This is a more personal than usual entry in this series. I've talked about the fact I'm a therapist before on this blog, and have deliberately brought my love of RPGs into that work. I'm also a lifelong psychiatric survivor, which I consider more useful to my job than any formal training I've undergone.
I had the idea for Happy Medium a while ago, when I had nearly as many bad patient experiences under my belt as now, but very little experience on the other side of the Freudian couch. That is no longer as true, and seeing the specifics of how organizations fuck over patients on a structural, systemic level has not only been eye opening, but also quite helpful in fleshing out this GMC cabal.
I still have more to write about the role of psychotherapy in Unknown Armies because it is a game explicitly about trauma (among other things) and explicitly mechanizes the therapeutic process in ways I find naive, and too trusting of psychiatry as a system built within and supportive of capitalism. Another day, for sure.
Unlike other StatSat posts, I'm going to have an afterword as well as this little introduction. Please read it, too.
Happy
Medium
Most people agree that the
"occult mainstream" is more socially accepted in the wider
world than ever before. As we approach half a century since the
height of the Satanic Panic, astrology, tarot, crystals, new age
medicine, even Paganism, wicca, and Santeria are everywhere. Long,
long gone are the days of burning people at the stake because of a
fear of the unknown power they had, or were believed to have had.
Into this cultural climate steps Happy Medium, with arms wide open.
While many occult practices
have, by and large, ceased to inspire primarily fear and disgust
among the masses, it can still be hard for many magick practitioners
to integrate fully into society. Happy Medium's viewpoint is that the
fragmentary, insular, and eccentric communities that comprise the
so-called "occult underground" exist in fearful opposition
to normality.
Some adepts wear their
heterodoxy as a badge of honor, scoffing at those who desire to
integrate with society. Happy Medium feels for these wayward souls,
but believes that attitude can only hold them back. Magick is a
wonderful gift that can change lives, but to use it doesn't make you
a god or a messiah. No man is an island, says Happy Medium; what good
is the power to change humanity if you insist on setting yourself
apart from it?
Beliefs & Objectives
In a phrase, Happy Medium
believes in respectability politics for the occult. They want to be
sure that in any hypothetical conflict with the occult underground,
they're seen as "the good ones", and are left alone, while
the "real bad actors" get what's coming to them. They
reject the Sleepers' framing of the Sleeping Tiger in a world now so
saturated with weirdness; it doesn't have to be all-out chaos when
magick and mundanity meet. At the same time, they're no Mak Attax.
They are happy to keep the occult underground separate but equal, as
it were.
Their focus is on the
rehabilitation of occultists' image and wrongdoings. Where the
Sleepers want to cover things up at all costs, Happy Medium seeks to
smooth things over and reach a mutual understanding. To that end,
they operate not as disconnected vigilantes, but under an organized
hierarchy, which is just as rife with petty internal politics as you
might imagine.
Operations
Happy Medium was founded by
philanthropist, retired psychiatrist, and cliomancer (in that order),
Patricia Walton. She identifies as self-made, despite being the
beneficiary of both occult and socioeconomic nepotism in a dozen
subtle and several obvious ways. Her vision remains the guiding star
by which the organization operates.
Happy Medium is unique in
the occult underground as the only legally qualified, 501(c)(3)
nonprofit organization that regularly interfaces with charges and
major cabals. Naturally, this earns them no shortage of revulsion,
which is not easy for them to understand, since they perceive their
mission as so noble.
Nonetheless, many adepts,
and even avatars, who get in too deep lean on the resources they
provide: namely, financial and legal support, housing assistance, and
therapy. All these services come with strings attached; their goal is
not simply charity, but to reform their clients into respectable
members of society. They operate shelters in several major cities
across the northeast U.S. and have a number of additional offices
where those willing to jump through the requisite bureaucratic hoops
can be connected to aid, both by Happy Medium and a number of wholly
mundane partner agencies.
Mum is not just the word,
but a way of life when interfacing with these latter allies. Happy
Medium uses coy language, typically framing their clients' real
magick as delusion and psychosis (not that there's never overlap),
and insisting they play along if they want to keep getting handouts.
Legally binding documents and their implicit financial threats are
weaponized to further ensure compliance here, although they aren't
always enough to contain rebellious and/or unstable mages who have
had enough being bossed around and made out to be kooks.
Resources &
Organization
Money is king, of course.
