The couple's dreams dissolve as they sleep, their minds rising into, if not wakefulness, at least lucidity. 

They find themselves in a field of calming grass, a blonde haired woman sitting at a desk with a stack of heavily marked up papers addresses them:

"Welcome. You've been selected by the Astral Therapy Agency to receive lucid dreaming therapy sessions. You'll be brought to your appointments while you sleep but be able to think and process emotions as if you're awake. As you're part of a group session you will be able to interact with other participants as well. Each of you will wake up fully rested and be able to remember everything that happened during the sessions."

The woman's voice is calm, but something in her smile gives the impression that she finds this job deeply fulfilling.

"Your particular group seems to be the two of you and -" ruffle of papers "- and Meelia. She'll be receiving this same talk separately. Do you have any questions before your first appointment?"

"Haemi, what are you getting me for seasonchange?"

"What does that have to do with - oh. Boots, those white ones you were ogling."

"And why is this happening - and why with Meelia, she's gone now -"

"Sessions are provided to people who may benefit from them and would not otherwise receive them. Special attention is paid to people in unique circumstances with issues that may go unresolved otherwise, though there's also a degree of seeming randomness to the selection process, as I'm told we don't yet have the resources to offer our services to everyone who might benefit."

"But why are you using this power you have to provide therapy services and not - almost anything else, really."

"I couldn't say - I'm just an employee of the Spirit that provides the services."

Personally she thinks this is a very good use of magic dream powers, but she'll admit that she was selected for being a good fit for this job out of quite a large pool of people.

"The Spirit? Can we speak to the Spirit?"

"I don't expect so, sorry."

"How did you come by this job - how many people like you are there -"

"I was offered it in a dream, and I don't know."

Also look there's a door over there. Was it there before? Unclear.

"What even are you, you don't look Amentan quite, where are you from?"

"I'm sorry but I'm not actually allowed to talk about any of that, only things related to your personal decisions about whether to attend your first therapy session are not."

She is genuinely apologetic about this, but there are rules. If she wasn't the sort to obey the rules she'd wouldn't have been offered this job in the first place.

"Who'd be giving us therapy?" wonders Haemi.

Papers get shuffled around.

"Ramona Sterling - she's a licensed professional and should be reasonably well suited to the situation."

"What kind of a name is that, where's she from -"

"You'd have to ask her."

"Is she allowed to tell us?"

"Most likely yes."

"I'd like to see Meelia again," murmurs Haemi. "Even if it's only in a dream."

The woman smiles. 

"If you don't have any more questions you'll find your therapist through there," she says, nodding her head towards the door.

"Is there anything more like an explanation or context you are allowed to tell us," says Tish.

"I can go over more details of the mechanics of your visits if you'd like?"

"- yes please."

The woman, a placard at her desk gives her name as Gerty, explains that Haemi, Tish, and Meelia will find themselves in their therapist's office on time for the sessions they schedule, so long as they are sleeping during the relevant night. They can leave or refuse to schedule sessions - the process is strictly voluntary. If they aren't in a session they'll sleep normally. Typically leaving your therapist's office will result in the dreamer awakening. Attempting to use the dreams for things other than receiving therapy will likewise result in the dreamer waking up.

The dreams won't infere with getting enough sleep, and physical harm that occurs during the dream won't transfer to their actual bodies. Though note that the therapist won't be dreaming during the appointments and will be actually physically present, so this doesn't apply to them.

As a general rule the dreams will work conveintly and without hastle - the Astral Therapy Agency exists primarily to make the process as intuitive as possible.

"How do we schedule these?"

"You make an appointment with your therapist in person, typically at the end of your session. If for some reason there's an issue with this the Agency will help find a solution."

"Will that work in Amentan time, though?"

"So long as you are sleeping during the night of a given session you'll find yourself on time, regardless of when the session is scheduled on the therapist's end."

"...okay."

"If that's everything you can get to your first session through there," Gerty says, nodding towards the door.

Tish is having an entire face journey about it but she will take her wife's hand and go through the door.

Ramona looks at her schedule to see what's coming up after lunch.

Oh, interesting, a family therapy intake scheduled by the Astral Therapy Agency. Ramona just signed up with these folks recently. It's sort of like an Employee Assistance Plan on Earth; the clients get free sessions that are paid for by -- well, not their employer in this case. To be honest, Ramona's not really sure exactly who's paying, but the reimbursement schedule is excellent. Ramona has the impression they've had a hard time finding therapists qualified for interdimensional work and so they're willing to pay top dollar for it. She hopes the clients aren't especially gnarly.

The file doesn't say anything other than "family therapy" so she'll just have to see who shows up.

Meanwhile she slurps up her dandan noodles and watches a cheesy dating show on Netflix.

And now it's time for the appointment! Will the clients walk in the door? Just materialize on her couch? How does this work?

Here's a lesbian couple with blue hair and slightly too many teeth. They are sharply dressed to some alien standard and holding hands.

And following them in through the front door is a young girl with short hair and oddly tired eyes.

"Welcome, thank you for coming. Please make yourselves comfortable anywhere in the room that you like."

There's a big comfy couch with blankets and pillows, definitely large enough for all three of them, as well as a few comfy chairs. Ramona stays standing while the others sort themselves out. It's always interesting to see how they choose to arrange themselves.

The blues - they're slightly older women, though how old they are exactly is not necessarily going to be obvious to an Earthling - sit on the couch together.

Meelia sits crisscross in one of the chairs.

And Ramona will take the remaining chair, pull her feet up under her, and get cozy with a blanket.

"Good! Is this everyone?"

"My name is Ramona. My understanding is that you're here for family therapy. Can you start by telling me your names and how you're related to each other?"

"My name is Tish Ahtemik and this is my wife Haemi Fanu. We - briefly fostered Meelia when she visited our planet, until - she was deported."

"I'm Meelia. I stayed with Haemi and Tish when I was visiting their planet and they were nice to me and things."

"Nice to meet you, Tish, Haemi, and Meelia."

"I'm going to ask you more about yourselves in a few minutes but first I need to tell you a few things about how therapy works."

"My job is to listen to each of you and find out what you want to be different in your family and help you work together on your goals."

"If you want to, you can tell me private things. The rules of my job say that I'm not allowed to tell your secrets to other people. I'm not even allowed to tell anyone that you're in therapy."

"There's an exception, though, if I'm worried that someone is in really big trouble, like they might get hurt very badly or die. Then I might have to ask other people for help with that, and I might end up having to tell some of your secrets. I really try hard not to do that, though, because I know that privacy is important."

"Do you have any questions about any of that?"

Ramona's taken the standard disclosure speech and made it kid-friendly, though she was only guessing how to pitch it. She hasn't been able to guess yet how mature this kid is in human terms.

"D'you have ways to help other people who might be hurt in our world?"

"I don't know! I don't know anything about your world. Usually I can only help the people who are actually doing therapy with me, and I can't always even help them, but I try. Are you worried about the people in your world?"

Meelia nods, glancing awkwardly at Haemi and Tish.

"Is there some kind of - dream police - and if so what are the laws we need to be complying with?" asks Tish.

"We, uh, don't currently live together and can't because she is no longer welcome in our country," says Haemi. "I'm not opposed to getting therapy but I'm not sure what kind of - goals we could set here."

