D E A R S COT T , T H E T H E R A P I S T T H AT D I S A P P E A R E D KRYSTYNA REDMOND We were making great strides, I thought, trying to understand why my brain reacted certain ways to situations. Why there were so many ups and downs in my life that seemed to have no purpose but still dragged me through the dirt emotionally each time. I’ll admit, when I was finally comfortable talking to a stranger about my past and my family that’s when you disappeared from the practice. And that hurt, that left me even more confused than before. I’m writing to let you know that I’m okay without your guidance. In fact, I have been able to shine my own light on my life and its various struggles. I no longer see myself as a victim of the world, and I have the ability to accept that sometimes things just happen to people and not everyone is going to react the same way. It might not have been the best topic in relation to those things we talked about, but I took a class on war stories. As you can imagine, they were filled with violence and horrible scenes that I initially reacted to in two different ways: A. they were very hard for me to swallow and made me have flashbacks, or B. I ignored them and pretended they weren’t reality. As I have always done. At the end of ten weeks, however, I am able to confidently walk away from this course with an option C. A recurring theme in the various films and stories we read was how people reacted and dealt with the trauma and negativity that was both inevitable and out of their hands. Fight or flight were the only options. If you remember my homelessness as a teenager and the things that led me to that point, or the things I went through when I was homeless and where I am now, you know that I am all too familiar with fight or flight. Though I was never shot at, I was attacked; though I never had a helicopter destroy the roof of my home, I did have a third party beat me out the door; and while my entire economic system was never burned to the ground, I did have many nights with no food because someone decided I had to pay for it in ways I didn’t want to.
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