Private Finished Returning Patient: Ishvi

The words were coming out in a nearly incoherent rush, and Valli was having a hard tim keeping up. He got bits and pieces, things here and there, but actually understanding the grand scheme of things--what Ishvi really meant--was a bit beyond him.

He was going to just do the best he could.

"You knew your thoughts were bad, and yet you persevered any way. You continued on," he said carefully, hoping to get a better idea of what he was dealing with.

He'd given in to his grief and sorrow, and yet he was left with even more regrets. More issues. Haunted by his suicide and what he'd done, both how it had happen and in terms of failures.

"When you say you think about bad things," Valli said. "Can you describe them? Please don't be afraid of saying them - saying a bad thing is not the same thing as acting on a bad thing. And I don't judge people for their thoughts. Not here, certainly."

So his bad thoughts were suicidal in nature. That was at least something. He'd fallen. He'd thought about killing himself. He'd fallen, tried, and come back. Even now, he thought about it just the same, trying to find ways to escape.

That was something he can work with.

"What you're experiencing could be considered an intrusive thought. A thought that, even if you don't want it, seems to constantly... get in the way. To be in your brain. Even if you push it away. Everyone has intrusive thoughts to some degree, but sometimes those thoughts can become too intense to allow them to be handled by just one person. Even so, there are ways to handle them - to train the brain to not think of those sorts of thoughts, and to allow you to simply change your mind when they pop up, rather than forcing yourself to linger on them."

Valli paused for a moment, and then pushed himself up, heading over to his desk and pulling out a small flier.

"What I can recommend is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It's generally fairly short term, lasting only a few sessions, and it focuses on retraining the brain and allowing you to change patterns of thought, and thus change the way you feel about things. It's a bit more practical and overall, but I think it would be able to help relieve some of your distress about this issue."

"It's not my place to judge," Valli said. "People don't come to therapy to be judged by someone else. They come for someone to offer help. To guide them through the hard times in life."

He didn't usually comment on things like angels or purity or absolute good. But in this case it was hard to not to. He couldn't really deal with the issues as long as Ishvi remained fixed in his current viewpoint.

"Do you believe in free will, Ishvi?"

He carried onward just the same, even if it was obvious Ishvi didn't quite know where he was going.

"Do you think it's fair, that when someone makes a single mistake, they can no longer be saved? That once someone has fallen, they cannot be brought back up?"

He paused, his face placid, his usual smile gone. He was fairly serious about the whole thing, actually.

"If they were a human child, how would you feel about that? Would you punish a child because their parent was a bad person? Would you tell them they were bad because their father was bad?"