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Theresa sat in a large, comfy leather chair facing the woman she’d chosen as her therapist. The seating arrangement also held a full-size couch, end tables, and a coffee table. Each one held a box of tissue within easy reach. The obvious need for tissue had her insides roiling. She had no idea what to expect with this whole therapy thing.
“Why don’t we begin with what brought you here today, Theresa?” Dr. Grayson began. She held a tablet with a small attachable keyboard on her lap. “And please call me Jenna, everyone does,” she said, setting the tablet on the coffee table between them.
“Okay.” Theresa nodded. “I’m here because….” She stared at the ceiling. What she’d planned to say flew out the window. “I’m here because, other than my two children, I don’t believe a single person in my entire life has ever truly loved me. Not one. Not the real me.” She huffed out a mirthless laugh. “I don’t even think I love me. Pathetic, right?” She squirmed in the chair. “That’s not what I intended to say, by the way.”
“What had you intended to say?” Jenna asked.
“I had planned to say I’m going through a nightmarish divorce involving a child custody battle with a man who—since I began my career as a singer—is either high, drunk, or both all the time. I’m suffering enormous stress because I no longer have any privacy. The paparazzi follow me everywhere, and total strangers post and tweet nasty things about me constantly.” She shifted on the chair again, unable to sit still. “I’ve gained a lot of weight this past year.” She sighed.
“Being a celebrity is a fairly new thing.” Theresa clasped her hands together in her lap. “Having no privacy makes my life difficult, but I think everything revolves around what I actually said to you and not so much what I’d planned to say… if that makes any sense.” She swallowed a few times. “I think feeling this way has affected every decision I’ve ever made my entire life.”
“Tell me about your childhood.” Jenna crossed her jean-clad legs, her demeanor one of professional interest. She was maybe in her early forties, and she was dressed casually in jeans, a loose, tunic-style linen top, and comfy slip-on shoes. She had really curly black hair which hung wild and free to her shoulders. Dr. Grayson didn’t wear any makeup. She didn’t need to. Her brown skin was smooth and flawless, and her dark-brown eyes were striking, framed as they were with naturally thick lashes. She looked as if she spent a lot of time outdoors or at a gym. Dr. Grayson was fit, tall, and elegant—everything Theresa was not.
The casualness wasn’t what Theresa had expected, but it did help her feel less … on the witness stand or something. “Don’t you need to take notes?” she asked, gesturing toward the tablet between them.”
“I’m recording our session so I can focus on you and not on taking notes. I hope that’s okay. Everything is completely confidential.”
“Oh. Sure.” Theresa slid her hands along the smooth leather armrests of the chair.
“So, tell me a little bit about your family, Theresa.”
“My mom and dad split up when I was six. I never heard from my mother again after that. I have no idea if she’s even still alive.” Her chest tightened as a myriad of long-buried emotions stirred to life. Anger, grief, and a bewildering sense of abandonment assailed her. “I’ll tell you one thing; I don’t blame her for leaving. My dad is a real piece of work.”
“In what way?” Jenna asked.
“Gregory Morris uses words like a whip, and there’s never a doubt that he intends what he says to leave welts. He also used his fists and his belt on my two older brothers, but he never hit me. I was the household drudge, beneath his notice, nothing more than my mom’s replacement housekeeper I think.”
She gazed blindly out the window, overwhelmed by the pain of rejection and unworthiness she’d been carrying her entire life. She’d never said anything like this out loud before. But then, no one had ever asked her before either.
“Dad never once told me he loved me, and he sure as hell didn’t tell my bothers he loved them either. He never told us we did a good job, or that he was proud of anything we did.”
Her eyes filled. She hadn’t even heard a single word from dear old Dad when she’d won Star Launch, and she knew for a fact he’d been told.
“Once Mom left, we were never hugged. There were no bedtime stories read to us anymore, and there were never fun family outings or vacations, just emotional neglect and monotony day after day. All I ever got from that man was a crapload of meanness. Unfortunately, my brothers turned out just like Dad.”
She risked meeting her therapist’s gaze. “I married when I was nineteen just to change my name and get the hell out of that house.”
Well wasn’t that a revelation. What had drawn her to David? What had he ever done for her? Caleb had asked her those questions, and it had made her feel as if other people knew something she didn’t. Like, the way to happiness was a secret that had been purposefully kept from her all this time. When she got right down to it, what had drawn her to David had been nothing more than the chance to escape the fire only to crawl into the frying pan.
“My brothers don’t know how to be husbands or fathers, and they don’t do a thing to better themselves or to learn either. I don’t think they care enough about their families to make the effort. Both of them have been divorced and remarried a few times.”
Her hands formed fists in her lap as that revelation also slammed into her. Why was she just now realizing these things? No. She had realized, but she’d never articulated the thoughts to herself or to anybody else.
“I worked hard to become a decent parent. When I was pregnant with my first, I read every book about parenting I could find. I even took parenting classes at a community center.” She swallowed the boulder clogging her throat. “I also have a degree in education. I’m the only one in my family to go to college, and I did it because I wanted better for my boys. I want them to be….”
She squelched that last part. She wanted her boys to grow up to be better than any of the men in her family, including David. If she achieved nothing more in this life, ensuring her sons grew up to be decent, caring, responsible, compassionate men, that would be enough. Another revelation to add to the growing list.
Dr. Grayson cleared her throat. “You may not realize how difficult it is to break out of the kind of familial pattern of abuse you’ve described with your father and brothers. That you went to so much effort to learn how to parent your children is something you can be proud of, Theresa. It’s definitely something you can love about yourself.”
Her eyes prickled with tears, and she nodded. “David, my ex, is….” Theresa drew a breath and describe what her marriage had been like and how she’d always bent over backwards to keep the peace for the sake of her two sons. Not the best example of what a healthy partnership looked like, but it definitely beat the environment in which she’d been raised.
“Entering Star Launch is an example of keeping the peace. It wasn’t my idea. I really didn’t want to put myself out there like that, but David pushed and pushed. Being married to him, teaching full time, and having two growing boys was enough for me. The effort to avoid a confrontation with David at all costs exhausted me, so I caved. Our entire marriage I constantly felt on edge and hypervigilant. Now I’m still on edge and hypervigilant, but for different reasons.”
She then brought Dr. Grayson up to date on what had been going on for the past year. “So, David is out on bail, and I have a bodyguard who is constantly with me and my boys.”
“You’ve suffered a great deal of trauma in your life.” Jenna’s eyes held sympathy. “So, tell me, what do you hope to gain from therapy, Theresa?”
After spilling her guts for forty-five minutes, the question brought her up short. “I don’t know. I mean, I know I’m not healthy in terms of, well, in any emotional sense.” She sucked in a breath. Caleb had mentioned the concept of healing, and obviously she had a lot more healing to do than she’d realized.
