by Eric Christopher, M.S.
Abstract
Eric Christopher, M.S., has applied the techniques of entity Releasement Therapy, as taught by numerous professionals, to patients on a psychiatric unit who are hearing unwanted voices. He has observed that the disturbing voices are immediately eliminated in certain circumstances, offering great relief to the patient. Here is an account of his experiences employing this modality. He encourages any person or professional who works with people who hear unwanted voices to consider research with this efficient process.
Exactly twenty years ago, Louise Ireland-Frey wrote an insightful 17 page article for the fall edition of the first volume of The Journal of Regression Therapy called “Clinical Depossession: Releasement of Attached Entities From Unsuspecting Hosts.” Twenty years later, I find myself writing an article to share my experiences in applying the techniques and insights of this healing modality while I’ve been working on an adult locked psychiatric unit, specifically with patients who hear unwanted voices. In addition to my private therapy practice, I’ve worked as a counselor on this psychiatric unit half time for 16 years. Roughly a third of the patients who are admitted to the unit experience what is considered by the established medical model to be auditory and/or visual hallucinations. In rare instances, the voices are reported as helpful, and occasionally they are funny. Mostly, however, the voices are not only quite distracting, but can be tormenting as they fill the patient’s mind with relentless vulgarities, or with command hallucinations to “jump out the window,” “cut your arm,” or “kill yourself,” for example.
What is a hallucination? Webster’s dictionary defines a hallucination as “an illusion of perceiving something that is nonexistent.” But are these voices non-existent? Many times I’ve witnessed a staff trying to comfort a patient who is hearing voices by telling them, “it’s just a hallucination,” only to receive an angry retort, “it’s not just a hallucination! I hear it!” The term “hallucination” in these cases may be more accurately applied if the definition expands to include: “perceiving something that is non-existent in the physical reality.”
Presently the western medical model does not recognize something considered to be in the “spiritual realm”, or something vibrating at a frequency that is out of our range of auditory or visual senses. Therefore, from this paradigm of operation, the voices don’t really exist, and thus the mode of therapy to quell voices on a psychiatric unit is the same for all other problems: psychotropic medications. An old rule of thumb regarding the success of these medications when dealing with voices is: “It works great about a third of the time, helps a bit another third of the time, and hardly at all on a third of the cases.” In reality, the success of medications depends upon the patient and the circumstances. However, the side effects of prolonged use of the medications may be hand tremors, nausea, tiredness, sedation, and weight gain, among others.
This article, of course, is not a condemnation of medications, as they often aid in alleviating unwanted symptoms, and can help propel a person toward healing. Rather, the purpose of this article is to share my experience of using the modality of spirit releasement with people hearing unwanted voices, and to encourage others to consider exploring what may be a more efficient and effective approach in certain circumstances when dealing with clients who struggle with these symptoms.
I’ve observed success using Releasement Therapy to the point where the voices are immediately eliminated in approximately 16 out of 25 cases. I suspect the future will reveal more consistently favorable results as I have been noting the situations which yield the best outcomes when dealing with this population. For instance, it does not work well if the patient appears very disorganized, confused, and unable to concentrate. It also doesn’t work if the patient partially wants the voice to remain for any reason. It tends to work well with patients who appear to be in acute distress due to the voices. These findings coincide with those reported by Shakuntala Modi, M.D. in her book Remarkable Healings, which is about her success using Releasement Therapy on a variety of illnesses.
When releasement works properly, I’ve observed that the voices leave immediately and the results have lasted up to the point of patient discharge from the hospital, which may be days or even weeks later. I have not tracked for extended results after the patient leaves the hospital. It should be noted that in each case, I have not worked with a patient more than once and not for a period over 30 minutes, due to time constraints and other considerations on the psychiatric unit. It would be far more therapeutic for the patient, and likely yield better results, if more time could be spent healing past trauma or events, as well as strengthening the protective energy shield that surrounds the patient. I usually teach patients how to do this on their own. Thus, another purpose for this article emerges: An appeal to any professional or person in the healing profession who works with people hearing unwanted voices to consider research or a study using this modality of treatment.
