“Basically, yes,” Jess admitted with a crooked smile. “I find it hard to separate myself emotionally from what I’m hearing. From their pain,” she explained, her expression growing solemn. “A clinical psychologist needs to remain objective to help their patient. I couldn’t do that.”
“It must have been hard when you came to that conclusion. I mean, all that time wasted on one degree, only to have to switch to another,” Raffaele said solemnly.
“Not really,” Jess said, her smile returning. “I got a lot out of it.”
Raffaele tilted his head, his confusion, he knew, plain on his face. It made her smile widen.
“In truth, I took psychology mostly so I could figure out how to fix myself,” Jess admitted now, and then said more seriously, “I think that’s probably why most psychologists get into it.”
“Fix what?” Raffaele asked with surprise. “You seem perfectly fine to me.”
“Well, sure. Now.” Jess added the word in a tone as dry as dirt. She then explained, “Counseling is pretty much free on campus, and the professors are happy to muck about in your head if you’re a psych major and they like you. I’ve had loads of counseling over the years. But I went through a nightmare childhood. All the abuses: physical, sexual, and mental.”
Raffaele frowned. “Your parents—”
“No.” Jess shook her head and explained, “My birth father died before I was born, and my birth mom when I was two. After that I was in the foster care system. That’s where the abuse happened. By the time my parents adopted me at age eight, I was one damaged kid,” she admitted, her gaze perusing the other dishes on the table.
“These are good,” Zani said, sliding a plate of breaded something-or-other toward her. “I’m not sure what they are, and they’re a bit spicy, but bursting with flavor.”
As Raffaele watched her select one of the breaded nuggets, he said, “But things got better for you once you were adopted.” The words were a hopeful suggestion. The thought of this beautiful, vibrant woman being abused as an innocent child was extremely distressing to him, and he wished he’d been in her life earlier, and able to protect her.
Jess paused with the breaded treat in hand to smile wryly and say, “Oh, yes, but for a long time, I couldn’t escape what had happened. It was stuck in my head like a rut in the road. Even when I slept, the abusers visited me in my dreams. So, of course, I became one angry, hurting, and suicidal teen.” She shrugged. “I knew there had to be something better, a happier way to live. So I took psychology hoping to heal myself and find it.”
“And did you?” Santo asked, his voice a deep rumble. “Have you escaped your past? Or do your abusers still visit your dreams?”
Raffaele glanced at his cousin solemnly, knowing it wasn’t idle curiosity that made him ask that. Santo was obviously interested in healing. Perhaps a 3-on-1 could be avoided, after all.
Jess considered his question seriously. “I haven’t escaped it, per se. You just can’t escape the past, or erase it like it was never there. It happened. But I learned to accept it, and even appreciate it.”
“Appreciate it?” Santo asked sharply, his disbelief evident.
Jess smiled wryly. “Yeah, I know. Sounds crazy, right? But I really did luck out with my adoptive parents, and with them came a really awesome family full of wonderful grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Well, not counting Allison,” she added dryly, and then continued. “I might never have had them if my life had taken a different path. And,” she added, “I’ve learned to like myself. To value how strong I am, a strength I gained from surviving so much.”
“And you don’t think you could have been strong without the abuses put upon you in your past?” Santo asked.
Jess shrugged. “Maybe. But probably not.” Tilting her head, she asked, “Have you ever heard the saying ‘Strong winds, strong tree’?”
Santo shook his head.
“Well, my father—the one who adopted me,” she added, “he was a horticulturalist. He worked for the government doing Lord knows what. I know he had to visit a lot of government parks and lands. But anyway, he taught me that strong winds make strong trees, because the winds force the tree to send out a deeper root system to withstand those winds. Of course, having a deeper and larger root system helps the tree in other ways, in getting water in a drought and so on. So that adversity while the tree was young and growing makes it stronger later . . . if you see what I mean?”
Santo nodded.
“Well, I really think that’s true of humans too,” she said solemnly. “I mean, I’ve counseled a lot of people since starting work at the clinic, and what I’ve found is that the ones who had it rough when younger tend to bounce back better when life kicks them in the teeth as an adult, which you know happens to everyone. We lose the people we love, we’re robbed, we find ourselves on a pirate ship full of . . . er . . . bad guys,” she finished in a mutter.
