A Curious Case of “Proxy Treatment”— The Origin Story of KaradaNaoru (Part 8)

It happened some time after our training workshops had begun in earnest.

As usual, I was demonstrating treatment techniques and guiding the participants when one trainee raised a hand.

“My son has schizophrenia. I want to do something to help him.”

That was the question.

Without thinking too deeply about it, I replied,

“Would you like to try a proxy treatment?”

Whether the idea came to me in that moment or whether I had already been experimenting with it from time to time, I honestly can’t remember.

A proxy treatment was something I occasionally tried when the actual person could not be present.

The idea was simple: if two people shared a particularly strong connection—such as a parent and child—I would work on one person as a stand-in for the other.

This was long before I began offering remote sessions or working through Zoom.

Back then, this was simply one of the methods I sometimes explored.

There was, however, one strange feature.

Whenever I performed a proxy treatment, the person receiving the treatment would experience significantly more pain than usual.

To this day, I do not know why.

I never investigated it very deeply.

Over time, I simply accepted it as one of those peculiar things that seemed to happen.

According to the trainee, his son suffered from schizophrenia and constantly heard voices.

Not one or two voices.

He estimated that he heard around one hundred different voices at any given time.

My honest reaction was:

“That must be incredibly difficult.”

So I gave the session everything I had.

Partway through, the trainee’s expression changed.

He began grimacing in pain.

The discomfort appeared to be much stronger than what I normally saw during treatment.

Eventually we finished.

Then a thought occurred to me.

“Can you contact your son right now?”

He said he could.

I was curious.

What had happened to the voices?

So I asked him to call his son on the spot.

The answer surprised all of us.

“Until a little while ago, I could hear around a hundred voices,” he said.

“Now it’s more like ten or twenty.”

At the next training session, we followed up.

According to his father, the number had remained significantly lower.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this was the result of the treatment.

It may have been coincidence.

There may have been other factors involved.

There is simply no way to prove it.

All I know is this:

What had been around one hundred voices became somewhere between ten and twenty.

That is the fact as it was reported to me.

I have always been somewhat skeptical about the effects of my own work.

Not because I doubt people’s experiences, but because I am interested in whether a result can truly be reproduced.

Was it something I did?

Was it merely a fortunate coincidence?

To be honest, I have never been particularly attached to either answer.

If someone suffers less than before, that is already enough.

Yet one question still remains.

Why did proxy treatments consistently produce so much more pain than ordinary sessions?

At the time, I didn’t think much about it.

Looking back, however, it remains one of the most curious phenomena I have encountered.

Perhaps one day the mechanism behind it will become clear.

Or perhaps it never will.

Either way, that day remains in my memory as one of the strangest experiences from the early years of KaradaNaoru.

Schizophrenia and other mental health conditions require professional medical care. This article is simply a personal account of an unusual experience and should not be interpreted as a claim of medical treatment or therapeutic efficacy.