#therapy in fiction

[ethereal-w0lf]

I just got the funniest thought…

What was the sessions between Melanie or therapist like?

Like did she tell the truth???

Did she lie??

If she told the truth how would that go??

One of my favorite things is when a character who sees a therapist have their therapy notes appear on screen, and I want to read Melanie’s old notes. Pre eyepocalypse and especially post eye severing.

[brucewaynehater101]

Dinah being the JL's therapist in fanfics has always rubbed me the wrong way (I'm not seeing anything to support this canonically. Apparently her role on the YJ show is more of a counselor).

One, she's a coworker and has personal relationships with some of them. You can't maintain a professional relationship with healthy boundaries if you're mixing those lines. That's not okay for mental health.

Two, people should not be sharing therapists if they have a personal connection. If they were doing family or couple's therapy, then it would be okay. Because the sessions are focused on the individual and their mental well-being, there needs to be options and separation in therapists. Otherwise, the therapist may end up having to choose sides and can become partial. That's not the point of therapy.

Three, she's affiliated with Green Arrow. If she was an independent hero without a team or association, that would be better (not great, but better). She's going to have obligations, mental associations, and limitations due to her being a part of a small subsection of the JL.

All in all, she should not be considered the paragon of mental health for JL or heroes/vigilantes. It's okay if she uptakes a managerial role for ensuring her colleagues get access to adequate mental health care, but it isn't right for her to actively be within that role.

[indigosabyss]

Ooh, what about Gwen Gutterslashing the Queen Goblin so that Ashley Kafka can be Kamala’s therapist?

in that post I was actually referring to MCU Kamala, as a bit of a set up for a "Kamala meets the Avengers"-type story. Though this is a cool concept!!

I also don't think Ashley (with a specialization in rehabilitating villains) would be a good fit for Kamala, who is dealing with the aftermath of intensely traumatic combat situations.

[ravenlocksentwisted]

Character: I can't see a therapist because I have gigantic secrets that are too important to share.

Me: ...you know you can just go to a therapist to work on specific problems, right?

Me: You know that they ask insightful questions that help with the problems you've consented to work on with them, but they're not trying to uncover all your deepest, darkest secrets?

Me: RIGHT?

[shadowtoherlight]

I feel like therapy is a little more accepted now, but when this show was airing, there was a lot of potential for them to do it wrong and they didn’t, as this post states. Yet another crumb of pride in my comfort show 💕

Thinking about therapy in fiction and this one episode of the early 2000s show, Numb3rs where Don is forced to go to therapy for reasons which are only tangentially important, and the show could have done the tired "put the character in therapy so we make them relive their trauma for views" or "character has therapy only to realize through outside forces that they don't need it" or worse, "horrible crackpot therapist abuses character and/or turns out to be a psychopath."

But they Didn't. And instead you get Don being Extremely Reluctant to be in therapy or deal with his (many) issues or any of that mushy garbage but he's up against A Real Pro of a counselor (impeccably played by Wendell Pierce) who just makes him talk and the pinnacle of this whole situation is that the main conversation lasts an entire episode (intercut with the rest of the characters handling that week's action, but in ways relevant to the conversation, like we're talking deep narrative parallelism here and Don is the freaking narrator) with Don becoming increasingly frustrated at having his thoughts and feelings pulled out of him when his team needs him at work, while making revelation after revelation about himself, until Pierce's character staidly declares, "You're not worried that your team will fall apart when you're not there, you're afraid that they won't." LIKE???!

AND THEN we have a Don who not only takes all this stuff he just worked out to heart, but He Isn't Magically Fixed And Fine and so he chooses to continue going to therapy long-term and it becomes part of his normal life in a casual, off-screen function, and you see him slowly blossom because of it AND THIS WAS NOT APPRECIATED ENOUGH BUT GOSH I LOVE THAT WHOLE JOURNEY.

[animentality]

[captainkirkk]

I love reading kid fics but I can't turn off my speechie brain when I'm reading them and it's obvious the writer isn't familar with developmental norms. What do you MEAN this 4 year old is only babbling or pointing to request but everyone says he's "doing wonderfully"???? I'M STRESSED OUT

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

Green flag this, mature relationship that, y'all don't properly appreciate characters and relationships that are unmitigated disasters and it shows

[sweet-as-petrichor]

Headcanon that a fact very rarely known about Damian Wayne al Ghul, son of Bruce What emotion am I feeling today Wayne, is that he's a crier. Whenever he's having a bad day, the only thing that can fix it and make him feel better is a long, hard cry.

Of course, he's learned to cry completely silently (growing up in the league that viewed every supposed weakness as lethal will do that to you). He's also very good at compartmentalization and can push it down until he has time and privacy enough to let go.

When he first came to the manor, it was in the in suite bathroom behind two locked doors with the shower running. Once he started trusting him, it was on his eldest brother's shoulder.

