“THE BOOK THAT started it all,” according to its publishers, with “revelations of alien-human contact” was Missing Time by Budd Hopkins. The author created a sensation with the accounts related by seven people under repeated sessions of hypnosis. They told how they were temporarily abducted by aliens and taken aboard UFOs, where they were held captive and violated with bodily intrusions that left mysterious scars. The similarities in the victims’ descriptions of their alien abductors and the experiments they endured led the author to conclude that what the people had described was exactly what happened. And yet even the jacket copy on the back of the book offers a clue to a different explanation:
Hopkins could not have told the stories of those victims without having first discovered the one experience common to all who report alien encounters—the phenomenon known as missing time. Missing Time tells how the people who have experienced abductions retained no memory of them—all traces of the trauma were effectively erased from their memory.
Amnesia was the one experience common to all of the victims, and only under hypnosis were they able to recall the “trauma.” But what trauma was it? Were they remembering an actual abduction by aliens from outer space or a previous trauma of childhood abuse that their own inner aliens—their dissociated hidden parts—had reconstructed into a less stressful memory? Were these real images or symbols of a reality from which they had disconnected?
The SCID-D holds an answer to their symptoms. Absolutely everything in the transcripts of the people describing alien abductions has analogies to what abuse survivors report on their experiences of the five dissociative symptoms on the SCID-D. The conclusion is clear: alien abduction stories are probably screen memories, partial or implicit memories, of feelings and sensations associated with early childhood trauma that block the actual memory of the trauma. They are a symbolic form of dissociated traumatic memories of childhood sexual or other abuse—a psychological event rather than explicit memories of a real occurrence.
Howard Rich, one of the abductees in Missing Time, recalled under hypnosis seeing an incredibly bright “blue light”—not unlike Jean’s “green light”—one night while he was visiting his mother and was alone in a ground floor bedroom. Impelled by fear and an intense feeling of being in danger, he went outside to investigate and was gone for what he thought was a few minutes, but what the clock later revealed was more than an hour. During this period of amnesia Howard claimed that he saw dark, shadowy figures he couldn’t identify—“just black—the shapes—the figures”—and felt a muscular paralysis that rendered him helpless.
Floating outside his body, Howard moved into a thick black cloud and onto a high, flat table and was subjected to an “examination.” While he continued to feel that he was floating and that everything around him was dreamlike, the kind of pleasant numbing of an anesthetic, the shadowy figures probed him with bright lights that were all around the room and touched him everywhere. Howard’s breathing became agitated and his muscles tensed at this point in the hypnosis session. He said that he felt “something happening down there.” Reliving the experience, he arched his back and bent his neck as if in sudden pain and cried out, “Oh, God! It hurts—it hurts—Oh!” Emotionally he felt there was a struggle going on inside him to dispel his fear of his captors and prove to himself that he was stronger. Without remembering his legs’ walking, Howard returned to the bedroom in his mothers house and awoke in the morning with a few droplets of blood on his pillow.
It took Howard a week to recover from the anxiety that the traumatic memory provoked. He told Hopkins that he had suffered from “a powerful sense of having done something forbidden, of having betrayed an important injunction not to remember and not to tell what happened to him.”
Remember Vince, the former football player in Chapter 5 who suffered from severe dissociative amnesia and saw “dark people” or shadowy figures who accosted him during his daily episodes of lost time? They held him down, stuck needles in him, or tried to strangle him. When Vince relived their assaults during his trances, like Howard, he arched his back and stretched his neck until he was in pain. Vince was originally diagnosed as having DDNOS, a milder dissociative illness than DID But that diagnosis was changed to DID when he later began to describe the different people who existed inside him and recovered memories of being sexually abused by priests in Catholic school during his childhood. This abuse was the actual trauma for which the attacks by the shadowy “dark people” in his trances were screen memories.
If Howard had been given the SCID-D, he would have shown moderate to severe levels of all five dissociative symptoms:
Amnesia: Howard had significant periods of time that he couldn’t account for by memory.
Depersonalization: He had also experienced bodily floating, automatic moving, a feeling of being anesthetized, and self-injury he had no awareness of (probably caused by inserting his finger inside his nose, as other alien abduction reports indicate).
Derealization: Howard had the feeling of being in a dream in which the surroundings were strange and unreal and having perceptual distortions like the “blue light,” the “black cloud,” and the lights inside the cloud.
Identity confusion: Howard had the feeling of having his identity stripped from him while his body was being used for experimentation and had sensed an internal struggle over his own physical strength and his sense of helplessness.
Identity alteration: Howard had the feeling of having no will of his own and the perception that other personalities (externalized as aliens) were taking control of his behavior.
