Siv's clients usually came to them after a failed visit, one or two or five years in, having spent their five minutes the way most people spent them, which was ineffectively. Siv did not say this to clients. They said: let's see what worked and what we can build on.
The work was usually eighteen months. Sometimes longer. Siv helped clients identify the items that were actually questions, the questions that were actually statements, the statements that were actually apologies, the apologies that were actually accusations. Most people arrived with a list of fifty things and left with a list of three. The three things were always the real ones. Finding them took the eighteen months.
Siv's clients had some of the best visits in the Office's recorded outcomes. Not resolved visits. The Office did not promise resolution and neither did Siv. But used visits. Visits that addressed the three real things rather than the forty-seven others.
Their client today was a woman who had been visiting her father for six years. She had a list of nine items. Siv had been working with her for four months. They were getting close.
After the session Siv sat in the office for a while.
Their appointment card was in the desk drawer. Their mother had died seven years ago. Siv had rescheduled the appointment four times: first because the wait list was long, then because the time wasn't right, then because they were busy, then because they had not finished the list.
The list was three items. It had been three items for two years.
Siv understood, professionally, that there was no such thing as finished. That the list of three would remain three, and would not improve with more time, and that the longer they waited the less time remained for their mother to respond.
They knew this. It was their area of expertise.
They rescheduled for the third week of March and put the card back in the drawer.