First Session: Eroshay Rosales

Valli's office in the city was a good deal more lived in than his office in the school. It was more homey, more used. There was a waiting room, for one, although it was almost always empty. Some people liked to show up early, and some people liked to sit. It also gave Valli a bit of a buffer, time alone in his office to reset things that had been disturbed.

His last patient had already left, so Shay wouldn't be given any time to sit. The moment she checked in--Valli's secretary was polite but firmly disinterested in the lives of his patients--Valli himself would pop his head into the waiting room, a friendly smile on his face.

"Eroshay, right?" He said. Normally he'd have used her last name, but it seemed more pertinent not to. He wasn't ignorant enough to not know who the Rosales's were, so he stuck to just her first name to begin with as he gestured her in.

The room was not what most people would think of as a therapist's office. There was no bed to lie down on, no clipboard in place. There was a large comfortable couch with an array of pillows. There was a desk crammed in one corner. Everything was in an array of shades of forest greens, and there was a small garden placed under the frosted glass window.

"Is Eroshay alright? Or would you prefer something else?" Valli called as he headed towards an armchair.

Valli effectively had a script to start off the first session, and since Shay was more or less asking for just that, he launched into it without much of a pause.

"Sessions can go however you'd like them to. We don't have a set script or schedule. In the interest of full disclosure, I will note that my powers make me appear more pleasant and put together than I might otherwise appear. The effect is minor, and not something I can disable."

That was point one.

"I'm required by law and professional ethics to report any situation where I believe someone--you, or someone else--is in immediate danger. Other than that, anything you say here is strictly confidential, and I neither can nor will reveal it. Even in the case of danger, I'm only allowed to reveal enough to remedy the situation at hand, not your entire history."

And point two, which was normally the point where Valli would pause for questions, but instead he opted to jump right into point three, largely since Shay was a student who had come all the way to the city.

"I also will not approach you or acknowledge you in public unless you acknowledge me first. I'm well aware that the average person thinks that seeking mental health treatment as embarrassing or shameful, and I prefer not upsetting my patients should I happen to run into them outside of my office."

Well, that was three.

"Any questions?"

"Nope," Valli said, his voice significantly more cheerful now that he was done his entire standard speech. Now he could be a bit more open and not have to worry about covering the basis. "I have had, in the past, patients confess to everything up to and including murder. I can encourage people to turn themselves in and contact the police, but it would be a violation of the confidentiality we share to reveal that information myself. If someone tells me they are planning to murder someone, I can report it. If someone tells me they have already murdered someone, I can't report it. Even if they told me they had killed someone, and were planning to kill again, I could only share with the police that they were planning to commit a murder, not what they had already told me. A therapists confidentiality is extremely important--if these rules weren't there, the people who so often need us the most wouldn't feel they were able to talk freely."

"Has it been affecting your day to day life?" Valli prompted at mention of her PTSD. People tended to throw around the term PTSD fairly casually, and as far as he knew there was no official diagnosis, which meant it was time to sniff around the conversation to try and get an idea of how serious it was or wasn't.

That was a yes if he'd ever heard one. Yes, it effected her. Yes, it was with her every day. Valli wasn't even entirely clear what it was she was remembering.

It didn't really matter.

"Then we won't," Valli said. "The point of this--especially the first session--is for me to get to know you, and for you to get used to how things work, not for me to take a knife and use it to dig around through your personal life. So we'll talk about something else instead. How does school sound?"