Howard’s physical movements during hypnosis and his crying out in pain are analogous to the behavior of DID patients reliving traumatic events of childhood sexual abuse in flashbacks. Many other abductees report having nasal or anal probes inserted into them and having semen or ova withdrawn from them with some kind of instrument. A ubiquitous tool that appears in the accounts is a “bullet-shaped” or cylindrical object with a rounded bulbous end, seven or eight inches long, and “over twice as thick” as a man’s thumb—an obvious phallic symbol. One of the male abductees reported having his legs raised by round metal loops on the table so that he was forced into the same kind of posture as a woman in obstetrical stirrups. All of the people in Missing Time spoke of feeling strong, externally imposed fear or waking up paralyzed by a sense of a strange presence in the room; of being in a hazy, dreamlike, out-of-body state; of being held captive on a high, flat table or bed by humanoids with mechanical limbs reminiscent of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz; of having something painfully implanted in them and a sample taken from them, usually in the groin or lower abdominal region; and of being used in a single-minded, unfeeling way by these creatures, who, as one man put it, “were just out to do their job.”
All of this can be seen as an emerging partial memory of sexual abuse by exploitative perpetrators whom the victims feel compelled to hide because they are usually threatened with bodily harm or death if they reveal the truth. Howard’s sense of having disobeyed an important injunction not to remember and not to tell what happened to him is a common feeling among survivors of childhood sexual abuse who’ve dissociated from the trauma and are loath to report it.
What better way to dissociate from one’s trauma and the perpetrator of it than to attribute it to someone else, some imaginary figure—in this case, an alien that no one can find or identify? This concealment is very consistent with Jennifer Frye’s betrayal blindness theory. The majority of adults who recall alien abduction experiences under hypnosis remember being abducted before as children, often when they were six or seven years old. As Jennifer Frye has explained, young children who are betrayed by people who are supposed to be their primary caretakers have to turn a blind eye to it or they won’t survive.
Breaking Down the Wall of Silence by Alice Miller, a lay analyst who blocked out her own abuse for some sixty years, points out that society also makes it very difficult for people to retain explicit memories of child- hood abuse. People who go public with their experiences may run into resistance by skeptics in the media. Or they may meet with a reluctance to get involved among people they tell, who act like bystanders stolidly walking, eyes averted, past an accident victim lying on the sidewalk. Psychoanalysis itself is a system that suppresses the truth about abuse in childhood, Miller says, dating back to Freud’s time in 1897 when the subject of child abuse was banned from psychoanalytic circles. Freud, perhaps unable to confront his own childhood, proclaimed that childhood sexual abuse existed only in his patients’ fantasy lives and made his students suppress any hint of such abuse whenever it appeared.
Today teachers, social workers, child protection agencies, and law enforcement officers are becoming increasingly aware of how widespread and devastating child abuse is, but too many people are still looking the other way. The societal wall of silence may no longer be impenetrable, but it is still standing tall.
We have an ever-growing number of people who are now able to identify that they’ve been traumatized—but by “aliens.” The screen memories they’ve created to explain what they’ve been forbidden to remember shows the extent of their disconnection, a very fundamental problem that occurs in dissociative disorders. Implicit memories, instead of being taken figuratively as metaphors for the actual trauma, are being taken literally by an entire subculture in our society who believe in alien abduction.
Virginia Horton, one of the abductees in Missing Time, actually saw a resemblance between her imaginary abductor and the real perpetrator who wanted to take “a little itty bitty piece of her”—her grandfather. Her hypnosis sessions also provide concrete evidence of the existence of alternate personalities within Virginia. Much of the time she spoke like a six-year-old girl, at other times like a sixties teenager, and the rest of the time like a contemporary highly intelligent adult.
Described as a happily married thirty-five-year-old lawyer with a major corporation, Virginia recalled under hypnosis that her family was living on her grandfather’s farm when she had her first episode of memory loss as a six-year-old girl. She was in the barn gathering eggs and arrived in the yard of the house with a deep gash on the back of her calf, having no memory of going from the barn to the yard and no idea how she had cut herself. There was no tear in her jeans or other sign of a mishap. At age sixteen on a family picnic in France Virginia had another lengthy memory blank while playing in the woods. She returned to her family with blood on her blouse and no explanation for it.
Under hypnosis after expressing considerable fear of remembering these incidents, Virginia recalled that the cut on her leg was made by aliens using a tubular instrument that resembled “a long electric massager”—easily a symbolic penis. She remembered lying on a couch surrounded by shadowy people performing experiments in a room full of silver-colored objects sparkling like crystals (perceptual distortions common in derealization). She felt the presence of the people more than she could see them, as if they had to remain hidden or their appearance would scare her. The one person she spoke to, she said, reminded her of her grandfather—“somebody who’s older and whom I’m very comfortable around.” She later added that he wouldn’t tell her how old he was, “and that reminds me of my grandfather, too, who used to lie about his age.”
