"Is that right, Meelia? Or is there anything you'd like to add or edit about that?"

"I don't think 'enjoy' is the right word? I... do like being the sort of person who does hard things but a lot of it's because I think it's really important for someone to be that sort of person. I didn't really enjoy the most adventurey parts of it, I don't think?"

"It's complicated I guess."

"Hmm, I guess I'm still a little confused, then. Did you come to Amenta hoping to find problems to solve, and was that part of the appeal of coming?"

"Yeah. I just don't feel like the word 'enjoy' is right for how I was feeling."

"More like... the universe is a better place if someone takes responsibility for finding and fixing problems?"

"Yeah, that."

"Maybe there was some bit of enjoyment somewhere too but I think that's a better de-scription of how I was feeling."

Ramona turns back to Haemi and Tish.

"I'm imagining being in your shoes, and I think if I were you I might be feeling... I don't know, insulted or something? That someone came to my world, not really knowing anything about it, but just expecting to find something wrong with it to fix. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty wrong with my world, and it's not hard to imagine that someone from another planet might have something to offer us. But it still just kind of feels bad, in my imagination, when I think about it."

"Is anything like that happening for either of you?"

"I think it might have offended me not at all if she'd chosen a more palatable cause - I hear some amaliens are concerned about the welfare of chickens, that might have been fine - and if it hadn't been so - hasty -"

"And if it hadn't involved felonies."

There's that judgment leaking in again, not in any clear violation of Ramona's rules, but she needs to contain it. Both Amentans have taken Ramona's questions about their feelings -- an invitation to introspect, to be a bit vulnerable and show themselves, and they've used it instead as an opening to go back on the offensive and complain about Meelia.

It is quite possible that the therapy is just going to fail. That often happens when there's insufficient motivation for people to change, when they come in mostly with an axe to grind, wanting to prove a point, wanting to 'win' the therapy, and they're not actually all that interested in learning anything new or surprising, or making any changes within themselves.

There's a saying, among Earth therapists. The clients must win the battle for motivation, and the therapist must win the battle for structure. Or put another way, if the clients don't actually want to understand, Ramona can't make them -- but she can refuse to allow them to do much additional damage on her watch, by imposing structure.

Up until now she's avoided confronting the Amentans, for lack of rapport -- but now she's going to switch tacks. She's going to push back against them. There's a decent chance they'll be offended and just walk, and that would be totally fair, they're allowed to do that. But Ramona won't continue the therapy with them calling the shots.

"It sounds to me like you've got it all figured out. Meelia was just wrong, in your value system, and you want her to know it, and you want her to feel bad about it, and that's all you're here to do. Is that true?"

Ramona's words are confrontational, but she speaks softly and warmly, in a curious tone. She's not trying to slam a door, here, she's trying to open one. She'll see if they walk through.

"I don't understand why we're here if - Obviously there are a lot of complicated feelings on top of the fact that, yes, she was wrong - do you just not have therapeutic experience with anything clearer cut than people not listening to each other about picking up their socks? If she had dislocated my joints and given me a head injury, or done the same thing to my wife, would we be hearing that we need to learn exciting new facts about why this was a great choice if you have an open mind? I'm sorry, I didn't exactly go to bed tonight planning for this, I am assuming that you have some procedure that you hope will accomplish something, but how it's supposed to do that is deeply unclear to me. I am not an orange and cannot guess how an Amentan therapist would do it to compare but I don't think they encourage people to come to a more accepting perspective about things like that."

Ramona wiggles her toes in her shoes. She is glad, from a therapeutic perspective, that she's drawn Haemi's fire -- Haemi is attacking Ramona, now, instead of Meelia, and that's actually a better state of the gameboard. She knows more seasoned therapists who are completely unflapped by it when a client starts attacking them. Ramona is not quite there yet. It does still register with her. It's just a little blip, but she does have to actively decide to regulate herself about it, and the toe-wiggling helps with that.

