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Rescripting in Past-Life Therapy: Its Use with Clients as Thinking Beings – Maggie van Staveren (Is.17)

Maggie van Staveren, L.C.S.W., C.Ht.

 It is important that we take a second look at our work as past-life therapists. We have learned a lot over the past few years. We are more aware of who we are, who our clients are, and more aware of the nature of our work as past-life therapists. Perhaps there is more than one technique to use with our clients. Now that we know more, let’s take a look at rescripting.

We and our clients are spiritual thinking beings in human form. The very word “man” means “thinker” in its Sanskrit origins. We think and by our thinking we create. Our greatest power is to choose our thinking. There is that part of us, soul, that can instantly communicate and create by thought.

As spiritual beings we live many lives in human form for a purpose. The purpose is to experience everything in this dimension and thereby learn the soul lessons we all have to learn. In our human existence we have experiences and make choices which have an influence on our beliefs about ourselves, other people, and our environment. Our beliefs are really a construct in which we can safely operate under current conditions. This psychological construct protects us and keeps us safe in our environment until we are ready to depart these safe boundaries by new information or understanding.

 

Reframing or Rescripting – Hans TenDam (Is.17)

Hans TenDam

 Rewriting history is a crime. Rewriting somebody’s personal history is a crime against the individual ‑ even on request. Rewriting is done by people who don’t understand what therapy is, probably because they don’t understand what life is about, what people are.

There are two types of rescripting, that done by the client himself, without awareness of the therapist, and that induced by the therapist as a conscious intervention. Why clients rescript, is simple: they resist facing the truth because of shame, guilt, humiliation, or sheer terror. The real memory is overwhelming, or ‑ as often ‑ resisted because it threatens a cherished self-image.

 

My Thoughts on Rescripting – Thomas G. Shafer (Is.17)

by Thomas G. Shafer, M.D.

Dr. Cunningham has given us an excellent clinical example illustrating the problems with rescripting and some excellent arguments.

I have ethical concerns here. There is a vast power differential between the therapist and the client as an innate part of the process. Allowing therapists to rewrite history and change the fabric of time itself raises their power to the point of being God-like. I think God has enough trouble being God without humans, even those with a Masters, a Ph.D., or a M.D. taking over some of the job.

Refraining from Reframing in Past-Life Sessions – Holly Holmes-Meredith (Is.17)

Holly Holmes-Meredith, M.A., M.F.T.

 I have been using regression therapy in some form in my private practice since 1981 and have been training hypnotherapists and past-life therapists through HCH, a state-licensed institute, since 1986. I have a strong background in NLP and use reframing and rescripting techniques primarily while working with habit control and current-life inner child work. I find reframing and rescripting profoundly transforming in these areas. In past-life work, however, I consider reframing and rescripting unnecessary and dishonoring of the soul journey and soul lessons; not only of the client, but of all other souls involved in the past-life events and soul experiences. The discussion that follows will explain my thoughts on these important clinical issues.

If the client requests inner child work I spend time asking what he wants and expects from present-life regression therapy. A detailed discussion follows which outlines the therapist and client’s responsibilities in doing present-life regression therapy. I explain that we can focus on current presenting issues with pragmatic goals as the outcome. The present-life regression work becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. Because of the legal limits of the use of hypnosis in California, I make sure my client gives informed consent and understands that any information he accesses in a hypnotic state is not admissible in a court of law nor can it be used in a deposition for testimony. I make sure my client has his own healing and wholeness as the focus of the work and that he understands that uncovering memories does not necessarily prove that what was remembered is factual. The client is informed that the inner child work is a process to which one must commit in his own time and way, but that the present-life regression work, itself, is just the beginning of the process.

The First Law of Time Travel: Don’t Change History – Thelma B. Freedman (Is.17)

Thelma B. Freedman, Ph.D.

 As all sci-fi savvy people can tell you, The Federation’s First Law of Time Travel is “Don’t Change History.” There is an intriguing short story by Isaac Asimov about this. An eminent professor of chemistry is giving a lecture to a packed auditorium; he is carrying out the first trial of his new “time machine,” which will carry one drop of water back in time several million years. As he speaks he fires up his apparatus (sparks and humming sounds) and carefully drops the fateful drop of water onto the waiting plate of glass. More sparks and louder humming sounds ensue. The professor continues to talk, describing what the machine is doing, and as he does so everyone in the auditorium (including himself) slowly changes into green scaly reptilian creatures. The professor’s words come out in squeaks (but everyone understands him fine) and the building itself changes shape. Alas for the poor professor, no one realizes anything has happened. The experiment is declared a failure, and he is hooted out as a crackpot and a charlatan, ruined for life.

