Welcome back to my February love stories project: in the run up to Valentine’s Day I’m writing as many stories as I can, inspired by some of Jericho Writers’ romance prompts.
Today’s story is inspired by this prompt:
After learning about Stockholm Syndrome, Beauty and the Beast decide to give couples therapy a try.
I had a lot of fun writing this one. I’d recommend pairing it with a nice glass of something French and the absolute banger of an album that is the Beauty and the Beast (1991) original movie soundtrack. As ever, if you enjoy this story, please subscribe below for more!
Dear Lynette,
When I was a bookish young girl, I dreamed of adventure in the great wide somewhere. I wanted to travel, to learn new things, and - yes - someday to meet a man I could share my life with.
As I got older I realised that, although I had the man, I was in danger of losing sight of the rest of my dreams. I thought that, as a couple’s therapist, you would help me. I was wrong.
Adam and I had a fairytale romance. You know the story: boy meets girl when boy is a hideous beast and girl has accidentally wandered into his castle looking for her father, boy kidnaps girl, boy wins girl’s heart by giving her a big-ass library, girl’s former suitor kills boy, girl weeps over boy’s corpse, boy comes back to life and turns into a human, they live happily ever after. Tale as old as time.
But a few years into our marriage, our relationship was under a lot of strain. Adam had difficulty regulating his emotions, and was quick to anger. I struggled with anxiety, depression, and an almost complete lack of desire to burst into song.
It was hard to know just how common these issues were. We didn’t have many friends: we were close with one other couple, Lumiere and Fifi, but we didn’t really have the right dynamic to discuss our relationships. Since they were both technically our servants (and former household items) I didn’t feel comfortable asking them to take on that emotional labour.
So, like a lot of stay-at-home princesses, I turned to social media. At first, I felt it had opened my eyes: although I owned literally thousands of books, they were all the kind of books you’d expect to find in the long-untouched library of a minor European royal, and so had little to offer in the way of self-help. When I discovered TikTok, it gave me access to a new vocabulary, a new community - a whole new world. (Wait, that’s another story.)
That’s where I saw your video about Stockholm Syndrome. The one where you danced to a sped-up version of Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary and pointed to captions on screen that you said could be Stockholm symptoms. Flashbacks? Feeling irritated, jittery and anxious? Trouble relaxing and/or concentrating? It was like looking in a magic mirror. The more I watched your videos, the more I became convinced that Adam and I needed you to save our marriage.
I wasn’t sure how to tell my husband that I was worried I only loved him because he’d once held me hostage. I admit that in the end, I took the coward’s way out: I watched your videos with the sound on, as we sat together one evening on the IKEA sofa we’d had to buy after all the furniture that used to be in the castle had turned back into people.
I’d watched only two or three before Adam put his big hand over mine. I looked up into his face: I hadn’t seen him look so wounded since the time he was stabbed in the back by the aforementioned suitor, or maybe even since the time he was bitten in the shoulder while saving me from wolves.
“Belle,” he said. “My love. What have I done to you?”
We agreed to start seeing you for couples’ counselling, and I reached out that same night to book our initial session.
In hindsight, I should have seen the red flags right from that first Zoom call. You spent a lot of time looking at your phone; when we asked you about your qualifications you were elliptical at best; and although you were obviously very pleased with the line “You’re Belle - but are you bel-ieved?”, I’m not sure it added much therapeutic value.
However, Adam and I encouraged each other to ‘trust the process’, and so we gamely agreed to come back the following week.
But the next day, I was scrolling through TikTok over my usual breakfast of grey stuff (it’s delicious) when I noticed you’d posted a new video.
‘Um, can we normalise NOT describing small towns using slurs like ‘provincial’ when you’re talking to a therapist who is literally from a town??’ *eyeroll emoji*
It was definitely about me. I was mortified. How could I have been so thoughtless?
It didn’t occur to me that it was wrong of you to share identifiable information from a confidential therapy session. Not then. Not after the next session, when you shared a video of yourself blinking in cartoonish astonishment with the caption ‘Me when my client says he was brought up by a talking teapot’. Not the time we told you that Adam finds it difficult to get me flowers, because he associates them with the cursed rose once given to him by the enchantress who turned him into a nightmarish monster, and then the next day you posted a video where you talked about this while dancing to ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus. Not even after our solo session, when I was horrified to see your video captioned ‘TFW your client tells you she found her husband hotter as a beast’.
Despite all of it, we just kept going back to you for more. It was almost as though our client/therapist relationship with you was a form of…
…I bet you thought I was going to say ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ there, didn’t you? Well, I’m not. Because here’s the thing: after months of ‘therapy’ with you, I finally read some actual psychology textbooks. (Remember the bookshop in my small hometown? Turns out they have a new owner who doesn’t just give the stock away for free, so business is a lot better.) What I found there made me realise you’d wildly misrepresented this ‘Syndrome’ in your videos and in our sessions.
Did you know just how little actual research has been done on the phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome? Did you know that the little research that has been done turns up contradictory results, and that basically no-one agrees on what the supposed symptoms actually are? Did you know it’s not even listed in either the DSM or the ICD classifications of mental illness? Did you know that the term was originally coined to describe a 1973 bank robbery in which the authorities, including the criminologist who coined the term, fucked up so badly that the hostages had to essentially negotiate their own release? Can you imagine what it’s like to be a woman who saves her own life, only to be told that you did it because you’re crazy?
Maybe you are aware of all these things, maybe you’re not. I don’t care. Emboldened by what I read, I deleted TikTok and found my husband and I a real therapist.
Sophie has helped us consider the real issues in our marriage. Like the fact that Adam probably has complex PTSD from being abandoned in a castle before the age of 11 and then cursed. Or the way I was never really able to grieve the death of my mother because she was literally never mentioned at all. She’s even helped us to appreciate how the adversity in both our pasts helps us to deal with the challenges we face every day. (Egg shortages? Try living in a town where one dude eats five dozen eggs every morning to help him get large.) With Sophie’s help, and with love, the two of us save each other every day.
We’ve decided to make some major changes in our lives. First, we’re going to move. I obviously never liked it here, I’ve always wanted to see new places, and to be honest it’s difficult for either of us to feel secure in a place where the entire nearest town once turned up to try and murder my husband.
What’s more, my husband has decided to take a step back from the royal family, partly because he wants to consciously uncouple from this dated and suffocating institution, but mostly because this is France and the rest of them are all dead. His book will be out later this year.
As for me, inspired by Sophie, I’m going back to school to become a qualified therapist myself.
We’ve realised that ‘happily ever after’ doesn’t just happen - you have to make it happen. We’re both a little scared, neither one prepared, but also excited about the next chapter of our lives together.
Oh, and I’ve even redownloaded TikTok: not so that I can use my future therapy clients for clout, but so that my husband and I can share our journey with the world. So if you want to follow us there, Lynette, well, go ahead. Be our guest.