The Doctor Is In.
Sep. 9th, 2004 06:20 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsLorna talks to Samson. Progress is made.
Lorna had called Doc Samson after Paul left and scheduled an appointment with him. So Thursday evening, she grabbed a travel mug and armed with her coffee, headed down to his office. It had been some time since she’d talked to the man, not since just after coming to grips with her anorexia. Time flies, she reflected as she rapped on his door.
Len sat down the file he was re-reading. He had everything in it memorized, but it was a habit left over from his residency to re-familiarize himself with every patient's files just prior to a new appointment. It was a comfort, in a sense -- a leftover habit to calm nerves and insecurities that he had all but conquered years ago. And it was always good to be prepared. "Come in," he called, rising to his feet to greet Lorna.
“Hi, doc.” Lorna said with more cheer than she felt, swinging the door shut behind her. “How are you?” She crossed the office quickly and shook his hand, pleased that he remembered that she was a rather tactile person. She flopped in an armchair and waved him back into his own seat.
He smiled at her. Len genuinely liked Lorna as a person, even if she could be completely frustrating as a patient. "I'm doing well. Remember that paper I told you I was writing? I've sent it around to some of my peers to be reviewed. I'm hoping to get it published. So other than my seasonal allergies acting up, I'm good." He sat down but didn't immediately reach for his notepad and pen and he kept his body language relaxed. He had a feeling that Lorna would like to start off this session very low-key, and while not scientifically sound, Len Samson had learned to trust his feelings. "And you? How is Lorna Dane doing?"
“Lorna has completely screwed up her life, Doc.” She sighed, “So I’m going to operate on the assumption that you’re not a gossip hound and so you don’t know what’s going on. Good enough?”
"That is, actually, a pretty good assumption, Lorna. You know that no one really likes to talk to me outside of this space, and inside this office they are focused on themselves, not on the doings of others. So. What is going on?" Len had, actually heard a bit about Lorna and Alex's situation -- it was hard to miss, actually -- but he wasn't bringing any preconceptions to their conversation and he wanted to hear about it from Lorna's own perspective, that being the only perspective that mattered here and now.
“Last Thursday, Alex and I had a fight. A really huge screaming ugly fight and we broke up. That’s the short version. Do you want a full play by play?” Lorna tilted her head to the side, “I swear if you say ‘do you want to give me a play by play’ I’ll throw my coffee at your head.”
Len grinned at her. "And waste good coffee like that, Lorna? I am shocked, simply shocked." He was teasing her gently in the hopes of putting her a bit more at ease. She was obviously tense and completely stressed. He knew how much of herself she had invested in her relationship with Alex, and he suspected that it had been the foundation that helped her cope with everything. With that foundation shaken, she would be hurting, and hurting deeply. However, as a psychiatrist, Len didn't it healthy for her to have based her own sanity on a relationship, no matter how content. This might just be a good thing for her, if he could steer her towards laying a more solid foundation internally, if he could help her find and believe in her own inner strength. It probably wouldn't happen right away, but Len was going to do his best to help it happen.
“You didn’t answer my question, Doc. Do you want the cliff’s notes or what?” Lorna sipped her coffee instead of throwing it, since it really would have been a waste otherwise. She knew he wasn’t fooled in the least by her aggressively casual stance, which may have been why she was maintaining it.
"I want the version you're comfortable with giving me right now, Lorna."
She mimed throwing her mug at him. “That’s a coffee to the head phrase, Doc. I’m comfortable telling you what you need to know but you’re the brain here so give me some direction.”
"Okay then. Why did you and Alex fight?"
Lorna sat back and sighed, relaxing now that he was cooperating. “Leyu told me he was having nightmares. I went to talk to him about them. I was upset that he hadn’t told me himself and I accused him of not communicating with me.”
"So you accused him of not communicating with you, okay. Was this the first time? Do you feel he has not communicated with you before? And was that the first time you confronted him about this?" Len finally picked up his pen in preparation for note-taking. From what he knew of both Lorna and Alex, he seriously doubted this was the first instance of bad communication between them. It didn't surprise him that Lorna would be doing the confronting on something like this, either. She was the type of person to hide her own problems from a loved one while at the same time demanding that nothing be hidden from her.
“Yes, yes, not exactly.” She set aside her coffee so she could talk. “We suck at communicating. We’re perfectly happy to pretend that nothing is wrong and there isn’t a white elephant in the middle of the room and besides he matches the décor. But it wasn’t this bad before. He used to talk to me. There were actual conversations about actual important things but since they brought him back, nothing. We talked a little bit about my anorexia but never any of the other hells that we’d gone through. Hell, I think the last serious conversation we had was when I decided to join the team.”
