MAD WOMAN | CRIMINAL MINDS¹

xviii. and you find something to wrap your noose around

-MAD WOMAN-
eighteen!

the problem with surviving was that
you ended up with the ghosts of
everyone you'd ever left behind
riding on your shoulders
- paolo bacigalupi

now - 6x20!

Grief can do unspeakable things to a person. It can leave them in denial for longer than they should ever have to live in that stage. They can force themselves to believe their trauma isn't real and walk about their lives as if nothing has changed. Grief could leave them with so much anger that their entire thought process revolves around revenge or the best way to get justice for what happened to them. They could feel so hopeless that all they want is to find a way to change the past and they live in the what-ifs. They could fall into a depression so deep that it feels as though waves are swallowing them whole with nothing to grab onto to pull them out. 

For Wren Spader, grief left her with the latter of the options. 

Two months had passed since Emily's death and while the team as a whole was showing signs of improvement, they still had a long way to go before anything felt somewhat normal. Wren knew that there would never be a day at the BAU where she felt like everything was as it should be ever again, but she had hope that one day she'd heal enough to look at Emily's old desk and not feel a heartwrenching pain. 

The bureau had ordered a routine check-in on the BAU, which made sense seeing as they had just lost one of their own, but that didn't make talking about it any easier.

Wren was already talking to a therapist about it all. She really didn't want to have to talk to Hotch about it, too. It was at the point where she just felt like she was repeating herself every time she opened her mouth. No, she wasn't okay. She wasn't anywhere close to okay and Hotch knew that. In her opinion, her assessment was a waste of time when all it took was one look at the brunette to know that she still hadn't fully processed what had happened.

After Wren's initial breakdown at the hospital, it took her two weeks to cry again over Emily's death. And that was mostly because she was so focused on recovering the relationships she had with the team. But once those were repaired, the floodgates opened again and Wren remembered why she had to repair her friendships in the first place. That night in the apartment that she was now sharing with Spencer, she cried more tears than she realized she had in you. Spencer kept mentioning that she had to keep drinking water, otherwise, she'd make herself dehydrated and that comment was one of the first things that made her laugh in two weeks.

She was very open about the fact that she blamed herself for Emily's death. The whole team knew it, and most tiptoed around the topic when they were around her. The only ones who actually talked to her about it were Spencer and Hotch. The former helped her process her guilt in any way that he could and the latter only brought it up in the grief assessment.