Chapter Text
After a summer full of therapist appointments Hermione could finally admit, even if only to herself, that her approach to therapist appointments was predictably studious. She knew it was studious from the start, but admitting that it was predictably studious took time.
When her parents suggested a therapist in the summer after her first year she felt a touch offended. She had spent ten months without her parents, with teachers trying to kill her best (out of two) friends, and with herself having been put in death defying adventures. Not to mention the terrible culture shock. Self evidently, she could take care of herself, or at the very least survive by herself, without the involvement of adults or parents! Not that she didn’t need them or anything, but Hermione felt entitled to label herself as quite self-sufficient.
And so what if she had noticed herself being a bit too suspicious of adults she didn’t know. It’s not that she didn’t trust authority figures, there was a reason why they were put in positions of authority! It’s just that… if once she could have seen an adult side-eyeing her parents or herself and thought that the reason was her new, lovely blouse or her mother talking too enthusiastically about dental care in a patisserie, now she searched for more sinister plots first and only then accepted that maybe the owner of a pastry shop could just be a bit offended if a customer was loudly disparaging those who frequented such shops each day.
It wasn’t a problem. It was natural to be a little bit suspicious of those who didn’t deserve the benefit of doubt. Teachers were educated and put through rigorous testing before they became teachers. Headmasters even more! Government officials might be a bit corrupted, she listened to her parents discussing the news and joined herself, at least those mornings she read the newspaper not her books, but that was just bribery. And only bad people did that.
It wasn’t like government employees or any other authorities would normally murder school children to steal immortality assuring gems. That surely was an outliner and even more a magical outliner. (Not that the Philosopher's Stone was a gem per se, the reading she had done quite clearly outlined that. The difference between the common usage, chemical composition and historical use of words such as gems, jewels, gemstones, stones and rocks was truly fascinating.)
Altogether, when her parents suggested a therapist after her first year she scoffed and frowned and felt offended and the summer ended so fast that she only had time to promise she would think about it during her next school year.
And then her next school year started. And people started getting petrified. Which scared Hermione more than others perhaps, because she felt quite grounded in her reading about rocks and gems and knew that petrification was complicated , especially since the victims were still alive, just… petrified.
Hermione was also petrified, just in a different sense of the word (at first). She knew about blood purist views, hard not to with Draco walking around and spewing such nonsense. But she hadn’t felt like such outdated, outlandish, (surely completely baseless) views had endangered her life before!
She dreamt of someone stunning her and pouring a potion in her mouth while she watched the attacker and couldn’t do a thing. After a brief mention of witch burnings in professor Binn’s class she dreamt of Harry being burned at a stake for snake charming. She even dreamt of a snake swallowing her whole.
She didn’t tell Harry about the nightmare of course, but talking to snakes really was a bit unnerving. She couldn’t understand a thing that came out of his mouth. Of course she did trust him, but years of hearing whispers behind her back, now the blood purity nonsense, made it unpleasant to think that he could whisper behind her back (she very well knew it was not a logical thing to think and so shoved it as far as possible in a corner of her mind, together with Ron calling her a nightmare and did her best to forget it). Nevertheless, Hermione felt that she deserved to secretly think that bloody hell , if it was a non magical unknown language she could’ve at least learned it! This thought process was not wholly logical, as mentioned, and later served to Hermione as a good illustration of the type of things a therapist would happily help her with.
Anyways, suffice to say, after her parents received a message that their daughter had been turned into stone and would miss a month of studies because something had attacked her… Suffice to say, after Hermione had woken up after missing a month of studies and being attacked… The summer after her second year Hermione fervently agreed with her parents that perhaps she could stand to talk to someone who understood why she covered all her plush toys so that their beady eyes didn’t gleam in the evening light.
Of course, before agreeing with her parents Hermione drew a pro and con list. It looked something like this.
PRO: her anxiety would be treated, she might start dealing with her fear of reflections of all things, people might like her more (this, she did not elaborate on, but she did show the pro list to her therapist after three appointments and decided to elaborate on it then), she could finally talk to someone who would understand, therapy was proven to be very beneficial and she would love to feel good. Better. Insomnia (this was scraped so hard in her paper notebook that the next page was ruined).
CON: CANNOT BREAK STATUTE OF SECRECY. HOW? (It’s needless to say that this was not shown to her therapist. A replacement con list was created with the words “judged for it?” in it.)
