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When I’m feeling like I have been lately, I think back to that time when I was on call at the assault center and I was awakened at 2:30am by a woman who couldn’t sleep. It was one of my first calls and I was still unsure of my counseling skills. Her voice was calm and wise in her depression, like there was nothing else she could experience that could shock her and that the knowing accompanying such experience is a sort of clarity with affect capable of nothing else but resolute somber. She was counseling me.
She was counselor-savvy. Going through the drill, she told me the long history of abuse just so I could sit remotely in the same ballpark with her. I was too stunned to talk. This was new to me, see; she had already lived it a thousand lifetimes in reality and then again in counseling. This night, she just wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to someone existing outside of her mind.
Times like this I wish I was still a counselor. I could sit on the phone in equal place with many of the callers. I could say without thinking what I know they feel. It’s awfully painful isn’t it? It’s such a lonely, lonely place. Life doesn’t seem to have the same purpose we were taught to believe it did. I could just sit and be with them on that lowest rung: "You and I, we hang from the same knot."
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