"To answer Tish's question first, there's no dream police. Back when I just worked with clients on my own world, I was beholden to local law about what I needed to report to whom. Now that I work interdimensionally, I have to be a lot more creative. I don't usually have any way of contacting agencies that could enforce rules, and anyway the rules are different all over the place. I mostly go by my own sense of what's right, but I try to be humble about it. People organize themselves all kinds of different ways and just because I don't like something doesn't make it bad."

"And to address Haemi's question about goal setting, we'll get to that very soon. Sometimes it's hard, but if we go through your situation step by step we might find something worth doing, or at least something worth understanding better."

"Before we do that, do you have any other questions about the rules here? Or anything you wonder about family therapy in general? People come in with all kinds of different ideas about what it is. Many people have never heard of it before and need to start from the beginning."

"Our planet has family therapy but I'd be surprised if amaliens had anything quite like it."

"We have people who talk to people who want help getting 'long or have problems or things. Not sure if what we have is the same as fam-ily therapy?"

"That sounds pretty close! And yeah, generally, we talk. We try to understand what each person wants. We try to come up with new ways of doing things differently and better. We find ways to soothe old emotional hurts and make them heal up better."

"Meelia, can you say anything about how old you are? It won't make any sense to me to tell me in years, because we're from different places. But maybe you can say how much being-a-kid you've already done, and how much being-a-kid there still is before you're all grown up."

Ramona is interested in whatever Meelia will say next, but she also just wants to get her to talk a little bit more about general, hopefully neutral topics before they start anything serious, to get a bead on how much abstract thought she's capable of, how oriented she is to her world, and so on.

"Dunno - at least a bunch of thousands of years I think."

"Amentan scientists think amaliens have probably been around for at least forty thousand years and probably more like three hundred thousand if not longer. They don't have particularly enhanced memories so they have no idea where they came from. They're immortal and don't age."

Oh! Well, that's a new one... but only sort of. Ramona can draw on her experience with families with various genetic conditions that prevent kids from fully maturing, though it probably won't apply wholesale. These parents probably didn't expect Meelia to mature, and aren't sad that she won't? Something to check on.

"All right, let's get started, then. Can someone tell me why you've come to therapy?"

"I think I hurt Tish and Haemi a bunch and I'm sad about that and I want to still be friends with them even if that's harder now? And also I think I want to better understand some things about them and also other Amentans."

Meelia takes a breath.

"And also I want to see them again, but I don't think I'm allowed to even ask to go back for a hundred and twenty years and I don't know if they'll still be 'round then."

"...we were assumed into a special-purpose dreamscape and invited to without much affordance to use the opportunity for anything else. But, yes, the terms on which Meelia left were very awkward, and visiting her home planet would be very fraught."

"Can you say more about how Meelia came to join your family in the first place, and why she was deported?"

"Our country discovered the amalien planet not too long ago. Meelia was interested in coming to Amenta and we applied to foster her - we live on a farm and our children and grandchildren are grown up, we have lots of spare time - and the government agreed we'd be a reasonable pick. We collected her from the shuttleport and brought her home and we were showing her things like, like - trampolines, and bath bombs and -

- and then she was arrested and deported for incitement to pollution hysteria and battery. The battery was against our night watchman Seso Poante, she knocked him unconscious and dislocated most of his joints."

"I didn't think it'd hurt him and I was trying to do something important," says Meelia very quietly, "Though I know that doesn't make hurting him okay."

"People usually have reasons for the things they do and I believe you had your reasons, Meelia. It can be especially hard to figure out the best way to get important things done when you're in a strange place with different rules and systems."

"What is incitement to pollution hysteria?"

"And what was the important thing you were trying to do?"

"Incitement to pollution hysteria is - a failure to verifiably follow procedures intended to keep pollution contained and tracked appropriately. Amaliens don't have the concept of pollution hardly at all but they also can't get sick, I don't know what your planet is like..."

"We definitely have pollution, and laws to try to keep it under control, but that's mostly not something regular people worry about, it's generally big corporations doing the polluting. And we can absolutely get sick, but it's more common to get sick from pathogens than from pollution."

She looks at Meelia to see if she should repeat the question.

(Something about that reply is really confusing to the Amentans but they wait patiently for the conversation to come back around to them.)

"Um."

She's not sure at all if Ramona is going to understand cause she looks sorta like an Amentan but maybe she'll be different and even if she doesn't understand at least Meelia can try to talk about it?

"I found some Amentans who had red hair and the other Amentans were being really mean to and I wanted to help them and Haemi and Tish and the other Amentans didn't seem to understand what was wrong and so I tried to go on an adventure to figure out what was happening and I think I mostly did and I think it was important but I also hurt people when I did that."

"Okay, so you were trying to protect some people who needed protecting, but it sounds like things got all mixed up, and then it got bad enough that you got kicked out. I'm sorry, that must have been hard for all of you."

"I am very sure I don't understand a lot of the details, we'll have to talk much more about it before I do, but there's something else we need to do first."

"Haemi asked before what kind of goals are even possible given that you don't live together anymore and we're just meeting in a dream. Let's try to figure that out."

"I'll start with Meelia. Meelia, I want you to play pretend with me for a second. Let's pretend that we've known each other for a long time already, because the four of us have been meeting for a while. And let's pretend that it worked out really well - that you're really glad you came to therapy, because something important got a lot better."

"Now you can tell me the rest of the story. What happened in that story that made you glad you came to therapy?"

This question is a total gamble. Can Meelia do hypotheticals? Can she identify outcomes that are realistic given the group's resources? Most human twelve-year-olds can answer a question like this with no problem, most human four-year-olds definitely cannot, and it varies a lot for the ones in between. If it's a flop, that's okay, Ramona will learn something different instead.

"Hm. I think I understand Haemi and Tish and think they understand me better and I think right now they sorta think I'm wrong about lots of things and I think they're wrong about lots of things and probably the truth is somewhere sorta in the middle? And I think if therapy went well than we'd prolly better understand each other and I would understand how to talk to them more."

"And also um. I think I'd like it if they also changed their mind about reds but that feels like the sorta thing that's too big and cul-tur-al to be changed in therapy unless it goes on for a really long time. And even then I don't want them to change their minds just cause it'd make me feel better. I guess if it turns out I'm wrong about reds I'd like to know that too but I really don't think I am and I've had a lot of experience being different amounts of sure and... I can 'member a couple of times I've been this sure and been wrong but way way more times I've been this sure and was right. But also I don't want to make them agree with me."

"I think I got part of that and missed part of that, which is normal in therapy! And in communication in general."

"The part I think I got is that you would like Haemi and Tish to understand you better. Right now, you think they think you're kind of mysterious, like why did you do the things you did, and really, everything made sense from your perspective. So you want them to get your perspective better so you'll make sense to them. Is that right? And you also suspect maybe you don't totally understand them."

"The part I didn't understand is when you said you want them to change their mind about reds. What are reds? Are those people with red hair, the ones that other Amentans were being mean to?"

Ramona's still looking at Meelia, but she wonders if the Amentans will jump in.

Tish is rubbing a tear away from one eye.

"Reds are the Amentans with red hair. Tish told me they're poll-uted and I'm still not really sure what that means. But um. The first time I met an Amentan with red hair another Amentan broke one of their feet and then wouldn't let me help them and all the reds seemed scared of the other Amentan. And then later a bunch of bad things happened to the reds and um. The other Amentans didn't seem to care or try to make things better. Um."

