"What I'm going to teach you is called the Mind Palace technique," she says easily enough, watching him carefully, "and it's traditionally used to help you remember and process information. I thought 'another life? that's a kind of information'. So I used it to help me deal with that information when I want, how I want."
She leans on her elbows.
"Can you think of a place that you know well enough to pull up in your mind's eye?" A pause. "A place you want to be. A good place. Familiar and friendly. Somewhere it's comforting to go."
Well that's a tall order. Charlie casts about his own cabin for inspiration. He's very aware of her eyes on him, and putting a lot of effort into not looking like he's staring down the barrel of a gun.
He's got, uh, places that are familiar but not friendly. Places that are friendly, but too broken-down by time into disconnected details to be really called familiar. Plenty of places that are neither because he was hustling through them without looking or thinking about it. He traipsed to Ulthar thinking he'd feel safe once he was on Earth, and on Earth he traipsed to New York thinking he'd feel safe once he was where he promised to go, and in New York...
This is ridiculous. The diner on 77th, that'll do. He likes it well enough, isn't likely to forget it anytime soon.
He makes himself sit down opposite Saga, or else he knows he's going to start pacing, and gives her a nod that manages to come off as faintly wary. "Alright, easy so far."
"Now you're going to pick a spot in that place. The one you remember vividly. And look for a few items in that space. Maybe a certain chair or a desk. A poster that you liked. Anything."
He gives her a blank look for a moment: not because the instruction is unclear, or even because this all sounds a bit kooky, but because it's either that or look at her suspiciously. Bilingual problems of spending too much time in a country where 'picture familiar things' is local slang for 'give me a stick to hit you with'.
Still, he pictures a booth there, and says: "Alright, got somethin'."
"Now you're going to mentally assign this area a purpose: this is where I'm going to hold my thoughts about... whatever. Let's say 'childhood memories' for instance."
She shrugs.
"Now, what you're going to do is assign a memory to an item in that area. We'll start with one. You can pick it because it's connected to that memory or because you can connect it easily: the salt shaker is your memory of a trip to Coney Island to go to the beach. Or it's a memory of that time when you were helping your mother bake and you mixed up the salt and the sugar. Just... giving you examples. That item is the memory. You're storing it there. Which means you have complete control over whether you interact with it or not. You can pick it up... Or you can leave it there.
Charlie sips his coffee while he listens, industriously working his way towards nonchalance. It... huh. It sure does taste like coffee that isn't bitter. Wild, since he expected in the back of his mind for it to taste salty.
"Think I follow. Like tyin' knots in a string in your head, right?"
This does sound kooky, though, doesn't it? Is it just him? Then again, it's not as kooky as a magic boat flying through an endless universe, so he isn't about to pooh-pooh it without trying it.
"That, and a little more." She sips her coffee and gestures with one hand. "The mind works best with symbols. It's designed to tie things together. That's how we came up with words and concepts. It's how ideas are built. What you're doing when you're tying that memory to that object is you're anchoring it to one place.
"It can't fly around and surprise you nearly as easily, because it's tied to something. The same way, say, a red octagon is tied to the concept of 'you have to stop'."
They aren't at simultaneous coffee sipping yet, but they have time to work on it!
"Huh, that does make sense."
Childhood memories works as a practice run. The phone behind the bar can be that time he scared the life out of his mum by running in front of horses, since they had to call the doctor out from the phone in... the butcher's, he thinks. Maybe it'd make more sense to make that one a plate of sausages. Fork can be poking the fire in the evenings, knife can be the ruler, and it occurs to him he'll be boned if he needs to think of a new location for every era of memories.
A quirk of his eyebrow, and a dry joke: "What happens if I tie a memory to something and then throw it real hard outta the window?"
"It's just a mental exercise, so nothing is absolutely certain. But I've found for the most part that those memories seem distant. They kind of... take the hint."
She sips her coffee.
"The problem being is that when or if something brings them back, it can feel like getting beaned in the head with a baseball."
Because it'll fly right back through that window.
"My solution for the kind of things I don't want to touch or interract with much is... well, who doesn't have a junk drawer, right?"
