Baggage
2025 Day Twenty: ,Regression/Recursion , 2545 words
Emotional baggage happy, - Psychonauts 2 , Doublefine adventure
___ Authors note: TW: weight. This story is a fantasy. Weight loss was the only way I could imagine this working without even more plot holes. This is my longest writing so far this month. All of them have been uniquely hard in their way, but this one... enfin; here it is. ___
Catharina always has been curious about hypnosis. But fear prevented her to act on that curiosity. But today, she would meet an honest-to-god, real hypnotist for the first time! She had collected all the courage she could muster and called the hypnotherapist for the first time.
She had an irrational fear of hypnotists, for as long as she could remember. But she wanted to lose some weight, and her best friend, Carla, made such big steps since she went to Doctor Jansen. Carla sung the praises about how good it felt to go to the doctor. It was supposed to be so relaxing. The tiny voice in her head, the one that always had hunger, was quiet after her visits to the good doctor.
It seemed an easy win to Catharina, and she put her fear aside to make the appointment. And after 3 weeks of waiting, it was finally time! She sat down in the waiting room, but her hands had trouble to stay still. She plucked some imaginary dirt off her pants as the door opened.
‘Miss Miller?’ an low, pleasant voice said from the door. Catharina looked up, and stared at a well groomed man in a tweed suit, about her own age, mid-thirties. She stood up, and smiled while extending her hand.
‘Yes, Doctor Jansen, please call me Catharina.’
She walked behind him to a warm room with nice wooden accents and a desk with a comfortable chair at both sides. As he sat down on the side facing the screen, she made herself comfortable at the other side.
yourself, and tell me if you are ready to try going into trance?’
Catharina took a moment, and nodded. Doctor Jansen took the Newton’s cradle on his desk, and set the leftmost ball in motion. A clear clicking filled the room.
‘Good. Then, I want to ask you to concentrate on the balls. They are nice and shiny. They reflect the light. And with each tick, you might feel your thoughts clicking and bumping into each other, just like the balls do. Click, click, click. Do you feel that?”
She nodded once more.
“I will count down now. Five.
Four.
Three.
Two
One.
DROP”
He put his hands on the Newtons cradle, stopping it, and Catharina’s mind seemed to stop with it.
“you are doing well Catharina. How do you feel?”
“Tired. ” A deep breath. “Good. Nice, and warm.”
“All very nice feelings, Catharina. Allow yourself to feel them. Enjoy the quiet.”
She nodded again, but more faint this time.
“Now Catharina, the next time you have a food craving, I want you to think back to this quiet. And you might notice the quiet overtaking the craving, stilling your hunger. Can you do that?”
“Mj-yes. I, I think I can do that.”
“You are doing so well, Catharina.
“s’not Catharina, sir. It’s Cathy”
That made the doctor frown. Most patients either are chatty or become very silent. Almost none disagreed with him, least of all when called by their name. Her mannerism also seemed to change; it seems like she slipped in a younger state of mind. Regression is not unheard of, but it is also not common, at least not in the practice of Doctor Jansen.
“Okay then, Cathy. Can you tell me some more about yourself?”
“Yes sir, but you know everything already about me, sir” What was happening here? The doctor was out of his depth. He resisted the urge to scratch his head, ant thought on how to proceed.
But Catharina - Cathy now - started to talk.
“You hypnotized me, Sir. Again. And you will make me feel even better, each time, sir. And you make me feel so good, and we will go on a date later, and celebrate your 20th birthday, sir”
A light went up for dr. Jansen. Catharina has been hypnotized before, by an old boyfriend. And the age… could she have been regressed to the moment she started to think negatively about herself? The timeline matches up, if her previous hypnotist was 20, she would be of a similar age. And… did her smell change?
“You are doing well, Cathy. And what has happened the last time you was hypnotized?”
She let out a happy bubble of laughter. “Oke, silly! You showed me a spiral, and I fell into the spiral. It made me all wet and giggly. You told me I would look better if I was smaller, and we made love. How could you forget that, sir?”
Doctor Jansen did his best to hide his surprise. Her whole demeanor has changed, even tho she still sat in her chair, slightly slumped, her legs almost rubbing to each other, and her eyes still closed.
“Can you tell me more about the ‘smaller’?”
She frowned at that question. “You said I looked fat in that dress. And you said that when I was still tranced, so I internalized that. Is that not your wish, sir?”
She looked so small.
“Now, Cathy, did you like how the dress looked on you before the trance?”
“Yes”
“Do you think you look good?”
“Yes”
“And can you imagine yourself looking like that, and be happy?”
“Yes”
“Can you store that image, and use that later?”
“Yes”
“You are doing well, Cathy. Now, I will count up, and you will slowly find yourself coming back to yourself. One: feel the room around you, the air caressing you, and the chair beneath you. Remembering all that happened. Two: Feel yourself returning to your adult self. Your eyes start blinking, and you are back in the room with me. Three, look around, take your time, and welcome back.”
Doctor Jansen observed the woman in front of him. She was blinking, and clearly processing what she just learned about her past.
“How are you feeling, Catharina?”
She shook her head and looked at the doctor. “I feel a bit strange. I… what just happened?”
“I have a hypothesis. You said your self-image changed when you were around 20, correct?”
She nodded again. A wave of familiarity fell over her, nodding seems such a natural response by now.
“And my guess is you had a boyfriend who hypnotized you. And he made a careless remark about your looks that influenced you for the rest of your life. Does that ring true?”
“It sounds plausible. Stijn was not the best of boyfriends, I forgot most of it. But I can recall more of it than I did in years.”
The doctor smiled. ‘Then I would leave it here for today, and I would love to hear how you do in a week, when you have processed this new information about yourself.’ He paused for a moment. “It also seems you used hypnosis in a less clinical setting before. You might want to consider exploring that. But that is not something I can help you with.”
~
When Catharina closed the door of Doctor Jansen’s office behind her, she felt freer than she had felt in years. She felt like she had unlocked part of herself. She didn’t want to let an asshole like Stijn from years ago ruin her life more with a careless remark. She had looked so good when she was 20. She saw her reflection in a shop window. And maybe, she still looked good. With her newfound confidence, she could start exploring this new part of her. Because if she was honest, that wet spot in her panties told her she liked the hypnosis itself more than she would dare to admit to the good doctor.