Meelia glances awk-wardly at Tish.

"I tried to talk with Tish 'bout it but it was like she didn't think of bad things happening to reds as sad and important? Other Amentans seemed like that too - like they were afraid of how the reds were poll-uted and trying to avoid the pollution and then also didn't think it was bad when bad things happened to reds cause of this?"

For some reason she wants to apologize to Tish right now but she doesn't think she actually should.

"Thank you, Meelia! That helps quite a bit but I notice I am still very confused!"

"I should explain that one of the hazards of going to an interdimensional therapist is that often we don't know anything about your native culture and biology and so on and we have to ask you a lot of questions before we understand. If you have only been to therapists from your native culture before, this may seem like an annoying waste of time! On my own planet, it is considered very rude for a therapist to ask a client to educate them about background cultural matters - the standard is for the therapist to do that research on their own time, or only to work with people whose cultures are already very familiar."

"In interdimensional therapy, it's impossible for the therapist to 'do their homework' because there are too many dimensions, too many worlds, and no reference materials at all. We have no choice but to ask our clients to explain and to spend a bunch of time on that."

"In this case, I think it will be especially helpful because you're from different cultures yourselves! Meelia is ahead of me in understanding Amenta, and Tish and Haemi are ahead of me in understanding amaliens, but I bet there are still some important aspects you're each missing about the other culture. So having to patiently explain to me is actually part of the therapy. If you think I'm obsessing about some part of your culture that's not relevant, feel free to say so!"

I won't necessarily agree, Ramona doesn't say.

"Anyway, with all that in mind - Tish, Haemi, could you please help me understand your culture's attitude towards people with red hair?"

Ramona knows a ginger on Earth who would be utterly unsurprised by anti-red-hair-discrimination; he says that most women on dating sites filter out red-headed men. Ramona has no idea if that's true.

"It's not about them having red hair, specifically. Occasionally there's a throwback with another color and they have to dye it, or at least so I've heard. It's a caste marker. Reds are the caste devoted to handling polluted material - not fumes and things like it sounded you meant, but, uh." She closes her eyes and sighs. "I suppose it's inextricably relevant. Corpses, biological wastes. They also collect garbage though by default nothing technically polluted accumulates there. I tried - very hard - to explain to Meelia - but by the time she got home I was already up waiting for her hours past my bedtime. I thought - that after a brief summary we'd go to bed, and - talk more in the morning -"

Haemi pats her arm.

Ramona now has questions exploding in a dozen directions, but she has to pick one direction to go first. She writes quick cryptic notes to herself as reminders, writing as fast as she can but knowing she's losing some of the ideas as she goes, because she can think faster than she can write. They'll come back to her if they're important.

- caste genetic / at birth?
- intermarriage / interbreeding?
- my hair?
- birth / death rate?
- poop?

"So people on Amenta always have hair that matches their caste, by dyeing it if it doesn't come in that way naturally? Is your blue hair significant in the caste system, and what does it mean?"

"Blue hair means that we're part of the caste that does governance, judiciary, land rental, urban planning, that kind of thing. There are seven castes if you count reds."

"Do you think in terms of 'high caste' and 'low caste'? I'm getting the sense that red is low caste, maybe the lowest. Is blue the highest?"

"And is there a purple caste? I'm sure you've realized that I'm outside your system entirely, but I wonder what associations pop up for me when you look at me and my hair."

"The hierarchy gets a little fuzzy in the middle but yes, blue is highest and red is lowest. Purples do a lot of things - farming, retail, shipping, manufacturing. Not therapy. That would be orange. But you're not an Amentan so I assume it's meaningless or means something quite different."

Ramona wonders what happens if she gets a bunch of cheap wigs in various colors and gets everyone to wear a random one each session.

This is probably not a good intervention. She doesn't even know what the problem is yet, nor does she have a great theory of how this helps solve that problem, but it does sound like it would probably get thoughts and feelings flowing in new directions!

She shakes off that useless-for-now thought.

"My hair is not completely devoid of meaning in my culture, but yeah, for our purposes, it's best just to ignore it I think. It definitely doesn't mean the same as in Amenta." (on Amenta?)

"Anyway, let me go back to Meelia. Can you tell me about learning about the Amentan caste system and what reactions you had? Do you feel like you understand it, or did you not really have enough time to figure it out before you were sent away?"

"I don't think I under-stood it that much? I guess I knew different Amentans had different hair colors for different sorts of things they did but I didn't know much else."

"Oh, that sounds important, I think! My current theory is that living on Amenta without understanding castes could easily lead to quite a lot of confusion." Ramona says 'on' instead of 'in' this time, maybe someone will correct her if she's doing it wrong.

"Does that sound right to you, Haemi and Tish?"

She's really having a lot of trouble reading the Amentans. They don't say much. One of them shed a tear, earlier, and they've been making comforting little gestures at each other, but it's not a lot to go on. Does she notice anything about their nonverbals or facial expressions that seems to map to a light bulb coming on, that Meelia was flying blind with castes? Or was this obvious?

"I think Meelia was well and fully aware by the second time she had to take a decontamination shower to get out of the red district that she was not supposed to be there. It was almost two in the morning when she got home. I usually go to bed at ten. She could have waited to talk more about the details. She didn't have any problems with any other caste-related socialization while she was there."

"I think how Amentans treated reds was different than the rest of the caste thing? But maybe all caste sys-tems have that."

"Um. Also I did know some people didn't want me talking to the reds, especially the second time." she says, not apologizing cause she thinks it was important to do even if it made some people sad.

There's definitely something here. It was probably some combination of not understanding and having a different value system, but Ramona doesn't want to chase it too much further at the moment; she's got something else she needs to do first.

"All right, it sounds like there's much more to talk about with Meelia's interactions with reds, and we'll come back to that. Right now, I want to jump back to goals for therapy. Meelia's goal is for you all to come to a better mutual understanding, but I didn't ask Tish and Haemi yet."

"Let me ask Haemi next. Haemi, I want you to imagine that it's our very last session of therapy. In this thought experiment, we've been meeting regularly for a while, and the reason it's our last session is because we succeeded - therapy worked, you got what you came for. What would be different on that day, so you'd know you were done?"

"I think," says Haemi, "that Meelia knows she hurt us, though I'm not sure she understands how badly or why. But I would like it if I could be sure that she didn't think we were wrong to be hurt."

"Let me say that back to you so I can be sure I understand. You want Meelia to know how badly she hurt you and how, and more importantly, you would like her to understand that it makes sense that you were hurt, that your hurt is valid?"

"- I think that doesn't sound quite right to me but I have no idea how we are all speaking the same language in the first place. I think Meelia already does know that we were hurt. I think that she - feels justified? Thinks that this was the right tradeoff? Believes that we would not have been upset about her running off to commit what would have been capital crimes if she weren't an immortal alien, if only we felt differently about reds? And I think that in fact she should not have snuck out in the middle of the night to cripple our night watchman who has worked for us for forty* years and wasn't even trying to physically stop her, just to wake me up, and snuck into a district full of reds who did not even want her there -"

*ten Amentan

Ramona starts putting up her hand and then actually interrupting partway into Haemi's speech, because it's going into dangerous territory. It has a lot of assumptions and judgments and mindreading and arguments in it, and while she really wants the information Haemi is providing, she doesn't want Haemi to unwittingly do relationship damage while she's saying her piece. She wants the therapy room to come to be a place where clients know they're safe from the verbal attacks of others.

