“In what way am I not being honest?” I ask.
She shakes her head a little, saying, “You’re not being honest with me, but you’re also not being honest with yourself. You’re not here because you want to change. You’re here because your girlfriend might break up with you if you weren’t. Isn’t that true?”
“No,” I answer. “She laid down the law, sure, but I’m here because I realized she was right. I do need something. What happened in that fight—”
“So you’re here because you want to be here?” she asks.
“I don’t know if ‘want’ is the right word right now, but yeah,” I answer.
She nods. “Okay,” she says. “Continue, but this time, let’s focus on the feelings.”
“Oh god,” I groan.
“Hey, finally a real reaction from you,” she says. “I thought the stuff with the wig was the only bit of that I was going to see this hour.”
“Do you have some kind of problem with me I don’t know about?” I ask. “Did I sleep with a relative of yours and not call or something?”
“There’s no need to be hostile,” Dr. Sadler says. “I’m just assessing your mental state.”
“My mental state?” I ask. “What are you even talking about?”
“We’ll come back to that,” she says. “Now, if you had to pick the top three emotions, the three emotions that you felt more than anything else during those minutes or seconds when you said you weren’t in control, what would they be?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I wasn’t feeling anything.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
“You know,” I scoff, “at this point, I don’t really care whether you believe me or not.”
Now, it’s just a matter of waiting a moment for her to collect herself and kick me out of the office and I can go back to Ash, telling her that I tried. I tried, it just didn’t work.
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad you’re finally recognizing your emotions instead of just reacting to them. Now, if you could tell me the three emotions—”
“Annoyance, frustration and irritation,” I tell her.
“Three near synonyms,” she says. “Linguistically, that’s mildly impressive, but you’re not talking about what you were feeling that night. You’re talking about how you’re feeling right now.”
“Gee, how’d you guess?” I ask sarcastically.
She actually bothers answering, “You’ve said a couple of times in this conversation that you don’t recall feeling any particular emotion immediately before or at any time during the fight,” she says. “If you were talking about that, I doubt your emotions would be quite so clear. That’s probably why you felt emotionally anesthetized. Do you frequently feel anhedonic?”
I think a beat, but nope. “I don’t know what that is,” I tell Dr. Sadler.
“Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure,” she says.
“Oh, that’s not it then,” I say quickly.
“So the things in your life that used to bring you pleasure still do?” she asks.
I think about it for a minute. “Well, I guess maybe not as much, but I still experience pleasure,” I answer.
“Okay,” she says. “There are many different ways in which a person’s body and mind can react to depression. If you’d be willing, I’d like to try something that might help us find out what the best—”
“I’m sorry,” I say, stopping her. “I’m not depressed.”
“Okay,” she says.
I’m waiting for more, but there doesn’t seem to be any.
“Okay?” I ask. “You just sat there telling me that’s what’s going on. Are you really a doctor or do you just like messing with people?”
She snickers. “Why can’t it be both?” she asks. “No, I’ve simply found that it does no good trying to talk a person into believing something they don’t think they have, especially when they don’t think they could have it.”
“I’ve been depressed before,” I tell her. “Growing up in my house, I would have been out of my mind not to go a little out of my mind.”
“Well, let’s try to get you back in,” she says. “Have you given any more thought to what you were feeling that night?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I was feeling detached.”
“Okay,” she says, picking up a pen from her desk and writing something on a yellow legal note pad, slowly pronouncing the word “detachment” while she does.
“That’s not really an emotion, though, is it?” I ask.
“Oh, absolutely it is,” she says. “What else?”
I’m not sure if I trust her, but I’m already paying to be here. The least I can do is get my money’s worth.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I just felt really numb.”
“What about just before the fight, before you started feeling this sort of disconnect. Was there anything that triggered your response immediately beforehand, or had it been building for a while?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I really don’t remember.”
“All right,” she says, writing something else on her paper. Just like with the word detachment, she slowly speaks the word that she’s writing. “Hypnosis,” she says.
“You think someone hypnotized me?” I ask.
“Not yet,” she says. “Hypnosis has been shown to aid with memory and can even put you back to another time in your life using a process called age regression. The brain is a pretty interesting thing.”
“So you’re going to hypnotize me to find out what I was feeling?” I ask.
She ignores the question. “So, tell me more about your relationship with Ash,” she says. “I’m assuming that’s short for Ashley or Ashton?”
“Ashley,” I answer. “She’s great. We get along really well, and we seem to get each other. Things haven’t been easy, but a lot’s been going on over the past few months. Apart from the thing with her mom, there’s really nothing I’d change about her.”
“Okay,” Dr. Sadler says. “When would you say was the last time when there wasn’t a lot going on—when things were more normal?”
“I don’t think things were ever normal,” I tell her.
“That’s why I used the modifier ‘more,’” she says. “When was the last time you really felt like yourself?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I know it’s been a while.”
“That must be very difficult,” Dr. Sadler says.
I look at her. “It is what it is,” I tell her.
“And what it is must be very difficult,” she says.
“Look, I didn’t come in here to be judged, okay?” I ask, getting out of my seat yet again.
The doctor doesn’t move. She barely blinks. “Where did that come from?” she asks in a surprisingly soft tone.