It is in and of itself self-evidently useful even to people who can
bend reality to their will through less conventional means. Connected
is Happy Medium's plentiful social capital. Through expert
politicking, choice "financial incentives", discretion
uncommon among adepts, and, yes, the occasional sneaky spell or two,
the organization is in surprisingly good standing considering its
volatile clientele.
Many checkers, a solid
handful of avatars, and even a few adepts besides the founder are on
the payroll. All have had enough exposure to the unnatural to at
least keep it together in the face of open displays, and the
therapists on staff tend to be especially prepped. They are required
to be in therapy themselves, although they tend to need to
metaphorize their stranger experiences to their own shrinks.
Although Happy Medium
employs occultists, much like in TNI they are rarely promoted very
far, and for similar reasons. The organizational culture is forcibly
unified to the extent of feeling uncomfortably culty, which is an
unpleasantly familiar vibe for many of its clients. Patricia has done
everything possible to distance herself from the cliomantic circles
of her youth, but out of the kindness of her heart they still find
their way to her organization more than most other adepts. Their
brand of magick is easier than most to make palatable and useful for
her agency's needs, after all.
In any moderate-to-large
city in the northeastern U.S., Happy Medium maintains at the very
least an office where you can get started on their substantial
battery of intake questionnaires and assessments, and then be
directed to the nearest relevant providers, which are almost always
within a day's drive. They also offer remote therapy and social work
services - by Zoom, not astral projection or anything like that, of
course.
Second only to the
behavioral health staff in number and prominence are the lawyers, all
of whose loyalty is thoroughly paid for. Their work on clients'
behalf is often dicey, and they are also frequently deployed to
protect the organization's good name. However, they tend to be spared
the most unpredictable interactions with clients while taking home
the best pay and benefits by a mile, a fact they are regularly
reminded to appreciate.
Management has the
privilege of all the best perks and status without having to
regularly expose themselves to the target demographic of the
organization. They are the elite, and they and everyone beneath them
know it. More often than dissent, this results in employees trampling
each others' careers to make it into the club themselves. While this
doesn't usually serve the clients, it's tacitly encouraged, in part
because the infighting protects the managers' seats at the top.
Drawbacks
For the rank and file,
burnout is at least as big a problem as in any other human services
work. They're overworked, underpaid, and once in a while they hear a
horror story about a colleague being hit with a blast spell.
Additionally, it's not too
uncommon for some cabal to get the idea of infiltrating the
organization, trying to broaden the availability of its resources
without the associated judgment, or even just for purely selfish
purposes. Over time, this has prompted a pretty strong paranoid
streak amongst the upper eschelon of management.
Uses for Happy Medium in Your Campaign
If a PC seeks therapy,
especially for some hard-to-explain Unnatural notches, Happy Medium
is a solution that offers lots of ways to turn healing into
blowback.
Similarly, Happy Medium can
offer a lifeline after the law gets involved, which is frankly a
pretty likely consequence for the pursuit of many objectives, even
at the local level.
As described under
"Operations", maybe the PCs have ideas about how Happy
Medium could be run better, or its resources redirected. Do they
want to try and fix it from the inside? Or perhaps a more radical
approach?
Maybe someday Patricia
loses her shit (again) and the end result is a bunch of highly
unstable patients back out on the street to start charging up again,
all at once.
GMC: Patricia Walton
There is a perverse secret
behind Happy Medium's seemingly banal structure: Patricia Walton was
not always Patricia Walton. Before that, her name was Dawn Miller,
agent of renunciation, and before that, Leticia Tobin, down-and-out
wife of a poor, sleazy gambler. In seeking better for herself from
the latter, she wound up the steward of the Room of Heart's Burden
Lifted (see Statosphere from 1e), transformed from a young
Black woman troubled by her oppression and its interplay with her
undiagnosed autism, to a shrewd white matron with a savior complex.
The thing is, that didn't
really solve her problems. Eventually, after years as a magickal
social worker, it hit her that nothing had actually changed. She had
gone from living in service of a husband who didn't care for her, to
fixing the problems of whoever the Room sent her way, and at no point
was she getting anything out
of the arrangement.
The
day this realization hit her, she
waited for her secretary/bodyguard
to leave for the day and repeated her renunciation, starting another
new life. Maybe she should
have waited to calm down and
think through her options, though, because the Room was just as
fickle the second time it spat her out as the first.
