Image Source: hybridpedagogy.org
Moments the Series
- Moments Zero (click here)
- Moments One (this post)
“How was your day?” the Woman asked quietly, slightly smiled.
“Anything you wanted to talk about?” she added, tried to keep the conversation moving, while she took a pen and a notebook from her purse. She preferred a traditional way of note taking over the others. Although the room was equipped with sound and video recorders in each corner. Anything that can go wrong, will. That’s what Murphy’s Law stated, and that’s what she believed: the one time you rely solely on a recorder will be the one time the recorder faults. Except there were at least 4 recorders in the room, and she used notebooks anyway.
The Woman waited for five more minutes. There was still no answer from the other side of the room. Ethan kept gazing out the window, blankly. He looked right through the Woman as if she wasn’t there. Something had preoccupied him. Good. Bad. No one knew. He was so fixated on that space as if it was reeling him in. Out of this world.
“Ethan, you’re with me?” the Woman asked again for the second time. She was Dr Patricia, Ethan’s therapist for the last six months. And that’s how the session had been going on, every once a week, for that amount of time. No conversation, just her asking Ethan’s day and how was he holding up.
Six months. She didn’t have any clue of what had happened to Ethan and never once did she ask him about it. Well, except for the first four sessions. Then she learned her role, and joined Ethan in silence for every session to that day.
Others would tell Ethan to move on, to put everything behind; to go on vacation, buy a cat, buy a dog, or buy an iguana. Anything to move his attention from whatever he had been going through and tell him that everything would be all right.
However, the psychological principle has it that buried traumas must be excavated and dealt with before a patient can move on. Dr Patricia was pretty aware of that, and she really needed Ethan to speak. But who knew whether it was trauma or not? Ethan wouldn’t tell anyone about anything. Though you could tell by Ethan’s eyes that he was in so much pain.
Dr Patricia understood the best she could do in this matter would be to give Ethan all the space and quiet he needed. For whatever happened to him. That’s all that matter. Because both of them knew that everything would never be all right again, and everything she said.. none of that mattered.
There they were, sat in silence.