"Oh good idea, I bet there are!" Off to the library to see what it has to say about Mindhealing.

It takes a while to find anything! There are whole library sections for every other Gift, but not that, and they end up having to go find and ask the librarian. 

Once that's done, though, there are a handful of treatises on it, tucked away in the depths of the very large section on ordinary physical Healing. The foreword in the first one warns that Mindhealing is an especially tricky discipline to learn from books, as different Mindhealers end up with different Sight-metaphors, and since they're so rare they often work mostly alone and don't have the same chance to standardize a curriculum that Healers do. This treatise is by three traveling Mindhealers who exchanged regular correspondence for decades and met up once a year to share case studies and get each other's advice. They want to disclaim that the things they're writing about is what worked for them; in cases where they disagreed with each other on what ought to be the theory or the best practice, this will be explained in the footnotes.

The three Mindhealers in question had the following Sight metaphors: city-maps, coral reefs (that Mindhealer grew up in a fishing-village on the far southern coast and used to go swim and dive around the coral reefs as a child), and kitchens. If they use descriptions reminiscent of these things, that's why. 

To start! A lot of people think Mindhealing is like Empathy, but it really isn't! It's not that much like Thoughtsensing either! It's common for Mindhealers to have one or both of those Gifts too, but Mindhealing in isolation is its own thing, and pure Mindhealing-Sight doesn't show the content of thoughts at all. 

What is does show is the structure, and also the - movement, or use-patterns, or shapes-of-thoughts, they never agreed on a good word for it. The rapid changes over seconds and minutes, is what that means, whereas changes to the deeper structure can happen but generally over weeks to years. Here is a page of tips for how to think about focusing your Sight in order to see one versus the other better. They're very poetic and flowery. 

City maps sound like a decent metaphor but the others sound worse! Aza is glad she has gears.

She reads this entire book straight through raptly and takes a lot of notes.

The different metaphors lean to different strengths; the kitchen one, for example, gives the Mindhealer in question much stronger guesses about the function of various mind-bits, what they mean to the patient, but it's harder to see fine detail by going in deeper. The coral-reef Mindhealer can very easily swap between focusing on the realtime patterns-of-thought (schools of fish or other sea life interacting with the reef) and more permanent structure (the coral itself), but needs to do a lot more back and forth with the patient to understand what it means in their particular context. The city-map Mindhealer can very easily see large-scale structure at a glance or zoom in closer and see fine-scale patterns, but finds it a bit overwhelming to focus on realtime thought-shapes. 

Huh. She thinks gears seem very all purpose but maybe there is something they are worse at. Does the book mostly just talk about Sight or does it also talk about messing around with stuff and how to make that safe?

The second half is mostly about that! It also opens with an opinionated preface!

The Mindhealer with the map metaphor is firmly of the opinion that seeing what's going on is the most important part, and changing things with the direct use of Mindhealing Gift should be done sparingly (there are many footnoted disagreements on what 'sparingly' means in practice.) In his opinion, patients will benefit the most from a Mindhealer helping them figure out what's already happening in their mind, so they can relate to it better and learn self-acceptance. 

The Mindhealer with the kitchen metaphor thinks that helping patients 'clean up' and 'organize' their minds, with Mindhealing Gift, is often very helpful; sometimes certain skills, like calming themselves down by taking deep breaths, will be hard to use in, say, an angry argument, because that tool isn't very accessible from that 'corner' of the 'kitchen'. 

The coral-reef Mindhealer thinks that you should find which parts of patients' minds are 'hidden' and can have emotions or habits build up in a way the patient isn't consciously aware of, and help them 'open' this so there are fewer obstacles to their feelings. 

...

The textbook is not a replacement for an apprenticeship with an adult Mindhealer! You should if at all possible have that! It's much safer for an untrained Mindhealer to practice Gift-control on an adult, trained Mindhealer who can set their own mind right easily. That being said, they fully understand that sometimes this is impossible, given the rarity of the Gift. In which case you should practice on fairly mentally healthy patients (who've agreed to this!!) before you try to treat people who are very badly off and fragile. 

'Detours' are a way of pinning down a particular reflexive thought-pattern, and changing it so it instead ends somewhere different and more helpful. For example, a child struggling in school might have a habitual train of thought of "it's hopeless, I'm just stupid" every time they find something difficult, or a man who sometimes loses his temper and hits his girlfriends might have the thought "that bitch isn't treating me the way I deserve" whenever she does something minorly inconsiderate, which most people wouldn't explode into anger over. These could be shifted to "I don't know how to do this yet but I can ask the teacher for help" for the child, or "but I remember when she did something very kind for me" for the man with a temper. 

