“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.