Huh, he wasn't expecting an answer in the halfway affirmative. But he isn't surprised by the baseball simile. "Hah," he says, finally hitting a convincingly light tone, "ain't that the truth."
You could almost think that he's forgotten he'll have to elaborate on that to some extent in short order. Almost.
"So... imagine a junk drawer, imagine the, uh, breach is a piece of junk... throw the junk in the drawer. Hey presto?"
His tone isn't particularly finite. He suspects there's more to elaborate on, because that doesn't seem... complete? Realistic?
"You can. But I'll admit, a whole life seems too big to fit into something small and fiddly like what you'd find in a junk drawer. I'm not sure the 'anchor' would be large enough."
She turns her hands open towards him.
"I made a bookshelf. And when I needed to attach that life to something, I picked a book. For my first breach? It was Around the World in 80 Days. And I stuck that book in the shelf, so I can pull it out when I want... or leave it there forever. So far, so good."
Some of that classic 'letting you know I'm listening' slow nodding. Sorry, the prospect of having a whole life inserted into his head -- and the fact that apparently the way to deal with it is- okay he appreciates Saga's help so far and maybe there's some subtlety he's not getting but he has the sinking feeling it really is just- imagining himself ignoring a salt shaker -- is lowkey making him want to smack that head into the ground like a frightened ostrich. Instead of doing that he drinks some coffee.
"Books ain't a bad idea." Dragging along the corpse of dry levity: "Better make sure it's not one I plan on readin' in real life."
He falls silent again, watching her and waiting for more elaboration, hoping for a key detail that'll demonstrate how this isn't an exercise in hanging his sanity on visual metaphors, holding back a pre-emptive 'that can't be it'.
"Or it's one you love so you can pair individual pieces of the book to the life memories," she offers with a turn of the head. "The memories of that life centered around a hot air balloon race. The image of those balloons tied with the cover of the edition of that book help me 'secure' the memory."
She looks to him.
"Look, I know it sounds... ridiculous. But the mind works in weird ways. It's almost like creating a trigger backwards, but it's one that you can control."
He doesn't deny finding the theory hard to buy, but he does look a little embarrassed to have been evident about it.
"I'm not... sayin' there's no way it can work like that, but I am... tryin' to understand it." Because it sounds ridiculous. "How d'you mean a trigger?" It's not a context he's encountered that word in before.
Ah. Fair enough. Sometimes the time thing is difficult.
She sips her coffee before she dives in.
"A trigger is something that's seemingly unrelated that evokes an immediate emotional response. Good triggers include things like... the specific smell that a recipe makes filling your home, reminding you of your mother, making you feel warm and safe and good. Bad triggers are things like... firecrackers reminding a combat veteran of gunfire, bringing to mind a traumatic attack, and making them feel panicked and terrified. The recipe doesn't put you in your old family home and isn't your mother... but it triggers those feelings regardless."
Charlie, who (among other things) spent some time in some little European war or other, and is therefore not treating one of those examples as a hypothetical, listens to all this with a measured expression.
"Part of what I do is interview victims of violent crimes," she says quietly, "and part of doing that responsibly is making sure that my questions and choices don't do harm to them while I'm trying to catch my criminal. Triggers are a pretty well known concept in psychology at this point in time. If you're interested, there's a few books I could suggest that the library probably has, given how big it is."
She shrugs.
"Or you could ask Dr. Sheehan, my coworker. I've found him very knowledgeable, and he's a terribly charming man to boot."
Her tone makes it very clear she adores him. Because she does.
He's sure charmed Arthur, Charlie doesn't reply, because you don't make that sort of joke unless you 100% know you're making it to someone safe. No matter how fucking obvious the guy in question is.
"I'll take those suggestions," he says, carefully curious. Thinking the explanation over.
This is both a foreign concept and not one. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to observe that things remind people of other things; and he's been on the same side of the interview table as her, trying with sometimes mixed success to do the same thing. Where it gets surprising is conflating called-up memories with the thing that makes you freak out and think you're still somewhere worse -- which he's pretty sure a doctor once told him was to do with back injuries, but that's far from the only theory he's heard.
"Both for the books and for the coworker."