These clients don't know how to transmit the information without transmitting the barbs, yet, so she'll just have to rudely interrupt.

"Sorry to interrupt you, Haemi! I definitely want to know all of that stuff, but at the moment I mostly want to focus on the positive future we're shooting for, rather than jumping directly into litigating how you were hurt and who did what incorrectly in the past."

"It sounds like there's a lot you want Meelia to know. And also, you have some guesses about what Meelia thinks of you, and some guesses about what Meelia believes, and if you're right about those things, you don't like them. You'd like an opportunity to change Meelia's mind by giving her more information so that she understands and then maybe comes to agree with you. Is that close?"

"...It's close."

"Is there something important that I missed?"

"I... don't actually think that 'committing crimes is wrong' is the sort of thing everyone is entitled to their opinion about, so if we are talking about an outcome where I am satisfied with the results, it does not include a 'maybe' there. I understand that you can't possibly guarantee this, but that isn't what you asked."

"Thank you for telling me! I'm glad you're bringing that up early!"

"If I'm understanding you correctly, you hope to arrive at a point where Meelia agrees that she shouldn't have broken Amentan law, and you won't really be satisfied with the therapy if that doesn't happen. You're right! I can't guarantee that will happen!" Ramona is not even especially sure she wants that to happen, she's not sure yet!

"Is there anything else that you would value, or is convincing Meelia to agree with you the only thing you could possibly come away with? For example, would you place any value on understanding Meelia's point of view, even if you never come to agree with it?"

"- it would be useful assuming there is nothing stopping us from telling the people who are handling interplanetary diplomacy. It is conceivable that something about reds needs to change. I am not interested in being told that it was right to attack Poante."

"I will not tell you my own opinions of what was right or wrong unless you ask me. I am here to help you understand each other better and reach your other therapeutic goals, not to judge you or adjudicate a disagreement."

"As for talking to the people handling interplanetary diplomacy, you are free to do that. Meelia, you should be aware that whatever you say in here may be repeated by Haemi or Tish to others; they haven't promised to keep it a secret. And conceivably it could end up affecting relations between your worlds. Are you worried about that?"

"I don't think I am? Would be sorta weird if they said everything I said to lots of people but I don't think they will share things unless it's important to them and that's okay. I might say things to other amaliens."

She also thinks she has some emotions about what Haemi said before but she can wait till Ramona asks her.

Ramona would not be surprised to learn that Meelia had feelings about what Haemi said! Ramona is intentionally not asking about that right now, because at this point in the therapy, nobody knows how to talk about hard things without getting all tangled up and hurting each other even more.

"Thank you, Meelia, that's helpful."

She turns.

"And what about you, Tish? You've heard Meelia's and Haemi's goals. Meelia wants to work toward mutual understanding. So does Haemi, though Haemi also very much wants to convince Meelia of her point of view and will be less satisfied if that doesn't happen, and has some principles that she intends to hold firm on."

"When you picture that last session of therapy, when you picture being glad that you came, like therapy really helped, what's different for you? And I'll ask you to focus on the future that you want, rather than getting into the details of things that already happened, that part comes later."

"I think - focusing on what therapy in particular could possibly do - I would like to feel more ready to let go of what I had built up in my head about an idyllic fostering relationship that I was hoping to have for months or seasons and instead had for less than a week."

Ouch. That does sound hard. Ramona lets a little of the sadness into her voice.

"Do you know what it takes to help you let go, or is that a mystery to you?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think it's going to be very much like when our kids grew up and moved out."

"Because... you expected that? You could see it coming? It was the natural way of things? Whereas this was a bad surprise?" Ramona ventures.

"We expected it and it was - not perfectly smooth, that kind of thing never is, but within - expected tolerances."

Ramona nods. "That makes sense, I think."

"I can't be sure until we get into it, but my guess about what helps you let go, what helps heal the wound, is to talk about it, and to make some sense of it. And maybe to construct some ritual around it."

Ramona thinks maybe Meelia's values differences were so big that she was never going to be happy following Amentan law, that this family was not meant to be, but it's too soon to say that out loud, and anyway it's better if Tish finds her way there on her own than if Ramona blurts it out.

She gives Tish a moment to respond if she wants to.

Meelia is a bit confused about what families are s'pposed to be like and how children and fostering work most of the time but now doesn't seem like the right time to ask. 

"All right, thank you everyone."

"It seems pretty clear that we need to spend some time on mutual understanding. It looks to me like that fits with all of your goals. And then, when we have a pretty clear picture of what happened here and how you each experienced it, then we can regroup and see what else we need to do to help Tish move through her grief, and to let Haemi and Meelia see if they can find shared ground about what's right. And I'm guessing Tish is not the only one with grief."

"Does anyone have any questions before we get started on the understanding part?"

No one says anything, so Ramona forges ahead.

"All right, let's get started then!"

"I have some rules for how we tell our stories. Here is how it works."

"One person speaks at a time. That person tells a part of the story from their perspective. When you are the one speaking, you can tell about things that you remember happening, things that anyone in the room at the time could clearly see. And you can also talk about your own thoughts and feelings."

"So, for example, you can say, 'When we showed Meelia the bath bombs, she giggled a lot and she stayed in the bath tub for an hour,' if that's true, but you can't say 'When we showed Meelia the bath bombs, she was happy.'  The feeling of 'happy' is inside Meelia in that case and you can't be sure that's what she was feeling. It's probably a good guess, but it's safer just to describe observable facts."

"Does that make sense? Does anyone have any questions about that?"

"What if someone reported their feelings at the time?"

"Great question! If they said out loud that they were scared, then you can say 'And then she told me she was scared.'"

"I might mess up sometimes on acc-ident but I can try my best."

Ramona smiles at Meelia in a way she hopes is reassuring.

"That is okay! People mess it up quite a lot! That's part of why I'm here, to help you do this correctly. I might interrupt if I notice you starting to talk about what someone else thinks or feels, or why they did what they did, or what their intentions or motivations were. I stop you because you don't know that stuff for sure and it's not your part of the story to tell. And figuring out what you actually know and what you were just guessing about is really hard, actually."

"Mhm."

Sounds reasonable to her.

"All right, then, let's start at the very beginning, before you even met each other. And Meelia, let's start with you. What do you remember of when your people first encountered Amenta? How did you hear about it, and what did you hear?"

"The Aurorite, which is an aurora shaped monster came to the Cold Town I was visiting to try to find an amalien who got frozen a while ago. Uh, I'm not sure if you have monsters but they're sorta magical creatures on the amalien planet that are all u-nique, and the frozen amalien isn't very important to this story but his name was Tama."

"So the Aurorite came down and and she told me and the other amaliens that there were new people in the sky using ele-ctronic communication and looking at our planet and that there were a bunch of them on the ground too so I went to talk to some other amaliens in other places and we decided to go meet the new people."

"And the new people were the Amentans and we talked to them and they wanted to move in to our planet - uh, said they wanted to move to our planet, and we talked about it with them and decided that would be good and also I decided I wanted to go and see what their planet was like."

"Is that enough of the story or should I say more?"

"What made you interested to go see the Amentans' planet? What were you hoping would happen?"

Ramona also wonders if the visiting Amentans scrupulously obeyed the local laws while visiting, but that's not the main line to take at the moment. She might come back to it.