Hmm," he said thoughtfully, and then winced internally. He did so hate falling into the stereotype of a hmm-ing analyst. "So what did Alex say, then? Did you two communicate, or did you just fight?" Usually, fighting precluded true communication, but with these two, a fight just might bring something to light.
“See, that’s where it went wrong. We started fight and then he told me something that, if I had any kind of sense outside of my own welfare, I’d have been able to talk to him.” She heard Paul’s voice in her head, calling her selfish and cruel then Scott’s telling her he’d lost all respect for her. She took a deep breath. “Instead I just made things worse.”
He kept silent. Sometimes, Len knew, it was best to say nothing and let a person just talk. Silences like this were heavy and fraught and he had no doubt that if he didn't break it himself, then Lorna would. She didn't need him to tell her that it wasn't her fault and she wouldn't believe him if he told her that she hadn't made things worse -- he didn't know if she had or not, besides. And he didn't care. This was about Lorna, not AlexandLorna.
She glared at him when she realized he wasn’t going to answer. “I can’t decide if I can justify coffee throwing just for being quiet but know that you’re treading the line, Doc.” She fidgeted in her chair for a moment then shrugged, “What the hell. It’s not like you’re going to tell anyone and with any luck, Alex will be in here or have already been in here to talk to you so…yeah. Look, play by play. I said he should have told me about the nightmares, he said they were about her, Selene, and I said that I was tired of our relationship having a third person in it. Which is when he told me that he had been hiding the nightmares because,” she stopped and had to take some time to regroup, “because they were about her raping him.
“I was just…I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what do you say when someone says something like that to you in the middle of a fight?” She shook her head, “Whatever it is, it’s not what I said which was something incredibly cruel about him holding on to her better than me. Which is when he ran out.”
Worse than he'd heard, then. That would teach him to listen to idle, fifth-hand gossip. Len focused on Lorna. She was sitting ramrod straight in the chair, her mouth compressed and her hands white-knuckled. "What were you feeling when you said that?"
“Christ, I don’t know. Like I should have known. I was scared out of my mind at that point and still mad and hurt that he hadn’t told me that either. I wanted to cry but I didn’t want him to see me cry. Too many things to sort out really.”
Len nodded. "Then what do you feel now?"
“Guilty. Stupid. Selfish. Cruel. I accused him of not telling me because he didn’t love me, which may win me the award for cheapest shot ever.” She’d curled up on herself and was clinging to the arms of the chair like a lifeline.
"Do you believe that he doesn't love you?"
“Not when I said it. Now?” she shrugged, “Would you still love someone who turned your pain into something you’d done wrong to them?”
"I don't know," he replied. "But I'm not Alex. But to get back to the subject at hand, when you said it, you didn't believe it. Why, then, did you say it?" Len was trying to get her to face her feelings. She needed to know what she had been feeling during the fight to understand her own motivations in picking the fight better.
“Because I was scared and it was easier to yell at him.” She winced, that sounded painfully stupid and selfish. “I just wanted him to deal with things instead of hiding from them and hiding them from me. I am…I was supposed to be someone he could trust.”
Now was not the time for relationship counseling, but Lorna's relationship with Alex seemed to be the most important thing in her life for Lorna, so he had to address it somehow. But the most important part of her statement wasn't the trust bit, but the scared bit. "You were scared," he said. "Why were you scared?"
“He was in so much pain. I didn’t know what to do and I just…I guess I wanted to hear him say that she wasn’t going to break us up. That he wouldn’t let that happen. That he did love me.” Lorna shook her head, “Selfish.”
"So you were scared that he would break up with you over her? That doesn't sound selfish so much as human."
She stared at him like he’d grown another head or, given that two heads wouldn’t really rate a second glance around the mansion, something more extreme. “I was acting like I was the one who had been hurt,” she protested, not really sure how to react to being told that her feelings were valid.
Len raised an eyebrow at her. "But hadn't you been hurt?" He wanted her to admit that she had been hurt by Alex. Because, no matter what his reasons, she really had been and that was a perfectly valid feeling. Not that it justified her harsh words, but it did explain them.
“That doesn’t matter.” That had been made very clear to her over the past week.