Some Concerns About Rescripting – Janet Cunningham (Is.17)

Janet Cunningham, Ph.D.

 The technique of rescripting is not one that I use, and I have never had a clear explanation of its benefits, although I have discussed it with colleagues who use the method. As I understand, rescripting grows out of quantum physics and current thinking that all time exists now; there is no past, present or future, there is only the eternal Now.

My concern for rescripting in past-life therapy comes from three primary positions:

  1. Even though all time may exist now, the fact is that in this physical dimension and in physical bodies we do exist in time; time is a truth of our lives in this reality.
  2. In my personal experience it simply didn’t work, it brought confusion and a lack of resolution.
  3. Rescripting, as I have seen it applied, comes from the mind of the therapist/ practitioner and not from the mind of the client; e.g. “What would you like to say to…”, “How would you change …” For this reason, accusations of a therapist “planting false memories” is a very real issue. This will be addressed by other contributors to this cluster of articles, so I will not elaborate further on this topic.

 

Reframing or Rescripting in Past-Life Work – Joseph Costa (Is.17)

Joseph Costa, Ph.D.

 In any field of endeavor there are advocates of doing work in different ways from others that produces successes. In our field we have counselors and therapists who use the methods called reframing and rescripting. In my own practice I use both methods, choosing that which serves the client as the work unfolds.

What I present here is from a perspective of energies. For example: I interpret the dynamics of events, feelings and trauma as energy experiences. The events, feelings and trauma have more or less energy involved, based on the degree of the lesson experienced by the client.

 

Rescripting and Other Delusional Thinking – David P. Armentrout (Is.17)

David P. Armentrout, Ph.D.

 Some years ago I saw a postcard with the caption, “I have abandoned the search for Truth and am now looking for an acceptable fantasy.” That seems to summarize the goals of rescripting. It also summarizes the dereific processes leading to psychosis. Rescripting means substitution of fantasied content for valid memory. The usual reason given for rescripting is that realty is too terrible to be handled.

Psychopathology

Mental disorders can be roughly broken down into those problems due to faulty wiring of the cranial computer and its peripherals, and those due to flawed software. In the first group we find various dementias, cyclothymias, autisms and the schizophrenias. There is a region of overlap in which subclinical problems may or may not become significant, as in the case of borderlines who may learn to channel their creativity, or who may dissociate under stress. Generally, these disorders are present at birth and receive psychiatric treatment through drugs which suppress some of the most noxious signs and symptoms.

If You Can Imagine It, You Can Achieve It; If You Can Dream It, You Can Become It! – Linda Adler (Is.17)

Linda Adler, L.C.S.W.

 There is wisdom in that title statement and most of us would endorse it, at least to some degree. However, if it were that simple, we would all be exactly who we want to be and do exactly what we want to do without limitation. Unfortunately, there are often underlying causes that prevent us from fully achieving our imaginings and becoming our dreams.

I suspect that most of us embrace the concept that we create our own reality, although we might not agree on the exact meaning of that idea. If we are both the Creator and the Creation, we can also be Creative and, in alignment with the Higher Self, re-create our reality.

As a Gestalt therapist I was encouraged to be expansive and creative in my work, and was trained to use imagination as a part of the healing process. I was thoroughly schooled at creating experiential exercises designed to bring the client into an “organic” knowing about his/her limiting and dysfunctional patterns and to develop exercises designed to create an experience of what it would be like on the other side of those patterns. Regression therapy is Gestalt therapy without time limitations. Process-oriented, it seeks to uncover unfinished business that the client is carrying like a “hangover” from the past and bring it to closure or to a Gestalt.

Healing The Past-Life Personality – George Schwimmer (Is.8)

by George Schwimmer, Ph.D.

Recollections of events, which shocked or traumatized an individual in a past life, very often re-traumatize the present personality during regression, this author finds. He advocates visualization healing and other techniques to relieve a client of such traumas, which are usually symbols of the client’s core issue.

The principal dictum—both spoken and unspoken—of many past-life therapists is, “To relive is to relieve.” In my own experience as a therapist in this field, reliving is just one part of the PLT process, and in some instances merely reliving a past life can be deleterious—it usually shocks the present personality’s emotional body, the nervous system, the glandular systems, and the electromagnetic systems, replaying the entire inner tape of the past-life trauma.

The client’s emotions and energy body are consequently left in a very vulnerable condition—one that must be dealt with.

If it does seem necessary to have a client relive a previous lifetime, then I strongly feel it is the therapist’s duty to help the client heal all the wounds of that lifetime, which the therapist has been instrumental in accessing. Since there are methods of inner healing which can easily be employed by any PLT practitioner, they should be used in most regressions—with the consent of the client, of course.