Summer is the slow season for hypnotists. By June, most weight-loss patients - the profession's bread and butter - have already given up, or else they've successfully harnessed the power of the subconscious mind, shed the extra pounds and beelined for the beach.
Which was precisely where Don Patterson hoped to find a new type of client. On the Fourth of July, the Pasadena hypnotist commissioned a banner plane to fly along the Ocean City shore, trailing a sign that read, "End Bridge Fear" - a cryptic slogan to everyone except the untold hundreds of Marylanders who are petrified of driving, and even being driven, over the lofty Bay Bridge. Not all of these people are gephyrophobics in the true sense: Some can navigate the Key Bridge or the Delaware Memorial without incident. It's just the Bay Bridge, which is more than 4 miles long and 180 feet high and seems to float above the choppy Chesapeake. Last year, there were about 4,000 requests for the service that chauffeurs the frightened across, and that number doesn't include all those who commissioned spouses, nephews and friends to transport them instead.
So Patterson dreamed up his beach banner, which also listed his Web address, and posted similar signs along roads leading to the bridge. Often, he says, such business inspirations come to him only after self-hypnosis sessions, but, in this case, it just seemed logical that some people would prefer one-hour's worth of therapy to another summer of dread. He was right.
A recent Monday found the hypnotist in his office waiting for a Bay Bridge-shy patient. He is a dapper man who favors pinstripe suits and sometimes giggles so hard that he cringes. A former analyst - "No, not that kind of analyst" - for the Department of Defense who also dabbled in corporate recruiting, Patterson just began his full-time practice, Maryland Family Hypnosis, last fall. But he's been studying techniques for almost a decade, and his belief in his craft is so touching that it's tough to harp on the obvious criticisms - namely, that it's tough to prove that this stuff works.
"The power of the mind is an amazing thing," he often says.
His set fee is $115 per session, but it's going up to $190 in September. Multiple sessions are often necessary. "For reference," his Web site says, "removing a fear is usually one or two sessions and weight loss is usually four sessions with three follow-ups if necessary."
Patterson is too serious for the comedic hypnosis scene, in which audience members are made to behave like chickens, etc. His appointment book is dominated by slimming, smoking and stress, the so-called three S's of hypnosis. Given the chance, though, he likes working with phobias. Those patients tend "to have great imaginations," he says, and "are almost always highly hypnotizable." No matter the phobia, he employs similar relaxation and visualization techniques to pinpoint the traumatic childhood memory that, he believes, is at the bottom of every case.
Before long, Mary Kay Matejevich, a 51-year-old flower-shop worker from Arbutus, crept into the office, clutching fretfully at her elbows.
"I have to admit I'm a very big skeptic," she said, sitting down in a giant black easy chair, above which hung a photograph of a tame-looking, eminently crossable little river. "I really don't think this will work. I just can't imagine it."
But it was almost time for her family's annual beach vacation, and she was willing to try anything. She'd felt sick at the mere mention of the Bay Bridge since she was a little girl, but, until six or seven years ago, her husband had gallantly driven them across, so she could close her eyes in the passenger's seat. Now, though, after a scary crossing in the fog, he was terrified too, and the family has resorted to taking a land route through Delaware.
"What is the height of your fear, Mary Kay?" Patterson asked when she finished her story.
"The way up. And at the top," she said. "I'm afraid to even think about that."
"If you went off the bridge, you'd - "
"- die," Matejevich finished.
"Yes." Patterson smiled. It was time to begin.
He asked her to pull the footrest lever on the easy chair and put her feet up, to remove her glasses and close her eyes. Almost immediately, her face looked less worried, the skin like a sheet just tugged smooth. Patterson asked her to breathe deeply, to envision peacefulness spreading through her body.
"Just go 10 times deeper into relaxation," Patterson said. "Go deeper, and much deeper. ... "
Oh, my. There it is."
About an hour and a half after she first closed her eyes, Matejevich was wide awake and barreling along toward the bridge in the passenger seat of her hypnotist's Hummer. Now the whole horrifying roller-coaster arc of it reared before her; she could see the supports, as spindly as crabs' legs.
Patterson wasn't worried. The therapy had gone very well, especially compared to his first session that morning. At the moment when he was attempting to sling-shot the previous patient back into childhood - by rapping on the center of her forehead with his fingers and shouting "be there!" - she had opened her eyes and erupted into helpless laughter.
Matejevich, on the other hand, had succumbed to the hypnosis quickly. Before long, Patterson traced her Bay Bridge anxiety to an eye operation she'd had when she was 5 years old. Exactly how that trauma related to her fear wasn't clear to the hypnotist, but it didn't really matter. In a visualization exercise, he'd had Matejevich give her younger self a pep talk and a hug, then instructed her to envision her feelings of terror progressively lessening. By the end of the treatment, Matejevich confessed that she didn't feel worried at all anymore.
It was then that he asked her to accompany him across the bridge.
So far, so good. They were almost to the toll booth now, and Matejevich was still calm.
"It's funny," she said as they rolled through and on to the bridge. "I don't feel anything. Normally, I would be absolutely nauseous."
They were climbing higher and higher. Matejevich peered at the plunging speed boats and watched a bird crash-land in the water below.
"Are those crab pots down there?" she asked with interest.
By now Patterson's grin was as broad as the bridge itself. The Bay Bridge separates ordinary life from vacation and home from away; perhaps that's really why it's hard for so many people to cross. Maybe, more than intimidating height or tremendous length, the real threat is letting go.
He doesn't tell people upfront, but Patterson once suffered from a paralyzing fear of the bridge, which he treated himself through various mental exercises. Now he can wander the Ocean City Boardwalk, practicing his skills on curious passersby, a happy hypnotist taking his ease.
Back on solid land again, Matejevich picked up her cell phone and reported her triumph to the flower shop. Patterson giggled delightedly. Sure, his profession has its detractors, but it's all worth it when someone reaches the other side.
His patient barely seemed to notice when he turned the car around and headed back toward the bridge, and home.
abigail.tucker@baltsun.com