Grimacing, she continued, “Anyway, in my opinion, people who experienced adversity earlier in their life tend to withstand and come back from that kind of stuff better as an adult than people who didn’t have adversity while young. In fact, people who were protected and cosseted while young often don’t seem to have learned the coping skills needed to handle stressors as an adult, and they’re the ones more likely to completely fall apart when adversity does hit them.”
Expression turning solemn, she added, “I’d rather be a strong tree than one that will topple over under the first big wind. And I am. I appreciate that.”
“And the dreams that haunted you?” Santo asked, his body tense.
Jess met his gaze, and something about her expression made Raffaele think she knew she was looking at another of the walking wounded, someone with a troubled and painful past that still haunted him.
“Once I accepted my past and decided I probably wouldn’t be me without that past . . . it seemed to lose a lot of its power over me,” she said slowly. “A lot of my anger slipped away, and a lot of . . .” Jess frowned, and then said, “When it’s happening, you start to feel like you must have deserved or caused the abuse . . . which is really just a kind of self-defense mechanism. You think, well, if I just hadn’t angered him, he wouldn’t have hit me. I should walk more quietly, clean better, do whatever better, and he won’t hit me again. Or if I hadn’t worn that skirt he wouldn’t have raped me. Or if I hadn’t walked down that road, or hadn’t gone to that party . . .” She paused and shrugged. “But that’s just your mind trying desperately to figure out why it was you and not someone else, so that it can find a way to prevent it happening again. Because to acknowledge that it was them and not you, and that you could encounter that kind of abuse or torture again no matter what you do . . . well, that’s scary as hell. And, I think, the nightmares are your mind struggling to come to terms, not only with what happened, but with the knowledge it could happen again.” Shrugging mildly, she added, “But that’s just what I think.”
“And why do you think that?” Santo asked.
“Because when I decided I liked myself, and accepted my past as a part of me, that made me the way I am, and acknowledged that bad things probably would happen again no matter my choices, but that I would survive them as I had everything else . . .” She shrugged. “The nightmares stopped coming. It wasn’t overnight, but it didn’t take ages either.”
She waved the breaded treat around briefly, and added with a wry smile, “At least those nightmares about my childhood. I still have nightmares on occasion, but they’re just your standard type nightmare: being lost or trapped, falling or drowning, being naked in public, flunking a test, that sort of thing. And that’s how it went for me. Doesn’t guarantee it will go that way for others.”
Raffaele watched Santo consider that for a moment, and then glanced to Jess and said, “You said you didn’t think you were a good counselor, and yet you still counsel?”
“Well, perhaps it’s not so much that I’m not a good counselor, as that counseling wasn’t necessarily healthy for me since I empathized too much with my clients.”
“And yet you still do it,” Raffaele said quietly.
“I need to eat,” she said with a shrug. “And working at the clinic pays well. Besides, I don’t really counsel anymore. Mostly I’m on intake. I interview new clients, and decide which of our counselors would best suit them. Apparently, I have a knack for that. So, I’ll probably do it until I finish my history degree, and then teacher’s college.”
Sitting back, she shook her head. “Boy, I sure turned into a Chatty Kathy, didn’t I?” she said almost apologetically, and then shook her head again and admitted, “Wine tends to loosen my tongue. I should probably eat more to soak it up.” With that, she finally popped the breaded treat into her mouth and began to chew.
The change in her was almost immediate and somewhat alarming. Her eyes widened with dismay, her mouth stopped moving, and then she flushed bright red and began to search the table almost desperately for something. Raffaele wasn’t sure what was happening, or what she was looking for. He was about to ask when the waitress arrived with her iced tea. Jess didn’t even wait for the woman to set it down, but snatched it from her hand with a gasped “Gracias” as she raised it to her mouth. She gulped down the contents of that glass like there was a fire in her stomach she needed to douse.
Or a fire in her mouth, Raffaele corrected when Zani offered an apologetic, “I did warn you it was spicy.”
Jess lowered her nearly empty glass to glare at the man.
“Sí, spicy,” their waitress said brightly. “There are ghost peppers in the . . . how you say? Breading?” She didn’t wait for a response, but moved a bowl of creamy dip toward Jess. “The sour cream, she helps, sí? Try.”