And hey, he understands how a trigger fits into her sentence now. But he doesn't steer back to it immediately. Instead:
"Is a bad trigger somethin' different to shell shock?"
But he's got another question, and thankfully, she's ready for this one.
"It's a part of it. 'Shell Shock' usually gets called something else these days: PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There's also CPTSD, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is considered a 'sister' condition. The first one usually gets diagnosed in regards to a singular or limited set of circumstances: a violent attack, a harrowing experience, a terrible loss. CPTSD, on the other hand, has to do with prolonged trauma: a child raised in an abusive home, a woman in an abusive and dangerous relationship, prisoners of war kept for months or years in horrific conditions. Both tend to involve an absence of the feeling of safety that blurs the lines between the past and the present, but CPTSD can also affect your sense of self, the control you have of your emotions, and usually come with feelings of guilt or self-hatred since the source of the damage is more... well, complex."
She's going to loop this back. Carefully.
"Since remember, the mind likes nice, easy to identify symbols. Flashpoints. Distinct things it can point to. A PTSD trigger, like the firecracker, is easy to tie back and the response is simple: gunfire, duck. Direct threat, direct impulse. A CPTSD trigger might be something like... hearing a baseball game on the radio, because their father would get angry when his team lost and beat his kid for it. What is someone supposed to do with that feeling of unease and impending threat? It's harder to deal with but the 'trigger' is just as real. But because it's not a direct tie, just one that was established over a long period of time, it's sometimes harder to identify."
She's going to let that hang in the air for a moment before moving on.
Saga gets to see the moment where he goes from listening to listening-with-curtains-drawn. It's a surprisingly subtle shift for something that hits so close to home it's basically in the living room.
There are a few things this explanation makes him wonder. One thing he wonders, again, is how much of this visit -- the music especially; this wouldn't seem pointed at all if it didn't come after the music -- is coincidence, how much is a law-woman's hypothesis, and how much is knowledge. And it's impossible to ask without making it stunningly obvious that there's a connection between A and B. But- fuck, he's going to tell her some amount of it, so maybe there's no better time to draw that line. One more way to keep himself from backing out of talking about it, right?
"It's an interestin' theory," he says, thoughtful. Breathes in with every sign of continuing, pauses for half a beat too long, and says: "I wanna..."
Exhales. "Nah, that's a lie, I don't wanna. But I'm gonna ask. Has, uh..."
She shakes her head. Because no, he hasn't. She knows things, but not because Edwin told her anything and she won't put that on his plate. Instead, she'll spread her hands just a little.
She can come clean. Cleanish.
"I saw the way your eyes were, when he transformed. And I've... worked with someone who was under a long time stress situation for years. I'm sure you know that." Because it's Alan. "I couldn't know for certain, just from that. But... I figured it wouldn't hurt you, either as Alan's warden or... for any other reason, to have that knowledge in your back pocket."
Was she even there when Yellow transformed? Charlie has to assume yeah, since he couldn't even start to tell you what order of events that all happened in.
He's still not comfortable. His eyes may've said something then but they sure aren't emoting for shit right now. He misses the hell out of New York, where if anyone noticed they just thought he never got over the War or something.
"Alright." He lifts his cup. "It's useful. Thanks." Drinks.
She watches him for a long moment as she considers her options, because the closed door she's getting is pretty well locked. It's frustrating, but understandable, and she doesn't hold it against him even a little bit. Her answer was fair but it was also unsatisfying.
"Wake tell you anything about my partner?" and this is on topic. It just might not seem it at first.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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She leans on her elbows.
"Can you think of a place that you know well enough to pull up in your mind's eye?" A pause. "A place you want to be. A good place. Familiar and friendly. Somewhere it's comforting to go."
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He's got, uh, places that are familiar but not friendly. Places that are friendly, but too broken-down by time into disconnected details to be really called familiar. Plenty of places that are neither because he was hustling through them without looking or thinking about it. He traipsed to Ulthar thinking he'd feel safe once he was on Earth, and on Earth he traipsed to New York thinking he'd feel safe once he was where he promised to go, and in New York...
This is ridiculous. The diner on 77th, that'll do. He likes it well enough, isn't likely to forget it anytime soon.
