Clawing at the Wreckage

[Monty Pendleton]

[adminapproval=30535149]Monty couldn't believe he'd agreed to this. Not that he'd been given a great deal of choice. The nurse had recommended it as if he did, but he knew that refusing to see Maria would only have delayed his discharge from the hospital wing. Still, it wasn't as if he had to talk. He only had to turn up, go through the motions, tell the counsellor what she wanted to hear, and that would be it.

He startled at the abruptness of his own thought. Why was he so determined counselling wouldn't help? He was the first to recommend it to struggling students. After thinking for a moment, he came to the conclusion that while he did believe it could be effective in some cases, he was simply screwed up beyond help. Perhaps if he poured his heart out, opened up, shared his deepest vulnerability, Maria might be able to salvage something from the wreck that he had become; more likely, though, he would just feel ashamed, empty, or angry that there was no quick fix to his problems. He would give up after two weeks, and then feel like a failure. What was the sense in beginning something he already knew would end badly? It was easier just to lie.

But he had to see Maria either way. Mentally rehearsing some speech about how he was getting on just fine, Monty leaned forward and knocked on the counsellor's door.

 

[Maria Madison]

It was difficult not to be a little nervous about today. Although she was a youth specialist Maria had certainly provided counselling for adults before, but having one of her colleagues booked in to see her was a new experience. Maria hadn't really made friends among the Hogwarts staff in her time back at school, partly due to her busy schedule, and partly out of embarrassment at facing colleagues old enough to remember Maria in her own time at school. On the rare times they had spoken however, Monty had seemed quite a pleasant, cheerful man to her, and Maria had been shocked to hear of his collapse. If there was anything she could do to help him, Maria was determined to do it.

She had a fresh notebook and self-writing quill set up, ready to take her notes for her, when she heard a knock on the door. Time to work. Putting a friendly, reassuring smile on her face, Maria got up and opened the door, offering a hand for Monty to shake. "Hi, Monty. Come on in, make yourself comfortable." She stepped back, inviting him into her office. "Can I offer you tea or coffee? There's also a tin of biscuits on the coffee table, help yourself." She smiled encouragingly, closing the door behind Monty once he was inside and returning to her seat.

 

[Monty Pendleton]

With only a second's hesitation, Monty took Maria's hand, releasing it again just as soon as he could without seeming abrupt. Handshakes were such a strange form of greeting - so ordinary, yet so personal, and unnecessary. "Thank you," he said, stepping into the comfortable room and quietly taking a seat. At the offer of tea or biscuits, he held up a dismissive hand. "No, I'm fine. Thank you." He had the feeling he was going to be thanking Maria for a lot of things he'd never wanted in the first place. Surely the counsellor had better things she could be doing with her time! Monty felt wrong imposing on it.

Afraid of what Maria might ask, yet unable to find any words to fill the silence, Monty sat numbly in his chair, gaze fixed on the floor. He could feel the pressure of being expected to talk encroaching on him already, tension settling in the air. This was going to be a long session.

 

[Maria Madison]

Taking her seat again, Maria nodded. "Well, if you change your mind, the kettle's right over there, it's no trouble at all." She smiled gently. As strange as it was seeing a colleague in her office in this context, first and foremost Maria knew she had to be professional, and as she slipped into the introduction she gave in most first appointments, it was easier to relax into the familiar territory. "Now, the first thing I always have to say in first appointments is that these sessions are entirely confidential. Nothing you say in this room will ever leave it without your written consent. The only exception to that rule is if I feel that you're in immediate danger of hurting yourself or someone else. At that point I'm required by law to ensure that you get the care you need to make sure that doesn't happen. I understand that it may feel uncomfortable to talk about these things with a colleague, but I take my clients confidentiality very seriously, and you have my word that everything you say will remain in this room." She gave Monty what she hoped was a reassuring smile, keeping her tone and body language gentle.

"Now, it's up to you where you think we need to begin with all of this, but I'd like to start off with what I know about why you're here, just so that we're on equal footing. I've heard that you had a collapse in the entrance hall, that you spent some time in hospital wing, and now you've been referred to me." There were rumours about Monty's condition, for sure, but Maria had done her best not to listen, wanting to hear it from the man himself. She didn't want possibly false information clouding her view of how best to help him. "So... how can I help you? What do you think I should know about your situation?"

