room.

“Well first it...grabs. With its talons.” His hand fists at nothing. “Scratches. It leaves lots of deep...marks...” He’s still struggling with this one. Whatever he’s done he doesn’t like to think about it. “All over. Arms. Back. Chest.” His fingernails flip out of his clenched fist. These are what he sees. His own talons. “Then it...” His voice fades a little. It’s hard for him. Whatever he did was horrible. He hates that he did it. He hates himself for having done it. “Then it...feeds.”

“Feeds?” This time she’s startled and she shows it. She has no clue what that means.

Whatever it means, it’s hurting him. He shows it. His face contorts. The pain is even closer to the surface now. Perhaps she can uncover it. And if he can release it, if he can acknowledge it, he can get past it.

And then suddenly he’s detached. His eyes get cold and his tone turns automatic. “It takes what it wants. Because it can. Because it’s a monster.” And it all comes out like some hideous monologue. A prepared, polished, grotesque conglomeration of words that bring out all the worst without making it real. He can’t make it real and acknowledge it. The metaphor has helped, somewhat. He can see and describe what the monster did without feeling the horrific pain that should accompany it.

That was the first step. To bring it out of him. The next step will be to put him back into what he did. Stop blaming the monster and start recognising the choice that went into what he did.

But for now, the monster can do it. She can hear it and he can say it this way.

“If the monster wants something, it takes it. Even if it’s not his to take.”

And finally she has an idea of what ‘it’ is. It’s not what his father did to his mother, but its abuse all the same. It’s a form of forced submission, but not the misogynistic rantings of an angry man. “What did the monster take from Tuomas?” she asks softly.

“He should have known; you can’t love a monster.” He’s not answering the question. Its frightening to see how far away from what he’s talking about he’s become. Because prior to this closeness with the reality of his abuse, he was seeping with pain. But just at the breaking point of admitting what happened, he turns into something different.

It’s a very different shield from the defensiveness. She wonders if this is the person he becomes when he’s with this Tuomas. She doesn’t doubt it. It would allow him to keep coming back without wanting to destroy himself.

“That’s why it did what it did. He needed to know. It needed to show him just how horrible it is.”

And suddenly, though she does not show it and will not show it, she finds herself afraid of this manifestation of him. It’s horrifying. It’s so cold, so dark, so completely heartless and unfeeling that she’s a little surprised she hasn’t seen it before. Unlike the angry, irrational, railing and ranting man she’s experienced, and unlike the sardonic, cynical, bitingly sarcastic person that sits across from her on various sessions, this person is awful. If there is a monster in him, somewhere, this is it. The one that turns off everything else and feels nothing.

She hopes it doesn’t come out often. She hopes he gets to a point where it never comes out again.

“What did it do to him?”

Words roll out of his mouth and fall onto the floor like lead. “It raped him.”

A stunned silence is all that follows. Her initial reaction is to feel a combination of disgust and sadness for both her patient and his victim. It’s so horrible. And he says it like its yesterday’s news. It was delivered with the same kind of feeling as “I went to the store” or “I walked the dog.”

Yet the meaning behind it...

All of this is her doing. She brought this manifestation of him out of the recesses of his mind. He feared it initially, but she pushed it. And now she sees what he was so afraid of. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he had been keeping this personality in the deepest parts of his brain to protect her and himself. She gives him a moment. Saying something, right now, while this manifestation of Jan is sitting in the room, frightens her. She knows nothing of it. She doesn’t know how it will respond to her prodding and questioning.

“He brought it on himself,” he continues, automatically. “You can’t love a monster.”

The silence shatters. “You’re not a monster, Jan.”

“Humans don’t do that to each other.”

There is no pain. No sadness. No guilt. Just words.

“They shouldn’t. They absolutely should not. But sometimes they do.”

“No,” he answers immediately. “Humans don’t.”

“You’re not a monster, Jan.”

“Yes I am.” Automatic. Little inflection. No feeling at all.

“Jan.”

Silence.

“Jan I need you to come back to me.”

More silence.

“Jan.” She snaps her fingers and it seems to rattle him back into some semblance of humanity, though there is still that shield there, outside of him, keeping him from accepting what he just said as the truth. Whether he’s aware that he just admitted to rape or not, he doesn’t show it. Instead he just sits there, sinking further into the chair and staring at the wall behind her.

Her discomfort settles. That horrible, emotionless thing has vanished. She lets the silence hang for a while. Right now she’s pondering bringing up the reality of what he said to his real self. If he’s ready to handle it.

But she doesn’t need to push anything out of him because suddenly he speaks. “Now you know what I’m really like.”

It’s a strange statement. She doesn’t know whether he’s acknowledging what he did or what he became just now. Neither is good, though she is sure that automatic cold person was not the real Jan either. The real Jan is the vulnerable one that can experience the pain of abuse, the guilt of having abused someone else, and the struggle of self-hatred as a manifestation of what he hates in his father and what he fears he has become.

“You made a choice,” she answers softly. “It isn’t who you are.”

“If it was once it would have been a choice,” he speaks just as softly, firmly, and with great effort. So he has recognized what he did. Even though he couldn’t tell her like this, couldn’t share his abuse with her as himself, the real Jan knows what he did. He recognizes it and he carries it with him. It’s probably something he’s carried with him daily since he started coming to her. Even longer. Since Tuomas told him no. Or before.

