Fire Smoldering Under Water. Anastasia Kuznetsova
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time the horrors of war still echoed in the memories of all the members of Jean Batist’s family. But time moves space, and in a while the professional self-fulfillment of Jean Batist started to develop successfully as he used his life experience in working with PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – applying this experience to treating the people who had gone through a war.
Psychological traumas – is a special subject studied by psychotherapists. Jean Batist was not a supporter of a human body’s exposure to pharmaceuticals.
According to his long-term observations, it was quite obvious to him that a trans state in hypnotherapy was more qualitative by its nature than antidepressant drugs. Certainly not in every case, but in the cases related to mental health – for sure.
When mentally healthy people go through traumas, it is not necessary at all to introduce chemical elements into a body to exercise a forced control over people’s mental state.
Our unconsciousness – is that specific particle of God inside us. And this inner God is open to professional conversation. A psychotherapist always has a choice. To make a pharmaceutical company richer or to find the right words for a conversation.
Of course, it is easier to prescribe drugs. Substantially easier, as compared to that enormous work of the mind and soul, which is required to be done for the sake of a patient.
But Jean Batist liked what he was doing with all his heart and the more complicated the cases were, the more he committed himself to this amazing skill of curing human souls.
The children grew up, his son was going to apply to college and his daughter was graduating from a secondary school. Finally they got an opportunity to give up social housing, to take a loan and to build their own house.
Their own new house. Now each member of the family had their own room and in the evening they all could gather in the nice and comfortable living room with a beautiful fireplace made of red bricks. Only 3 years were left till the final payment to the bank. And the house would become theirs, at last.
And in this new country, in this new life, after all the ordeals of war, finally they would be able to obtain peace and to live happily ever after.
But one morning he realized that he was dying.
Jean Batist kept silence. Long ago they have agreed with Anastasia, that they would tell their own stories as well as the stories of their patients in third and first person.
This was fair.
– Jean Batist, do you mind if we get out into the garden and I have a smoke? – Anastasia realized that they needed a break. They were sitting near that particular fireplace of red bricks, where the fire was burning brightly.
– Damn it! Of course! I will breath your menthol, – exclaimed Jean Batist, smiling, as if this was exactly what he was waiting for. – You know, I will probably suggest the following. How about now you tell me how you lived. And then we will get back to my trauma. OK?
– No problem! – Anastasia took long menthol sticks out of a cigarette case, and they went out to the terrace, to the night garden filled with a citrus scent of lemon grass.
Black Caviar Sandwich
A pack of huge stray dogs surrounded her from all sides. She had to walk through the wasteland, which had a bad reputation.
For a 13 year old girl it was better to walk accompanied by somebody. And she was accompanied. As if unknown powers of her Guardian Angel took very unexpected shapes.
Until she reached the age of majority, if she walked through dark streets of the city or trough a wasteland between her home and her school, a large pack of stray dogs, led by a huge white dog, appeared out of nowhere. Wild dogs just ran alongside. And she felt that these free animals, that built up horror throughout the area, in some mysterious way protected her. The pack leader often looked into her eyes. And she looked back. Also with courage and confidence. But she never looked away first. By this age, seriously keen on studying animal psychology, she got to know the principle of a pack.
If you withstand a direct look – you earn respect.
The principle of a stronger one.
It is much simpler with animals.
They do not know how to lie.
Anastasia was born in Kazakhstan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where her parents had been assigned to work after their graduation from the university. Only in a month after her birth she was already flying in an airplane to her second homeland, to her grandparents, to the North Caucasus.
Thus she spent her childhood – between a desert with camels, at a seashore, from one side, and the authentic culture of the green mountains of Alanya, from the other. This paradoxical reality had influenced her perception of the world since her childhood.
Later, when her secondary school started, her parents moved to Volga. The southern city was alien to her in all its manifestations. All 20 years, which she spent in it, she wanted to move away. She still spent every summer in the North Caucasus and only there she felt at home. Summer storms with blasts of thunder and lightning, which hit the whole sky and made even stones in the mountains tremble, caused her to feel delight and admiration.
As well as all other natural elements, however.
She felt that some ancient, archaic energy of these powerful natural forces caused a response in her soul. In every cell of her blood, body, mind, soul. As if something inside her was like bottomless water well. And those ancient natural elements filled this deep water well with some specific life force. Unlike anything else. With the force of the Joy of Life.
It was like this when she, being a seven year old girl, came to the sea for the first time. It was that rare summer when she did not go to the Caucasus for all three months. And she went to the sea with her father. Severe storms happened at the Caspian Sea even in summer time. And now she just looked at huge waves that rose to the sky and soaked up the coastal sand in its total power. Her father took her hand and asked:
– Would you like to catch a wave, little sparrow?
– Yes, – she said, blinking with delight.
And they stepped into the sea. Her father firmly held her hand and led her toward the waves. The waves were high. The first big wave covered not only her but her father as well. When they came to the surface again she realized that she would never learn to swim. But she would always step into the stormy sea. Because from that moment the sea had become her friend. And for the first time she felt this sea waves’ energy, which was not like anything in the world.
Much later, when she became an adult, she had come to realize that there was no sense in learning to swim, as swimming in such a stormy sea was a complete folly. And to swim in a quite sea was not interesting, it was boring. Because sleeping natural elements were like a chrysalis of a butterfly – nothing remarkable, just an intermediate stage.
She preferred to look at an even sea from the shore.
As well as at a restless rain. Or at softly falling snowflakes. Or at a fire burning in a fireplace, limited by an air draft. To look before going to sleep, listening to a lullaby of nature.
Anastasia grew up in 1990s, which was a complicated period for Russia. It was the time, when the white house building was attacked in Moscow and a coup d'état took place. When the power in the country began to belong to organized gangs, and a person could be killed for no reason, just for the sake of practicing to fire a gun. Chaos reigned in the country and everyone was on their own. And it was a lot to go through and there were many roads to take.
Despite the fact that she had never loved this southern city, this was where Anastasia became a person and her profession was chosen.
Unlike most young people, she began to do what had been determined by her