 

[Monty Pendleton]

Monty resisted the temptation to interrupt Maria's confidentiality speech. He'd heard it before - used it, during his own training days as a counsellor, and once or twice with upset students. Sharing such personal information with a colleague was certainly strange, but it could have been worse. His mother, a retired psychology, would likely have grilled him if she'd known what he was going through. Perhaps that was part of the reason he was so afraid to see her again. When they spoke, he always got the feeling she was trying to analyse him.

It was no small secret that Monty had cried in the entrance hall the day he'd collapsed, nor that he had begged the nurse to help him, or confessed he felt as if he were breaking. If it had been a secret, he would surely have taken it to the grave; but since he figured Maria already knew about it, and simply didn't want to make conjectures based on rumour, he saw little point in lying. How she could help him was less simple a question. "I was really hoping you might be able to tell me," he admitted. Then he shrugged and looked down at his hands. "I don't know where you want me to start."

 

[Maria Madison]

Maria wasn't surprised that Monty didn't have much to say to start with, but it was clear that finding the right questions to ask him was going to be the real challenge, at least at first. "Well, how I can help you will all depend on what kind of help you need." Maria said gently, crossing her legs as she spoke. "Let's start with your history. Was the recent incident isolated, or have you had similar problems in the past? I'm not talking about collapses, but the things that caused it... stress, anxiety, whatever you feel was the cause. Have these things troubled you before in your life?" Maria knew the answer was almost certainly going to be yes, but it was important to establish a proper history and see how Monty framed his problems from his own perspective.

 

[Monty Pendleton]

[adminapproval=30083257]Monty laughed, though it wasn't funny. He couldn't remember the last time he hadn't suffered from some form of stress or anxiety. Even his childhood had been affected. He was going to be here an incredibly long time if Maria wanted to know about all that. He opened his mouth to start, but the words didn't come as he anticipated. They got stuck in his throat somewhere, stopped by the voice in his mind that convinced him not to talk. But as he listened to it, a cold realisation came over him: it wasn't his voice. The voice that promised him he would be laughed at, invalidated, scorned, was his stepdad's voice. And then suddenly he was crying, because he knew he still believed it.

"Sorry," he said, quickly wiping his face. It didn't stem the flow. All of his pain seemed to be crouched just beneath the surface; he felt it clawing to get out, and was terrified what would happen if it did. "I don't think I can do this. With absolutely every respect, I just can't." He said this, but he didn't move, or try to leave. After reflecting for a moment, he said slowly, "I realise it's illogical, but I'm terrified you're going to judge me. You certainly wouldn't be the first. Besides which, I wouldn't have a clue where to start. I've suffered from anxiety since I was six or seven years old. That's forty-odd years. I don't see how talking it out is going to do anything besides make us both uncomfortable. Do you see where I'm coming from?"

 

[Maria Madison]

Maria had been a little apprehensive about asking Monty about his history, knowing that she could potentially be digging up something ugly, but the second she heard the man laugh she knew it had been too much. Just watching his reaction broke her heart and she reached over, gently sliding the box of tissues on her coffee table closer for if Monty needed them. Seeing clients cry was always one of the most difficult parts of her job, and coming from an adult man who had been carrying such a heavy burden his whole life it only hurt more.

When Monty apologised, Maria shook her head firmly. "Listen, Monty, you never need to apologise for your feelings to me. This is why I'm here." She said, keeping her tone gentle. With a quick flick of her wand she set the kettle in the corner of her office to start boiling - despite his earlier refusal, Monty looked very much like he needed a cup of tea. Listening to Monty's description of his struggles, Maria's heart ached. "That makes sense." She said gently. "Now I know me saying that I won't judge you for anything you say here might not actually help convince you, but I'm going to say it anyway. I'm not here to judge you, or hurt you. I'm only here to support you, and hopefully help you find some ways to cope a little more comfortably. That's everything I'm here to do." She said gently, crossing her ankles. Maria knew that it was easy for anxiety to convince a person of things, even when they were being told the opposite, and she hoped Monty would be able to take her words to heart. "It sounds to me like you've been trying to carry an enormous weight for a very, very long time. It's not surprising to me that things have become too much recently. Have you ever seen anyone about your anxiety before?" Monty wasn't wrong about it being difficult to know where to start, but Maria hoped that by giving him something specific to focus on she would be able to get him talking, and hopefully calmed down a little.