He makes himself sit down opposite Saga, or else he knows he's going to start pacing, and gives her a nod that manages to come off as faintly wary. "Alright, easy so far."
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"Now you're going to pick a spot in that place. The one you remember vividly. And look for a few items in that space. Maybe a certain chair or a desk. A poster that you liked. Anything."
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Still, he pictures a booth there, and says: "Alright, got somethin'."
no subject
"Now you're going to mentally assign this area a purpose: this is where I'm going to hold my thoughts about... whatever. Let's say 'childhood memories' for instance."
She shrugs.
"Now, what you're going to do is assign a memory to an item in that area. We'll start with one. You can pick it because it's connected to that memory or because you can connect it easily: the salt shaker is your memory of a trip to Coney Island to go to the beach. Or it's a memory of that time when you were helping your mother bake and you mixed up the salt and the sugar. Just... giving you examples. That item is the memory. You're storing it there. Which means you have complete control over whether you interact with it or not. You can pick it up... Or you can leave it there.
"Starting to get the idea?"
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"Think I follow. Like tyin' knots in a string in your head, right?"
This does sound kooky, though, doesn't it? Is it just him? Then again, it's not as kooky as a magic boat flying through an endless universe, so he isn't about to pooh-pooh it without trying it.
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"That, and a little more." She sips her coffee and gestures with one hand. "The mind works best with symbols. It's designed to tie things together. That's how we came up with words and concepts. It's how ideas are built. What you're doing when you're tying that memory to that object is you're anchoring it to one place.
"It can't fly around and surprise you nearly as easily, because it's tied to something. The same way, say, a red octagon is tied to the concept of 'you have to stop'."
no subject
"Huh, that does make sense."
Childhood memories works as a practice run. The phone behind the bar can be that time he scared the life out of his mum by running in front of horses, since they had to call the doctor out from the phone in... the butcher's, he thinks. Maybe it'd make more sense to make that one a plate of sausages. Fork can be poking the fire in the evenings, knife can be the ruler, and it occurs to him he'll be boned if he needs to think of a new location for every era of memories.
A quirk of his eyebrow, and a dry joke: "What happens if I tie a memory to something and then throw it real hard outta the window?"
no subject
"It's just a mental exercise, so nothing is absolutely certain. But I've found for the most part that those memories seem distant. They kind of... take the hint."
She sips her coffee.
"The problem being is that when or if something brings them back, it can feel like getting beaned in the head with a baseball."
Because it'll fly right back through that window.
"My solution for the kind of things I don't want to touch or interract with much is... well, who doesn't have a junk drawer, right?"
no subject
You could almost think that he's forgotten he'll have to elaborate on that to some extent in short order. Almost.
"So... imagine a junk drawer, imagine the, uh, breach is a piece of junk... throw the junk in the drawer. Hey presto?"
His tone isn't particularly finite. He suspects there's more to elaborate on, because that doesn't seem... complete? Realistic?
no subject
"You can. But I'll admit, a whole life seems too big to fit into something small and fiddly like what you'd find in a junk drawer. I'm not sure the 'anchor' would be large enough."
She turns her hands open towards him.
"I made a bookshelf. And when I needed to attach that life to something, I picked a book. For my first breach? It was Around the World in 80 Days. And I stuck that book in the shelf, so I can pull it out when I want... or leave it there forever. So far, so good."
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"Books ain't a bad idea." Dragging along the corpse of dry levity: "Better make sure it's not one I plan on readin' in real life."
He falls silent again, watching her and waiting for more elaboration, hoping for a key detail that'll demonstrate how this isn't an exercise in hanging his sanity on visual metaphors, holding back a pre-emptive 'that can't be it'.
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She looks to him.
"Look, I know it sounds... ridiculous. But the mind works in weird ways. It's almost like creating a trigger backwards, but it's one that you can control."
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"I'm not... sayin' there's no way it can work like that, but I am... tryin' to understand it." Because it sounds ridiculous. "How d'you mean a trigger?" It's not a context he's encountered that word in before.
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She sips her coffee before she dives in.
