As with most things the discussion merely brings my attention to underlying facts which are upsetting. I don't wish to be handled as though unable to cope with facts.

...what new information was present there? I am functional but not all here. That was already known to you.

Exact details of the not-all-here. I really don't have a very good model of what it's like inside your head, for all that I can guess better about some of it than the locals.

Do therapists encounter this sort of thing much?

Big universe. The exact situations are all unique, of course, but trauma therapy's a thing.

I'm really not that badly off. I haven't had much trouble this trip and it's involved some stressful situations.

...he says, after explaining how he is in a constant state of panic...

Which isn't affecting my productivity.

There's a difference between 'ineffective' and 'badly off'. I know being productive is your priority, I can respect that, but it's quite another matter to claim you're not that badly off.

I have much refined my reference point for badly off.

No doubt. Mine remains calibrated to the general population.

Which I'm sure is delightfully free of people who ask their boyfriends to hold a knife to their throat so they can stop pretending to feel like there isn't one there.

It's irregular, yes.

...people do it for other reasons, though, right? I mean, Quendi couples get up to that and we're apparently the prudes of the galaxy.

I mentioned I suspect Sigyn may be too kinky to torture?

It's a shame Thauron's dead - it's not at all a shame Thauron's dead, but - because I'd like to see that. He gets stupider when he's frustrated, it's always worth it to provoke him -

Oh, that'd be the funniest thing in a horrible sort of way. He kept osanwëing me Vár screaming - if it'd been Sigyn I probably would've mustered the energy to quip that they seemed to be getting along well -

I think he'd have been frustrated by you galactics anyway, a little bit harder to shock your sensibilities.

Asgardians aren't even the cosmopolitans of the galaxy, everything I know is from books and the occasional offworld diplomat or whatever I was the only royal willing to bother with.

It seems like there's probably some level of cosmopolitism at which it starts to disadvantage you, planets where someone's never taken a serious injury or had to rebreak a bone before...

Not sure what that has to do with cosmopolitism.

Does it not - tend to go with having more civilized hobbies and more advanced technology and things? That's how I was imagining it, though perhaps unreasonably - the better inventors and scientists would also have the broader worldviews, what a thoroughly Noldorin prejudice now I think about it...

Well, if you have more advanced technology and your hobbies include 'exploring' you certainly get to meet more people, but there's some awful, narrow-viewed spacefaring sorts whose idea of meeting people involves genocide and some very open-minded folks confined to their planet of origin. Diversity within the planet matters too, species dispositions and how their history has unfolded matters. Just because Asgard has conflated the hobby of 'hitting people' with the visible tech level of 'make it look like we've barely learned to forge steel' and the foreign policy of 'ugh, do we have to' doesn't mean the things go hand in hand everywhere.