The Ones For Him

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One week later...

I was sitting in the living room and had just finished explaining everything to Alvaro, Felix, and Ollie. They sat in silence and that only made me more anxious than I was already feeling.

Are they gonna leave? Will they forgive me? What if they don't want anything to do with me after this? Will they ever talk to me again? Do they hate me?

I'm pretty sure they hate me, but I'd understand why. I hated myself still and I'll only begin to like myself once I was better.

This past week was ok. I had spent the whole week after school doing homework and catching up on the missing work. I also was able to finish up three of the packets within the week, which were the thinnest ones, and I turned them in yesterday. I was almost done with the last two, but they both had the most work. One of them being from the old grumpy man that didn't like me and I knew that he gave me extra work to do.

On Wednesday when I went to therapy, Dr. Martin made me go more into detail about how I felt when I had a flashback, nightmare, panic, and anxiety attacks. He then made me write down the two incidents on paper, then read it out loud to him. He explained to me that it would help me examine how I thought about the trauma.

I then told him that I was blaming myself for the first incident, but he explained to me that it would've been beyond my control to save Alvaro and Felix from that first explosion. He said that the more we talked about it, it would help me accept the fact that I couldn't save them so that I could move on from it and understand that it wasn't my fault.

On Friday, he said that we would do Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR. He would hold one of his fingers up and tell me to think about one of the events, but to concentrate on his finger as he moved it side to side. The point was for me to be able to think about something more positive while I remembered the traumatic events, so that when I'm on my own and I'm thinking about the bad memories, I can think about something that makes me happy.

We split the exercises and did them again the last two therapy sessions. Today was Thursday so I didn't have to worry about having to go meet him, but I instead invited Alvaro, Felix, and Ollie. I decided that I was finally ready to see them again.

One thing that Dr. Martin told me, was that I would avoid things that reminded me about the events and there were two particular people that I had been avoiding. My heart would race whenever I thought about Alvaro or Felix since they were the last two people that I had seen in the first bad memory.

Even when I was explaining things to the three of them, I would avert my eyes from Alvaro and Felix so that I wouldn't get a flashback. It didn't really end up mattering in the end, because my hands would become sweaty and I'd see parts of images pop in front of my eyes.

I took Dr. Martin's advice and thought about a positive memory that I had with them. I focused on all the times that we went out when I first met them and when I had introduced Alvaro and Felix to Ollie. That helped me relax a bit more while I continued to explain things to them, but I did have trouble keeping eye contact with Alvaro and Felix.

The medication that Dr. Martin had prescribed for me was working. Bad thoughts and memories would sometimes appear but not as much as before, although I did have some trouble with the flashbacks which Dr. Martin said that they would still occur. The nightmares wouldn't happen every night anymore and I was sleeping a lot better which meant that I finally would get full nights of rest.

I also started talking more to the guys, but then sometimes I would lock myself up in my room whenever I started overthinking too much. I couldn't help myself because when I felt like things were slowly getting better, my mind would just ruin it and I'd start thinking about a bunch of things that I kept making up.