“How many times did it happen?” she presses. He has her full attention now and he won’t lose it.

His face shatters for a moment only, then he reels it in and recovers. The pain presses at him but he keeps pushing it back, because it’s safer to keep in the recesses of his mind than to acknowledge it. He can know it happened, but he can’t accept that it was anything less than his own nature. If he can make himself into a monster, he can take his own responsibility out of it. Monsters are expected to be horrific. Humans, on the other hand, have to live with the consequences of their actions.

She wonders what will happen when he recognizes his own humanity and the hideousness of his choice.

It takes him a while to admit the frequency. Perhaps he doesn’t know. He seems to be summing it up in his head, doing a kind of grotesque mental arithmetic that he doesn’t want to acknowledge, and then finally he allows, “I don’t know. Hundreds of times.”

So although he didn’t admit to dating Tuomas, they were in an extensive abusive relationship of some kind. It must have lasted a while or the number wouldn’t be so great. Momentarily she wishes Tuomas was still a part of her patient’s life. She has a feeling he would need a great deal of therapy himself.

Then suddenly his eyes glance up to the clock on the wall. “My session’s up,” he says quietly. “Don’t you...have someone else?”

She allows a small, sympathetic smile. “You’re my last session today. I think I can give you some extra time.”

He weighs the statement. He’s unsure whether he wants to keep going or not. Finally he settles on taking advantage of the added time and makes eye contact with her briefly. “I don’t know why you’d want to,” he admits in a tone that betrays all his insecurities. “I’m horrible. I’m a –”

“Stop,” she cuts him off. She holds her hand up to silence him, and he opens and closes his mouth a few times, settling back in the chair. “Jan. There’s no denying that what you did was horrible.”

A flinch. He knows. He’s always known or he wouldn’t hate himself so much.

“But you are not a monster.”

He coughs.

“What you did was monstrous. But you are not a monster.”

“Yes I am,” he breathes.

She sits back in the chair and watches him sadly. She sighs. What can she do to get him to move beyond this? There is another prolonged silence where she ponders. Then, quietly, “Fine. Each time you say that...you lose your cigarette privileges.”

His eyes shoot up to her. “What?!”

“You can still earn your cigarettes through talking to me. But each time you say that, you’ll lose one. So it’s your choice.” Her eyes search him. Will it work? Does the incentive still stand?

It seems to do the trick because he leans forward and runs his fingers through his long hair. “Fuck. Does that mean I’m out three for today?”

She pauses and thinks back on their conversation. Usually she takes note of how many times he says it, but today she was giving him her undivided attention. She ventures a guess; “Actually I think it was five.”

“Oh fuck! Does that mean I have to go through five sessions without saying it to earn them back?” He looks panicked at this prospect and moves forward on the chair so he’s perching on the edge. “Isn’t there something I can do to earn them back?!”

A thought. There are several things he could do; he could admit that he is not a monster, verbally, to himself. That might work. He could also earn it back by volunteering information – talking without prompting, keeping his anger under control, or apologizing when it gets out of hand. All those seem reasonable to cancel out his “cigarette debt.” “I have a few ideas...” she ventures.

“Okay.” He’s anxious. The cigarettes are a great motivator, it seems; though he’s been weaning himself off of them slowly, the pull of the nicotine addiction is still strong.

“You could admit to me and yourself that you are not a monster.”

His brow furrows. “What, out loud?”

She nods.

For some reason this doesn’t work for him. “What else?”

“Well, I suppose if you keep your anger under control for a whole session and keep paying attention to when it gets out of hand, that could earn you back one as well.”

This seems to sit better with him, though his expression grows sad when he realizes he hasn’t so much today. He did explode at her a couple times with anger, and Lord knows what that emotionless robot was. “Fuck. I guess I’m still out five today.”

“You could just say –”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Why is it so hard for you, Jan?” Her eyes watch him with layers of compassion. It shouldn’t be so hard for him to say a few words, even if he doesn’t believe them. He says many words that he doesn’t believe. Why is this one so difficult?

“Because...”

“Jan.”

He doesn’t want to look at her. He’s staring at his hands.

“Jan, if it’s what you did...then hate what you did. What you did was horrible. But it doesn’t have to define you.”

All he can do is shake his head. “I...” He doesn’t speak again but shifts in the seat sadly. He’s pondering saying it. Forcing it out. Just to get his nicotine fix. “I’m...” he starts again, and his face shows just how much of an effort it is. “I’m...I’m not...a monster,” he finally chokes out, though his face contorts to contempt and disgust. He doesn’t believe it. He can’t. But he’s trying.

The fact that it left his mouth at all is a miracle. Her expression changes to one of infinite compassion and grace. She rifles through her desk and pulls out the pack of cigarettes. “Since I didn’t keep track...I’ll count that.”

He takes the white stick from her but says nothing.

“I’m proud of you, Jan,” she says genuinely. Her kind eyes search him but he refuses to look up at her. He’s too lost in his hands, the cigarette rolling around between his fingers with a kind of artistry. And the words...they swirl around him in the air and he tries to ignore them. It’s too hard to hear them fully yet.

But he will.

“Thank you,” he says finally. It’s strained, but it sounds true and her smile broadens. “I still...don’t believe it.”

Gingerly she reaches out to touch his hand. She pats it once reassuringly. “You will.”