Can Trigger Hypnosis Help With Anxiety?

My name is Aria, so I’ve been told. Last week I was a normal girl about to celebrate her eighteenth birthday. Today I woke up and I can’t even remember my own name. Everyone says I’m not acting like myself but how can I when I don’t remember anything? The touch of THOSE three elicits unfamiliar sensations, can I trust them? Who can I trust if I can’t trust myself? Excerpt: I was shocked. This fine piece of man has never had a girlfriend? “Why not?” I asked him. “I was saving myself for my mate. You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you. How long the three of us waited,” he answered. “Waited as in no girlfriends?” I asked. He smirked, “princess, you’re my first everything. Our first everything.” He winked at me when realization hit. Oh my god. We were all virgins. They saved themselves for me. Trigger Warnings: Blood/blood play Murder/death Abuse of a minor/abuse Dubious consent Compelling (the act of forcing one to do things against their will) Violence Attempted sexual assault

My wife, Denise Hawkins, and I are invited to a hypnosis reality show. The hypnotist, Magnus Pitt, asks her, "What's the most unforgettable day in your life?" Denise's answer is our wedding night. While I'm secretly happy about it, I hear her add, "Back then, the fun I had with Alan was too intense and spicy that we ended up ruining the sheets." I initially thought that Denise is working with the production crew to play a prank on me. After all, she was with me the entire night. How is it possible for her to sleep with her childhood friend, Alan Parker, anyway? But then Denise continues, "Alan came when it was past midnight. I was afraid that I might wake my husband up, so I dared not make a sound at all." Immediately, the entire studio goes eerily quiet.

I'm learning to swim when my childhood friend, Vivian Thorne, fakes a cramp. My boyfriend, Oliver Wilde, suddenly lets go of my hand and swims toward her. I'm left alone in the two-yard-deep pool, completely stunned. After Oliver carries Vivian ashore, he smiles as he watches me thrash around. "Vivian says you rely on me too much and need a push to learn, so just swim over here yourself." I choke on water and sink. At the sight of my struggle, Vivian laughs so hard she slaps her thigh. Oliver says something to her, then drapes a towel over her shoulders in resignation. Even though I can't hear what he says, I bet it must be, "Now that you've had your laugh, don't tease her the next time. Aria is already pitiful enough with her fear of water." It's true that I was born with a fear of water. I've known them for seven years. All this time, Oliver and Vivian have been tormenting me under the guise of helping me overcome my fear of water. In college, at the beach, Vivian deliberately pushes me off the speedboat. Oliver jumps in to shield her and watches me swallow a bellyful of seawater in the waves. On the graduation rafting trip, Vivian suddenly capsizes the kayak. Oliver swims over to pull her up and watches me slam into a rock, my leg bleeding nonstop. Last year at the water park, Vivian shoves me down the waterslide. Oliver slides down to catch her and leaves me in the pool, nearly suffocating with fear. Every time, my fear and despair are met with a burst of laughter from Vivian. Meanwhile, Oliver stands behind her, always saying the same thing. "No more next time." However, the next time always turns into Vivian's new way of having fun at my expense. Water floods into my mouth and nose, the suffocation shooting straight to the top of my skull. But suddenly, I realize that I can actually float on my own. I grab the safety rope and haul myself ashore. Two pairs of hands reach out to pull me up, but I push them away. "From now on, I don't need you two to help me build up my courage anymore."

The night my parents were kidnapped, my brother—who happened to be a police officer—chose to go bungee jumping with the fake heiress. I didn't stop him. Instead, I called the police and began preparing the ransom. In my previous life, my brother had forgone the outing to rescue our parents. As a result, the rope snapped during her jump, sending her plummeting into the abyss. Her body was never recovered. He never spoke a word about it afterward. On my birthday, he drugged me and dragged me to that very cliff. "You orchestrated the kidnapping! You'd go this far for their attention? You're nothing but a monster! Lillian is dead. You don't deserve to live either!" When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back on the night my parents were kidnapped. This time, my brother didn't rush to their rescue. Instead, he ran to the fake heiress. But in the end, he regretted it so much that he nearly lost his mind.

On the day Clara forced me to sign the divorce papers, I got bound to a self-sabotaging system. The system commanded me to slap her hard and tell her to get lost. I trembled in fear because Clara was a ruthless person. If I dared to stop her from getting back together with the love of her life, she would utterly destroy me. But the system threatened me: "If you don't self-sabotage, you will die soon." Left with no choice, I slapped her. As soon as I hit her, I ran out of the house, terrified. The system then told me to smash a police car on the side of the road. I suspected the system wanted me dead. However, after I smashed the police car's side view mirror, I realized that the system was trying to sabotage someone else's life instead.

The novel consists of several mini-stories about therapy sessions at a therapy clinic named "Soulmate", but the letters "m-a-t-e" were broken in a storm. Each mini-story is narrated by both the psychologists and the patients, describe the patients' worldview, why they do what seems "mentally ill" to us. We often say that the patients' head is abnormal, that their way of thinking is so weird. But is there any possibility that it's because they received different (whether right or wrong) information, so they react differently? Is that just because we "normal people" haven't got enough understanding about this world? Throughout the story, we could see that therapy sessions are a two-way arrow. While the experts are affecting the patient, the patient is also influencing them,“When you look deeply into the darkness, the deep darkness is also looking into you". The story does not make any conclusion about who is right or which world is real, maybe all of them are real, maybe they are all virtual, or maybe, it all doesn't matter. Isn't the world where we live? Wherever you live, that's your world.