Her client's son was getting married in six weeks. The man had managed his CPC without significant difficulty for most of his adult life, but the approaching wedding had introduced a layering problem he had not encountered before: his own wedding was increasingly present alongside the preparations, and with it, his son's birth, his first wife's death four years after the birth, and a funeral for his own father that had taken place in the same church where his son would now be married. All of these were happening simultaneously, and he found that he could no longer be in the same room as his son without all of them present, and this made him distant in a way his son had noticed and asked about.
Jeln's method was layer-sorting: she had the client identify each active layer, name it, and establish its approximate intensity relative to the primary now. The goal was not to silence the other layers, which could not be silenced, but to maintain the thread of primary now clearly enough to function. Her clients consistently described the technique as useful in the way that a railing is useful on a familiar staircase. You don't need it until you need it.
She had been doing this work for fourteen years, since she was thirty-two. She had 127 certified clients. The condition was more common than the diagnostic literature suggested, in part because mild cases were often classified as other things: strong associative memory, heightened emotional recall, difficulty with transitions. The full diagnostic criteria required simultaneous presence of at least three distinct past occasions at a continuous density indistinguishable from the current one. Most of her clients met this comfortably.
She had never been assessed herself. There was no clinical reason to be; she had no presenting symptoms. But on certain mornings, specific and repeating, the smell of a particular brand of coffee or the quality of low grey light through her office window brought forward a morning from her childhood with an intensity that she had never quite categorized. It was not emotional. It was positional: the morning was there, in the room, alongside the current morning, at approximately the same density.
She noted this in her personal log, periodically, the way she noted other things she had not resolved. She did not know what the number would be if she were assessed. She was not sure the number would help her understand it.
After the session she sat at her desk. It was 4:17 PM. Outside, the light on the window had a particular quality. She was aware that a morning fourteen years ago, the first week she had taken this office, had a similar quality of light. Both lights were in the room. She wrote "4:17 PM" in her log, the way she usually did when she wanted to locate herself. Then she kept writing.