He leaned forward to emphasize his words. "Yes it does. You matter as much as Alex does, why should the hurt you feel not matter as much as his own?"
“It was my fault!”
"I see. You somehow forced Alex not to confide in you. In fact, you also caused his nightmares. Maybe you are even responsible for the whole mess with Selene, too, hmm?" Lorna flinched at his sarcasm -- he'd hit something there. "How is it your fault, Lorna?" he asked softly.
“It’s not. I mean, that would be crazy, right? Blaming myself for what she did. I didn’t make her doing anything.” She curled up into an even tighter ball, showing her words to be a lie.
"We all feel things that are illogical sometimes. It's not crazy. It's just that people are very, very good at redistributing blame onto the wrong heads... especially their own." Len set down his pen, got up, and moved around to kneel next to her, taking her hands. "You were hurt and angry and then scared. And while we've come a long way, people -- and yes, that includes mutants -- people are still animals, and when animals are wounded and frightened they tend to lash out at the source of their pain, even if that source is something that they dearly love."
“I should have known better. No one else reacted like I did. They all think I’m horrible.” Lorna had to force the words out around the lump of tears she was holding in. They came out strangled and powerless.
"Nobody else has quite as much of himself invested in one Alex Summers, hmm? Not even his brother or his roommate. And as for "they"... well, they can't know how you feel and they can't know how they'd react in a similar situation and they are WRONG to think you're horrible. And I don't believe that ALL of "they" would think so, either. I, for one, don't think you're horrible. I think you were hurt and I think you lashed out without thinking about how much you would hurt Alex, and I know that you sincerely regret it. But punishing yourself is not the way to make things better, Lorna."
“Then how do I make things better?” she demanded, “Because whether or not I’m hurt, I hurt him more and I have to fix it.”
"To be able to help other people, sometimes we have to first help ourselves. And yes, I do know that sounds inane, but it's true. You don't want to hurt Alex more, right?" He felt slightly underhanded using this tactic, but he knew that Lorna wouldn’t help herself just for her own benefit. She would, however, help herself if it meant helping Alex in the long run, too. When she nodded, he continued. "I think that right now you need to work on your own feelings."
She sighed. That wasn’t the answer she’d wanted though it didn’t surprise her. “All right, Doc. Let’s fix me then.”
Lorna had called Doc Samson after Paul left and scheduled an appointment with him. So Thursday evening, she grabbed a travel mug and armed with her coffee, headed down to his office. It had been some time since she’d talked to the man, not since just after coming to grips with her anorexia. Time flies, she reflected as she rapped on his door.
Len sat down the file he was re-reading. He had everything in it memorized, but it was a habit left over from his residency to re-familiarize himself with every patient's files just prior to a new appointment. It was a comfort, in a sense -- a leftover habit to calm nerves and insecurities that he had all but conquered years ago. And it was always good to be prepared. "Come in," he called, rising to his feet to greet Lorna.
“Hi, doc.” Lorna said with more cheer than she felt, swinging the door shut behind her. “How are you?” She crossed the office quickly and shook his hand, pleased that he remembered that she was a rather tactile person. She flopped in an armchair and waved him back into his own seat.
He smiled at her. Len genuinely liked Lorna as a person, even if she could be completely frustrating as a patient. "I'm doing well. Remember that paper I told you I was writing? I've sent it around to some of my peers to be reviewed. I'm hoping to get it published. So other than my seasonal allergies acting up, I'm good." He sat down but didn't immediately reach for his notepad and pen and he kept his body language relaxed. He had a feeling that Lorna would like to start off this session very low-key, and while not scientifically sound, Len Samson had learned to trust his feelings. "And you? How is Lorna Dane doing?"
“Lorna has completely screwed up her life, Doc.” She sighed, “So I’m going to operate on the assumption that you’re not a gossip hound and so you don’t know what’s going on. Good enough?”
"That is, actually, a pretty good assumption, Lorna. You know that no one really likes to talk to me outside of this space, and inside this office they are focused on themselves, not on the doings of others. So. What is going on?" Len had, actually heard a bit about Lorna and Alex's situation -- it was hard to miss, actually -- but he wasn't bringing any preconceptions to their conversation and he wanted to hear about it from Lorna's own perspective, that being the only perspective that mattered here and now.
“Last Thursday, Alex and I had a fight. A really huge screaming ugly fight and we broke up. That’s the short version. Do you want a full play by play?” Lorna tilted her head to the side, “I swear if you say ‘do you want to give me a play by play’ I’ll throw my coffee at your head.”
