Chapter 1

Waking up Monday morning, he felt a sense of anticipation going to work that he hadn’t felt in a while. He had truly come to enjoy the Kiwi way of life, and one of the things he liked most was the way they approached the idea of work, which was with a lot less stress than their American counterparts. For most of his life Sunday night meant a sense of foreboding and pending doom, but now it was just another night at the beach.

 His first patient of the day was a young man who had recently gotten out of prison, and was having a hard time finding a positive track despite his best intentions. John’s approach was one that took him all the way back to the beginning of his time as a therapist, simply starting with the question “what problem is a person trying to solve?”

Despite any cultural differences, he had found that this approach was an effective way of getting to the core of why someone was sitting in front of him. In this case the young man was in treatment as part of his probation, and on paper it didn’t look too promising. By the age of 24 he had been arrested dozens of times, and while looking over this young man’s file he was reminded of an old Axim, “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”

It wasn’t an empty phrase. John himself had repeated so many of his own mistakes over and over again, that he knew what this kid was up against.

“So it says here your name is Jonathon, but you go by Tui is that right?” John began.

The kid looked up at him with a laugh. “Tui, that’s right. It’s also the name of a beer here in case you didn’t know. What chance did I really have?”

“Well, alright fine, but a Tui is also a kind of bird, right?” John asked, returning the laugh.

“Well yea you got me there. I’m not just a criminal you know. I play music in a band and I did a couple years of university. I’m actually a pretty good bloke if you get to know me. It’s just when I get on the drink that things happen sometimes. You know what I mean?”

He did indeed.