 

[Monty Pendleton]

All Monty had ever done was apologise for his feelings, so Maria's reassurance was foreign to his ears. As the counsellor continued, Monty searched her face for duplicity, but instead found only disarming sincerity. She would not judge him. Of course she wouldn't. Monty didn't judge the students when they approached him with their concerns; why did he imagine Maria would treat him any differently? He knew why, of course - because his vulnerability had so often been betrayed - but he also knew he had to let it go. Not everybody was like his stepdad. Not everybody revelled in the sight of his crying. Least of all, he presumed, Maria.

"Thank you," he said, drying his face with a tissue and then scrunching it up in his fists. He nodded in agreement. When he considered everything he'd been carrying alone, it wasn't remotely surprising he'd collapsed under its weight. "No," he said. "I studied psychology, a long time ago. I suffered from depression when I was..." Monty shook his head. "Young. I couldn't face the thought of explaining why, so I thought, 'If I study the human mind, and mental illness, perhaps I can overcome my own.' It worked for my depression, I suppose; once I recognised those negative thought patterns, and changed them into something more positive, I never suffered so badly again. But it didn't fix everything." Pain deepened the creases of his face. "I seem to worry about everything. Not so much at the moment, while I'm taking these potions, but usually. I don't trust myself - I don't trust my own judgement. And I know why - and that's why this feels so pointless. I already know why I'm the way I am. If I thought I could fix it, I would have done so years ago."

Pointless as he claimed it was, suddenly the urge to talk to someone, anyone, overwhelmed him. Fresh tears sprang to his eyes as he said, "My dad had an affair when I was six - the man I trusted, idolised. He was everything to me, and to my mother. When he left, she fell into a deep, deep depression. I was six, and... and I had to take care of us both. I tried so hard to make her happy. I didn't understand why I couldn't. It had to be my fault - something I was doing, or not doing, that my father did. She forced me to keep it a secret, and I was much too scared of losing her to protest. A year or two later - I think I was eight - she reconnected with an old school friend, Richard, and within a few months they were engaged. It was like... like a light had come back on. I knew I ought to have been happy, but I was furious.

"After that, it was as if I ceased to exist. I don't know whether she felt guilty, or just didn't care, but from that moment on she completely ignored me. I hated Richard, for reasons I couldn't at that age articulate, but I couldn't tell her; she wouldn't have listened, or cared. She was in love with him, and she was happy, and I convinced myself that that was what mattered - tried to invalidate my feelings of discomfort. A few months after they married, Richard began to suspect I didn't like him. He was paranoid, I think - thought I wanted to break up his marriage, or something ridiculous like that. So he started to put me down, to make me believe I was a burden to my mother. Anything and everything he could possibly scold or humiliate me for, he did - even if I hadn't done anything wrong. I was treading on eggshells trying to keep him happy, trying to avoid that humiliation, but it was never enough. There was always something. I used to dread coming home for the holidays. Not that school was much better. I was so anxious all the time, so scared, I would be physically sick." Monty laughed weakly. "He said I was too sensitive. Eventually, when I was fourteen, I ran away.

"My voice never mattered. I was always wrong. If you hear that enough as a child, you question your judgement forever. That's why I'm anxious. How can I be sure I'm making the right decisions, doing the right thing, when nothing I ever did as a child was right? How can I move on from that?" He really wanted to know, really hoped Maria would have the immediate answers, though he knew it wasn't so simple. A hollow, sick feeling settled in his stomach, and he realised his hands were trembling. This was it. The truth occupied the air around them, hung there as if, in Monty's mind, awaiting judgement. He could hardly look Maria in the eye.

