Asher ✓

62 | condition

OCTOBER 11, 2020 / THERAPY

Being Ryanel's boyfriend came with only one condition.

Asher had to go to therapy.

Asher didn't think he needed therapy, not after having properly functioned and succeeded for years after his accident. He started a non-profit organisation and won a national motocross competition. What said 'thriving' more than that?

But Ryanel was adamant. Asher's dependency and mental health had been a recurring issue when they'd dated the first time, and Ryanel believed Asher had a lot about himself to untangle — not that he told Asher any of this. He put therapy out there as a take-it-or-leave-it agreement.

Best to let Asher discover this on his own.

In all his twenty-four years, Asher had never gone to therapy before. Sure, he had received multiple lifetimes' worth of counselling following his amputation, but — as he would learn — there was a difference between the two. Not that Asher knew specifically what it was yet.

If he had to wager, he'd say that counselling tried to help him problem-solve from the outside, in. Counselling said, this shitty event happened to you, and here's the ways it's made you feel shitty, and here's some things that might help you get through.

Therapy tried to help him problem-solve from the inside, out. Therapy said, you've actually been feeling shitty inside for a long time, and that's why external events easily send you into a downward spiral of shitty-ness.

This was all according to Asher's first three confronting therapy sessions, at least.

He nearly didn't return after the third session. Being told that his mind was somehow self-perpetuating his suffering felt like an insult to the very real, very tangible obstacles he had faced over his life. Was he to blame for being diagnosed with a bone condition, or for his mother's death, or for being hit by a drunk driver? Was it his fault for not getting over it quickly enough?

"No, of course not," Pallavi, his therapist, said. "I'm glad you returned, Asher. Let me elaborate on what I said during our last session."

Asher leaned back into the leather chair. One good thing about this very expensive, very time-consuming routine was the comfortable furniture boasted by the clinic. "Go ahead."

"To put the way you feel down to events that happen to you is a completely fair response, but in doing that, you're suggesting, in a way," Pallavi explained carefully, "that if those events didn't happen to you, you would be completely happy."

Asher remained silent. He wasn't blatantly yelling at Pallavi in protest, though — which he had done last time — so she took it as a positive sign to continue.

"I think being diagnosed with imperfecta and your mother's death were the two formative moments of your childhood that changed the way you think about the world. Correct me if I'm wrong."

Silence.

She pushed on, "Last time you were here, you told me that you've always felt like you were waiting for bad things to happen, that feeling low was the natural state of your emotions, sprinkled with good times — rather than the other way around. Again, correct me at any time."