Fences are a more substantial and invasive technique, generally used when a patient is suffering because their thoughts keep going back to the same painful subject. For example, a mother who survived a fire while her child died might feel incredibly guilty and like she doesn't deserve life as much and wishes she could trade herself for her child, and this can easily become a sort of pit or downhill slope (in the kitchen metaphor, a hole shattered in the counter, or a place where it's cracked and everything slides downhill into the crack). In the long run these feelings need to be fully processed, in a safe context, but in the short run, the patient is only with the Mindhealer a candlemark or two a week, and the rest of the time they may not have the emotional skills yet to avoid making the problem even worse by ruminating. A fence is like putting up a guard-rail around the entire region of their mind, so they fall into it less. There is disagreement between the Mindhealers on how freely one ought to use fences; the kitchen Mindhealer thinks they're a very useful therapeutic technique, the city-map one is technically very good at them but thinks they ought be used sparingly and with a lot of forethought and planning, keeping an eye on not disturbing the overall structure of the patient's mind. The coral-reef Mindhealer haaaaaates them with a fiery passion and this is apparently an ongoing dispute between the book's authors. 

Sometimes a Mindhealer will want to do the opposite of a fence! The patient's mind will have partitioned off an area, so they mostly never think about it, and when they do it may be overwhelming and distressing. For example, a man with unprocessed anger toward his neglectful father might believe that he's an adult and entirely over this petty childhood pain, but occasionally explode into rage at his wife when she nags him about not doing something in a way that reminds him of his own mother nagging her husband, and makes him feel as though he's being compared to his own father, who he can't bear the idea of resembling. The man might be baffled at his own behaviour after the fact, and regret it, but it's going to be hard to stop if he cannot even understand where this response is coming from, and getting to the root of the emotions often involves taking down the fences. The Mindhealer should make sure the patient is ready for this, and set aside extra time in case they need a longer session to process it. 

This is a really good book! Aza doesn't think she wants any fences or detours in her own personal clockwork but she can try to figure out what they'd look like - maybe she could put a hinge on a gear, swing it out of the way of another that locks into it sometimes, put it either in empty space or meshed up to a different gear depending. Maybe she needs a book on actual literal clockwork?

She can find lots and lots of those in the section on engineering, subsection mechanical devices. 

Skan wants to know things about clockwork! 

Then she can leave the pages open a bit longer and take notes while he catches up.

He runs out of attention span well before she does, and bounces around the library pretending to fight imaginary enemies. 

Skan is very Skan.

She is by this time pretty sure she will not accidentally knock somebody's gears out of alignment. "Skan?" she says, when she has extracted the vocabulary she wants out of the clockwork book.

He bounces over. "Did you learn things?" 

"Yeah. Uh - is it okay, if I look at your gears - you don't have to let me even though I saw them before or because we're friends or anything - just to practice looking, I can wait till I have a teacher tomorrow -"

"I don't mind! I thought about it a lot and I still don't." (By 'a lot' he means about five minutes, but that really is a long time to sit down and think about something, for Skan.) 

"You can tell me if you want me to stop, okay? And I'll stop." Scritch scritch.

Peek.

Skan flops and purrs under her scritches. 

His gears still look different from her own or Urtho's! There are fewer layers to his, nearly all of it is right there on the surface. He doesn't have a big central gear connected to everything else, like Azabel does, but he does have a couple of different...long gearshafts or something, which link up distant areas so that movement in a handful of specific gears can very rapidly grab and shift all of his mind toward it. This is clearly not something he can do for just anything, though, especially reading. The attentional-patterns in his gears are very distributed and a lot of them seem very deeply linked into the physical; it looks like it would be easier for him to keep his attention on something the more it involved all of his senses and using his whole body. 

"Huh! - do you want me to tell you what it looks like -"

"Yess!" He vibrates with excitement. 

So she can fumble through an explanation, and try to find pictures in the clockwork book to use as visual aids. "That's probably why you don't like reading for a long time."

"Oh. That makess ssensse. I wissh I could read better but I like being able to fly and dodge fasst. - Ooh, can you ssee in your gearss why you can't run?" 

"That's a really good question - let's see -" Where does her physically-doing-things hook up, hm?

It's really interesting! Compared to the way Skan's mind is very distributed so it's hard to keep his attention on one thing instead of everything else, but he has the gearshafts that let him instantly engage nearly all of his mind for a physical response, Azabel's mind is the opposite! Her big central gear doesn't connect to the gears that are physically-doing-things, and those gears don't connect very well to each other either or to the gears that do seeing and hearing things and recognizing them. At a glance it looks like setup can sort of manage, but it's slow to react and clearly not doing as much fast complicated recognition of things like, say, a crack in the path ahead of her, let alone a ball flying at her face (which Skan can leap up and catch while not even pausing in their conversation.) 

"I think I can see the problem, which might mean I can fix it! I shouldn't try by myself though. Even if it looks like just oiling all those gears would be fine."

"Probably not! It would be bad if you made it worsse."