“You look different today,” she said, studying me from her chair with that quiet attentiveness she brought to every session. Her pen was already in her hand but she hadn’t written anything yet. She was just looking. “Something’s shifted.”
I settled onto the couch and crossed my legs and tried to arrange my face into something neutral, but apparently my face wasn’t cooperating because Janelle tilted her head slightly and smiled.
“You’re glowing, Mehar.”
“I’m moisturized. It’s a new serum.”
“It’s not the serum.” Her smile was warm and genuine and it made me want to tell her everything, which was exactly what therapy was supposed to do and exactly what made it dangerous. “Your shoulders are down. Your jaw is relaxed. You didn’t scan the room when you walked in like you usually do. Whatever is happening in your life right now, your body is responding to it positively.”
I sat there for a second debating how much to say. I’d been coming to Janelle for almost two months and she knew things about me that nobody else on earth knew, the cage, the dungeon,my father, Ahmad, the ectopic pregnancy, the lost fallopian tube. She’d earned my trust inch by inch across hundreds of hours on this couch. If there was anyone I could tell about Quest, it was her.
“There’s someone,” I said.
Janelle’s eyebrows lifted slightly and she leaned forward in her chair. “Tell me about him.”
“I don’t even know where to start. He’s… different. From any man I’ve been around. He’s smart and successful and cocky as hell, but he’s also patient in a way that I didn’t think men could be. He took me roller skating because he said I looked like I hadn’t had fun in five years, and he was right. He defended me when someone grabbed me at a bar and then we argued about it for twenty minutes because I told him I didn’t need saving.” I paused. “And he didn’t try to sleep with me. He could have. I was ready. But he only… he just wanted to make me feel good without taking anything for himself.”
I was staring at my hands because looking at Janelle while I said that felt like too much exposure. When I finally glanced up, she was nodding slowly, her expression soft and encouraging.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “It sounds like you’re allowing yourself to be open to connection. That’s real progress, Mehar. I mean that.”
Something in my chest loosened. I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear someone say that.
“How long have you known him?” Janelle asked.
“Maybe about a year. But we’ve only really been spending time together for the last few weeks.”
“And how soon after the ectopic pregnancy and the end of things with your ex did this begin?”
I thought about it. “I guess it’s been about seven or eight months since all of that.”
Janelle wrote something down. “That’s still relatively recent, Mehar. Not in calendar terms, but in terms of your healing. You’ve been through an extraordinary amount of trauma in a very compressed timeline—leaving Ahmad, the surgery, the pregnancy loss, and then everything with your most recent ex. Your nervous system has been in survival mode for most of your adult life.” She paused and looked at me directly. “I want to ask you something and I want you to sit with it before you answer. How did you feel the first time he touched you?”
“Safe,” I said without hesitating.
“Safe.” Janelle repeated the word and wrote it down. “You’ve described your father’s house as unsafe. Ahmad’s house as unsafe. Your relationship with your last ex as unsafe in ways you didn’t recognize until it was too late. And now, within weeks of spending time with this new person, you feel safe.” She set her pen down. “Do you think it’s possible that what you’re interpreting as safety is actually your nervous system seeking regulation?”
“What do you mean?”
“When someone has been in a prolonged state of hypervigilance—which you have been for years—the body craves regulation. It craves calm. And when someone comes along who provides that calm, the body latches onto it because it’s starving for it. That doesn’t mean the connection isn’t real. But it does mean that your body might be responding to the relief rather than to the person. You’re responding to what he represents; safety, stability, control, rather than to who he actually is.”
I opened my mouth to argue but nothing came out because she wasn’t wrong. At least, I couldn’t prove she was wrong. My body HAD been in survival mode for years. And Quest HAD made me feel calm in a way I’d never experienced. What if she was right? What if I wasn’t falling for him but for the feeling hegave me? What if I took that feeling away and there was nothing underneath it?
“I’m not saying don’t pursue this,” Janelle said gently, reading the spiral on my face. “I’m saying be aware. Trauma survivors often mistake intensity for intimacy. And the most dangerous relationships are the ones that feel like healing before you’ve actually healed.”
That sentence landed in the center of my chest and stayed there.
“You told me in our last session that the dungeon gives you a false sense of control,” Janelle continued. “That it manages the wound without addressing the root. Is it possible that this man is doing something similar? Giving you a false sense of safety that manages the loneliness and the fear without addressing where those feelings actually come from?”
“He’s not a coping mechanism,” I said, but my voice was quieter than I wanted it to be.
“He might not be. But your pattern is worth examining. You went from your father’s house to Ahmad. From Ahmad to your last ex. And now from your ex to this new person. Each relationship has served a function—control, escape, validation, safety. What I want for you is a relationship that doesn’t serve a function at all. One that exists because you choose it from a place of wholeness, not from a place of need.”
“I don’t know what wholeness feels like,” I admitted.
“I know. And that’s exactly why I want you to be careful.” Janelle’s voice was so tender, so full of what sounded like genuine concern, that I felt my eyes sting. “You deserve someone who loves you. But you also deserve to be healthy enough to recognize whether what you’re receiving is love or just the absence of pain. Those are two very different things.”
The session ended a few minutes later. Janelle gave me a new journaling prompt: write about a time you chose somethingfrom a place of want rather than a place of need. I nodded and gathered my things and walked out of her office into the Dupont Circle sunshine and sat in my car for ten minutes without starting the engine.