The
product she became was
still white, still an
expert of bougie social mores, and
she retained her rediscovered drive to
put herself first for a change. Unfortunately, she
came out even less like her original self, and her altruistic
motivations were utterly subsumed by the
desire to finally get hers.
She
really doesn't care a bit about
whose neck she has to step on to satisfy herself. She's done her time
on the bottom rungs. Now she
wants to reap the rewards,
with the aid to others at
best a thin veneer,
and at worst a disguise for
her desire to manipulate others embroiled in the occult and make them
suffer as she has. She no
longer gives any thought to the life she left behind in the Room,
just as she stopped thinking about her daughter long ago.
If she had gotten the chance to find her own courage in her own time,
who knows what good she could have done. But the Room of Heart's
Burden Lifted has twice molded her, leaving only this bitter discard
in its wake.
Obsession:
putting herself first.
Patricia has had two
lifetimes of serving others; been there, done that. It's me time now.
Rage
stimulus: people
who make their problems, her problem.
She has a nonprofit to run; she doesn't have time for your whining!
Fear
stimulus: confronting
the several paved-over layers of her abandoned lives, and figuring
out what's still
left of her underneath it
all. (Self)
Noble stimulus:
giving others what they need.
At this point, it's so obvious
to Patricia how to fix someone's problems. Why wait around,
explaining it over and over to them, when you
can just bring them in line? They'll thank her later.
Boss Bitch 90%: Subs
for Status, Coerces
Helplessness, Protects
Helplessness
Psychotherapist 30%:
Subs for Connect,
Evaluates
Self,
Therapeutic
Third Time's the Charm
60%: Subs
for Secrecy, Subs for Lie, Protects Self
Possessions:
the definitional girlboss wardrobe, pricey and gaudy jewelry with a
couple of cars and a
house in the suburbs to match,
plus a timeshare in a
delightfully quaint Martha's
Vineyard cottage.
Afterword
Besides
the stress healing mechanics, the other place where therapy shows up
prominently in the official Unknown Armies books is the Room of
Heart's Burden Lifted in 1e's Statosphere, which is *all kinds* of icky,
and not just in relation to my profession.
The agent of this room of renunciation is a Black woman
implied to be neurodivergent who got turned into a white woman
therapist, which. Wow. Also, it's one of fairly few canon ways to trans your gender, which in connection with other details is pretty wild.
Patronizing
and microaggression-riddled writing by Rick Neal aside, it's pretty
unclear as to whether this was supposed to be a good, bad, or lateral
thing for her. By
extension, it's unclear what the reader is supposed to make of her role
as a magick therapist. A lot of times, the House of Renunciation is
supposed to just be about changes without qualifying them as positive or
negative, but when they get this political and intersectional I
personally find that quite unsatisfying and centrist-y.
The emphasis on individual autonomy is super at odds with the
fact that Dawn's current existence as outlined feels like it would be a personal hell for her original self. I also really, really hate
the preachy bullshit about how if she just had a spine, she (and every
other abused wife) should have left her husband and fixed her whole
life, easy peasy. I read her becoming the room's agent instead as almost
some kind of karmic punishment for not doing that. This reading casts
the whole entry in a really ugly light, and my writing Patricia as the
result of Dawn rejecting that is an attempt to call that out as the
patriarchal slime it is, while maintaining the idea that the room will
always fuck you over monkey's paw style (and there's a case to be made
that I should have challenged that part, as well).
Happy
Medium and Patricia are a response to the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted, but also a response to my
experience working against my institutional role as a therapist at a
nonprofit for the sake of my clients. Maybe doing both those things in one piece of writing isn't a great idea, I dunno.
I'll
end by stating that I am a white trans woman who grew up in a petit
bourgeousie ("upper middle class") family. I'm not trying to claim any
authority to speak for all others who share those identities, but I
think it's useful information as to why this came out the way it did.
I'm
more invested in the explanation here than I usually am on this blog
because, again, this is an unusually personal piece of writing, and
because I took some big ideological swings at some shit I'm still
navigating and will probably have to navigate the rest of my life. I
reserve the right to
look back at this in six months and put up a big disclaimer of how hard
I'm cringing at some or all of it, but hopefully I have the courage to
leave it up, as an artifact of who I am at this point in my life if
nothing else.