"I like going on adventurers and think it's important and going to a new planet seemed like a bigger adventure than any I'd been on in a long time. I was hoping to try new things and help people."

She ended up hurting people too but that wasn't what she'd wanted, even if it happens on adventures sometimes that doesn't make it okay.

"Did you have some idea in mind about how you wanted to help people, before you even went to Amenta? Or was it just general, open-ended good will?"

"The second one - I didn't know what people on Amenta needed help with yet."

"Did you know, before you left, that you'd be placed with a foster family? What did you think about that?"

"I was excited that they were excited - um wait. I was excited when I was told they were excited to meet me. It was nice to know that there were two people I could get to know right away."

"You remembered how to talk about other people's feelings! Thank you!"

It's a tricky rule, and Ramona introduced it and then it was a long time before it mattered, so it's good to reinforce it.

"Are there families on your world? Are new people born, and who takes care of them? Does there come a time when you are too 'grown up' to live with your family any more and you move out?"

"I don't think there're families? No new people are born. Sometimes we take care of each other or of monsters or animals. Only animals grow up and when amaliens care for them it's for their whole lives usually I think."

"So the whole idea of joining a family when you came to Amenta was probably pretty foreign? Like maybe you didn't really know what it was or how it worked?"

'I guess? There were a lot of things that were going to be new and I thought I'd figure them out - that's part of an adventure."

"That makes sense! Thank you for telling this part of your story!"

Ramona turns to the Amentans.

"Now I'd like to hear from Tish about the time when the two cultures first encountered each other. What do you remember about that? What did you hear about the contact, and what did you think about it?"

"Well, we weren't there, neither of us are diplomats, but - Amenta's been hoping to find other habitable planets, other kinds of people, for as long as we've known what stars were. - according to the consensus understanding of the themes of Amentan culture that I could dig up a citation for if necessary, I'm not sure how I'm meant to talk about things like that. At any rate I'm no exception to this trend - it's too late for us to have more children, we're both menopausal, but we could have great-grandchildren settling on new worlds, meeting new neighbors, growing and learning... Anyway, when pictures and news started circulating it was basically the next best thing to a planet full of friendly merpeople who have always dreamed of sharing planets with terrestrials. Immortal ancient children - I know they're not children, not really, but this is how the news initially went and it's not a bad one-word summary of what impressions I expect most Amentans would get from meeting most amaliens naively. Not very many of them and there never will be, adorable, friendly, happy to share space. Magical animals and creatures with all kinds of cool abilities. It was astonishing wonderful news. Haemi and I looked at pictures of amaliens for hours on end."

"The way you are describing your understanding of the consensus of Amentans is fine, thank you for distinguishing between your understanding and the facts! I appreciate that!"

Most people are not nearly so good at this to start with!

"I remember that when you introduced yourselves, you talked about having 'fostered' Meelia, which I took to mean that you saw yourselves as parents and her as your foster child. Did I understand that correctly? Was that the framing the Amentan government was using for it as well? I wonder why it was 'fostering' and not, say, 'hosting.'"

"We were aware from the - I was aware from the beginning and have been under the impression that Haemi was also aware, that they're not really children. But there's still the element of showing them new things, guiding them around, and it feels different with a little person of childlike demeanor than if we were just having over a more centrally adult houseguest. We bought her things and played with her and answered her questions and made sure that there food on the table for her and arranged that she wasn't alone in the house in a way we likely wouldn't have with an adult houseguest. The government did say 'fostering'."

"How many amaliens came to Amenta? If there were a lot, did they all come at the same time? Did you have the opportunity to compare notes with others who were fostering?"

"It was just the one. We did exchange some notes with some people who were working with amaliens in various capacities on their home planet. There was a marine biologist particularly enamored with a science-inclined amalien who she'd been introduced to... or so she represented herself to me."

"What were your personal hopes for Meelia's stay, Tish? How long did you hope she would stay, what did you hope would come of it, what did it mean to you?"

"I hoped... that she'd be with us for a season or two or even a couple years if she wanted, long enough to get a good look at an insider's perspective on Amenta or at least a reasonable slice of it. I hoped that when she decided she was done she'd be ready to tell the other amaliens what they needed to know about us from a position of fond remembrance. I wanted to - take lots of pictures of us together doing silly gymnastics poses together in the park and -" She dabs her eye on her sleeve. "Not like a daughter, but like - a niece of indeterminate age staying with us for a while to get out of her bubble?"

Meelia tears up a bit - even if she's confused by what Tish is saying it's still sad. She doesn't need to understand it to know that.

"That is a very big difference, Tish, between what you hoped for and what ended up happening. It makes sense that you're grieving the loss of your hopes."

Ramona lets the moment hang there for a few beats, not enough that everyone gets uncomfortable, just enough to give the sadness a little space.

And then she turns to Haemi.

"What about you, Haemi? Can you tell us about your impressions of the amaliens when you first heard about them?"

"Not very different from Tish's. I guess I was wondering what the catch would be. They're all so cute, though..."

"Yeah, you both keep emphasizing that. Can you say more about what makes them 'cute' to you?"

It's not like Ramona hasn't noticed that Meelia is cute - she looks a lot like an adorable human child - but how will Haemi put that in context?

"- you look a lot like an Amentan, but I guess maybe your children look different? Amaliens look like Amentan children except with different teeth and hair colors."

"So they just kind of pull out -- maternal, or parental feelings in you, because of how they look?"

"I wonder, as you've gained in direct experience, do you still think of amaliens as child-like? What still seems that way to you, and what seems different, based on your observations?"

"They are not children. There are some things they have in common with children that they don't have with adults, and those things are very - emotionally salient. But I always knew they weren't children. They're all thousands of times older than we are. There's - disfluencies in how they speak, a range of short attention spans, a certain - emotional rawness in the enthusiasm and upset they display... I would expect an amalien to have more fun in a toy store than in a bookstore."

"On my world and, it sounds like, on Amenta, we have babies who grow into children and then adults. Babies and children must be looked after by adults because they lack certain qualities they would need to take good care of themselves in the wider world -- so adults 'raise' children, until the children are themselves adults."

"Is it the same on Amenta? And what are the qualities that adults have that children lack, on Amenta?"

"That's right. I guess 'maturity' is not going to be specific enough? Impulse control. General knowledge and experience to evaluate plans and possible risks. Resilience, or maybe what I mean is more like responsibility - continuing to do what you have to do after a shock. Patience and diligence, which are related to earning power."

This is a fascinating answer! Ramona wonders if it's a particularly Blue answer, or if other Amentans would answer exactly the same way.

She also wants to check in with Meelia pretty soon, because she suspects a lot of this information may be new to Meelia? Or even if Meelia knew it, it might have been academic, and she might not have realized how these ideas would come into play in their little nascent family unit.

But she can't leave Haemi hanging there, she needs to tie that up before she turns back to Meelia.

"Thank you, that's really helpful, I'm starting to form a better picture of Amenta. One more thing before I turn back to Meelia," she says, to give everyone a heads up about how the conversation is going to flow.

"Thinking back to what you said about amaliens before, how they can get excited and playful, how they go from one thing to the next more quickly than you might -- that doesn't sound like it maps exactly to your notion of Amentan childhood, but there are some overlaps. Certainly Meelia would lack knowledge and experience about Amenta. So did that kind of cement the idea that you two were in loco parentis?"