In the end, her answer, as always, was to research. Philosopher’s Stone could just as well be an expensive jewelry collection. Snape… well, he was curiously unchanged, only now a chemistry teacher. The troll was quite a bit harder, but a dog with rabies was the best she could think to replace it with. It didn’t quite encompass the awful sight of a 12 foot troll or it’s smell but it served the symbolic purpose well enough. After reading the morning newspaper, which had a blown up picture of a (most likely) criminally insane prison escapee, Hermione decided that the basilisk could just as well be an escaped murderer who bashed her over the head and gave her a brain swell which required a medically induced coma. Blood purity was even harder, but well, while it wasn’t like sexism was an ingrained Hogwarts problem, in the end it was the only prejudice she could ethically use.
Quite frankly, after her research paper “How to Supplant and Side Step Magic in a Muggle Medical Environment” was finished she felt even more terrified than before. Blood prejudice was an alien concept, sexism was a well known one. It was one thing to accept petrification as a horrible, terrible, petrifying magical incident, it was another to imagine it as an induced coma. She had read horror stories to terrify herself (research to educate herself) on patients being aware while in coma. If that had been the case with the basilisk Hermione was certain she’d have gone bonkers within a week.
And so, once her third year approached Hermione had two months of thrice weekly therapist appointments under her belt. She didn’t feel like she was so bad off as to deserve thrice weekly appointments, but she did agree with her parents that Hogwarts wasn’t very conducive to year round appointments so it was better to do as much as possible in the summer.
When Hermione told her therapist about why was alone when a rabid dog escaped in the school, her therapist asked her a few questions and told her a few things. Why do you think Ron said so? What did he hope to achieve by saying that? Hermione, I suspect you’ve been often told that children can be cruel. But you must understand that you don’t have to stand for cruelty, and even if someone (supposedly) tells the truth, that doesn’t mean they deserve to try to hurt you with it.
What do the words “know it all” mean to you? What does your class ranking mean to you? What other ways have you noticed your friends or fellow students standing out? Hermione, a child deserves an education due to ethical, moral, even legal reasons. I would like you to think of three other reasons why you deserve an education and a place in your school which are not connected to your academic standing.
To summarise, her therapy appointments made Hermione happy. They made her think , they improved her analytical skills, she learned what to question and what to be sure of. Her therapist never gave her the answers but led her to them with even more questions. It was the perfect environment for Hermione to learn about self-confidence. Even her choice of misogyny being the prejudice of the day in Hogwarts ended up being discussed in depth. Hermione learned to accept that the concept of femininity applied to her as well and also learned that femininity was not the antithesis to being intelligent.
And so, her last therapy appointment for that summer had come. Hermione’s therapist, one Mandy Birtch was happy to see that her client looked much more sure in her skin than she had been at the beginning of the summer. Quick glances when Hermione wasn’t keeping eye contact with her proved as much. Her fingernails weren’t bitten down anymore. She had even put on a light, sparkly nail polish. Her clothing was polite as ever, but Hermione swished her skirt before sitting down, a sure sign that she liked it. Her posture was still impressive for a teenager, but much less tense. Her gestures had calmed down as well and Mandy could see that Hermione was using them to illustrate specific ideas more than to desperately impress them upon someone unwilling to listen.
All in all, Mandy was happy to see her client’s progress. With Hermione’s penchant for writing down important points they had discussed, Mandy was even sure that Hermione’s progress wouldn’t backslide too much in that ghastly, murderous, dangerous school of hers.
Hermione was also, always, happy to see her therapist. Mandy was soft spoken, took her seriously, always believed her and was an adult that Hermione liked even more than professors McGonagall and Flitwick! Of course Hermione knew that it was her therapist’s job to listen to her and believe her. But Hermione had observed Mandy just as much as the reverse had happened.
That glimmer of humor in Mandy’s eyes when she joked, that smile when Mandy greeted her and invited her in the cabinet, that slightly sad and serious expression of Mandy’s when Hermione told her of her nightmares, all of those were true and not faked in the least. Quite frankly, Hermione was ecstatic to find an adult which she could trust fully and with everything.
And so, when Hermione stepped out of the apartment building where Mandy’s practice was, she was smiling and bounced twice on her toes before waving at her father’s car. She felt ready for her vacation in France to begin! She felt a bit silly being so happy but at the same time she was happy to be a bit silly since there was nothing wrong with silliness. Isn’t it glorious to feel so good , she thought to herself.