How a New Therapy Uses the Dead to Help Patients Live
When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true, till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough,—this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.
—William James, The Will to Believe
Tom Lareau broke on a hillside in Dak Do.
A Claymor mine exploded, wounding his best friend. Lareau reached for him and saw that his friend’s legs were almost entirely blown off. Only some tendons and a thighbone bare as rock still descended from his hips.
Lareau picked his friend up, slung him over his shoulder, and started up the hillside, marching toward the area where Evac helicopters had already begun to descend. On the way there, the backs of Lareau’s legs grew increasingly wet and warm. And the wounded man hollered in his ear, “Call my family,” he said. “You tell them what happened. Take care of my family. Don’t let me die.”
“By the time I reached the top of that hill,” Lareau told me, roughly thirty years later, “I had lost my mind.”
By the time Lareau reached the top of that hill, his friend was dead.
Lareau, like so many Vietnam veterans, carried the traumatic events he witnessed in war inside himself for decades. He worked to the exclusion of all else. He wanted no friends, and the world obliged him. He never contacted his friend’s family, because the prospect of facing that hillside again was just too tough. He even tried to kill himself on two occasions. Finally, in 1995, he wound up at a Chicago area Veteran’s Administration medical center. There, he met a doctor by the name of Allan Botkin.
Botkin provided him with an experience Lareau still can’t explain. All he knows is—he is finally content. “I saw my friend. He was sitting on a rock in a clearing in the jungle. He told me he was okay. He was in a beautiful, peaceful place, and he told me it was all right that I never contacted his family. He understood.”
Lareau does not know if he received a communication from his friend or merely enjoyed a vivid, pleasing vision—a fantasy that healed him. Botkin doesn’t claim to understand the experience all that much better. But he does claim he can induce similar experiences in others. In fact, Botkin claims that he and the therapists he has trained have induced the experience in thousands of people already.
I heard Botkin promoting a book about his procedure on the radio and called him shortly thereafter. At this point, my mother was alive, her cancer not diagnosed. But my brother had died more than a decade earlier, and my brother-in-law had passed away just months before. I decided to tell this story here, out of chronological order, because Botkin’s odd therapy draws upon virtually all of the issues raised in this book—issues associated with consciousness, belief, dreamlike states, the relationship between mind and body, recovery from grief, and our current understanding, or misunderstanding of the paranormal. And frankly, I think I understand it better now, after all my subsequent research, than I did at the time.
Botkin had told me, over the phone, that he wasn’t claiming to put people directly in contact with their deceased loved ones. But he wasn’t claiming not to, either. “I don’t know what’s happening, exactly,” he said. “But I do know it’s safe and it’s effective in helping people deal with their grief.”
Botkin and the retired soldiers I ultimately met with were on something of a mission. Thousands of American soldiers, they said, returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, face more danger at home. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), grief, guilt and loss, addiction and recovery—all lie in wait, roadside bombs threatening the rest of their lives. “I know Dr. Al can help them,” one of Botkin’s soldiers said.
Five years later, I think that Botkin’s therapy might be more complicated than either believers or skeptics would at first admit, and that some concerted effort should be made to understand his strange procedure. But I also know: the only way Botkin will get a wider hearing, is if we reframe our view of the paranormal.
IN PERSON, AL BOTKIN is a big man, well over six feet tall, his hair close cropped and blond, his shoulders broad, his manner matter of fact. A former athlete, Botkin pursued a career in basketball before he blew out a knee. And when I met him, he still carried himself with an athlete’s physical confidence and upright posture. “I’m still surprised that all this happened,” he told me. “I know, everybody says this. But I am the last person I ever thought would start a therapy like this one. I’ve never been, and still am not, a ‘New Age’ guy. But this started happening, and it seemed to be helping people. So I went with it.”
Botkin calls his therapy “induced after-death communication,” or IADC, a moniker he admits is paranormally loaded. He defends his naming decision, pointing out that it is an attention getter and it accurately depicts the way most patients describe it. Personally, I think he may have doomed himself with this name; he took a therapy that might already bear some Paranormal Taint and further lathered it in hoo ha. Certainly, the fact that his therapy has grown in the five years since I met him but has never come close to catching on might be taken as evidence of this.
Whatever the name, certainly, Botkin was always going to face an uphill climb. His therapy originates in an unusual treatment, called “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,” or EMDR. Like Botkin’s IADC therapy, the discovery of EMDR has a kind of mythic quality, tied up in a single unlikely event. In 1987, Dr. Francine Shapiro, a trained psychotherapist, had physically recovered from a bout with cancer. But as she walked around a small lake, on a spring day, she ruminated on her own anxiety. The sun shone, but her disposition was gray. And then, suddenly, she simply didn’t feel the weight of anxiety anymore. Good feeling had returned to her with a haste she found jarring.
This might sound like a kind of non-happening to most people; certainly, it did at first to me. Mental states pass. That is their very nature. But Shapiro was deeply concerned with this subject—concerned for her life.
In her book, EMDR, Shapiro describes how her doctor had warned that her cancer could come back. How to prevent it? He had no answer. When she discovered that both her own cancer and the colitis that killed her sister had potentially been linked to stress, she resolved to become her own doctor; and so, by the time she found herself near this lakeside, she had spent a lot of time exploring the relationship between mind and body, in hope of helping other people and herself.
She worked as both researcher and subject, continually monitoring her own body for links between mental states and physical effects. And so, having suddenly felt her depression lift, with no explanation she could find, she dwelled on the sudden change as she walked by the lake. What had even been on her mind, previously, that troubled her? Sure enough, she found the source of her negativity again, but incredibly, she discovered, those thoughts had lost their emotional charge.
