Dr. Kaur’soffice smells like peppermint tea today and that weird diffuser oil I’ve never identified. Today she’s in a soft gray sweater, hair pulled back, expression already attentive in that way that makes me feel examined and held at the same time.
“Rough day?” she asks, taking in my sweaty, shaken appearance.
I drop onto the couch and let my backpack slide to the floor. “You could say that. I feel like someone peeled me,” I say. “Like an onion with all its layers. In Psych.”
Her eyebrows lift, concerned. “Tell me what happened.”
I launch into it. The lecture, the case study, the graph, and the class comments about destiny and toughness and craving intensity. The way my body responded was like I was eight years old again and getting yelled at for eating too fast.
“I know it wasn’t literally me on the slide,” I say, picking at a loose thread on my jeans. “I know that. But it felt… close enough that my brain was like, ‘Ah, yes, this is the part where we implode.’”
“How did you keep from imploding?” she asks.
“I… did the breathing,” I say. “Box breathing. Grounding with my pen, thinking about the texture, the weight. I kept my ass in the chair. I didn’t bolt. Which felt like a miracle.”
“That is a small miracle,” she says. “Your nervous system was getting a lot of reminders of past experiences. And you stayed with your body instead of leaving it completely. That’s significant.”
“It didn’t feel significant,” I mutter. “It felt like barely not falling apart in public.”
“Sometimes that’s what progress looks like,” she says. “Not that you never get triggered, but that you have more tools when you do.”
I lean my head back against the couch, staring at the ceiling. “It just… hit too close,” I say. “That line about survival depending on performance, about being ‘worth keeping.’ I keep thinking about… if Dad hadn’t gotten me. If nobody had. What version of Subject A I would’ve been.”
She nods. “Those are understandable thoughts,” she says. “But notice that they’re counterfactuals. ‘What if.’ Your brain is very good at running simulations. It doesn’t mean they’re true.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to my brain,” I mutter.
Dr. Kaur smiles gently. “I would, if I could. In the meantime, we talk to the parts of you that can hear me.”
I snort. “Good luck with them.”
We unpack the lecture. The graph. The way my shoulders went up to my ears when that guy said, “Some people just toughen up,” like trauma is some kind of fucking gym membership that you go to to bulk up your coping skills. She asks where I felt things in my body, and I tell her. “Chest, neck, jaw, and in my hands.”
“And what did you want to do in that moment?” she asks.
“Leave,” I say immediately. “Or fight. Or both. Punch him and then run.”
“And what did you actually do?”
“I… stayed,” I say. “And then I came here. Instead of pretending I was fine and letting it rot in my head.”
Nodding once, firmly. “That’s excellent use of your system,” she says. “You’re learning to bring things into the room instead of trying to handle them alone in the dark.”
“Yeah, well, the dark has shitty ventilation,” I say.
She laughs softly. “I’m going to steal that,” she says.
We talk about the “prophecy” feeling. The way data that’s meant to be descriptive lands in my bones like fate. She brings me back to the safety plan, to the idea that knowing my patterns doesn’t doom me, it gives us leverage.
“Your history is relevant,” she says. “It explains a lot of your tendencies. But it does not write your ending. Do you hear the difference?”
“I hear it,” I say. “I don’t… feel it yet.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “Feeling usually comes after practice. For now, let’s work on what you do when that prophecy feeling shows up.”
We come up with a mini-plan: Limit doomy Googling about trauma outcomes. When the “this is who you are forever” thought pops up, literally write down an alternate statement like, “My nervous system expects catastrophe. That doesn’t mean catastrophe is guaranteed.” Tell Miguel the lecture was hard, even if I don’t want to unpack every detail.
“That last one feels… gross,” I say. “Things have been good. I don’t want to be like, ‘Surprise, here’s my weekly trauma monologue.’”