First case example
About two years ago I had my first case of spirit releasement. The patient was in her 40’s. This is an example of a typical session. I discovered her crying, rocking back and forth, her hands covering both ears:
Client: Yelling repeatedly, “shut up!”
Therapist: What is wrong?
Client: (Crying out loudly) “the voices.”
Therapist: Do you want them to leave?
Client: “Yes!” (Excitedly)
I next applied a combined approach of the techniques from Hans Ten Dam’s book Deep Healing and William Baldwin’s book Spirit Releasement Therapy: A Technique Manual.
Therapist: “Imagine that you are sitting in a room that is your room. Say “ok” when you visualize that.
Client: Ok.
Therapist: Visualize you are facing the door. Say ok when you see that.
Client: Ok.
Therapist: “Now you invite in the source of the voices. I will count from 3 to 1 and snap my fingers. When I snap my fingers the source will be there. 3…2…1 (snap). Who or what enters?”
Client: “Some man came in.”
I had her ask him various questions such as “Why are you here?…When did you arrive? Now you get an impression of when he arrived.” She said he came when she was 12 years old while her dad was molesting her. I said, “Tell him to turn around and see how he died. Now you get an impression of how he died.” “Explain to him that he’s dead and he should move into the light so he can continue to grow and evolve as a soul. His work here is finished.”
Usually there is some hesitancy on the part of the soul to leave, so Ten Dam and Baldwin both suggest a plethora of ways to cajole the soul into leaving. I had her ask the entity a key question:
Therapist: “Ask him who he loved and trusted the most in his last life.”
Client: “His mother.”
Therapist: “Tell him to call up to her with concentration and from the heart, and she will come down to get him.”
Client: “She came.”
Therapist: “What is the reunion like?”
Client: “They’re really happy to see each other.”
Therapist: “Have her take him into the light, watch them go, and tell me when you can’t see them anymore.”
Client: (After some time) “They’re gone.”
Next I invited her to visualize divine, healing light coming into the top of her head, going down, over, under. and through her body, healing it, cleansing it, letting the light push out any residual energy through her fingers and toes that was not her energy. I had her expand the energy to an arm’s length all around her and bask in it for a few minutes. This visualization strengthens the aura.
Later she told me that she felt lighter, which is a common description of how a person describes feeling after a releasement process. She reported that she felt like her whole self again, and that for the first time in almost 30 years, she felt the voices gone completely. She then corrected herself, saying that one time the pastor of her church and four other congregants gathered around her to pray that “the demon” leave her, and it did for about a month but then it came back. In our case, the absence of voices lasted at least 10 days. She was discharged from the hospital and I never saw her again.
Although the voices may leave, other thought and behavior issues often still remain, as deeper work needs to be done. Ideally, the therapist should go back and heal the circumstance or event when the entity entered the patient, as well as other times of trauma.
In another instance, I helped one patient alleviate the voices in her head, but she continued to think that the mafia was after her to kill her. Perhaps it was another entity, or a past-life issue, or maybe the mafia really was trying to kill her. I saw her in the hospital again several months later, still alive and with the same fears.
Second Case Example
In a more recent example, I approached a young woman who was huddled in the corner of the unit lounge, very frightened because she saw blood on the walls and heard the voice of her dead brother saying horrible and vulgar things to her. Her brother had been shot to death by gang members after he went to Chicago to visit his grandmother. It had been a case of mistaken identity.
Therapist: “Is it characteristic of your brother to speak that way to you.”
Client: “Never. We were very close. He looked out for me.”
I deduced that a dark entity either got into her brother or else was disguising the voice to sound like her brother. As in the previous example, I had her imagine that she was in a room that belonged to her and she was facing the door. She cringed when I asked her to invite in the source of the voice. However, soon she was talking sweetly to it after she learned it was very angry because “nobody ever loved him while he was alive.”
