"I think calling being gay a philosophical malady is probably dinging you there."

"I don't understand."

"Don't worry about it."

If he wanted his feelings to be easier to read, he could have more than one facecast image, sure.

How exactly is she supposed to HAVE body language?  Visibly twitch whenever somebody says something surprising?  This sure is a whole field of knowledge she'd have to study.

This "therapy" concept is not wholly unfamiliar to her, but in her experience it works better with Detect Thoughts, Detect Desires, and Detect Anxieties.  This also helps force your coauthor to make their character have visible thoughts and emotions.

Characters: what about the therapist?

So obviously I have a point of view, here, there's a way I like to write Ramona, and I'll mostly be writing about that. But of course there is probably more than one way to write a glowfic therapist, and there is prior art, and I think some of the other attempts have been quite successful even though they are different.

(Successful at something, anyway! When Iarwain writes Thellim as a therapist, I think he has entirely different goals than I have for Ramona, and he writes her accordingly.)

The most important thing, it turns out, is to write the thoughts of the therapist.

Swimmer does a fantastic job of writing Merrin/Marian's thought processes, and that's a huge part of what makes her medical drama threads so compelling to me. I get to ride along inside the nurse's head as she tracks several dozen things, picks out the three that matter, and then executes some very specific, tricky maneuver to fix the medical-crisis-of-the-moment. This is so fun to read.

But even though I wanted to write Swimmer-like threads, that is not how I started out writing Ramona. I was just writing the dialogue. And sure, I had reasons for making Ramona say the words that I wrote on the page, but my readers could not guess those reasons because most of my readers are not therapists. I had left out the most juicy part, the ride-along part.

Credit to Iarwain for pointing this out and then pointing it out several more times until I got better. (There may still be more room.)

The next conundrum is: who is the main character of a glowfic therapy thread?

Or to put it another way: many, many glowfic threads have a concept of "the setting" and "the character(s)." How those things are parceled out to the authors involved varies, but it's not unusual for author A to write the setting and some possibly-less-agentic characters while author B writes the main character: the protagonist, the mover-and-shaker, the person who's going to make things happen. (There are, of course, so very many exceptions, but I think I'm pointing at a real thing here.)

If therapy threads were like medical drama threads, then the therapist should be the main character, the person trying to make things happen -- right?

But wait! That doesn't actually work!

In real life, therapists are pretty careful not to be too agentic with respect to their clients! (Or at least, this is how I was trained and how I practiced, and I believe in this as a philosophy of good therapy.)

This is very very important!

In my opinion, a good therapist doesn't solve your problems for you; they help you learn to solve your own problems. They listen, they reflect back, they help you see things from different angles, they teach skills, they offer domain expertise when they have it. But they don't tell you what to do. This is actually built right into the ethical codes that most trained therapists adopt: respect for the autonomy of the client.

So given this, I claim that the best way to think about a therapy thread is that the client(s) are the protagonists and that the therapist is actually more like part of the setting. The setting is Going to Therapy and the therapist is there to showcase the clients, to ask them awkward questions, to make them confront their shit --

But it's up to the clients to provide the problems and, ultimately, to enact the solutions.

This was a major point of confusion in that first thread with Iarwain! We each thought of ourselves as the setting, and got frustrated by the passivity of the other writer's characters!

(I think he had a concept that a therapy thread would be more like a detective story, in which Ramona would ask enough questions that she would "figure the case out" and then provide the solution to the clients -- but I steadfastly kept writing Ramona as asking the clients to take responsibility for their own lives. Whoops -- we noticed the problem eventually and abandoned ship.)

It could be fine to write an entirely different kind of story, in which clients go to some kind of consultant and the consultant is the main character and does try to solve the clients' problems. That would be an entirely valid structure for a story -- but I claim it woud not be a therapy thread.

(For a while Iarwain tried to convince me that Ramona should evolve into a more cynical, less ethical, more agentic, more problem-solve-y kind of "helper," but I found it very difficult to write while still occupying the therapist frame. I think I would need to start over with a brand new character and never call that character a therapist in the first place.)

A few other quick notes on what you can do with a therapist character.

Ramona is from Earth and she thinks like an Earthling. (Well, she thinks like a smart autistic weirdo Earthling, but still.)

Thellim is from dath ilan and has (to me) completely wackadoodle notions of what is supposed to happen in therapy, and it's delightful! That makes the Going to Therapy setting more vibrant and salient, and shifts the spotlight a bit away from the clients' problems and toward the culture of dath ilan. I enjoy that a lot, and would like to see more offworld therapists!

Last note, and this may be obvious, but you can show the characters in settings other than the therapy room. Ramona went to a bar to consult with a friend. The clients go talk to their confidants between sessions. I find this to be a nice way to add some character and plot development outside the structure of the therapy session.

And now I'll open it up again to co-author (and character!) reactions!

A thing I appreciate about this way of running a therapy thread is that it allows for authors to explore characters who already have a lot of plot and backstory associated with them but have never had a chance to process it and might not know how to.