Falling Falling Stars

13 - Landmark

Notes: The technique that Dr Gary uses in his session with Efnisien is known as 'focusing' and is a part of felt sense psychotherapy. Brief ableist slur.

Bear with me, the road's about to get weird!

*

Efnisien stared at the word Assessment on Dr Gary's tablet and grimaced.

'Shit,' he said.

'Indeed,' Dr Gary said. 'It's time to revisit the fun and entertaining world of psychological reassessment. It shouldn't take the whole session, but I do want to run you through more than one test.'

'What if I had things I wanted to talk about?' Efnisien said.

Dr Gary looked at him, then tilted his head, thinking it over. 'Have you had a worse week than normal?'

'What? Uh...' Efnisien sat there, feeling stunned. Aside from his freak-out over Arden's story, and then sleeping a ton, not really. In fact, there'd been less tallies on the whiteboard than usual. 'No.'

He just wanted to talk about all the stuff that had been happening. That morning Efnisien's phone pinged. He'd snatched it up, thinking it was Arden, but Gwyn was messaging to double check they were okay to catch up. Efnisien messaged back to say it was fine, then realised he'd sort of...not forgotten exactly. He would never forget Gwyn's visits.

But he hadn't been as obsessed with it as normal.

'It's been weird though,' he added.

'Ah,' Dr Gary said, holding up his tablet. 'I'd like to do the assessments to quantify some of that 'weirdness.' We can put it off, but I'd rather not. I've already delayed your reassessment and it would be irresponsible of me to keep putting it off. The sooner we get this over and done with, the sooner we can talk.'

'You gonna tell me how fucked up I am after the tests?' Efnisien said.

'No,' Dr Gary said. 'I'm going to tell you if your diagnoses have changed or shifted, or if I think that the assessments are likely to indicate change. And then I'm going to see if that means it's time to advance you into some different therapeutic management techniques.'

'Oh, so like graduating to new disorders? You know, none of the psychology books I've read have talked about like, the undergrad and postgrads of being fucked up.'

'That's true,' Dr Gary said, slightly distracted as he tapped away on his tablet. 'Most people are generally satisfied with one disorder.'

'So this is the session where you finally admit you were wrong, and I never had Pure O, right?'

'No,' Dr Gary said. 'And now to the matter at hand. The assessments are all multiple choice. Please don't think too hard about your answers, and answer as quickly as reasonably possible. Your first answer is likely to be the most accurate, unless you misunderstood the question.'

Efnisien slouched down in his chair, and then for good measure continued to slide forwards until his hips were off the edge of the cushion and he had to brace his calves and thighs to stop from sliding onto the floor entirely.

'I hate this,' Efnisien muttered.

Dr Gary only smiled professionally at him, and Efnisien rolled his eyes and nodded to indicate that he was ready to answer questions as he wiggled back onto the chair.

So. Many. Fucking. Questions.

As Efnisien answered them, he remembered the way he'd answered them the first time around back in Hillview, even drugged up on injected Risperidone and Escitalopram, the latter of which stayed his drug of choice. He could tell he was answering differently on a lot of the questions this time around. No, he didn't enjoy thoughts of hurting animals. No, he didn't enjoy thoughts of hurting people. Yes, he was disturbed by the content of his intrusive thoughts. No, not just 'rarely,' but actually all the fucking time.