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Sitting back, Linda raised a hand to him. “I’m obviously aware of what happened to Ali. But why don’t you tell me what’s been bothering you?”
Bothering me? I wanted to kill a kid the other day. I scared Ali.
Cornell cleared his throat. “I’ve just been… trying to process everything and, it’s like it’s stuck, and I don’t know why.”
“What do you mean by ‘stuck’?”
“It’s like I watch it sometimes, in my head. What happened to Ali. I see it. I hear it. I don’t know how it’s possible to have flashbacks of something you’ve never seen, but I do. A lot.”
“Are they graphic?” Linda asked.
Cornell pressed his lips together and nodded.
Linda looked up after writing something down in her notebook. “Are these moments accompanied by strong feelings?”
“Rage,” Cornell spat out.
“Anything else?”
He scratched the back of his head. “Helplessness, I guess, is what you’d call it.”
“And thinking about that right now, how does that make you feel?”
“Crazy,” Cornell admitted before backtracking. “I’m sorry, that’s probably not the right word to use in a psychiatrist’s office.”
Linda laughed. “Everything here is taken with a grain of salt, don’t worry.”
“I feel nuts because it’s just so intense, like I’m there even though I wasn’t.” He shook his head with a sigh. “Then I feel shitty for feeling bad when Ali’s the one who was there and not me. I see her working on herself and doing so well. And I’m over here… ”
“You’re what, Cornell?” Linda asked.
“I feel like I’m dying inside. Like someone is torturing me to death. And that’s not fair. That didn’t happen to me. I didn’t even see it.”
“When someone we are close to, when someone we love is hurt, we feel that hurt deeply,” Linda began. “The problem is when we feel someone else’s pain so deeply that it inhibits us. That’s what secondary trauma is, the idea that what traumatizes our loved ones also traumatizes us.”
“I’m not a fighter,” he said with a small laugh. “I mean, I talked a lot of shit when I played football in college, but I’ll be the first one to tell you it’s easy to do that when you’ve got 900 pounds of protection in front of you. But the other night… I wanted to kill him.” He grimaced before glancing up at Linda. “I actually wanted to. It wasn’t just a thought.”
He could feel it, the rush of dark blood in his veins, the way it angrily pulsed through his body.
“He hurt someone you love,” Linda said as if Cornell needed the reminder. “That’s anger, Cornell. That’s a normal sentiment to have. The issue might be that the anger has been kept in for some time. Maybe you didn’t want to necessarily kill him. But maybe that anger was just becoming toxic because you’ve pushed it aside for someone else. It’s admirable you want to be strong. But that doesn’t mean you need to be.”
“I can’t unload that on her,” Cornell said, gritting his teeth. “I won’t.”
Even though I did,he thought with a grimace, remembering how hard he slammed Ali against the wall, how he gripped her wrists so she couldn’t use her hands. There had been moments of heated passion between them. But nothing that extreme. And what happened after the game wasn’t fueled by passion—it was driven entirely by fury.
“I agree to some extent. But if Ali is your partner, you need to be able to express yourself and do it in a way that doesn’t traumatize her. That’s something we can work on here. You can start by focusing on your present with Ali and not her past. It happened. It can’t be changed, and it’s an unfair thing for both of you. But what you can turn your energy toward is not letting Ali’s past have such control over you now and you tomorrow.”
Future, Cornell thought. We still have so much time.
“You’re a football guy, right?”
Cornell nodded.
“What would you tell your quarterback who came back to the sideline after fumbling the ball?”
“Forget it.”
“Does that one bad play have to affect the next one?”