The day he goes to Bruce to be held when he's crying, his father goes wide eyed, heart so full of love it hurts and it's like finding he has a son all over again.

[monsterslikemango]

Honestly this is just projection but I believe Simon Riley loves like me, hard and earth shattering, the type of love where you are end up drenched in your own blood because you don’t know when to stop giving pieces of your self…but Simon has no clue how to communicate his feelings — he runs left at the first sign of disloyalty. Integrity and loyalty is written across that man’s heart and the second he believes you betrayed he’s gone. Somewhere far, another mission, his favorite form of escapism.

Until four months later, he learned he failed you and jumped to conclusions and here he is begging to call you, knowing your friends are laughing because he has to make this right. Even if he doesn’t get a second chance…HE HAS TO MAKE THIS RIGHT.

Unfortunately that’s just who Simon is.

[flanaganfilm]

hey oomf have you considered getting therapy

Considered it? I adore therapy, and I've been in and out of it throughout my adult life. It's a truly excellent thing. Also, my work is a very potent form of therapy as well - Midnight Mass alone was equivalent to 10,000 hours on the couch

[odetojupiter]

so, we know that abuse and victim responses to abuse are very central to aftg, but what i find interesting is how other characters respond to the victim’s reactions, especially when it comes to mourning their abuser. there’s something about kevin mourning riko, aaron mourning tilda, neil mourning mary, andrew mourning cass, thats so important to me because it really truly highlights how even when people are united through similar traumas, the differences in their situations makes it impossible to fully understand the relationship a person has to their abuser. neil, aaron, and andrew are united through the abuse, neglect, or - what the fuck is the word i’m thinking of? permit? condone? i mean, knowingly allowing it to happen and not intervening - stemming from a maternal figure. but neil can’t understand why andrew would hold on to cass for so long - he refused to let her go until aaron came into the picture. and andrew can’t understand why aaron would mourn for tilda, potentially viewing aaron’s grief as a betrayal of their promise. and they all ridicule kevin for his reactions to riko. of course, neil and andrew are also abused by riko, but they still can’t understand the complicated relationship between kevin and riko because, at the end of the day, they just weren’t there.

i mean this is primarily an observation but i really love how trauma and trauma response is depicted as nuanced, complex and overall just difficult to understand from an outsider perspective in the books. it reads as really real, and though it can be frustrating when a character doesn’t understand a different character’s response, you have to understand that their perception of said character’s response is warped by their own experience of abuse.

andrew bounced from home to home, never had stability, so obviously he held tight on to the first mother-figure that didn’t outright hurt him. his self-worth was probably low enough that he thought living with drake was a fine price to pay to keep cass.

neil only ever had his mother, and he’d willingly accept her harsh hands because he believed she was just keeping him safe from the very real dangers that were closing in on them.

aaron was dealing with an addiction, and so was his mother; he was equally dependent on her to avoid withdrawal as he was scared of her anger.

i don’t really have a point anymore but you get what i’m saying

[leviismybby]

"I love Levi more than you!!!" Baby, he is fictional, I promise you no one is going to take him away from you, lmao.

[childrenofcain-if]

C x D love triangle is just toxic x toxic. That being said, I can't wait to romance them both

one-up them and be even more toxic lmao 💀 but you’re not wrong, their routes are just people being concerned for MC’s mental health cause out of all the people in the university, they chose either of these two walking red flags 😔

[susieandhobbes]

The SydCarmy backlash is so Boring

It's many other things besides, but primarily, it's so fucking BORING.

There's a very specific kind of irrational anger that comes with ships featuring a Black women x a leading white boy of the month and every sorry excuse for why it's definitely not racist is so played out

"What's wrong with a platonic friendship between men and women?! We need more non-romantic representation"

Yawn

"There just isn't any chemistry"

Cliche

"I just think she's too good for him actually. She's so strong/independent/amazing, she deserves better"

mhm if you say so

"What if she/he were gay instead? I think this would be a great time for more LGBT rep :)"

Yep, convenient

"It's definitely not a race thing because I ship her with this white person!" (A side character who is either a derivative of the lead, poorly written, or has minimal screentime)

Oh indeed

"I ship her with this Black person!" (Often times the only other Black person in the show or movie, no matter how little they interact or how little interest she has in him, in a violent case of "pair the spares")

Sigh

I can pick any popular swirl ship dating back to fucking 10 and Martha in 2007 and find 50-11 variations of the same excuses. Truly, I'd rather y'all just say you don't want Black women's hands on your fav white men but I'm pretty sure like 85-95% of the people aren't even self-aware enough to realize that that is their issue. So until then, can we at least switch up the damn script?

[marsplastic13]

Noo babe sorry I disappeared for hours! I'm not dead, I was just writing smut