Tale #95: Musings From the Big Chair

Tale #95: Musings From the Big Chair (Part 10 to 'As Before, Now Again') (Content Tags: Messy diaper, humiliation, mental regression, hypnosis, ongoing story) The doctor was right to be nervous. Having to see her delicate work get thrown back in her face, to see her entire career flash before her eyes, it'd been a terror to go through. Up until that point, the therapist hadn't been all that worried about the tools she was using to 'fix' her patients; Matty had appeared to have made real progress, so it only seemed natural that the rest of her clients would benefit in similar ways. But seeing the boy devolve before her very eyes, and becoming too deeply hypnotized to be further manipulated, that had informed her opinion. This stuff was more dangerous than she had given it credit for, and if she was to keep using it, then she would need to employ stronger caution. She needed to find a way to prevent such an error in the future, which would mean a lot of time exploring logic gates within the young minds of her patients. While Matty had come to appear something normal again, after the hard reboot, the doctor knew that the kid was likely messed up in a somewhat permanent way. He wouldn't remain an empty-headed moron, which was good, but some of those attributes would bleed through and permanently stain his baseline. In a fit of irony, Matty's therapist had given him reason to need even more therapy down the road, assuming that his mind didn't fully regress at some point. After sloppily fixing her mistake, she'd then had to make some extra precautions with the boy's mother. While Matty's mom had been simple to handle through hypnosis thus far, it was less likely that she would have been unconcerned if she began to see troubling new behavior from her son. The doctor had to 'reassure' her that everything was fine and going exactly as it should. The initial layer of programming needed reinforcing, so that it would withstand what was to come. The doctor was more careful this time, having been put on edge by what she'd done to Matty, but it hadn't taken long to inscribe her will. The boy's mother would be convinced that her son's new quirks were just a part of the process, no matter how unseemly they might be. Additionally, she was to nurture those new attributes and revert back to the maternal figure that Matty would undoubtedly need. Still, that was only one person in Matty's life. Surely the boy's peers or instructors would notice; even if Matty's behavior had become strange as of late, it had still fundamentally been him under the surface. Now? Doctor Farren really couldn't be sure. She'd have to make her son be her lookout, and if scrutinized, she'd have to make something up about this being a trauma response. With all that stress, one might imagine that the therapist would have canceled her next appointment, or that she would have at least used more restraint in her judgment. She first saw May, who was a young girl with serious maladaptive behavioral issues; this was a chance for the doctor to cool her head by sticking to the book on treatment. There was hypocrisy in her decision to give May normal treatment, since a little boy with a similar attitude was currently in the same secret program as Matty or Tucker. It just didn't seem becoming to subject a young lady to something so degrading. That hypocrisy was all the more jarring when it came time for that girl's brother to have his turn. Paul was on the list. The ten year old struggled with panic attacks that were born from trauma; they weren't severe episodes, but they were bad enough for his parents to seek out therapy for him too. Paul was probably one of her sweetest patients, and he was generally a very well-mannered little boy. For him, the doctor saw it as more of a genuine kindness than how she'd justified it with her other patients. He wasn't annoying like Tucker, or a bully like Matty; he wasn't violent, mean, or rude. But he was troubled, and Doctor Farren thought it best to swaddle him back in the comforts of infancy for a spell. She knew that he probably didn't appreciate the soiling accidents that she'd provoked within him, but it seemed like the best precursor to get things started with. This had been her third session with the boy, and even after what had happened with Matty, she hadn't strayed from her initial plan. The doctor was more cautious in what inquiries she made while hypnotizing him; while she asked for him to become more childish of mind, she added the caveat that he was to remain responsive to her words, as if his thoughts were unaffected. She set him down to toddler level for the session and allowed for him to play with some toys on the floor, while hugging onto a stuffed animal that she kept in the room for her younger patients. As expected, the baby-brained boy would make a big boom-boom in his briefs. It was just par for the course, and the doctor made a note on her clipboard that she'd prescribe some padding after today. She wouldn't be as mean as she was with some of the other boys under her care; Paul wouldn't be left totally unreliable, and she'd made sure that these newfound accidents would continue to only happen at home. She didn't want to humiliate him like she did Matty; she just wanted him to embrace the scared inner child that needed to be freed. Watching him crawl around on the floor, with this thumb in his smiling mouth and a stuffed animal under his arm, the doctor could feel her heart melt. The analytical side of her brain almost accused the emotional side of foul play; she had only had one child, and while he was far from adulthood, he was even further from infancy. Was it possible that one of her motivations came from a desire to once again have a baby in her life? Like so many other intrusive thoughts about the ethical boundaries she crossed, the doctor swatted it away and refocused her efforts on looking at it through a clinical lense. It might not be orthodox, and it's admittedly spawned from a place of revenge, but this *was* a therapy. If she started back down the road of self-doubt, then how could she remain effective as a practitioner? Admittedly though, her practice had become more like a daycare than anything else. Watching Paul stop his playing, to get that distant 'toddler' look and quietly grunt, only affirmed that feeling. This may be a room of healing, but it'd also become one where little 'baby' boys were messing themselves. The various air fresheners she had to buy were a testament to how often that now seemed to happen. How many patients were in the program now? Five? And there was a sixth that she was sowing the seeds for. In a matter of three months, she'd piloted this particular form of therapy into human trials for six kids! She had over thirty patients in total, so the ratio wasn't too extreme, but she'd need to slow down before adding too many more. Six would do just fine, and that would soon be going back down to five anyway. Matty only had two more sessions required by the conditions of the juvenile court, and the doctor didn't currently plan to convince the boy's mother to sign him up for more. For better or worse, she'd accomplished what she'd set out to do. Matty's