In 1995, my client and her roommates were taken hostage by gang members fleeing a shooting.  She recently crossed paths with one of the (now former) gang members at a workshop, which obviously unearthed a lot of buried emotions.  She is truly very glad to see that this person is a productive member of society now, a parent and spouse, doing good work and living a good life... and therein lies the hard part:  Did the perpetrator receive more support than the victim?  Will she receive an apology?  Can she forgive without one?         

 

Writing in third person about personal events, or having someone else write in third person for you, is a helpful way to detach from them.  It enables you to delve deeper into emotions and say that person feels like this, not me, providing a bit of psychological buffer.

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Carrie sat at her small desk in the entry of her small apartment.  A few feet away on her left was a TV, which a roommate watched from the sofa.  On the other side of the TV, Carrie's other roommate sat at her own small desk doing homework.  Unusually, they were all at home on a Friday night and, for the first time in a long, long while, as they all quietly went about their evening -- separately yet together -- Carrie felt cozy. Content. Roommates doing regular roommate stuff together was not their norm, having been randomly put together a few months ago by a college apartment service.  But for two full days now they had been watching the Oklahoma City bombing coverage on TV, stunned by the images of little children and people torn to shreds, and so no one much felt like going out to party or date or even study somewhere else this Friday evening.

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Turning back to her computer monitor, Carrie pecked out a few more thoughts on her course's latest bildungsroman.  Did The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes influence Oliver Twist, or did-- 

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"MOVE!"  The front door on Carrie's right slammed open and the entry filled floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, physically and energetically, with men.  If an enormous hand hadn't grabbed her arm, lifting her up and out of the chair and shoving her ahead of them, their charged momentum would have.  In an instant she was stumbling into the living room area, no thoughts in her head, no time to think or react or wonder.  

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"GET OVER THERE!"  Hunched over and trying to regain her footing, the man pushed Carrie;  she put her hands out to break her fall into the worn tweed sofa.  She turned slightly as she collapsed into it, perched sideways on one hip and leaning on her right arm and elbow.  Brittany, sitting upright in the middle of the sofa with her feet on the coffee table, wide-eyed and catatonic, didn't even react to her.  Carrie could see them now, two basketball player-sized men with handguns and... a woman?

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One of the men looked around the room and spied Thuy in the corner, who studiously finished writing in her notebook and was just now turning around in her chair to see what the commotion was about.  He took two strides past the TV, grabbed her arm and tossed the petite 19-year-old toward the sofa.  In two equal strides the other man reached the window by the sofa, looked out, and twisted the blinds shut.  The three young women sat haphazardly on the sofa in shock.

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Five seconds had passed.  Five seconds that would cause a lifetime of obsessively locking house doors, screen doors, sliding doors, garage doors, car doors, pet doors, gates, windows, anything that opened and anything with a latch, regardless of whether someone was coming right back inside.  

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To be continued as we work on this ...