Beyond The Veils

When life is definitively unpleasant
then misremembering events is a natural defence.
The problem being that when therapists,
and others with similar skills listen, and hoke through
the veils of memory to test for truth and falsity,
they can't tell when where or why their patients originally
needed to lie to others and themselves.
Perhaps that it is why both therapist and client retreat
from the shared cognition of how life was for them both,
in its time both nakedly hostile and threatening
-and that is why both retreat from giving due thanks
for the strength to see past the need for all that aggression.