4.27: Short Cuts

“What are your thoughts on your relationship with your masculinity?” Dr Peterson asked.

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Opened again.

“I… don’t have any thoughts on that,” I admitted. “Why?”

He glanced at his notes. “It is fairly common for boys to find ways to assert their masculinity during childhood and adolescence, but most of the traditional options were closed to you,” he pointed out. “You were absolutely forbidden from expressing even mild aggression or playful violence. You were taught to suppress your emotions – not just the emotions that young boys are routinely encouraged to suppress, but the ones that they are taught to overexpress also. You weren’t allowed to play any sports. You were very athletic, but got your ‘sport’ out of a game that you played with your two best friends – both girls. Given your reluctance to form strong friendships outside of these two, you were deprived of close male friendships until you came here at fourteen. Your early life was severely limited in ways to traditionally express masculinity.”

I crossed my arms. “So?”

“So, do you think that that might be a factor in your habit of extreme recklessness?”

“I… what?”

“Risk-taking and a disregard for one’s personal safety are common expressions of masculinity. You already believed that you would probably die young anyway. Given your lack of other options of expression…”

“I don’t… I mean, maybe? I’ve never really thought about it? But I don’t think so. Like you said, I already believed I was going to die young. Anyone would be reckless in my situation.”

“Are the others in your coven as reckless as you?”

“Well… no. But. y’know, everyone’s different.”

“And you were well and truly safe in Refujeyo when you volunteered for a human familiarity experiment.”

Oh. He was looking for an explanation about why I’d let anyone turn me into a familiar, which was basically suicide. I could see how incomprehensible that choice must look from the outside. He didn’t know about the Labyrinth of Dreams, or that Kylie’s life had been in danger, or that Max had been channelling Kylie’s magic into me already and I could feel it fitting safely, feel that it wouldn’t kill me. He already knew I wasn’t generally suicidal, so from his perspective, the choice must look absolutely baffling.

“It seemed to make some sort of sense at the time,” was all I could say.

“Hmm,” he said.

I had a brief moment of panic. Was Dr Peterson digging for information on making human familiars? Was he, like Max suspected therapists of doing, gathering information on his patients for political gain? Was that why he was pushing this line of thought?

I’d barely even completed the thought before dismissing it. Of course he wasn’t. Dr Peterson had never been anything but straightforward and trustworthy. What was I worried about, some massive therapist long con? The therapists at Refujeyo had to be trustworthy, because if they were doing anything shady with patient information, one of the paranoid legacy kids would have reported an actual example of it by now. Stealing information from patients for their own purposes just wouldn’t be sustainable.

I had no doubt that if I told him, “We’re looking for a safe way to blow up the school and will probably upend mage society in the process and also kill at least one person, any advice for how to deal with the stress of that?”, well, that would probably convince Dr Peterson to take protective measures. But he wasn’t going to go digging around for magical secrets. He had to be breaching the human familiarity topic because it was a genuinely concerning piece of behaviour that he didn’t understand.

But I didn’t want to explain further, so even if the ‘he’s trying to steal magic secrets’ theory was obvious bullshit, it was still useful.

I narrowed my eyes. “Why do you want to know about human familiarity magic, anyway?”

“I don’t,” he said. “My concern is for you.” But I knew he wouldn’t push the topic. He couldn’t do his job if I didn’t trust him, after all.

I changed the subject. Not to Magistus; I didn’t really want to talk about that yet. But I had something else. “Something happened, yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“I was making out with my girlfriend. And… she grabbed my wrists. She didn’t mean to!” I added quickly, at the sight of his expression. “She doesn’t know it’s a problem. And I didn’t, I mean, I managed to push through, I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice me pull away at all, but it did kind of kill the mood. I just, I mean, should I say anything? If it happens again?”

“Do you think you should?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I knew! You say I should try to avoid things that upset me that much, but that’s not always possible. It’s not like this is her problem. I mean, how pathetic would that be? ‘Hey, honey, your boyfriend is such a wuss he doesn’t want you touching his wrists’? There’s no reason she needs to worry about this, too. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Are you comfortable with her knowing about this?”

“That’s not the point! I’m not going to put my stupid bullshit on her just because I’m too weak to deal with my own problems!”

Dr Peterson raised an eyebrow at me. I took a deep breath and corrected my language.

“The issues that cause me difficulties are my responsibility, not Saina’s. It’s not fair for me to expect her to take responsibility for them.”

“Do you think she would want to know?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Well, would you want to know? If Saina was upset by something this simple to fix, and she told you about it, how would that make you feel?”

“Uh. Happy, I suppose. Honoured that she trusted me with this information, and happy to be able to make her feel more comfortable.”

“Do you think she would feel the same way, if you told her?”

“Well, that’s… it’s not… I mean, she shouldn’t have to worry about – ”

“So you’re happy to show consideration and look after others, but don’t believe that others should have to show consideration and look after you?”

Dr Peterson glanced at his notes again. “You have a strong circle of friends who you trust, but you always seem to be taken off guard when they go out of their way to act like friends and support you without being asked. Yet you take your support of them for granted. It’s up to you whether you want to discuss the thing with your wrists with Saina or not. But it might be helpful to try to accurately predict what you think her feelings would be, rather than confuse the issue by insisting that you’re unworthy of reciprocation in your relationship.”

