Page 57 of Deadly Attraction
He slanted a glance at her. “Perhaps.”
For some reason, his concession, though mild, gave her a sense of satisfaction. “Human nature is much the same. Many people find ways to overcome tragedy and go on to use their experiences to help others.”
“Like you,” he said.
When she gave him a questioning look, he pointed at Twinkie and Igor. “The horses, the dogs, Will. You overcame your loss and now you work with juvenile delinquents and rescue trick horses. You’ve channeled your dysfunction pretty well, Doc, even if you’ve never sought therapy.”
She laughed at that. “My penchant for rescuing things goes pretty far back. Like when I was seven and our neighbors moved off and left their cat and her newborn kittens. My dad forbade me from feeding that mother cat, but I snuck lunch meat and milk out to her every evening after supper. I found homes for all of her kittens too. Eventually, my parents gave up on punishing me for taking care of her. We got her spayed and she became my pet. Scout, I called her, after my favorite book heroine. She lived with us until she died at the ripe old age of thirteen.”
“How many veterans like Will have you helped?”
Was he asking out of curiosity or something more personal? “Will is a unique case. Most of the vets I’ve worked with are in jail from extenuating circumstances stemming from their inability to reintegrate into a normal life once they return from their deployments.”
“Can you fix them? The ones with PTSD?”
She squinted at him. “Fix them?”
“You know.” He wiggled his fingers in the air. “Do that voodoo you do in therapy.”
Touchy subject. One she’d been wanting to dig into deeper, but her work with criminal juveniles took up most of her time. “In most of the people I’ve worked with who suffer from PTSD—whether it’s from military or other traumatic events—I’ve found they have a rift between their mental and psychological stability before the trauma and their mental and psychological stability afterwards. No surprise there, that’s basically what it is. In my research, however, I haven’t found a way to heal those dysfunctions. The best I’ve discovered most of my patients can do is manage it.”
“So there’s no cure?”
It saddened her to admit it, especially when she was pretty darn sure he was asking for himself, but she shook her head. “What happens to us becomes ingrained in our cells. If we suffer a trauma, our body never forgets it, even if our brain finds a way to disconnect from it. That’s why, say, a woman who was sexually molested by her father or other male family member as a child may disassociate from the experience and forget it, her brain using a trick to repress the memory so she can continue to grow and function inside her family. Dependency can do that for us. As a child, she had no other option. She depended on her parents to take care of her, so her very survival relied on being part of the family. As a grown woman, she may be at a party or in a restaurant and smell a cologne or aftershave that suddenly triggers a flood of overwhelming fear, pain, and anger, but she doesn’t know why. Snatches of the memory of what happened to her may even arise, yet she can’t make sense of them.”
“Because her attacker wore the same cologne.”
“Exactly. Our sense of smell is the strongest at triggering memory recall. So even though our hypothetical patient’s brain repressed the memory of the sexual molestation, it’s buried in her psyche and the scent of the cologne brings it back up.”
“And then what?”
“The psychotherapy community believes it’s important for people to explore these repressed memories and bring them to the surface where they can be dealt with and then let go of.”
Twinkie raised his head and ambled over. Igor followed. The two horses stood side by side, tails switching at flies while the Labs took their turn at getting a drink and running through the water.
“Almost sounds like you don’t agree with that approach,” Mitch said.
Emma stroked Igor’s flank. “I’ve seen conventional behavior therapy help many people. I’m not arguing against it. I only know there are others, people I’ve dealt with in my own practice, where rehashing such devastating memories has a negative effect. It can create a tidal wave of stress and anxiety. Confronting an attacker can create more issues. In the situation where there is no single attacker—such as in a war—the client is left feeling frustrated. Take Will for example. He has no one single person to confront in order to heal his wounds. People like him often take out their frustration on themselves or their partners and children. In Will’s case, he’s somehow convinced himself that his unit’s collective destruction was his fault. Back here at home, he’s converted that horrible experience into something he can understand—he believes he’s bad luck.”
She kicked a pebble. “On the other hand, examining these past experiences does help a person understand self-sabotaging behavior. That can be very freeing.” Didn’t everyone want to understand themselves better? “I usually start there, helping my clients digest what happened to them in a way that helps them also understand how that experience created a negative habit or a self-sabotaging behavior. By forming new habits, they can find peace. Once they’re strong and secure in themselves, then they can confront those who may have harmed them. Or perhaps find purpose from their trauma, such as military veterans who go on to help other vets deal with PTSD.”
Mitch closed the few feet of space between them and stroked her cheek with a finger. “You’ve found purpose from your trauma, haven’t you?”
Her purpose was staring her right in the face. Not a cure, but a respite. “I’ve found a balm for my pain.”
He leaned down and kissed her gently. “Me, too.”
The feel of his lips still came as a pleasant shock. “Sometimes,” she said, looking into his beautiful, haunted eyes and feeling content, “that’s enough.”
One of the dogs barked sharply off to Mitch’s left. Not the playful bark he’d heard before from both of them during the ride. This one was an alert.
Whipping around, he saw Salt lumbering toward Pepper who was several yards away. The black Lab had his nose to the ground, digging and pawing at something.
“Great,” Emma said, returning her hat to her head. “He’s probably found another rabbit hole. I better chase him off before he brings me some poor little baby bunny.”
Mitch hadn’t seen or noted anything unusual on their trek so far. No one following them, no signs of anyone having been on the trail recently. Somewhere behind them, he could feel Will’s presence. “The dog brings you rabbits?”
“He doesn’t kill them.” She started walking toward the dogs, Salt having now joined Pepper in his dig. “It’s like he thinks he’s saving them. He picks them up in his mouth and carries them carefully, bringing them to me. I’ve found more than one litter on my porch and had to raise them by hand.”
