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From Shiloh to Saigon: Treating the “Nonbeliever” – Thomas G. Shafer (Is.16)

Thomas G. Shafer, M.D.

Multiple sources have said that belief in past lives is not a prerequisite for successful regression therapy. But exactly how do we use past-life therapy with the “nonbeliever?” The author, the Journal’s new Associate Editor Thomas Shafer, presents a case of a man who improved after exploration of past-life type dreams even though his religious tradition prohibited any belief in reincarnation or any work in altered states of consciousness.

(Author’s note: This is a case from my psychiatry practice but names and identifying details have been altered to protect confidentiality.)

 George M. was a 49-year-old white male US Marine Corps Vietnam combat veteran who presented to my office at the US Veteran’s Administration on referral from his internist. He complained that he had adjusted well after the war until recently, but now “was going crazy” and “can’t deal with it.”

George had an unremarkable childhood history, growing up in a rural Alabama town with no family history of serious mental illness. He graduated from high school with a C+ average. After high school, he had worked for about a year in a paint shop, but had then enlisted in the US Marine Corps at age 19.

After about nine months of training and active duty, his unit had been sent to Vietnam. He had served a full 13-month tour there as a rifleman. He had spent most of this time “in the boonies” and had been in numerous firefights. His platoon had taken over 30% casualties during George’s tour, including two of his close friends. He estimated he had killed “over a hundred” enemy soldiers. He had not been wounded.

Healing the Wounded Child From Past Lives – Margaret Lento (Is.14)

by Margaret Lento, Ph.D.

Margaret Lento presents some ways to heal the client who was wounded as a child in a past life, using three clients’ cases as examples. Especially interesting is the way she follows her client’s lead as to the best way to heal the child and then to bring the child’s good qualities into the client’s “here and now.”

 The benefits of current-life inner-child healing are very well known and accepted. But uncovering and reliving a traumatic experience as a child in a past life may reveal fears that have been built up over the years, over many existences. These fears must be eliminated before the regression can be permanently beneficial. I refer to it as “transforming the wounded child into the wonder child.”

It occurred to me from my work with clients who relived a past-life trauma as a child that the same negative energy that was present in the past life remained in the cellular memory of the client. This realization prompted me to develop techniques that would allow the client to go back into the lifetime, retrieve the child, and remove that negative charge or belief by releasing any residue that was still affecting the client in the present life. I have found that the client knows the best way to do this, and combining the client’s insights with my own techniques, I found that this release was rapid and effective. After the client experiences a past-life trauma as a child, I ask the client’s inner mind and higher wisdom to take them to a place where they can heal that little wounded child. Three cases illustrate this technique.

Aspects of Past-Life Bodywork: Understanding Subtle Energy Fields Part I: Theory – Roger Woolger (Is.3)

by Roger J. Woolger

A striking aspect of much past-life therapy, when seen for the first time by an observer, is the obvious physical involvement of the client in the story that is being relived. In many sessions the client doesn’t just sit or lie passively recounting an inner vision of a past life with his or her eyes closed. Instead he or she may be subject to the most dramatic convulsions, contortions, heavings, and thrashings imaginable. One client may clutch his chest in apparent pain as he recounts a sword wound, another may turn almost blue during a choking fit as she remembers a strangulation, while yet another may become rigidly fixed with arms above the head as he remembers being tied to a post during torture.

To the inexperienced observer this may appear distressing, if not dangerous. Even trained therapists (more often those using Freudian, cognitive, or purely verbal techniques) will come up to me after a particularly violent demonstration of the past-life technique and warn me of the dangers of provoking a psychotic break.

Yet for many therapists now practicing past-life therapy violent emotional release is not just a commonplace of our work but in many cases an essential part of it. More and more therapists are finding that all kinds of behavioral problems and complexes have traumatic under lays from past lives which are plainly physical as well as emotional. As a result, we are naturally finding ourselves using cathartic methods to release the old trauma. Seen from a historical perspective this kind of emphasis on the reliving of traumatic events and their treatment through abreactive or cathartic methods marks a return to the very approaches Freud abandoned eighty years ago in favor of his later psychology of the ego and its defense mechanisms.