“It shouldn’t even be an issue,” I grumbled. “Something grabbed my wrists one time. It shouldn’t still be causing problems. Is there a way to, I don’t know, overwrite the experience?”

Dr Peterson was quiet for several seconds. Eventually, he said, “You want to try exposure therapy?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s where you are introduced to something upsetting, in a safe and controlled manner, to try to teach your body and mind that that thing is safe. It doesn’t work for everyone or everything, but for triggers like this, it’s actually a very good fit. Attempting to train yourself to be okay with touch again is probably the easiest way to manage this kind of tri – of upsetting incident, especially since the mere existence of it as a problem seems to be causing you so much additional, tangential distress.”

“If it’s such a good fit, why didn’t you suggest it right away?”

“Because, to be honest, I was a little worried that you’d just charge off to deliberately expose yourself to as many upsetting things as you could in a fit of self-flagellation and call it ‘therapy’. Which isn’t how exposure therapy works, and would’ve done a lot more harm than good. When you started coming here, you were extremely ashamed and upset at yourself for being traumatised at all, regardless of the specific symptoms, which isn’t a helpful mindset to approach those kinds of therapy with. But if you do want to try exposure therapy now, we can give it a shot.”

"Yeah. Yeah, I think we should."

Dr Peterson nodded. “We should start with something a little less… core to your conceptualisation of the issue… than your wrists. How about the rain?”

“I’m sure I’m not actually frightened of the rain.” I scoffed.

“How long has it been since you’ve deliberately been in the rain?”

I shrugged. “That’s not weird. Most people avoid being in the rain.”

“Alright. Before our next session, I want you to take a short walk in the rain. Take an umbrella if you want. Pay attention to how you feel. Remember, if you find yourself getting too upset, stop; making an experience more upsetting is detrimental to our goals here.”

“I can do that,” I said. Dr Peterson smiled, and I reminded myself, yet again, that I wasn’t here for actual therapy. I had a job to do.

And this was a good opening, wasn’t it? I couldn’t convince him to give me the information I wanted today, it was still too soon, but if I laid the groundwork…

“I’ve read about… other ways,” I said. “To overwrite bad experiences, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“There are these potions that erase memories. If I just got rid of the inciting incident for all these things – ”

“That wouldn’t work, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“Memories are interrelated. You cannot simply carve them out and expect to leave nothing behind. Memory erasing potions are sometimes administered immediately following a traumatic incident, but your Initiation was years ago. Those memories have been thought about, spoken about, informed your other actions so many times by now. If they were removed, your mind would quickly patch together the memories of discrepancies – or probably wouldn’t need to, since you’d be aware of what you’ve forgotten and expect there to be blank spots – but your coping mechanisms wouldn’t magically disappear, you just wouldn’t understand why they exist. Your reactions to the things that upset you wouldn’t be magically gone, you just wouldn’t remember why they upset you. It would make recovery much harder, not easier.”

“I still want to try. Not remembering would make exposure therapy easier, wouldn’t it? So we should do it.”

“There are no quick and easy answers in mental health and hygiene, Kayden.” Then he made an offhand comment about me perhaps experimenting with wearing tighter sleeves, and just like that, the subject changed.

Later, walking out of the session, it occurred to me that getting information about memory potions this way might be impossible. It had seemed pretty straightforward, when we’d come up with the plan – we needed to know how we’d lost our memories and if they were recoverable. We needed to learn about memory erasing potions without anyone catching on that we knew our memories had been erased. (I wasn’t sure what anyone would do if they knew we’d found that out, but given that they’d gone to the trouble of erasing them in the first place, it probably wasn’t going to be anything good.) So, we needed another reason to go looking for information, and somebody to give us that information. Me pretending to be traumatised and talking (well, given my skill set, probably goading) a therapist into giving us the right information should work.

Except that we hadn’t counted on one thing: Dr Peterson was a professional.

One thing I’d noticed in my sessions with him was that it was straightup impossible to draw him into any kind of debate. If we disagreed on something about my mental health and he thought he could convince me, he’d do so; if he thought that objecting to something I said would help me deepen my thoughts and reach some kind of understanding, he’d do so. But he’d never directly debate me on anything. After asking Max a little more about psychology and Dr Peterson’s background, I figured out why – he didn’t want to encourage habits of me defending positions that he thought were bad for my mental health. Which sounded super manipulative to me, and I’d definitely be upset about it if I wasn’t attending therapy specifically to manipulate him, but. Glass houses and all that.

Anyway, I’d goaded teachers and peers into providing me information to prove me wrong on something before; it was easy. But it wasn’t going to work on somebody who refused to engage. No matter how hard I pushed, no matter how wrong he thought I was, he’d see providing me information on memory potions as encouraging unhealthy patterns of thought. He’d probably expect that arguing with me and being right might make me more determined to seek memory potions, out of sheer stubbornness.

I could try to push and goad, but any time I tried, he was sure to deflect to something else. And boy could he deflect. It was like talking to Magista, if she had professional psychology training and forty years more experience. I had to find something else. If I wanted information from Dr Peterson, I had to find a chink in his armour. Something I could use to make him want to prove me wrong about memory potions. Then I could push for them, and he might give me the information to prove me wrong.

I needed to find some kind of way in.