They will deny completely that they have a paralyzed arm and if forced to move it, they will say, “there, I just moved it,” while nothing moved.  Iian McGilchrist

Two psychiatrists walk into a therapist’s office….This is not the beginning of a joke. Married a few decades, together they are reasonable mother and father, wife and husband, dedicated and ambitious. One is silent about his drinking obsession. The other sits stone-faced, a woman who has tucked her secrets away in a box she vaguely calls anxiety; this container is somehow embodied and shakes on its own. perhaps a problem with her chromosomes passed down from her mother.

Why are they here? Hard to say. They can’t put it into words. Silence. Rambling. Protests. They make it clear that anything other than the physical world is unexplored and not open for examination. Everything is good. Maybe this is a mistake. Coming here, maybe, there is no point. They have done the best they could. Excellent prescribers and diagnosticians, long ago they ceded the mystery and can’t remember the passion. But is that enough of a problem?

I just painted the fox in. Now I wonder what she thinks about Mating on the Left.

She is a bit of an empath. She sees with her animal eyes what they cannot recognize. She smells the rotting stench of too long disowned pain and self-deception. I let her jump up and turn circles in my lap as she whines for what is about to come undone.