How does this translation magic work anyway and will it handle Latin phrases? Only one way to find out.

"Yes, we were construing ourselves as responsible for her and making sure she knew what she needed to know to navigate Amenta."

"That makes perfect sense! Thank you."

And Ramona turns to Meelia, as promised.

"Meelia, was anything about what Tish and Haemi said new to you, or surprising, or confusing? Maybe you're starting to get a picture of how families work on Amenta, and how Haemi and Tish were thinking about you when you arrived?"

"A lot of it was new and sur-prising."

Meelia tries to put her thoughts in order.

"Amaliens don't have a con-cept of people being younger, only of animals being younger. I knew that Amentans grew like animals do but I didn't really think about how their minds might grow and also didn't think about how the ones who look like amaliens might act diff-erently from amaliens cause they're young."

"I think I'm much more confused about how Haemi and Tish were thinking of me when I arrived on Amenta than I was earlier? But this is cause I realized there are things I don't under-stand, like how Amentans treat children - since it sounds like it might be different from how they treat adults - and also whether Haemi and Tish were treating me that way."

"That makes a perfect segue! All of you want to understand each other better, that was the goal you all had in common. We can get a lot of that just from me asking questions while the others listen. But we can get even more if you ask each other questions directly."

"I have rules for this part too!"

"You can ask open-ended, curious questions, designed to help you understand someone else better. You may not ask questions that are arguments disguised as questions."

"So, for example, you can ask, 'what were you feeling when I stayed out late?' but you can't ask 'why did you have such a stupid rule about getting home by a certain time?'"

"Before we keep going, does anyone have any questions for me about how this part works?"

"Is the word 'stupid' the only problem in that example or is it invalid to be curious about why rules exist?"

"Good question! 'Stupid' is the main problem! The person asking that question probably doesn't actually want to know the answer, they are probably mostly trying to make a point!"

"So asking, 'I don't understand about curfews, could you help me understand the reasoning behind them?' would be a perfectly fine question."

Ramona waits to see if there are further questions.

Everyone's just looking at Ramona, waiting for her to go on, so she does. She looks back at Meelia.

"Okay, so, Meelia, you were just wondering a bunch of things about Tish and Haemi and Amentans in general, about how they were thinking of you, how they treat children, and so on. Is there anything you want to ask them directly, so that you can understand them better?"

Ramona is not actually worried that Meelia will ask the wrong shape of question, she's been great about that so far, but she reinforces the format anyway.

"Um, could you say things about how Amentans treat children as opposed to not-children and why?"

"- well, we take care of children; they don't know how to look after their own needs, especially indirect ones like money and a good reputation, so adults taking care of them provide for what they need and impose limits to make sure they aren't too destructive to themselves or others while they're learning. And we teach them, by example and explicitly and by sending them to school when they're ready for a classroom environment. Part of how evolution makes this an appealing job is by making children look really cute to adults, especially in their most needy stages of life, but also anyone who manages to get a child credit in the first place is going to understand that this is a major privilege and undertaking and would take it pretty seriously even if they were, say, blind, and couldn't see how cute their baby was."

"Was amaliens being cute in the same way a fac-tor in why you wanted to foster me?"

"Yes - it wasn't decisive but it made it more appealing."

"Would things've been different if I looked like an Amentan grown-up instead?"

"It might depend if you also acted more like one."

Ramona's been sitting back, watching this exchange. When clients really start to talk to each other, it's best to melt into the furniture so they can just get on with it.

But the last thing Tish said -- well, it didn't break any rules, but it's ambiguous. It could be a really neutral, even-handed thing to say -- or it could be a dig.

Ramona's not going to confront Tish head-on about it, in case she's wrong that it was a dig, but she is going to redirect.

"Can you do the thought experiment, Tish? Not about Meelia specifically, go back in time to before Meelia arrived and you were thinking about hosting." Ramona swaps out the verb on purpose. "Would you still want to host if the amaliens looked like Amentan adults? Would you have provided different things? Expected different things? It can't really hinge on your guest's behavior at that point, because it's before she arrives."

"We were operating based on reports and recordings of amaliens as a class, if not Meelia in specific."

Ramona's not sure if Tish didn't get the question, or if she just doesn't want to answer it, but she mostly suspects Tish of not liking where Ramona's going with this line of questioning. Tish is presumably smart and has figured out some of what Ramona is up to.

Ramona doesn't have a strong opinion yet of what led to Meelia's assault on the guard. It could have been any combination of ignorance of Amentan frailty, different value systems, urgency either real or imagined, actual recklessness and impulsivity, or even actual malice. Ramona hasn't even heard a clear story, start to finish, yet, so it's far too soon for her to have a solid theory.

But she thinks it is also too soon for the Amentans to have a solid theory, given how little of Meelia they actually know!

They would probably not put it in such stark terms, at least not out loud, but a bunch of the Amentan narrative seems to be roughly, 'Meelia was a little girl who did a stupid thing out of childishness and impulsivity.'

And that might even be true, or at least partly true. But it's going to be hard for the Amentans to listen with open minds and hear what Meelia is telling them, if they've already got that story lodged firmly in place. So Ramona's trying to jar it loose a bit.

The thing is, she can't confront the story head on, not twenty minutes into a first session. She has very little rapport with these clients yet. If she just tells them directly to let go of their judgment and listen, it will probably backfire. She'll have to come at it from a different angle.

"I see, so there wasn't really a time when you were thinking about the amaliens separate from their appearance, you formed the whole package opinion from the start. So it's kind of hard now to do the hypothetical and imagine hosting someone who looked like an adult. That makes sense."

She gives Tish a little opening in case there's something she wants to interject in response to that --

"Right. I think possibly the government would have been looking for different things for a different sort of alien. It mattered that we live on a farm, for instance; it'd be harder to keep prying eyes eager to get up close to a real alien away from a townhouse. If they'd expected Meelia to have the context to make media relations decisions for herself or to have so much as been in a city with more than a few thousand people in it, they might have left that criterion open, as an example. I think an adult-presenting alien might have had more of an itinerary than a host family; they'd maybe be staying in hotels, taking meetings, attending specific events, presumed to be able to manage their own hygeine. Not going to someone's home and being introduced to the concept of trampolines."

Ramona stops and thinks a moment. This is a very helpful, cooperative answer, actually! She needs to send some reward signal to Tish, and then get back out of the way so Tish and Meelia can go back to their exchange.

"Oh wow, that's fascinating, thank you! That is a really different setup. I can't help thinking that Meelia got a good deal there, regardless -- I know that when I visit a new world, I prefer to be out of the limelight and free to explore!"

"I am curious about your reaction to this information, Meelia! Were you or any other amaliens involved in the decision about what kind of visit you would have to Amenta?"

"Not really? Um, some of the assum-ptions feel weird and like... I could have been asked? Like I don't think I really want to do meetings, though some amaliens definitely would, and I don't under-stand the media re-lations bit but I think that's cause we don't have the same sorts of media - thoughts lots of amaliens still hear about me 'cause of stories and things. I dunno - I guess I could have asked more about what op-tions there were but I amn't the sort of amalien who does that."

"I do think that staying in a house and trying a trampoline was a better fit for me than having lots of schedules and meetings would have been."

"Sounds like the placement mostly worked out for you, though it would have been nice to be involved in the decision. That's fair!"

"Do you have more questions for Tish and Haemi right now, about how they were approaching the whole thing, before you even got there?"

