Your Guide To Patients
Sept 2, 2013 19:47:42 GMT
Post by Aislynn Chariot on Sept 2, 2013 19:47:42 GMT
PATIENTS
who are they?
Patients are people who have hit rock bottom in their life and need help gaining a new insight into their life and what it means to live it.
In the patient's first appointment of Phase 1, they are asked to compose a list of their regrets in life. In subsequent sessions, the patient is sent back in time to relive and change a regret from their list which relates to a current problem in their lives. The situation is rarely as simple as it appears, however; in most cases, the event that the patient hoped to change by acting differently still occurs, and the patient must then seek out further information to reach a new understanding of the event's real meaning — and thus, in turn, new insight into their current problem. The session does not always change the person's past, but rather teaches them how to change their future by acting differently in the present. Only in some occasions do the events really change.
It is possible in a time travel session to alter the past in a much more significant way, but the result of doing so is that the patient returns to an unbalanced and unfamiliar present which will correct itself in unforeseen ways — for example, if someone uses a session to avoid a confrontation that first set them on their path of regret, instead taking up an interest they have in the present much earlier than they did in their original timeline. However, they would return to a new present in which they are using that interest in their new life, which my not always be a good thing. They would have to adjust to their new life, without having any knowledge of it. Ultimately, they would be forced to go back in time again and get into the original confrontation after all.
Patients can also be sent into incidents outside of their own lives; if the opportunity calls for it, they could be sent into their family's and friend's past to expand their understanding of that particular person.
In Phase 2, the patient is brought into group sessions, summoned whenever anyone within the group requires it. In a group session, the patient in need may select one of their other group-mates to time travel with them for support and guidance. Following a period within group therapy, the patient faces a critical, and unannounced, test to determine whether they're suitable for promotion to the final phase: they are suddenly sent back to the crisis moment where the therapist first entered their lives, and forced to cope with the possibility that the therapy and the changes that it brought to their lives never actually happened. The only way to pass the important test is to realize and understand that the incident may have been difficult and confusing, not to mention incredibly cruel, but it changed them in ways that could still benefit them in their new reality nonetheless.
If the test is passed, the patient enters training to become a therapist themselves, and is assigned a series of their own "patients", who are in fact people they already know, to assist with specific and immediate problems. During the training, however, the trainee does not send their patients into time travel, but instead continues to time travel themselves, revisiting situations which will provide them with the insight they need to give to their patient in the present day. Finally, when the training has been completed and the patient has become the doctor, they are directly assigned their first true time travel patient who will appear in a series of visions inside the new therapist's head.