"A trigger is something that's seemingly unrelated that evokes an immediate emotional response. Good triggers include things like... the specific smell that a recipe makes filling your home, reminding you of your mother, making you feel warm and safe and good. Bad triggers are things like... firecrackers reminding a combat veteran of gunfire, bringing to mind a traumatic attack, and making them feel panicked and terrified. The recipe doesn't put you in your old family home and isn't your mother... but it triggers those feelings regardless."
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"Where'd you hear that?"
It's not a challenge: he's interested.
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She shrugs.
"Or you could ask Dr. Sheehan, my coworker. I've found him very knowledgeable, and he's a terribly charming man to boot."
Her tone makes it very clear she adores him. Because she does.
no subject
"I'll take those suggestions," he says, carefully curious. Thinking the explanation over.
This is both a foreign concept and not one. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to observe that things remind people of other things; and he's been on the same side of the interview table as her, trying with sometimes mixed success to do the same thing. Where it gets surprising is conflating called-up memories with the thing that makes you freak out and think you're still somewhere worse -- which he's pretty sure a doctor once told him was to do with back injuries, but that's far from the only theory he's heard.
"Both for the books and for the coworker."
And hey, he understands how a trigger fits into her sentence now. But he doesn't steer back to it immediately. Instead:
"Is a bad trigger somethin' different to shell shock?"
no subject
"Any time."
But he's got another question, and thankfully, she's ready for this one.
"It's a part of it. 'Shell Shock' usually gets called something else these days: PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There's also CPTSD, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is considered a 'sister' condition. The first one usually gets diagnosed in regards to a singular or limited set of circumstances: a violent attack, a harrowing experience, a terrible loss. CPTSD, on the other hand, has to do with prolonged trauma: a child raised in an abusive home, a woman in an abusive and dangerous relationship, prisoners of war kept for months or years in horrific conditions. Both tend to involve an absence of the feeling of safety that blurs the lines between the past and the present, but CPTSD can also affect your sense of self, the control you have of your emotions, and usually come with feelings of guilt or self-hatred since the source of the damage is more... well, complex."
She's going to loop this back. Carefully.
"Since remember, the mind likes nice, easy to identify symbols. Flashpoints. Distinct things it can point to. A PTSD trigger, like the firecracker, is easy to tie back and the response is simple: gunfire, duck. Direct threat, direct impulse. A CPTSD trigger might be something like... hearing a baseball game on the radio, because their father would get angry when his team lost and beat his kid for it. What is someone supposed to do with that feeling of unease and impending threat? It's harder to deal with but the 'trigger' is just as real. But because it's not a direct tie, just one that was established over a long period of time, it's sometimes harder to identify."
She's going to let that hang in the air for a moment before moving on.
"Make sense?"
no subject
There are a few things this explanation makes him wonder. One thing he wonders, again, is how much of this visit -- the music especially; this wouldn't seem pointed at all if it didn't come after the music -- is coincidence, how much is a law-woman's hypothesis, and how much is knowledge. And it's impossible to ask without making it stunningly obvious that there's a connection between A and B. But- fuck, he's going to tell her some amount of it, so maybe there's no better time to draw that line. One more way to keep himself from backing out of talking about it, right?
"It's an interestin' theory," he says, thoughtful. Breathes in with every sign of continuing, pauses for half a beat too long, and says: "I wanna..."
Exhales. "Nah, that's a lie, I don't wanna. But I'm gonna ask. Has, uh..."
A flattening of his mouth.
"...Edwin told you why I ain't fond of him?"
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She can come clean. Cleanish.
"I saw the way your eyes were, when he transformed. And I've... worked with someone who was under a long time stress situation for years. I'm sure you know that." Because it's Alan. "I couldn't know for certain, just from that. But... I figured it wouldn't hurt you, either as Alan's warden or... for any other reason, to have that knowledge in your back pocket."
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He's still not comfortable. His eyes may've said something then but they sure aren't emoting for shit right now. He misses the hell out of New York, where if anyone noticed they just thought he never got over the War or something.
"Alright." He lifts his cup. "It's useful. Thanks." Drinks.
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"Wake tell you anything about my partner?" and this is on topic. It just might not seem it at first.
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He has no idea how bizarro-wrong he is about that answer.
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