As for the wound in her leg, Virginia says that she didn’t feel any pain because she was told that she wouldn’t feel it—another way of describing how a self-injurer numbs feelings of pain during a depersonalization episode. “It was like the pain was inside and the pain wanted to come out,” Virginia said, “but I don’t think it hurt at the time.”
Under hypnosis Virginia attributed the mysterious blood she found on her blouse when she was a teenager at a family picnic in France to an alien abduction. The humanoid abductors who carried her aboard the UFO and set her down on the couch had an outer layer that was not skin, but a gray, skinlike fabric that masked their faces. Again the captor who communicated with her reminded her of her grandfather, a very patient old man who wouldn’t reveal his age and liked to explain things.
During this abduction Virginia encountered a pretty deer with a personality of a female schoolgirl, close in age to Virginia at the time, who seemed to be her best, long-lost friend—a description that sounds very much like a hidden part of herself, possibly an animal alternate personality. Speaking like a teenager, Virginia recalled that she floated out of her body and was taken for a ride by the deer, flying above the earth. But Virginia admitted that she might have invented the deer or that it might have had a “hypnotic cover.” Like all abductees, she was not sure how much of her story was speculation to “fill in” for feelings or circumstances she couldn’t account for because of her amnesia. The author himself asks, “Was Virginia’s trip the recollection of an actual event or was it, perhaps, something else—an interpolated dream or an artificially induced image like the nonexistent deer?”
The blood on her blouse, Virginia said, was the result of a probe that was inserted into her nose so that it wouldn’t leave a mark like the scar on her leg. For a reason she couldn’t understand, this “research mission” was very exciting for her abductors and a cause for celebration. Her attempt to explain this excitement on the basis of an award for “extraterrestrial biology,” the author notes, “clearly implies a guess, an approximation that is metaphorical rather than literal.” That can be said for the entire alien abduction account—it’s an attempt to make sense of blurred memories of childhood sexual abuse that are only half understood. Hypnosis puts survivors in touch with the hidden parts of themselves that are stuck in time and still reliving the experience symbolically.
All of the alien abduction accounts make a point of the captors’ having metallic limbs or using metallic instruments to take what they need in a cold, self-serving manner—“a one-way transaction,” as Budd Hopkins puts it. He reports that for reasons that are vague to them, abductees say that they were singled out and were made to feel “special, loved, members of the ‘select.’” Hopkins likens this technique to the “love bombing” used by religious cults to weaken the opposition of their potential converts and set them up for unusual demands that will be made of them. If you read between the lines in this dialogue excerpted from a male abductees account, the seduction seems much more personal. The alien abductor professing love can be seen as a child’s useful metaphor for a sexually abusive caretaker trying to relax the child standing paralyzed with fear before him:
He wants—to hug me—says-says, “Why are you scared?”
“Someone loves you very deeply, and they want to see you. Close your eyes and be still.”
A “painful operation of some kind” follows, and the terrified victim asks, “What are you—what are you putting me in? What? It hurts—oh! Can’t see—can’t see—can’t see—can’t breathe.”
Told to relax, the captive says, “OK, OK, OK, I’m relaxed. I’m relaxed! Help! Help!” Another painful process follows, and the victim complains of cramps in his hands and arms and says, “Oh, my body is vibrating—I’m just standing here. I can’t see. Something is above me—and it makes me vibrate.”
Afterward, the captor flatters his victim with words that imply some kind of mind control: “We are working until your mind. We know you have very strong mental abilities.”
To abuse survivors this supposed alien seems deplorably all too human.
What about the argument that there must be some truth to alien abduction because of all the similarities in the descriptions of the aliens, their space ships, and the nature of the experiments? This is the argument advanced not only by Budd Hopkins, but by the prestigiously credentialed John E. Mack, M.D., a tenured professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who wrote his own book on the subject, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. The anecdotes in Dr. Mack’s book were criticized for a lack of scientific methodology, but the similarities raised the question of an overall pattern. How is it that the aliens are all between four and five feet tall in stature and look the same—fetuslike with large hairless heads, soft whitish gray skin, big black eyes? And why do the UFOs all resemble the ones we saw in ET or Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
Carl Sagan, a longtime acquaintance of Mack’s, had an answer for this. He pointed out that the fantasy life of people has always been influenced by prevailing cultural images in all times and places. When everyone believed that gods regularly came down to earth, gods were what people envisioned as fearsome otherworldly beings. In the Middle Ages, when demons were in vogue, it was incubi and succubi. Later, when fairies were widely believed in, it was fairies that were said to paralyze and rape human victims. Now, in the space age, when we are sending space ships to Mars and have begun to think that aliens might exist, aliens descending from space ships are the imaginary predators that people see in their dreams and flashbacks.
What I find most consistent about these humanoid figures is that the people who see them can’t identify them. Their strangeness is their overriding feature—the “strangeness” of familiar people that occurs in dissociative episodes. Abductees have the same dissociative symptoms as the trauma survivors that I see in my psychiatric practice. Part of what defines a posttraumatic disorder is that there are consistent, reliable ways that people respond to trauma. The consistency of the abductees’ symptoms, including the derealization of their abusers into strange or unfamiliar beings, fits in perfectly with the clinical picture of a dissociative disorder.
Dorene, a patient I first saw about ten years ago, has been living alone for seventeen years since her divorce and is now in her sixties. She began treatment convinced that burglars were breaking into her home. What were they taking? Nothing valuable—they were moving her underwear around. Personal items that she had placed in certain locations weren’t in them, and then she would find them in places that she had never put them. She was so paranoid about these intruders that she went to the managers of her apartment building and asked them to change her locks numerous times, and they did. But this problem continued, causing her much distress and prompting her grown daughter to think she was crazy. The clinic she went to for treatment asked me to evaluate her, and I suspected that she had a dissociative disorder. Dorene, however, was convinced that intruders were breaking into her home, and no one could talk her out of it. She was as certain of that as people who insist they were abducted by aliens.
Recently Dorene went back into treatment at the clinic, and once again I was asked to evaluate her. The SCID-D showed that she had each of the five core symptoms:
She had memory problems concerning things she put away and couldn’t find although she believed that somebody else was moving them. She also said that her head was in a “fog” at rimes and that she once found herself in a different city and couldn’t remember anything about herself—a classic example of amnesia.
Depersonalization manifested itself about four times a month when Dorene felt that she became a “spirit” watching herself, or felt that her hand was disconnected, or looked in the mirror and said, “Who’s that? That’s not me.”
In terms of derealization, Dorene reported going home sometimes and thinking, “This is not my house. This place is strange. Where am I?” She’d think that a door should be in a certain place, and it wasn’t, or she didn’t know where her bedroom was.
She expressed identity confusion this way: “I’ve always felt I wasn’t me—I’ve felt it for years.” She once told a priest that she was possessed because she felt as if someone else was making her do things. Recalling an experience she had when she was in the hospital, she said, “I would feel and see someone on top of me, and I felt like someone was making love to me.” After she left the hospital, this feeling of being possessed recurred for months.
Dorene manifested identity alteration in several ways. A gifted pianist, she volunteered to play at a senior citizens’ home and would find every so often that she was unable to play at all. “What’s wrong?” the man who accompanied her on the violin would ask. Dorene had no answer, not realizing that an alternate personality who couldn’t play the piano had taken control. Another manifestation was Dorene’s automatic writing—a very common occurrence among DID patients when alters take over. She recalled that it was a little girl named Doris—a ten-year-old who had been sexually abused and wanted retribution—who was doing the automatic writing. Dorene did not identify Doris as part of herself. Feeling frightened by the angry childish writing by her own hand, she would tell Doris, “Don’t come back!”
In addition to these symptoms Dorene suffered from migraine headaches and a fear of choking—two physical symptoms that are very common among people with a dissociative disorder related to childhood sexual abuse. Earlier in her life Dorene had worked at a variety of jobs. A bright, attractive woman, she had no trouble finding work, but she was fired again and again. She’d do well on the job for a while, until one day she would abruptly stop going to work because “something happened inside of me”—apparently one of her alters took control.
I was able to identify a few personalities within her. There was Doris, for one, the little girl who came out during her automatic writing. And there was another hidden part she called by a completely different name from hers—Vanessa Langdon—who was very extroverted. Dorene said that she felt she was playing a role when she acted like Vanessa. She herself tended to be more introverted, having grown up in a violent home with a brother who was a drug addict. Although she didn’t remember being sexually abused, she thought it was possible that she had been.
I explained to Dorene how the human mind uses dissociation to cope with trauma. The intruders moving her personal belongings around in her home might be internal parts of herself she had dissociated from as a child, I told her, and had dissociated from a second time by thinking that they were external intruders. When I asked her what Vanessa Langdon might say about that if she could speak to me, she said, “I’m glad the doctor’s really getting to the bottom of this.”
A distinction needs to be made between people who believe they have been abducted by aliens and sightees who report witnessing unidentified flying objects (UFOs) but do not recall extraterrestrial contact. A study undertaken in 1994 by Susan Marie Powers, Ph.D., a research psychologist, assessed the dissociative symptoms in three groups of people: abductees, sightees, and sexually abused persons who had good recall of their experiences involving penetration but did not recall any extraterrestrial contact. Dr. Powers found that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD symptoms were manifested by 45 percent of the abductees, none of the sightees, and 70 percent of the sexually abused subjects. Dissociative symptoms were demonstrated by 70 percent of the abductees, 10 percent of the sightees, and 100 percent of the sexually abused subjects. Neither of the two screening inventories that were used was specifically designed to evaluate dissociative symptoms. Had the SCID-D been available at the time and administered, it might have found an even higher prevalence of all five dissociative symptoms among the abductees.
The study by Dr. Powers confirmed previous findings that there are important differences between the person who alleges that he or she saw a UFO and a person who says he or she was physically violated by aliens. Sightees who do not report any subsequent contact with extraterrestrials or abduction tend to produce normal scores on psychological tests, whereas abductees do not. It is beyond the purview of this book to make any assumptions one way or another about the reliability of UFO sightings. What can be said with certainty is that people who claim to have had contact with alien abductors experience dissociative symptoms that are virtually identical to those found in people with dissociative disorders.
Dr. Powers cited research by Ring and Rosing (1990) indicating that people who claim contact with aliens often have a childhood history of physical and/or sexual abuse. Why then did the sexually abused population produce higher scores on the screening inventories than the abductee group? Dr. Powers suggested that as screen memories for early childhood trauma such as sexual abuse, the alien abduction narratives may function as “coping mechanisms that mitigate the experience of re-lived trauma.” Remembering the “reconstituted memory” in the form of alien abduction, she said, “might be less stressful than confronting the trauma of childhood abuse perpetrated by relatives or family friends.”
One facet of alien abduction that Budd Hopkins found perplexing was the “externally induced amnesia.” He thought that the aliens probably forced this amnesia upon the abductees by posthypnotic suggestion, but then asked, “Why is it done, especially if the UFO occupants know it can in many cases be broached by our own terrestrial hypnotic techniques? And why have there been cases where it was apparently not used at all?”
Hopkins speculated that the traumatic experience was blocked from conscious memory for the good of the abductees—talking about it to others would invite doubts about their sanity and compromise their role as “human specimens” being studied over a period of years. He also thought that amnesia failed for some people because they fainted and could not have posthypnotic suggestions implanted while they were unconscious. But why wasn’t the externally enforced amnesia more successful when, supposedly, it was implanted?
Dissociation is the piece of the puzzle that solves this mystery. Amnesia was enforced not by posthypnotic suggestion, but by verbal threats (Steven Kilburn, one abductee, actually recalled under hypnosis being told not to remember anything or he might die). And it was also self-imposed by the victims—child victims who were not violated by aliens, but by abusive caretakers and had to dissociate from the trauma and be blind to the perpetrators as a matter of survival. Abductees remembered the trauma not because posthypnotic suggestion failed to block their memories of alien abduction, but because hypnosis succeeded in temporarily dispelling the amnesia that hid their dissociated screen memories of childhood abuse.
Dr. Aphrodite Claymar, a psychologist who hypnotized a number of the subjects in Missing Time, admitted that after spending more that fifty hours with a dozen subjects who were under hypnosis, she still could not say whether the alien abduction experience was real or not. She further admitted that the subjects had not been subjected to “the kind of psychological testing that might provide a deeper understanding of their personalities.” Budd Hopkins had hoped that Dr. Claymar would be able to provide a final answer by inducing hypnosis in the abductees. But the evidence that would establish these similar experiences as something more than fantasy, she said, remained “disturbingly elusive.” She concluded, “The answer to the question has not yet been devised, the key to unlock the secret not yet found.”
Dissociation, identified by the presence of the five core symptoms, is that key.
Imagining that one’s childhood trauma occurred in a previous historical period is another way of dissociating from it. A belief in past lives allows people to externalize abuse to a different century and maintain attachments to family members who may have abused them in this life—a necessary disconnection because it’s too threatening to confront that abuse even in adulthood. It’s easier to think that one was a slave in ancient Egypt, for example, than to accept that one was oppressed and exploited in this life by loved and trusted caretakers. Again the narratives of past lives that are recalled under hypnosis are, like alien abduction narratives, metaphorical rather than literal accounts of what happened. People with past lives are not ready to say that they have different people inside them, but they can instead say that they themselves had different lives.
The ability of people with past lives to recall under hypnosis accurate descriptions of countries and cultures in previous times, or to speak languages they didn’t know they knew, or to demonstrate extraordinary intuition can be explained by dissociative amnesia. This fluctuation in knowledge and skills is very characteristic of people with a dissociative disorder. They have talents and information they’re unaware of that might have been acquired by an alternate personality—skills or knowledge they don’t remember having acquired in another personality state, as opposed to having learned them in another life.
The man who is credited with giving legitimacy to past life experiences is Brian Weiss, M.D., a psychiatrist who is a graduate of Yale Medical School and author of the book Many Lives, Many Masters (Simon and Schuster, 1988). Dr. Weiss’s book tells the story of Catherine, a twenty-eight-year-old patient of his, who suffered from severe anxiety and panic attacks and phobias. She feared choking and darkness, as well as water, airplanes, being trapped, and dying. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was hospitalized for depression and had shock treatments when Catherine was eleven. As the middle child she never enjoyed the freedom that her older brother had and the favoritism showered on her younger sister by both parents. At the time Catherine started therapy she had been involved in a six-year affair with Stuart, a married doctor who emotionally abused and manipulated her. Catherine was a lab technician at the same hospital where Dr. Weiss was chief of psychiatry, and she went to see him because she felt she was losing control over her life.
After eighteen months of unfruitful conventional therapy, Dr. Weiss decided to try hypnosis. Catherine remembered “amazingly few” traumatic events from her earlier years under hypnosis other than being pushed from a diving board into a pool when she was five. Reliving the experience, she started to choke and gag, but the gagging stopped when Dr. Weiss suggested that the experience was over and she was out of the water. Then she recalled “the worst event of all,” which occurred at age three: her father, reeking of alcohol, entered her dark bedroom at night and molested her. When the terrified child began to cry, he covered her mouth with his hand, and she could not breathe. Catherine began to sob in Dr. Weiss’s office, and again he comforted her by suggesting that the experience was over.
During the next few months of weekly hypnotic regressions, Catherine accessed hidden parts of herself that she recalled as different personalities in past lives. Their stories are quite revealing. There is Aronda, a young woman in 1863 B.C., who, together with her baby (recognized by Catherine as her niece in real life), drowns in a flood. In a subsequent lifetime Aronda reappears in the Royal House as a servant, and her death this time is peaceful—she floats out of her body. Johan, a young man in America in the days when bows and arrows were used, goes on a scouting expedition in a canoe and is killed when an enemy fighter grabs him from behind and slits his throat with a knife. Catherine catches a glimpse of the killers face and sees Stuart—her real-life lover. She next finds herself floating above her body, observing the scene below, and being pulled into a “tiny, warm” space, about to be born. The mother holding her is, Catherine says in surprise, “the same mother I have now!”
There are many other incarnations, during some of which Catherine speaks in voices and speech patterns that are different from her own. As Elizabeth, speaking as a child might, she becomes frightened when she recalls her father’s fighting with her mother and pushing the children. Eventually Elizabeth marries happily and dies peacefully in old age, again floating out of her body. As Abby, a black servant on a plantation in the South in the 1880s, Catherine sleeps with a man without being married to him. She dies of a fever in her sixties and floats out of her body, drawn toward the light to be reborn. In all of Catherine’s hypnosis sessions she experiences or reexperiences lifetimes of poverty, physical pain, servitude, and abuse within her family. When she dies, she always floats out of her body toward a new incarnation in a different lifetime.
In one session Catherine enters her present lifetime as herself at age five. Whining like a child, she complains that her father is beating her with a heavy stick and forcing her to eat food she hates that is going to make her sick. When asked why he is punishing her like that, she says, “He hates me for what he did, and he hates himself. So he must punish me.… I must have done something to make him do that.” Dr. Weiss points out why this deep guilt she has carried with her since she was a baby is unreasonable and tells her that she has to relieve herself of it.
In one of her past lives Catherine looks at her father’s face and sees Stuart—both think she is a nuisance. In an ancient lifetime her father and her brother die, and a spiritual entity called a Poet Master, speaking in a different voice, says that we must have patience: “A life cannot be rushed, cannot be worked on a schedule as so many people want it to be.” When Catherine’s body is burned in a fire in a past life, another spiritual part of herself, a Master Spirit, explains that we don’t need our bodies: “Our body is just a vehicle for us while we’re here; it is our soul and our spirit that last forever.”
Dr. Weiss thought that the information Catherine imparted about previous times and the spiritual and intuitive insights of the “Masters” or “spirit entities” were beyond Catherine’s conscious capacities. The conscious Catherine, when awake, he said, was much more limited and comparatively superficial—“oblivious of the genius within her.” He concluded that she was not herself but in a “superconscious state” when she relayed the messages from the Masters about such concepts as patience; trust and forgiveness; eradication of fears, especially fear of death; not judging others or halting anyone’s life; and, most of all, our immortality.
Dr. Weiss had no scientific explanation for the disparity between Catherine’s conscious personality and her “superconscious” one. Although he recognized that her repeated experiences of floating out of her body were akin to “near-death” experiences described by others, he did not identify this as a sign of the dissociative symptom of depersonalization. Several times in his book he ruled out a dissociative basis for Catherine’s condition without evaluating her for dissociation in a systematic manner. Once he said flatly that she did not have dissociative tendencies because “she was generally aware of what she was doing and thinking, did not function on ‘automatic pilot,’ and had never had any split or multiple personalities.”
Actually the people Catherine became in her trances were all alternate personalities or dissociated parts of herself with their individual qualities. The sagelike poet or Master Spirit that surfaced in her “superconscious state” was similar to Jean’s alternate personality that she called Knowledge. In Catherine’s conscious state her other personalities with their particular memories and knowledge were kept out of her awareness by amnesia, and they could be accessed only under hypnosis. In the same way that Dorene experienced automatic writing, Catherine was on “automatic pilot” the whole time that the Masters issued their wisdom through her mouth.
Catherine, in fact, exhibited all five core dissociative symptoms to a significant degree. Besides identity alteration, amnesia, and depersonalization, she repeatedly experienced derealization—the distortion of her home environment into strange places, for example, or times when she looked at her father’s face or her killer’s face and saw Stuart, her married, emotionally abusive lover. As for identity confusion, Catherine began therapy complaining of having no control over her life, of feeling confused by all the anxiety and fear overwhelming her—a common complaint initially presented by DID patients. An accurate assessment based on her symptoms would have shown Catherine to be one of them.
Dr. Weiss was surprised at how soon after the first hypnosis session-three and a half months—Catherine’s symptoms of anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias virtually disappeared. He admitted feeling frustrated that he was not able to be a bridge between her insightful state, in which she realized that she needed to break away from Stuart, and her state in the real world: “These insights needed to reach her conscious mind and needed to be applied to her conscious life. Superconscious insight was fascinating, but by itself it was not enough to transform her life.”
The remarkable progress that Dr. Weiss had in reducing Catherine’s fear of death and her other phobias came about because his past-life therapy acknowledged and worked with her hidden parts and did not discount them. He was able to reduce her fears, anxiety, and panic attacks by getting her to do two of the four C’s—comfort her different parts and communicate with them—at least under hypnosis. Since he did not recognize Catherine’s underlying dissociative disorder, he was unable to help her fully integrate the hidden parts of herself into a unified whole by means of cooperation and connection with each other. Without that inner teamwork her alternate personalities were still externalized to different lifetimes, and she remained disconnected from the “genius within her” on a conscious level.
Alien abduction and past life narratives are useful as coping mechanisms that lessen the pain and terror of relived childhood abuse. Once the trauma is externalized to that extent, full recovery can be a slow process. It requires a therapist who is skilled in dissociation to identify what’s happening. People who believe that these experiences are real are suffering from a double dissociation. First, they dissociated the original trauma from their conscious awareness; then they disconnected once again by masking the trauma—either by assigning it to an imaginary perpetrator or by assigning it to a different historical period. Getting people to connect their fragmented traumatic memories to themselves when they’ve doubly dissociated from them is extremely challenging.
Dr. Powers concluded her study of dissociation in alleged extraterrestrial abductees with a caution against challenging their belief system prematurely. A person who has been traumatized by horrific memories, she pointed out, should not be further traumatized by a therapeutic approach that undermines the individual’s sense of sanity. An abuse survivor who believes in the alien abduction experience or past lives need not immediately abandon that belief. As Dr. Weiss showed, listening to the patient’s subjective experience and empathetically taking the same point of view can ameliorate the person’s confusion and terror and help her move on with her life. But we’ve also seen that there are limits to this approach, and in some cases it might even strengthen the cognitive distortions in destructive ways.
After a person becomes comfortable with both the memories and the therapist, other possible explanations for the origin of the trauma can begin to be considered. Is it possible that it was perpetrated by a human or that it happened in this life? When an alternative explanation is accepted, dissociated material may eventually become conscious and accepted, too, and the person can begin to incorporate her personalities in different lifetimes into a coherent sense of self.
Religious or mystical phenomena often accompany the transient depersonalization episodes that occur as a universal response to life-threatening trauma. The first study of near-death experiences was undertaken in 1892 by Albert Heim, who accumulated the accounts of over thirty survivors of falls in the Alps. Heim found that “the person falling often heard beautiful music and fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets.”
Spiritual perceptions were found to be common in a later analysis of 114 accounts of near-death experiences obtained from 104 people by Russell Noyes, Jr., M.D., and Roy Kletti, M.A. A twenty-four-year-old mountain climber who lost his footing and found himself exposed to a two-thousand-foot drop reported: “I felt closer to God. I developed an understanding of death as something beautiful, a realization that stands out yet today as profoundly important.” A fourteen-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the chest reported a religious feeling that “strength came from a force outside myself. It affected my mind as well as my body, and I think it enabled me to hold onto life.” A fifty-five-year-old man who was certain he had died when his Jeep was blown up by a German mine during World War II reported experiencing a mystical sense of transcendence over time and space. He felt that he had entered a state in which only his mind existed in one moment of total serenity and peace that never altered. “I cannot stress strongly enough,” he said, “the feeling of… total blissful acceptance of my new status, which I knew would be never-ending.”
Transient depersonalization episodes involving visions of guardian angels or other religious figures can persist for a while in normal people after an acute trauma. We all need to develop a way to nurture ourselves when we’re tenuously hanging on to life. The angel appearing at our bedside in the hospital, assuring us that we’re going to make it, may actually be an internal helping part of ourselves that we’ve projected into an external source of support in this time of desperate need. This kind of apparitional experience would not constitute a psychiatric problem if the apparition went away in due time. If it developed an independent life and visited us recurrently and we began to lose time or have distress or dysfunction as a result of our ongoing dialogues with it, this out-of-body experience would be a symptom of a dissociative disorder. It would then have to be evaluated in the context of the other four symptoms.
Such popular books as Life After Life by Raymond Moody, Closer to the Light by Dr. Melvin Morse, and Embraced by the Light by Betty J. Eadie contain accounts of near-death out-of-body experiences. One of the most detailed and extensive personal accounts is found in Eadie’s book. As thirty-one-year-old Betty hovered between life and death of complications after surgery, she felt herself floating out of her body and through the closed window of her hospital room. She experienced herself as moving at incredible speed through a tunnel toward a brilliant light and into the arms of a man surrounded by a golden halo who received her with “the most unconditional love I have ever felt.” Recognizing the man as Jesus Christ, Betty proceeded to have an extended dialogue with him during which he answered all of her questions about God, the meaning of life, healing and dying, the laws that govern human beings, the importance of forgiveness and trust, and the supreme power of love. Like Catherine’s Master Spirit, he assured her of our immortality: “The grave was never intended for the spirit—only for the body.”
During her near-death experience Betty meets other spiritual beings and is taken on a tour of a breathtakingly beautiful garden, a library, and a room where happy souls are working on looms. She returns to earth after a tribunal lovingly reviews her life and tells her she must go back. Among the many lessons that Betty has learned on her journey is this one: “I understood that life is lived most fully in the imagination—that, ironically, imagination is the key to reality.” By this she means that we are to use our free will to create our own lives and find joy in our creations. The belief in life after death is surely one of the most joyful and comforting creations of the human mind and allows us to live our lives more abundantly.
Betty Eadie was separated from her parents at the age of four and placed in a Catholic boarding school. She had a harsh childhood devoid of the unconditional love that she found in her depersonalized near-death experience. Once before, in her first winter at the boarding school when she almost died of whooping cough and double pneumonia, she had a religious vision of “a man with a beautiful white beard” who cradled her in his arms and comforted her. Through her depersonalization episodes Betty created a symbolic source of nurturance denied her in childhood and tapped into the spiritual insights lying dormant within her that lay outside her conscious awareness.
No matter how persuasive they are, narratives of alien abduction, past lives, and an afterlife should not be confused with proven, objective statements of fact. This is not to rule out the possibility that there is extraterrestrial life or that we have had past lives or that there is life after death. We should keep an open mind and continue to draw comfort from our religious beliefs but also be open to alternative explanations. If these experiences can be explained by a conceptual model in this life and in this world—the scientific model of dissociation—it seems unnecessary to extrapolate to any other life or world in order to understand them.
Before the advent of the SCID-D, clinicians were faced with a dubious choice regarding patients who spoke of past lives or abductions by aliens: either proclaim these people crazy or accept their accounts as descriptions of real events. Today, the SCID-D assessment process shows that these people are attesting to symptoms of dissociation and could benefit from therapies designed to treat dissociative disorders. The phenomena they elaborately describe are, most likely, not events that actually happened, but yet another example of the power of the human mind to protect itself by creating imaginative metaphorical symbols for memories of unthinkable childhood trauma.
