"The long term treatment for nightmares is learning to lucid dream, which can be done without any subtle arts at all, but it requires practice. Making it so the practice doesn't consist of nightmares I can place blocks against certain concepts entering dreams, if the topical content is consistent, or certain affective states, if it's not. Panic attacks are also done with blocks - interrupting feedback loops - but everybody's attacks are different so to be able to do that I have to actually induce and watch one in progress, but just one. The aversion to touch could be handled several different ways depending on how it came about."

"...what about how it came about-"

"If there's one or a handful of precipitating incidents, there's a thing where we go over the memory with all its salience stripped out - the classic example is if you were once chased by a manticore off a cliff and landed in a harpy nest and took three days to limp back to civilization, instead you re-experience the memory as 'the time nothing in particular chased you nowhere in particular and you wound up in nothing in particular and took a while of unimportant whatever until this episode in your life was over'. The memory is still retained with all its detail in terms of content, but the mind stops attaching emotional import to it after you go over it salience-stripped enough times. And then you're not more afraid of manticores or falling or harpies or being lost in the wilderness than you were before the event.

"If there's a consistent pattern of precipitating incidents, too many to make it practical to do this with all of them, then for some minds it's possible to do a 'context change', which is sort of like rendering everything before the procedure the equivalent of something you might have read in a book - this is fairly drastic, it's got side effects even when performed perfectly, but it does work really well when it's what's needed. Some minds aren't architected in a way that cooperates with the context change; I haven't read you enough to know if yours is or not. I'd also hesitate to do it when you have an evidentiary, non-delusional suspicion that you're currently hallucinating.

"If there's no precipitating incidents at all or there are but the context change won't work, tampering with associations directly is possible - sort of the emotional equivalent of affecting factual memory - but it's very hard to do right and I'm not a specialist and something weird might happen because in spite of what Fëanáro says I am not actually flawlessly capable of literally all therapy-related tasks. I can do it lightly and impermanently, which will also reduce the risk, but then it can knock loose on its own."

"It would not be a case of one or a handful of precipitating incidents."

"Pattern or no identifiable source or something else?"

"Source is Angband."

Nod. "Can you be more specific?"

"Enemy liked looking like people I know. They'd be normal, or mostly, and then they'd be crowding me just slightly or touch me incidentally and then - so I don't like people touching me -"

Nod. "Does this also lead you to try to maintain more personal space, or is it only upsetting at the point of contact?"

"I don't try to do things to avoid it, I just experience it as unpleasant."

"Ah. How close can people get under what circumstances before it's unpleasant?"

"If they're moving in a very predictable way it's fine. Passing me on the street is fine. Someone walking up to my desk and leaving papers there is okay as long as I hear them coming and they don't linger."

"Public transportation? People fidgeting? Erratically-moving small children? Animals?"

"Animals are fine. children under six are fine, public transportation is not fine but reliably the same kind of not-fine, I can practically filter for it, fidgeting is usually fine."

"Practically filter for it?"

"If it's always going to be the same I can just expect it and expecting things is nice even if they're unpleasant - I'd rather have torture than uncertainty, depending on the torture -"

"...hm. Fidgeting's a usually? When isn't it fine?"

"Happen to have a mannerism that has bad associations or that seems glitchy like the hallucination's being done carelessly..."

"Please do let me know if I exhibit any mannerisms that have this problem."

"I don't like pointing out things that seem like inconsistencies or careless bits in the hallucination but I can tell you if it's the other thing."

"I suspect it would produce a rapport problem and I can't just send you to my colleague down the hall," she says. "If you don't want to draw attention to it yourself, may I keep a read up to check for it?"

"...yeah, sure."

"If you change your mind about that and let me know I will stop." And up goes the read.

He is mostly sincere about not wanting anything. He finds existing very unpleasant but nothing about her is making it moreso.

Okay, she can work with that. "We should work out some kind of schedule for the quicker interventions and the memory restorations."