“I’m Sorry, Johnny.”

by Jonathon Nixon, LMFT

“I’m sorry Johnny this just isn’t working out for me.” 

Johnny looked up from his lap with the same blank expression that he carried with him into the counseling room from nearly an hour before. 

“Do you know what I am talking about?” The counselor reiterated. 

Johnny shook his head, not providing the counselor with the satisfaction of tricking out of him a verbal answer. 

“I’m talking about continuing to work with you.  I have some real concerns that maybe you and I might not be a good fit when it comes to figuring out how we might be able to overcome some of these behavioral challenges that continue to keep causing these problems in your life.”   

Johnny returned his back into his lap and began swinging his legs so that his untied shoelaces on his black Nike shoes whipped and twirled between the space where his feet remain departed from the floor. 

“I guess I’m feeling quite at a loss with you and I’m not quite sure how I can connect with you.”  The therapist briefly paused and let out a loud enough sigh that it disrupted the stillness in the room.  “How does your mom typically reply when she encounters this kind of stuckness with you?” It was a desperate attempt, but the therapist figured he might throw out one last question that could potentially break through this young client’s stubborn silence. 

Johnny shrugged, allowing the sound from the friction of his grey cotton hoodie rubbing against his cheeks to signal his disregard to the therapist final line of questioning.  

The therapist tipped his head up to check the time remaining within the session, “42 minutes?” his voiced whined in his mind, “Shit!”   

“Well, no point in wasting your or my time, Johnny.” The therapist stood up and walked over to the door to his office and propped it open. “Your free to leave and please tell your mom I’d like a word with her before she leaves.” 

There was a pressure from a cool breeze that slipped in from the hallway past the counselor and into the warm room.   

The counselor returned to his chair expecting to see Johnny triumphally fleeing from his chair and at the opportunity to escape his obvious burden of therapy.   

Johnny didn’t move. 

“Did you hear me, Johnny? Your free to go.”  The therapist recited, turning his back on the kid toward his hungry computer that was awaiting to be fed the unproductive case note from the brief encounter.

Still, Johnny did not move. 

The therapist studied the boy for a moment taking note of the rigidity that seem to tighten along the left side of his body like it was responding to the same cool breeze that busted in from the hallway that was causing him to tense against its chilly sensations. 

“Penny for your thoughts?”  The therapist attempted to break the tension that was now radiating from the boy’s body. 

Again, the boy did not answer, but rather flashed an uncharacteristic look of concern toward the door that stood between him and the defiant lifestyle that was infecting both his social and family emotional bonds.

“It’s like he’s staring into his own coffin.” The therapist thought to himself while observing the discomfort crippling the boy’s once dysthymic body language.

The therapist felt the urge to comment on his observations about the boy’s subtle shift, but he severed himself to the thought and just joined with the boy with a silent stare that fixated beyond the symbolic illusion within the open range of the door. 

“Now begins the meeting of minds.” The therapist imprinted within his conscious. “What are you looking at, Johnny? What does it mean to you?”  He was now counseling himself. “Did somebody hurt you? Did you lose something? What’s missing in your life? What aren’t you telling us?”

As the therapist kept his gaze steady alongside Johnny he could slowly begin to see the fragments from all the other stories of trauma, pain, guilt, shame and anger he heard from his other clients casually pass through the open barrier of the door. 

Stories grounded in brutal assaults, the darkest despairs, the romances of impulsive violence now carried in as freely as the cool breeze that pressed upon his skin a few minutes before. 

The therapist could only wonder what kind of horror, hurt or anguish Johnny must have been reliving as he encountered his own psychological monsters reentered into the room and for a brief moment he considered closing the door to protect and shelter the boy from his own consciousness, but his instincts directed him otherwise and the door was to remain open. 

The therapist could see out of the corner of his eye the boy becoming more tense in his chair, stiffening toward whatever mental anguish that haunted the corridors between the synaptic exchanges in his brain. 

“Come on Johnny, you can do it.”   Parts of the therapist cheered from beyond the acuteness of his clinical concerns.  His attention was now focused purely on the boy. 

Johnny furrowed his brow and tightened his lips as he continued to confront whatever was coming through that door. He squeezed and peeled his pale fingers along side the railing of the office chair like his mind was suffocating in its attempts to breathe through the trauma that flourished alongside his internal representations.     

The therapist was beginning to anticipate the birth of a crisis and mentally began to work through his internal checklist and prior experience managing such an event.  He nearly opened his mouth to ask if the boy was alright when suddenly the boy sunk back into the cushion of his chair.  It was like a type of emotional climax just had taken place that sucked the structure of the boy that caused him to sink under a spell of grief that was now visible within the steady streams that rolled down his melancholic face.

It was a look that the therapist would never forget as the 14-year-old boy finally looked toward the therapist and presented to him a pair of soggy eyes that looked like two open pits that directly led into the core of his own soul and just like how the boy started the session he never said a word and simply got up and walked out of the office. 

The boy and the mother never returned the therapists follow up calls and never rescheduled a session after that.  The only contact the therapist was able to make with Johnny again was during a warm sunny October morning when the therapist recognized a familiar face on the front page of the local newspaper that showed a familiar young boy tangled up alongside a row of his joyous soccer teammates celebrating their first state championship for Johnny’ s local high school. 

DISCLAIMER: The characters in this story are fictious and is designed to illustrate the content in which my services provide. Any similarities to any real person are completely coincidental.  If you or someone you know is experiencing any type of mental health emergency or experiencing any suicidal type ideations contact the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 today!