Len grinned at her. "And waste good coffee like that, Lorna? I am shocked, simply shocked." He was teasing her gently in the hopes of putting her a bit more at ease. She was obviously tense and completely stressed. He knew how much of herself she had invested in her relationship with Alex, and he suspected that it had been the foundation that helped her cope with everything. With that foundation shaken, she would be hurting, and hurting deeply. However, as a psychiatrist, Len didn't it healthy for her to have based her own sanity on a relationship, no matter how content. This might just be a good thing for her, if he could steer her towards laying a more solid foundation internally, if he could help her find and believe in her own inner strength. It probably wouldn't happen right away, but Len was going to do his best to help it happen.
“You didn’t answer my question, Doc. Do you want the cliff’s notes or what?” Lorna sipped her coffee instead of throwing it, since it really would have been a waste otherwise. She knew he wasn’t fooled in the least by her aggressively casual stance, which may have been why she was maintaining it.
"I want the version you're comfortable with giving me right now, Lorna."
She mimed throwing her mug at him. “That’s a coffee to the head phrase, Doc. I’m comfortable telling you what you need to know but you’re the brain here so give me some direction.”
"Okay then. Why did you and Alex fight?"
Lorna sat back and sighed, relaxing now that he was cooperating. “Leyu told me he was having nightmares. I went to talk to him about them. I was upset that he hadn’t told me himself and I accused him of not communicating with me.”
"So you accused him of not communicating with you, okay. Was this the first time? Do you feel he has not communicated with you before? And was that the first time you confronted him about this?" Len finally picked up his pen in preparation for note-taking. From what he knew of both Lorna and Alex, he seriously doubted this was the first instance of bad communication between them. It didn't surprise him that Lorna would be doing the confronting on something like this, either. She was the type of person to hide her own problems from a loved one while at the same time demanding that nothing be hidden from her.
“Yes, yes, not exactly.” She set aside her coffee so she could talk. “We suck at communicating. We’re perfectly happy to pretend that nothing is wrong and there isn’t a white elephant in the middle of the room and besides he matches the décor. But it wasn’t this bad before. He used to talk to me. There were actual conversations about actual important things but since they brought him back, nothing. We talked a little bit about my anorexia but never any of the other hells that we’d gone through. Hell, I think the last serious conversation we had was when I decided to join the team.”
Hmm," he said thoughtfully, and then winced internally. He did so hate falling into the stereotype of a hmm-ing analyst. "So what did Alex say, then? Did you two communicate, or did you just fight?" Usually, fighting precluded true communication, but with these two, a fight just might bring something to light.
“See, that’s where it went wrong. We started fight and then he told me something that, if I had any kind of sense outside of my own welfare, I’d have been able to talk to him.” She heard Paul’s voice in her head, calling her selfish and cruel then Scott’s telling her he’d lost all respect for her. She took a deep breath. “Instead I just made things worse.”
He kept silent. Sometimes, Len knew, it was best to say nothing and let a person just talk. Silences like this were heavy and fraught and he had no doubt that if he didn't break it himself, then Lorna would. She didn't need him to tell her that it wasn't her fault and she wouldn't believe him if he told her that she hadn't made things worse -- he didn't know if she had or not, besides. And he didn't care. This was about Lorna, not AlexandLorna.
She glared at him when she realized he wasn’t going to answer. “I can’t decide if I can justify coffee throwing just for being quiet but know that you’re treading the line, Doc.” She fidgeted in her chair for a moment then shrugged, “What the hell. It’s not like you’re going to tell anyone and with any luck, Alex will be in here or have already been in here to talk to you so…yeah. Look, play by play. I said he should have told me about the nightmares, he said they were about her, Selene, and I said that I was tired of our relationship having a third person in it. Which is when he told me that he had been hiding the nightmares because,” she stopped and had to take some time to regroup, “because they were about her raping him.
“I was just…I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what do you say when someone says something like that to you in the middle of a fight?” She shook her head, “Whatever it is, it’s not what I said which was something incredibly cruel about him holding on to her better than me. Which is when he ran out.”
Worse than he'd heard, then. That would teach him to listen to idle, fifth-hand gossip. Len focused on Lorna. She was sitting ramrod straight in the chair, her mouth compressed and her hands white-knuckled. "What were you feeling when you said that?"
“Christ, I don’t know. Like I should have known. I was scared out of my mind at that point and still mad and hurt that he hadn’t told me that either. I wanted to cry but I didn’t want him to see me cry. Too many things to sort out really.”