bullying days were over, his attitude had been adjusted, and most importantly, he'd been thoroughly humiliated. At this point in the process, the doctor didn't need to lift another finger to complete her revenge; Matty's reputation and social standing would crumble like a sand castle in the tide, simply because he wouldn't be able to keep hiding his 'secret'. Whether or not her own son had gotten the closure he wanted, the victimized boy could at least take solace in seeing the 'friend' that betrayed him get what he deserved. Outside of programming Matty to be his friend, there wasn't really anything left to do, and Dr. Farren honestly didn't think Matty was worthy of being her son's friend now. Matty could only drag him down. The doctor also knew that once she was rid of him, that her own judgment would become better. She'd become aware that the emotions she had with Matty had become an issue for some of her other patients; she wasn't able to be as objective as her occupation called her to be. Tucker had been one of the boys that she'd probably taken out her frustrations on. Him and Matty had a similar schedule for their appointments, so Tucker often seemed to be collateral damage in her mood swings against Mathew. That wasn't remotely professional or ethical, but the younger boy was so grating, that she couldn't help but lose her cool on him. As it was, he was on the same trajectory that she'd set the bully on, but she knew that probably wasn't fair. While the doctor would stew in her own thoughts, Matty was doing the same in his full diaper on the car ride home from the office. His mother had neglected to restock the 'diaper bag', so she hadn't been able to change her smelly son, not that he really looked to mind it. That should have been a red flag, and it would have been if the doctor hadn't made adjustments to her hypnosis; Matty had been nothing but scornful and upset over having to wear diapers again, and he hated to be left sitting in a dirty one for too long, or at least that was how things had been before today. But now, he looked perfectly content to sit in his steaming pile; the physical sensation had become quite nice to him, and so had the smell, then there was the little matter of how 'right' it felt for him to be doing that. He'd felt so peaceful from it, that he'd been quietly sucking on his thumb for the last twenty minutes. His mind was in a strange conflict with itself. He knew that none of this would have made sense for him yesterday, and he knew how he *should* feel, but what he actually felt was completely different. It was an incongruity between two selves inside of him. When the doctor had made him act like a drooly dummy, that'd made a separate personality in a way; when she'd forced a hard reboot on his programming, it was as if the 'special ed' persona had been fused with his normal one. While his intellect didn't seem that impacted, his mannerisms and thought process had seen a complete rework. Matty would get his diaper change when he got home, not that he really cared about that, and that would normally be it for changes for the rest of the day. When his bladder and bowel control had been attached to emotional triggers or specific actions, it had meant that his diaper dependency was more of a sporadic problem. Even with the doctor weakening those abilities, he'd still been more pottytrained than not. Now? His pottytraining ability and desire had been significantly altered. One of the biggest contributions of the merging of egos was that his relationship with diapers had become absolutely mushbrained. Diapers would become a much larger part of his life, and he'd suffer the shame of actually liking it that way, while knowing he shouldn't. That same day, he would go through three more diapers. One of which was him loudly splattering his seat while next to his younger brother on the couch. Matty and his mother might be bewitched by the therapist, but the smaller boy was befuddled by how different his older brother now seemed. Matty had pooed himself in front of his brother a few times, especially since Matty's biggest trigger was from bullying, but he'd always been extremely embarrassed by it. This time, he'd just casually leaned forward and intentionally flooded his diaper with sloppy sludge. There'd been nothing to provoke it, and Matty hadn't looked surprised by it at all; if anything, it looked like he'd been having to push to get things moving. Once he'd finished, with all the farting and wet plopping that entailed, the boy had simply sat back flat with a nasty squelch. His little brother had mocked him, obviously, and teased him as hard as he could, but Matty had barely seemed phased by it. He hadn't denied that'd he'd loaded his pants, and he just sat in the bubbling muck without any distress. It was his little brother who ended up having to leave the room and holler for their mother to come change the dirty diaper. That was but a taste of the strange ways that Matty had become different. The thumbsucking, the childish vocabulary, the sensitivity and immaturity, the interest in juvenile things...These were all profound shifts in his character, and they'd happened so suddenly! Their mother gave the simplistic explanation of it being a part of the boy's therapy treatment, and not much else could be said of it. Home life was one thing, but the real test came from school. Fortunately, the diaper part had already been figured out well before this, since Matty had been padded in some way since after his second session; the only difference would become frequency, which would see an astronomical rise over the rarity it'd been before. Aside from needing diaper changes much more frequently, the bigger issue would come from him failing to hide that fact. Matty had started to act so baby-brained, in both subtle and brash ways, that it became impossible to conceal what he'd become. His former friend, the doctor's son, didn't even have to spread those rumors himself as revenge; before a chance could occur, Matty would massively poop his diaper in the middle of class, and when pressed about the smell, openly admitted he was wearing a freshly dirtied diaper. His friends, or rather the other bullies that he hung out with, were swift to abandon him. Matty had become a target, instead of a shooter, and now he was being put through the same humiliating harassment that he'd inflicted upon countless others over the years. It was miserable, because he was self-aware enough to still feel that sting and acknowledge why it was happening, but he'd become too baby-brained to stop any of it. The following session after his week of being the school's smelly diaper-boy, he'd tell the doctor about everything that had happened. It was a session that didn't actually involve any hypnosis either; just typical therapeutic techniques that any boy his age would receive. The doctor didn't find it necessary to put him under again, especially when he proceeded to lift his butt off the couch and assault his diaper with a massive volley of hot, squishy droppings. That would leave only one session left for Matty to conclude his mandatory therapy, and the doctor would need to think about exactly what kind of send-off she should give him.