Monday, 19 December 2016
“What, if anything, do you think you’ll take away from our time together?” It is my final session with Kate before I leave Appleton behind in favor of my new life. We have nothing left to do but review my progress and answer any lingering questions. I have never actually had a proper final session with a therapist before; I have always just bailed on them before an appointment and never gone back. Now, unsure of what to expect, I sit with my knees to my chest, chin resting on one knee and arms wrapped around my shins, not wanting to be here.
“The amount of times you used the word trauma will stick with me,” I say, then reconsider. Do I sound bitchy? “Not in a bad way. Just, I never really go that far.”
Kate studies my face. She’s said on several occasions that I am hard to read, and I must be especially so now. I have put up my walls and locked my windows and doors. She is not allowed into my brain anymore. But I do need to know why she thinks I’m a trauma case when, obviously, it’s most likely that nothing ever happened to me at all, and I’m just a mad girl too sensitive for this world.
She says she didn’t realize she’d said it so often, and I interject, “I never actually called it trauma.”
“I must have just deducted it from what you said, then. The fear of men, of being touched, kidnapped, the lack of a sense of self… it all screams, trauma! trauma! trauma!”
So that’s that. I scream Trauma Case™. I am a basket of bad childhood memories and even more repressed; I am a locked vault that never will open, even to myself. I cannot decide if this gives me a scrap of identity or further tears down what little sense of self I had.