She also takes a deep breath, but not a showy one, she doesn't want it to look like a heavy sigh. She just silently inflates her lungs without causing an audible whoosh of air, and then lets the breath out again.

With her own nervous system sorted out, her next task is to tend to Haemi's.

She's not really sure yet what the Amentans have going on, biologically, but they sure appear human and nothing that's happened so far cuts against the theory that they have very human-like nervous systems. Ramona will be on the lookout for evidence that there's something else going on, but until then, she's going to treat Haemi like a human with her nervous system in hyperarousal -- fight or flight. Mostly fight, in Haemi's case.

People in hyperarousal can't be curious - that part of their brain is shut down. If their brains are human-like in this way, Haemi (and probably Tish as well) won't be able to get interested in Meelia's story until they're feeling more safe and calm than this.

So Ramona needs to thread the needle. She needs to validate them as hard as she possibly can, create more safety for them, without letting them walk all over Meelia and Ramona in the process.

Ramona speaks slowly, in short sentences, leading with the validation part.

"You're right, of course."

"Everyone here agrees that you're right."

"It was very bad that guard was seriously injured. I am not asking you to have an open mind about that."

She pauses.

"I'm not asking you to think that serious injury was no big deal, something to be flexible about. Changing your mind about that is not a goal of this therapy."

"Do you believe that?"

"It's certainly news to me!"

"Do you believe that understanding and approval are two separate things? That you can really get why a person did what they did, why that made sense from their perspective, without condoning it?"

Haemi looks at Tish for help.

"I think - is it okay if I butt in here, I'm usually more the talker -"

"Yes, of course!"

Ramona honestly is having trouble even figuring out how these two are different, so this is a valuable clue!

Haemi led with anger and Tish led with grief, but then Tish had a lot of the same anger Haemi did. She hasn't seen the grief from Haemi yet. She'll keep paying attention, looking for clues, trying not to let them blend into Haemish in her head. If they actually do therapy for a while she'll probably ask to see them separately to try to get a better sense of them.

Meanwhile, if they want to cut in for each other, why not?

"I think a lot of things that might come up in the course of understanding a grave wrong that was committed, even if you're doing it in - almost a literary analysis style - will tend to come off as apologism if there isn't a really firm shared foundation of all, already, knowing, that it was a grave wrong. I think Haemi's focusing on Poante not just because his family's worked for hers for the last three generations but also because it's not clear if there's that understanding about the rest of it. There are four people in this room, not just three. I think we'd have an easier time with focusing on what you think is most likely to be helpful if could be sure we were all - metaphorically speaking the same language, I assume we are not literally doing so."

"Okay, let me just verify something with Meelia really quickly, because she said it at the beginning of the session and I want to make sure I remember it correctly. Meelia, I think you said that you didn't realize you were hurting Poante, and once you realized that you hurt him, you knew it wasn't okay. Is that right?"

Meelia is crying, but can apparently say words while crying cause it's important.

"I knew I was hurting him when I did it," she says, wiping some tears out of her eyes.

"I thought when it happened that it was important but sad and it happened really fast and now when everything is less all happening I um. Think I would like it to have not happened and should have chosen a better way but um. Think that rushing and things happening fast is sorta how I am and that it was important to find out about prob-lems Amenta had very fast."

"Doesn't make it less sad though and I feel really bad about it."

Oh there are more tears now, she can wipe those away too.

"Oh, that's even stronger than I realized. Thanks for that clarification, Meelia."

She turns back to Tish and Haemi.

"Does that help, to hear Meelia say she agrees with you that she hurt Poante and that it was wrong? That's not in dispute, we're not here to argue about whether it was wrong."

"All three of you indicated at the outset that you would like to better understand each other. I'm here to help you do that, and when that's done, we can also see about some of the more specific things you wanted, such as processing your grief."

"Is there more that you need to ask me or hear from me before we can continue to work on understanding?"

"I think that helps, thank you."