"I can't think of any right now?"

"How about you, Haemi and Tish? Especially Haemi, as I was talking mostly to Tish for this last bit. Is there anything about the time before Meelia arrived that you want to explain better, or ask Meelia about if you don't understand her perspective?"

"I find myself wondering about what Meelia means when she says 'adventure'. It looks from here like this is very important to her and may have been - motivating."

"I think an adventure is when you seek out hard important things that are new? Like um, things that aren't getting paid enough attention already."

"Why did you think coming to Amenta would be an adventure, then, before you'd done it?"

"A bit because being an amalien who could tell other amaliens about it was an important new thing, and a bit cause I didn't know whether their were hard things there that needed doing that weren't getting done."

"There are billions of people there. I know you found something you thought of as very important but I don't understand why you expected it."

"Hm, I think sometimes a new person can see things that other people who have been around a thing might have trouble seeing. Like you said about expecting me to be someone staying with you to get out of my bubble - just the other way around."

Tish sighs and looks away, falling silent.

"Tish, would you be able to summarize Meelia's point? It's okay if you don't agree with it, I just want to see if you can say it back in your own words. Or if you don't understand it yet, then you can ask a question that will help you understand."

"She thought an outsider's perspective on Amenta might reveal problems of the sort she enjoys tackling."

"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."

Ramona needs a second to retrace the entire stack of what they were doing before they got tangled up, and the clients might have lost track too, so she reviews her notes and organizes her thoughts.

Goals:
- Meelia: mutual understanding, share POV about Reds
- Haemi: mutual understanding, wants Meelia not to think they were wrong to be hurt
- Tish: mutual understanding, grief processing

Goal 1: Mutual understanding
- chronological storytelling plan: before Meelia arrives, while things are still good, when things go wrong
- so far: exchanged stories of the time before Meelia arrived, learned that the Amentans had a strong amaliens-as-children frame, while Meelia had a strong go-fix-stuff frame. Tish hoped for a 1-2 year stay.
- was in the middle of assessing the Amentans' take on Meelia's go-fix-stuff frame when a bunch of hostility spilled over and had to be contained, probably not worth going back for that sub-goal right now

There are various loose ends, like learning more about pollution and how Reds are treated, but Ramona mostly expects those things to come up in the course of the story.

"So far, we've talked about what happened before Meelia arrived, and we learned that you had pretty different frames for the purpose of the visit. Next, I'd like to talk about the period of time after Meelia arrived but before anything really serious went wrong. How long was that?"

Ramona is looking around to see who has an opinion about that.

"Very short. She spent the night in our house twice and the third night -" hand gesture.

"All right. Let's just talk about those first couple of days, then. Tish, would you like to go first this time? I'm interested in hearing your personal experience of those few days before anything went seriously wrong. Anything that you observed, thought, or felt is fair game. What happened? What were those days like for you?"

"We picked her up at the shuttleport. She did some cartwheels on the moving walkway... we asked if she wanted to see the city first or go home and she wanted - she said to go to home. She was cur- she expressed curiosity about somebody knitting on the train... we said we'd get her some knitting things, I don't think she ever wound up using them... she asked questions about our farm and we answered those. She watched me answer some emails. We showed her her room. She was pretty bouncy, I mentioned trampolines and she looked very keen so I ordered one. We'd already gotten her a pocket everything and I showed her that. Got her a bath, she said she preferred them to showers. She fell asleep afterward with a great big smile, I have pictures... in the morning by the time I got up she was on the new trampoline, she's very acrobatic. Then she wanted to explore the farm, I went with her, I remember I told her about what pollinates our peaches... her mouse ran off and she told me I didn't have to worry he'd get run over or anything. He found an earring for her and she wanted to get - she sounded interested in getting her ear pierced to wear it, so we went into town and did that... I had to explain about crossing the street, since she could sleep off any injuries she got but she'd have really scared someone if she ran into traffic... we talked about doing paintball since she likes running and dodging - since she presented herself as liking that. We wandered around the city for a while doing everything that caught her eye. As far as I know. There was a fountain she played in for a while, that was when Haemi met up with us. When we got home we tempted her into the bath with a bath bomb. And the next day she - started going into the red district."

"Wow, it sounds to me like you did everything you could to please and delight her. You paid attention to all of her cues and tried to set up a lot of lovely experiences for her. How did you feel about it?"

"It was idyllic," Tish sighs. "It was just what I'd wanted out of the whole thing, those first couple of days... showing her new things, and playing with her - she invited us to do gymnastics with her and came up with some introductory exercises that wouldn't hurt Haemi's ankles, and I love the - feeling of being pulled out of my routine to go play -"

"How about you, Haemi? Anything you want to add? Did you have a different experience or does Tish's description sum it up for you also?"

"I wasn't up for tromping around the city so I wasn't there for that part but yes, that's what happened, that's - what we'd wanted."

Ramona has mostly been asking Meelia first, whenever there's a question for everyone. The general heuristic in relational therapy is to go first to the weakest, quietest, most withdrawn, least bought in, most vulnerable, whoever it seems like might benefit most from first-mover advantage. Based on first impressions, Ramona thought that was Meelia.

But as they've gotten deeper into the session, she changed her mind, and asked the Amentans first. She correctly guessed that this part of the story would be pretty straightforward for them, but she kind of expects that Meelia's answer will be more complicated.

"Meelia, before I ask you about your first few days in Amenta, do you have any questions for Tish and Haemi about what that part was like for them? If it's all making sense you don't have to, but this is a good spot for it if you're curious about anything."

"I don't think I have any questions about it right now?"

"Fair enough! In that case, let's switch. Meelia, what would you like to tell us about your experience of those first few days? You don't need to do a play by play of the events, necessarily, unless you remember them quite differently from what Haemi and Tish described, but I would like to know how you thought and felt about it -- how did you experience your first few days on Amenta?"

 "I think I liked those first few days and they were fun though I wouldn't have wanted them to go on like that for a long time since they weren't... important?"

"Not important because... you hadn't found your adventure yet? Your problem that you wanted to solve?"

"Bas-ically? It wouldn't have to be one big adventure, just um, as it was I was just sorta doing every-day fun things that I liked and might do during periods in-between doing more mean-ingful things. Not to say that that stuff isn't meaningful too, just in a different way."

"What did you do to start to move in a direction that felt more important or meaningful? I'm guessing that whatever it was, that might also be the first thing that Haemi and Tish noticed as being 'off.'"

"When Cheep found a place he wanted to show me and it turned out to be a place with reds and someone was being hurt and I tried to help them."

"Oh Cheep is my pet mouse monster."

"Oh, interesting, I had guessed that it would be your idea, I didn't predict that you got the idea from someone else." Something else? Ramona's not sure of Cheep's sentience status so she'll round up, just in case.

"When that happened, did you have an opportunity to consult with your hosts about it?"

"They called me on the pocked everything* they gave me."

*roughly translates as "smart phone"

"I guess what I'm getting at here is that... at some point, you started to do things that surprised or maybe alarmed Tish and Haemi, and I'm interested to learn more about that decision point. I'm interested to know if you noticed it was a turning point, and how you reasoned about that?"

"I wasn't really thinking about them at the time? I was focused on figuring out what was going on with the reds and helping people."

"Got it, thank you. Okay, let's pause there to turn back to the Amentans and see if they have any questions about Meelia's experience of those first few days?"