I eventually asked her to tell him to call out to a grandmother who died when he was an infant. She told me, “He’s listening to you, you can tell him directly.” A few moments later, she said, “Oh, she’s here. She’s really glowing a gold color. Her name is Violet.” After they disappeared into the light together and she filled herself with healing light to an arms length away, her face was peacefully beaming a smile. She no longer heard voices and she no longer saw blood on the walls. This continued for two more days until her discharge, and I have not seen her since. The entire process took about 15 minutes, which is typical.
Periodically, the client won’t see an entity in the form of a person, but simply dark energy. In these circumstances, Baldwin recommends dealing with the dark energy differently. He suggests various techniques, one of which is asking the client to visualize a sticky web of light surrounding the dark energy form and calling to an angel to come down and bring it into the light, if it won’t go on its own.
Sometimes clients do not get answers to their questions. In these cases, there are a number of different ways described in Releasement Therapy manuals to usher the foreign energy out of the host, into the light, and then seal up the client’s aura.
In three instances on the psychiatric unit, the voices came back after a couple of days. In each of these cases, the patients did not seem too concerned, saying that they felt as if they had control over the voices now, and that they weren’t feeling victimized by them anymore. They felt they could communicate with them and that they really had the power over the voices now. In other words, their perspective and reaction to the voices had completely changed.
The late Dr. Sunny Satin, pioneering the teaching of Releasement Therapy in India and other countries, shared his insights regarding this modality: “The most important thing is to be careful about how you feel about the spirit attachment while releasing it. If you feel weak towards it, it will become much more powerful than you. If you know that this is just a lost soul who needs love and direction to find its way back home to the light, then you will easily send it to the light.”
There is value in employing Releasement Therapy when dealing with unwanted voices. It can be done quickly without the side effects of medication. It empowers the individual when it works, and it helps out a stranded soul, or perhaps a fragment of one. Perhaps in the future and in the right circumstances, this quick and effective approach could be tried first before relying on medications. Even though this method lies outside of the current paradigm of treatment, it seems to make sense to those afflicted with hearing unwanted voices. For those professionals who have difficulty believing in the concept of entity attachment, it works just as well if it is framed as though the process is a merely a game that the patient plays with their powerful subconscious mind, as he or she pretends to talk with the source of the voices, telling it to leave.
Further research into this method of treatment for unwanted voices is warranted. The main obstacle that stands in the way of further understanding of this treatment modality is belief systems. One of my favorite analogies regarding belief systems is to imagine ultimate reality as an infinite, dark storeroom that we are standing in the middle of. We can’t see anything. There are some people that hold a match to shine light out a little distance to gain an understanding of what is out there, and they may mistakenly believe that what they see is ultimate reality. Others may hold a stronger candle and thus, their perceptions and understandings of reality are more inclusive and extend further. Others may carry a torch and their light of awareness goes even farther.
I believe that as humanity as a whole continues on in this time-space dimension, we will collectively be given a larger light with which to understand reality. As this happens, the acknowledgement of a spiritual dimension may naturally begin to take hold of the collective awareness, as it already seems to be happening judging by the spiritual content that major network television shows have been airing recently. When the evidence and belief of a high-vibration spiritual dimension reaches the mainstream, perhaps the western medical model will begin to widen its paradigm to consider accessing and utilizing this spiritual realm at times in order to guide clients toward physical and mental health and wholeness. Until then, may we continue to explore and create!
References
Baldwin, William J. Spirit Releasement Therapy: A Technique Manual. Terra Alta, WV: Headline Books, Inc., 2002.
Ireland-Frey, Louise. “Clinical Depossession: Releasement of Attached Entities From Unsuspecting Hosts”. The Journal of Regression Therapy, I, (2). 41-58, 1986.
Modi, Shakuntala, M.D. Remarkable Healings: A Psychiatrist Discovers Unsuspected Roots of Mental and Physical Illness. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.
Ten Dam, Hans. Deep Healing. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Tasso Publishing, 1996.