Being Erica - Therapy Process

Therapy Process

In the show's reality, the therapist typically shows up at a time when the patient has reached their lowest point, usually shortly after the patient has faced a risk of death. Dr. Tom first shows up in Erica's hospital room after she's gone into anaphylactic shock from accidentally consuming a drink with hazelnut flavouring, while later in the show's run it's revealed that Dr. Naadiah first intervened in Tom's life during a suicide attempt, and in the final episode Erica first introduces herself to Sarah shortly after Sarah has taken a drug overdose.

Appointments with the therapist are not scheduled normally, nor does the therapist have a conventional office in a fixed location. Instead, when a therapy session is set to begin, the patient can walk through absolutely any door and end up in the therapist's office. Sometimes the patient can intentionally summon the doctor this way, but much more often they're surprised to end up in the office instead of in the room they thought they were entering. In some "emergency" cases the patient can also be transported to the doctor's office by simply sitting down in a chair, laying on a couch or a bed, or fainting.

In the patient's first appointment, they are asked to compose a list of their regrets in life. In subsequent sessions, the patient is sent back in time to relive and change a regret from their list which relates to a current problem in their lives. The situation is rarely as simple as it appears, however; in most cases, the event that the patient hoped to change by acting differently still occurs, and the patient must then seek out further information to reach a new understanding of the event's real meaning — and thus, in turn, new insight into their current problem. The session, thus, does not change the person's past, but rather teaches them how to change their future by acting differently in the present.

At least once during a session, the therapist will show up to give advice and feedback about what the patient is expected to learn. The therapist also possesses the ability to pull the patient out of the session prematurely if they do something inappropriate, such as revealing the future to another person, or if they discover unforeseen information, such as learning that someone in their present day lives may be misrepresenting their identity.

Being in a session does affect the consciousness of the time-appropriate version of the character. A recurring gag within the show is that when Erica is first transported into a session, it often occurs at an inopportune moment when the sudden shift in her consciousness has the potential to, or sometimes actually does, cause a clumsy accident. Similarly, when Kai is present only in his "contemporary" identity as a young aspiring musician instead of his "future" identity as a rock star inside a therapy session, he is only loosely aware of Erica as a customer about whom he knows almost nothing, not even her name — even when "future" Kai has had an extended and intimate conversation with her just minutes earlier.

It is possible in a time travel session to alter the past in a much more significant way, but the result of doing so is that the patient returns to an unbalanced and unfamiliar present which will correct itself in unforeseen ways — for example, in one episode Adam uses his session to avoid the confrontation that first set him on the path to a life of crime, instead taking up his current interest in landscaping work much earlier than he did in his original timeline. However, he then returns to a new present in which he runs his own landscaping business, despite his lack of training in landscape architecture, and is married to and has two kids with a woman he's never actually met. Ultimately, he is forced to go back in time again and get into the original confrontation after all.

At times, the therapy can take less conventional forms. In one episode, Erica is sent into a continuous time loop within the very same day in which she's having her session, being forced to repeatedly relive the very morning she's just had until she figures out how to correctly handle the situation that made it so upsetting. In another, instead of being sent into the past to actively make a different choice, Erica simply visits the parallel present that resulted from that choice. In still another, her "therapy" is an admonition to live her day normally but act differently than her usual instincts, and the only time travel she does in the entire episode is a five-second jump back to revisit the very first moment she fails to have done so. In yet another, Erica and Adam are simply sent to an island and told to figure out how to get to the other side.

In one episode, Erica faces a situation which Dr. Tom, to his own chagrin, is not allowed to send her back to change. Instead, he intervenes for her, going back in time himself to prevent it from happening without Erica's knowledge — an abuse of his power which he is ultimately forced to undo.

Patients can also be sent into incidents outside of their own lives; at various times during the series, Erica is sent to witness events in other people's lives to expand her understanding of their characters, including her parents, Dr. Tom, Kai and Julianne. (In the case of Kai, the event is several years into Erica's future.)

In the second phase of therapy, the patient is brought into group sessions, summoned whenever anyone within the group requires it. In a group session, the patient in need may select one of their other groupmates to time travel with them for support and guidance; however, in one episode Erica is also sent into another patient's session that's already underway, when a bit of unexpected emergency guidance is needed.

Following a period within group therapy, the patient faces a critical, and unannounced, test to determine whether they're suitable for promotion to the final phase: they are suddenly sent back to the crisis moment where the therapist first entered their lives, and forced to cope with the possibility that the therapy and the changes that it brought to their lives never actually happened. Erica, for instance, has not spent three years building a business and getting into a relationship with Adam and going through time travel therapy, but instead has simply been in a coma for two weeks — she ultimately passes the test by realizing that even if everything she experienced was just a dream or a hallucination, it changed her in ways that she can still apply to her new reality nonetheless.

If the test is passed, the patient enters training to become a therapist themselves, and is assigned a series of their own "patients", who are in fact people they already know, to assist with specific and immediate problems. During the training, however, the trainee does not send their patients into time travel, but instead continues to time travel themselves, revisiting situations which will provide them with the insight they need to give to their patient in the present day. Finally, when the training has been completed and the patient has become the doctor, they are directly assigned their first true time travel patient.

The mechanism of time travel is never fully explained; however, later episodes reveal that there are an infinite number of distinct realities, each created by a different response to a choice or situation that a person faces — and suggesting that instead of strictly travelling into their own past and altering their existing reality, the patient may instead be simply witnessing the consequences that unfolded in the particular parallel reality where their "revised" action was actually their original choice.