 

[Maria Madison]

Maria was both surprised and relieved when Monty began to open up, listening to the man carefully as her quill hurried to scratch notes of everything he was saying. It explained a lot of his demeanour, that he had already studied psychology, and his reasons reminded Maria a lot of her own past, having been inspired to her current career by her own experiences with anger management. Hearing that presumably some form of self-applied cognitive behavioural therapy had been helpful for Monty's depression was interesting to hear and Maria made a mental note. Presumably Monty would have tried to apply some similar techniques to his anxiety in the past, but it was definitely worth revisiting. She didn't want to interrupt him though, and kept the thought to herself to allow him to finish talking.

As Monty spoke Maria was able to develop a much clearer picture of him, and it filled in a lot of blanks in how she saw the man's anxieties. Something this deeply rooted would eat anyone up. It was no surprise. When he finished speaking Maria considered everything he had said for a long moment, choosing her words carefully when she spoke. "Well, I don't think anyone could blame you for being anxious with an upbringing like that." She said gently. "That's a lot of pain to carry, for a long time." It was true. Monty's story reminded her strongly of how her own family had treated her, and even after years of working through her past, it still haunted her sometimes. "There's one question I want to ask you first, and it's a question you may have asked yourself before, but I think it's important." She said gently, choosing her words. "You're an adult now. Probably older than they were. And you see children the same age you were all the time. Do you ever think it would be right for you to treat any of those children that way? I don't only mean right as in just, I also mean literally, accurate. Do you think any child could genuinely deserve the way you were treated? I think we're both agreed that the answer is no."

Maria shifted a little. It was difficult to find ways of discussing this without coming across patronising. "The people who were supposed to care for you betrayed you, and that is not your fault. They projected their own problems and insecurities on you, and that is not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. You were a child. Children are supposed to be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. By blaming you for their own problems, the adults in your life denied you an important developmental step." Maria paused, trying to figure out the next step forward. "You didn't do anything wrong with your parents, but you also should be allowed to make mistakes sometimes. Everyone does. The skill you never learned was how to cope with mistakes and fix them and move forward. That's something I'd like to work on with you going forward, but we'll save it for the end of the session." Maria didn't want to bog Monty down with exercises immediately after such a difficult revelation. For now she was mostly interested in his reactions to what she had to say, so she could decide how to go forward.

 

[Monty Pendleton]

Monty could hardly breathe, the anticipation crushing his chest. He knew he'd said too much - that Maria wouldn't be able to help him. He was prepared for it; and as she offered him a few words of sympathy, he briefly thought his suspicions had been confirmed. Then he looked up, shocked by her question. "No," he said. "No, of course not - never." Monty would rather have lived it all over again ten times than put somebody else through it once. No child deserved to be spoken to that way - to be humiliated, undermined, belittled. Monty wondered where Maria was taking this. If she was trying to help him see that his parents shouldn't have treated him that way, she needn't waste her breath; he already knew that. But that wasn't it. And what came out of her mouth instead nearly choked him.

Monty's eyes filled with fresh tears, which fell before he could catch them in his tissue. It wasn't his fault. He'd told himself that before, but it had always felt like a lie told to temporarily ease the guilt. Never had he actually thought about it, considered what had happened to him from anybody else's perspective, and realised that, actually, he wasn't to blame. He'd been a child, forced to take care of his mother, and silenced by his step-father. "It's stupid," he said after a moment, drying his face, "because - I'd never blame anybody else. If somebody came to me and told me the same story, I wouldn't blame them. It's like - I'm conditioned to believe that it was my fault - but what makes me so different to everybody else? Why am I so special that... that I should exclusively deserve the blame?" Monty exhaled softly through his nose, looking down. He wanted to believe that Maria could help him through this, but he knew it was going to take a lot of work on his end, too. "Thank you," he said. Not just for opening his eyes, but for opening him up. He hadn't known how much less lonely he would feel - how much more manageable his problems would look - simply by talking. It almost made him regret not having talked to somebody sooner; but then again, he hadn't been ready. He would have built his defences even higher had somebody even hinted at trying to knock them down. Why now was the moment that had changed, he wasn't sure, but it didn't matter. Where beginning the slow journey of recovery was concerned, 40 years late was still better than never.