She was even more intrigued now, and she had the self-awareness necessary to notice that, as she recalled these bleak ideas, she felt her own eyes move spontaneously back and forth. She began experimenting. She riffled through a mental inventory of emotionally charged memories and depressing thoughts. And as she did so, she purposefully moved her eyes side to side.
Over and over, she noticed the same effect. The depressing thoughts took hold, then quickly lost their power.
She spent the next many weeks asking friends and acquaintances to go through the same procedure. And as she heard their reports, she developed a protocol to elicit the best results.
The method she came up with, dubbed EMDR, was both simple and strange seeming—combining both psychology and physiology. In phase one, the therapist and client talk about some traumatic memory and the client is encouraged to reflect on the images, sounds, or emotions associated with it. Then, the physiological component of EMDR is initiated. In this next phase, the therapist asks the patient to follow the movement of some object—strictly with his or her eyes. “Don’t move your head at all,” Botkin told me, when it was my turn.
The idea is to get the patient’s eyes to move, left-right, left-right, as if they are witnessing a Ping-Pong match.
Individual therapists use different objects. Some raise the index and middle fingers of their hands, moving them side to side directly in front of the patient’s face. Others use an electronic gizmo that sends a single pinpoint of light pinging back and forth.
Shapiro began publishing on EMDR in 1989, and a new therapy was born. Or was it? According to Shapiro herself, in an updated edition of her book, though there are some theories under research, the exact mechanism by which EMDR works remains something of a mystery. So I digress, for just a moment, to ask the question: Does this make EMDR paranormal? I ask because EMDR faced a similar level of stigmatization.
Therapists had been working with a variety of treatments for many years, in the wake of natural disasters and wars, to help individual patients get their lives back. But the effectiveness of varying post-traumatic stress therapies has been notor-iously difficult to sort out, and some PTSD cases have simply seemed intractable. So, as might be expected, many in the psychological community were deeply suspicious of Shapiro’s odd origin story—the lady by the lake, suddenly glimpsing this steady, passable bridge between mind and body. But as Shapiro herself puts it, the main criticism seemed to be that EMDR was “too good to be true.”
The debate raged among U.S. psychologists throughout the 1990s; the Wikipedia page on the subject provides a quick view into the assertions and counter-assertions that continue to this day. But for now, it seems, EMDR is winning: numerous papers demonstrate that the therapy helps patients and has a measurable impact on brain function. And the practice of EMDR is gaining adherents, not losing them. Shapiro’s EMDR Institute estimates that 100,000 practitioners worldwide have been trained in EMDR, which has been endorsed as an effective treatment for PTSD by the American Psychiatric Association, the Department of Veterans Affairs/Department of Defense, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
Botkin himself even refers to the time “before EMDR” as “the bad old days.” He spent the 1980s, before Shapiro had published her work, working at the Veteran’s Administration (VA) Hospital in Chicago, where exposure therapy was still the standard treatment. “We had these guys, traumatized war veterans, watching war movies,” he said, laughing darkly. “I mean, we sat them down in a room and turned these films on with scenes of the most awful violence. And we told them, when they wanted to leave, to stay because it would make them better.”
At that point, in his own estimation, Botkin’s career amounted to ten years of failure. “It was rare, in my experience, to see a patient really get better,” he said. “The VA was a depressing place. And we told ourselves that it wasn’t us, or our treatment. It was our clients. They were just so damaged in the war. . . .”
But for a sense of professional desperation, Botkin was an unlikely practitioner of EMDR. He trained as a behavioral therapist, earning his doctorate in psychology in 1983 from Baylor University, and for a long time he believed in the central tenet of behaviorism: its singular focus on the way we respond to stimuli, its insect creed. “People’s inner lives,” Botkin told me, “their thoughts, seemed entirely irrelevant to me. I thought you just had to look at their behavior.”
His grip on that worldview was weakened, however, by years and experience. Dozens and then hundreds of men paraded past him, retired soldiers awash in alcoholism, bar fights, domestic violence, divorce, drug abuse, total estrangement from their families and society—and all because of what they reported happening inside their heads. Flashbacks, depression, despair, guilt, homicidal or suicidal rage. “In the bad old days, before EMDR, once you got a soldier to really open up to you about a trauma, he didn’t sleep for days,” Botkin told me. “They bounced off the walls.”
Then, one day, a colleague came in with a paper written by Francine Shapiro, extolling the virtues of EMDR and its odd protocol.
Botkin and another therapist listened intently to the psychologist describe the basic outline of Shapiro’s therapy.
And then they laughed.
The giggle factor can arise, it seems, whenever we hear something that doesn’t fit with our worldview. And Botkin admits, when he first heard about EMDR, he laughed it up pretty good. “In that paper,” Botkin said, “she describes some fairly fantastic results. And we laughed like crazy. The idea that something so simplistic—you know, waving your finger in front of somebody’s face—would have that kind of effect? We joked about it.”
In fact, between guffaws, Botkin barked out laugh lines like, “Which finger do you use?” before exploding again into mirth.
For many, many thousands of therapists, and hence for many, many millions of clients, the matter ended there. With a doctor feeling superior enough to laugh in the face of new, strange information. But Botkin and his colleagues decided to look further into the subject. “What did we have to lose?” Botkin remembers thinking. “We figured it was worth a shot.”
The year was 1990, and Botkin and his colleagues came back from a seminar, filled with uncertainty about whether this new method would work. They had been dealing with the same clients, in many instances, for years, with no relief. But EMDR turned the whole place around. “These guys used to be gripping the arm rests on their chairs at the end,” said Botkin, “white knuckling, and we’d have to say, ