“I don’t know about that,” Steve said. “It might be opening a can of worms.”
“That’s the whole point of it,” Sylvia told him. “Better a can of worms than a can’t of worms, I always say. Sometimes, you have to regress before you can progress. The recovered memories can be painful—they probably wouldn’t have been repressed in the first place, and wouldn’t be causing you difficulties now, if they weren’t—but it’s not a good idea to let them fester indefinitely. This is as safe an environment as you’re likely to find to reach out and touch them, I can do a swift demonstration now, if you like. Nothing heavy—I’ll just send you back five or ten years, if you like, so we won’t risk touching on anything too stressful, and you can see how it works. Then, if you’re agreeable, we can try to go deeper next time I see you.”
Steve hesitated. “I’m not sure I believe in that whole thing,” he said. “It would be convenient, I suppose, if all our problems could be traced back to childhood traumas, and then surgically excised by confronting the relevant horrors, but I really don’t think my phobias have that sort of cause. I think they’re just some sort of random neurophysiological accident—so I’m more interested in treating the manifest symptoms than going in search of potentially illusory causes. People start coming out with all sorts of rubbish when they’re regressed, don’t they? Past lives and false memories of being abused as children, and all that sort of crap. There’s a risk of increasing the problems instead of solving them, I think.”
“Memories of child abuse aren’t necessarily false,” the hypnotherapist told him, “even if the people cast as abusers deny it. I don’t agree that there’s any risk of increasing your problems, although it’s true that people who do begin to remember traumatic things sometimes find recovered memories hard to deal with. Can of worms or not, I believe it’s best to get such things out in the open.”
“I’m not sure that I can agree,” Steve said. “You might be right about memories of child abuse—but memories of past lives are certainly false. If delusions as blatantly ridiculous as once having served in Nelson’s fleet at Waterloo or as one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens can carry as much conviction as they’re said to do, how can anyone trust recovered memories of any sort? Regression can’t help me if it turns out to be nothing but an invitation to fantasize, and I sucker myself into believing my own fantasies.”
“You don’t have to believe anything you might recover, Steve,” Sylvia assured him, “and the recovered imagery might be revealing and helpful, even if it’s a blatant fabrication. The unconscious mind doesn’t send us these messages unless it’s trying to help. What do you have to lose?”
Steve didn’t know what he had to lose, and that was what worried him. He didn’t like taking leaps in the dark.
“Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet, Steve.” Sylvia Joyce said, gently. “Maybe the time has come to stop procrastinating. You’re here, aren’t you? Why not make the most of it? You can stop at any time.”
“Okay,” Steve said, eventually. “It can’t hurt to give it a go, I suppose, Give me a gentle introduction, mind. Just a brief trip into a safe and familiar yesteryear. That can’t do any harm.”
Ten minutes later, those had come to seem like famous last words. As promised, once he had begun to drift away with the fairies, Sylvia had asked him, in her most soothing and reassuring tone, to go back to the age of twenty-one, when he’d been in his third year at university, and as happy and carefree as in any period of his life before or since. The last thing he’d expected was to go into a full-blown panic attack—but that was what happened.
He felt the physical symptoms first—the cold sweat, the nausea, the dizziness. If he’d been able to faint, he probably wouldn’t have obtained any conscious sensations at all—but he was lying down on Sylvia Joyce’s couch, and the blood couldn’t drain away from his head under the pull of gravity. After the horrid physical sensations came the horrid psychological ones: a fully-fledged hallucination; a waking nightmare such as he’d never experienced before…or never, at any rate, allowed himself to remember after he awoke.
“Wow,” said Sylvia, after sitting him up giving him a glass of water from which to sip. “You really do suffer from phobias, don’t you? I’ve seen reactions like that before, but never in a first session and never in response to such a minimal regression.
“It was just a dream,” Steve said. “A nightmare. I don’t remember having suffered from nightmares like that at uni, but I suppose I must have. It was crazy.”
“Can you remember any of the images?” the therapist asked.
“I can now,” Steve told her, accusingly. “I was aboard some sort of spaceship, looking down at the Earth from a great height—from orbit, I suppose. The Earth was dark, devastated. I think the sun was about to explode. I was up so high…higher than I could ever go in real life. I felt such an awful vertigo.…” He handed the glass of water back, and lay down again, to armor himself against the possibility of fainting.
“That’s okay,” Sylvia said. “It’s enough, for now. You’re going to have to deal with it, though, if we’re to get on the root of your phobias—not just this nightmare, but others, maybe even worse.”
“A can of worms,” Steve murmured. “Just like I said.”
“And we can work on it,” the therapist insisted. “It’s not insuperable. It just needs time.”
“It was only a dream,” Steve said, sharply. “It wasn’t real. It can’t have anything to do with the cause of my phobias. It’s just one more stupid symptom.”
“It would be a mistake to back away from it,” Sylvia advised him. “Even if it was only a dream, it might well have significant meanings wrapped up in it. You really need to recover more of it, and get a better grip on it—and you probably will recover more, now, even if you try to put it back in its mental box and throw away the key. In my experience, once these things begin to resurface, they usually continue to bubble up. It’s far better to control that process, to the extent that we can, so that we can try to make some sense of it. If you resist, you’ll just make it more difficult for you to deal with it.”
“No way,” Steve said, remembering the flight to the Canaries and the crossing of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. “No more regression. Not now, not ever.”
“I don’t want to abandon you, Steve,” the hypnotherapist told him, presumably meaning that she didn’t want him to abandon her. “You need to deal with this. I won’t regress you again, if you don’t want me to, but you may be in greater need now of learning to relax properly than you were before.”
“Is this how you drum up business?” Steve asked, angrily. “Is this why Rhodri Jenkins has been coming to you for donkey’s years—because he’s getting further and further away from a cure for whatever ails him with every visit?”
“I can’t discuss another client, Steve,” the therapist said, soothingly. “And I don’t drum up business. I don’t have to. The world does that for me. You’re not further away from finding an answer to your problems than you were before—you’re closer. You just need a little more help in completing the journey.”
“No more regression,” Steve repeated. “I won’t bin the relaxation treatment, but that’s all I need from you, okay? I don’t need to be cured, in the way you think I can be—I just need to get my head into a state where I can step on a plane, if need be, or cross the Severn Bridge, without being reduced to a gibbering idiot. That’s all. We need to focus on that. Management, not cure. Forget about hypothetical causes, let’s just treat the symptoms.”
“If that’s what you want,” she told him, “We can do that. You’re the client.”
As long as you get your money, he thought, it doesn’t really matter which particular brand of old rope I buy, does it? Aloud, though, he only said: “Just a couple of sessions more, mind. No point in throwing