"I would have been supportive of - most kinds of possible - charitable projects, or..." She trails off. "No questions."

Ramona smiles a little bit at that, internally, but externally keeps her composure. Tish is learning! This is great!

Now she has a choice to make. Someone is going to have to tell the story of the Terrible Events. If the Amentans go first, they're going to have an incredibly hard time separating facts from meaning-making about those facts. But if Meelia goes first, the Amentans might struggle to listen, stay open, be curious about what they're hearing.

Meelia going first is the better option, on balance, but Ramona will have to make sure the story comes out in digestible chunks, so they can stay regulated and interested while they hear it.

Ramona has another tactic that she uses when she's working with, say, couples who are trying to improve their relationship. She teaches them a lot more skills, so they can have successful conversations on their own without Ramona's support. Ramona is skipping all that with these clients, because they aren't trying to rebuild a functional family. It would be overkill for them. Ramona can just do the heavy lifting of regulating the pace and tone of the conversation -- if everyone comes out with a better understanding, it doesn't matter that they relied on Ramona to get there.

"All right, we're there. We're at the point of discussing the main events. I want to check in with you -- we've been meeting for over an hour, and you might be getting tired or want to take a break. This would be a pretty reasonable place to stop if you want to go back to your beds and your regular lives and regroup a bit and come back to discuss the rest in a subsequent session. Or, if you'd like to keep going, I do have room in my schedule for that. What do you think?"

She addresses the whole group.

"If this seems like a good time for a break I don't have any compelling reason to push on tonight."

"I'd be okay with it either way."

"All right then, let's stop there for now."

"Thank you all for coming. I think you did some good foundational work and I appreciate your willingness to trust me with your stories. We stand ready to tackle the hardest part next time we all meet together."

"If any of you want to meet separately before we all meet as a group again, I'm open to that. Sometimes it can be easier to work through part of the problem with fewer people in the room. I think to arrange that you should talk to your coordinator and they'll handle the scheduling."

"If anyone has any questions, let me know. Otherwise I'll see you soon."

Ramona is not actually sure that's true; she thinks it's completely possible the Amentans decide not to return, which is absolutely their right. On the flip side, if they do come back, that'll be a really good sign for their buy-in.

"Thank you." The blues get up - Tish looks over her shoulder at Meelia - and they leave the room.

Ramona stands as they leave, projecting steadiness as best she can.

"See you soon." Meelia says to Ramona as she leaves as well.

A few days later, Ramona looks at her schedule in the morning and sees that the family therapy clients are coming in again. How about that!

She reviews her case notes and thinks about what she'd really like to see happen.

Best case, therapeutically speaking: Meelia tells her story and the Amentans go, "Ohhhh, wow, we never thought about it like that, thank you so much for telling us." This seems unlikely!

Another very good case, diplomatically speaking: both sides realize that it's important to check how they are different, and communicate about that, before integrating too much. This feels more realistic, and even if it's ultimately implemented in a fairly xenophobic way, that's probably actually a net positive?

And then it's time for the appointment!

Ramona stands as they come in, again, in case they want to pick different seats this time, but clients mostly just do "same seats" after the first session, like it's a bus ride home from a field trip.

Tish and Haemi indeed sit together where they were last time.

Meelia does as well.

"Welcome back! I'm glad to see you all again."

Ramona means this sincerely. It wasn't an easy start, last time, but the case is intriguing. She definitely wants to hear the next part of the story.

"By default, the plan for today is to continue sharing both sides of the story of what happened when Meelia visited Amenta. Before we start on that, is there anything anyone wants to say? Feedback from last time, things you've been thinking about since we last met, an alternate suggestion for how to spend the time today. Anything you like."

Ramona looks around warmly.

Meelia spent most of the rest of the time in-between sessions napping, and doesn't have anything to volunteer right now.

"Well, we've been asked to pass on a request to do as much technology and information trading as is possible through these sessions, which I assume is very little but might not be none. But nothing too germane to the topic."

"Meaning... your government wants to learn more about amalien technology, and is hoping you can get information about that during family therapy?"

This is a new one.

"Are other diplomatic channels closed at this point?"

"- no, about your technology. Since we don't have another line of communication to whatever planet you're from."

Ohhhhh.

This is an unexpected side effect of contracting through the Astral Therapy Agency.

Normally Ramona's clients come from worlds that have ties to Earth that don't run directly through her. She's never been the sole representative of Earth before -- there was one occasion when she was the primary representative, but those clients were free to move about and check out Earth without Ramona as intermediary.

This feels a little fraught. She'll try to remember not to give away the homeworld.

Ramona tries to regain her composure.

"Oh! Oh, I see. Thanks for explaining."

"As I'm sure you're aware, the Astral Therapy Agency terminates the sessions if we use them to do anything other than the therapy. So while I might give context on my own perspective on a situation sometimes, I will probably not be going into much detail about technology."

Ramona is suddenly acutely aware of the iMac and the printer and the mini-fridge in her office, not to mention her cell phone. The Amentans mentioned having gadgets that sounded like cell phones, so maybe all of this is fine.

"Haemi, Tish, can you say anything about why you decided to come back, and what you're hoping to get out of this session?" Other than technology info.

"Well, we do also want to know how Meelia's doing - she hasn't written, and her guards say she's just been napping a lot - and to see if there's any reconciliation to be had, especially since Meelia's about to go tell all the other amaliens her side of the story."

Ramona is not encouraged by her inferences about that last part, so she lets it go and focuses on the part that does seem constructive.

She turns to Meelia. "How are you doing, Meelia? Anything you're hoping for in this session?"

"I'm doing okay-ish I think? It's not very fun being alone on a ship but I can just nap a bunch and soon I'll be home and that's nice."

"I don't know what I'm hoping for? Prolly that I'll get a chance to talk about how I feel about some of the harder bits of what happened, which is scary but important I think." 

Ramona had hoped to use the break between sessions as motivational leverage. If the Amentans returned, that would be evidence that they were at least somewhat bought into the process. Unfortunately, now that they're here at least partly on a mission of interdimensional technology acquisition, Ramona's best motivational move is unavailable.

Nothing for it but to press on and see what happens!

"All right then, sounds like we're ready to get started."

Ramona looks down at her notes.

"So Meelia, last time we met, I heard about the time before you arrived, and the first few days you spent on Amenta. And then on something like... the third day? Something happened. Your hosts mentioned you staying out late that third night. Do you remember it the same way? What happened that day?"

"I did stay out late. I um. Went exploring to see a place Cheep found."

She closes her eyes to help her remember.

"The ground was painted red on the way there and I followed it and I eventually came to a neighbor-hood with people who all had red hair and then uh. One of the reds got his foot broken by a purple delivery person who was holding boxes - I think it was an accident but the delivery person was so angry at the red haired person and wasn't helping them and I wanted to help and. Um - he seemed really angry to me. And the reds seemed really scared of him. And I tried to help and he started saying he might get the police and um. One of the reds told me they really really really didn't want the police around and. I couldn't do anything to help with that - not right then, while someone who might call the police was watching."

"I had to go through a bunch of shower things or else the purple would keep being angry and it took really really long - like a few hours - and also it hurt Cheep a bunch. And then I went back into the red neighborhood but sneaky this time so no one else could spot me. But everyone was still scared, maybe cause they thought I would call the police? And after that Tish called."