#with my murder flute
BIOFEEDBACK AND EMDR!
I’ve been lowkey annoyed, as a therapist, with all this “Booker should go to therapy” comments because if he can’t tell the truth, psychotherapy won’t be any fucking good for him.
A huge part of talk therapy’s effectiveness is having an experience of being truly seen, of being able to be authentic and real with another human being and feeling their honest empathy and acceptance. If Booker has to lie and hide 90% of his life, the benefit is very limited.
So I’ve been thinking about what’s actually his issue, what’s actually wrong with him, what could be treated.
There’s a little bit of a gimme the Old Guard get, where if a normal human being encountered that much pain and stress—I’m talking physical pain and physiological stress—they would be a burned-out wreck. Their nervous system would just spend all its time pumping out pain signals. So already, their neural healing is as advanced as their other healing.
But if we’re assuming Booker’s incredible history of trauma and years of nihilism has still managed to etch itself onto his brain the way it might a mortal’s… I mean, one therapy is medication, and beyond your usual antidepressants there are experimental PTSD medications with promise, like MDMA (yes, the party drug). He could also try transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is administered over 20-30 treatments over a year (every two or three weeks).
But as for things Booker would consciously work at, there are two well-proven process therapies that don’t rely on talk because they target the physiological and emotional mechanisms of PTSD more than the cognitive ones.
One is biofeedback—here’s an informative videoandan informative article. It basically means training your brain and body to react in a different and more controlled way, so that, for example, you’re able to calm down in response to an incipient panic attack, or able to focus on the positive in a stressful situation.
The other is EMDR—here’s an informative video andan informative article. In EMDR the therapist provides sensory stimuli that basically puts your brain into “debug” mode, and you practice going from a feeling of peace and stability, to accessing your traumatic memories, to finding new ways to deal with them, to going back to being okay enough to go back to your life. EMDR is rather unique because the client needs to talk very little; most of the work is done internally.
So those might be of use to Booker. And Quỳnh, if she ends up going too.
This is a great example of how to use psychology with your fictional characters!