Len nodded. "Then what do you feel now?"
“Guilty. Stupid. Selfish. Cruel. I accused him of not telling me because he didn’t love me, which may win me the award for cheapest shot ever.” She’d curled up on herself and was clinging to the arms of the chair like a lifeline.
"Do you believe that he doesn't love you?"
“Not when I said it. Now?” she shrugged, “Would you still love someone who turned your pain into something you’d done wrong to them?”
"I don't know," he replied. "But I'm not Alex. But to get back to the subject at hand, when you said it, you didn't believe it. Why, then, did you say it?" Len was trying to get her to face her feelings. She needed to know what she had been feeling during the fight to understand her own motivations in picking the fight better.
“Because I was scared and it was easier to yell at him.” She winced, that sounded painfully stupid and selfish. “I just wanted him to deal with things instead of hiding from them and hiding them from me. I am…I was supposed to be someone he could trust.”
Now was not the time for relationship counseling, but Lorna's relationship with Alex seemed to be the most important thing in her life for Lorna, so he had to address it somehow. But the most important part of her statement wasn't the trust bit, but the scared bit. "You were scared," he said. "Why were you scared?"
“He was in so much pain. I didn’t know what to do and I just…I guess I wanted to hear him say that she wasn’t going to break us up. That he wouldn’t let that happen. That he did love me.” Lorna shook her head, “Selfish.”
"So you were scared that he would break up with you over her? That doesn't sound selfish so much as human."
She stared at him like he’d grown another head or, given that two heads wouldn’t really rate a second glance around the mansion, something more extreme. “I was acting like I was the one who had been hurt,” she protested, not really sure how to react to being told that her feelings were valid.
Len raised an eyebrow at her. "But hadn't you been hurt?" He wanted her to admit that she had been hurt by Alex. Because, no matter what his reasons, she really had been and that was a perfectly valid feeling. Not that it justified her harsh words, but it did explain them.
“That doesn’t matter.” That had been made very clear to her over the past week.
He leaned forward to emphasize his words. "Yes it does. You matter as much as Alex does, why should the hurt you feel not matter as much as his own?"
“It was my fault!”
"I see. You somehow forced Alex not to confide in you. In fact, you also caused his nightmares. Maybe you are even responsible for the whole mess with Selene, too, hmm?" Lorna flinched at his sarcasm -- he'd hit something there. "How is it your fault, Lorna?" he asked softly.
“It’s not. I mean, that would be crazy, right? Blaming myself for what she did. I didn’t make her doing anything.” She curled up into an even tighter ball, showing her words to be a lie.
"We all feel things that are illogical sometimes. It's not crazy. It's just that people are very, very good at redistributing blame onto the wrong heads... especially their own." Len set down his pen, got up, and moved around to kneel next to her, taking her hands. "You were hurt and angry and then scared. And while we've come a long way, people -- and yes, that includes mutants -- people are still animals, and when animals are wounded and frightened they tend to lash out at the source of their pain, even if that source is something that they dearly love."
“I should have known better. No one else reacted like I did. They all think I’m horrible.” Lorna had to force the words out around the lump of tears she was holding in. They came out strangled and powerless.
"Nobody else has quite as much of himself invested in one Alex Summers, hmm? Not even his brother or his roommate. And as for "they"... well, they can't know how you feel and they can't know how they'd react in a similar situation and they are WRONG to think you're horrible. And I don't believe that ALL of "they" would think so, either. I, for one, don't think you're horrible. I think you were hurt and I think you lashed out without thinking about how much you would hurt Alex, and I know that you sincerely regret it. But punishing yourself is not the way to make things better, Lorna."
“Then how do I make things better?” she demanded, “Because whether or not I’m hurt, I hurt him more and I have to fix it.”
"To be able to help other people, sometimes we have to first help ourselves. And yes, I do know that sounds inane, but it's true. You don't want to hurt Alex more, right?" He felt slightly underhanded using this tactic, but he knew that Lorna wouldn’t help herself just for her own benefit. She would, however, help herself if it meant helping Alex in the long run, too. When she nodded, he continued. "I think that right now you need to work on your own feelings."
She sighed. That wasn’t the answer she’d wanted though it didn’t surprise her. “All right, Doc. Let’s fix me then.”
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Date: 2004-09-10 10:06 am (UTC)Me: Alison, you swore. I'm shocked. Simply shocked. O.o
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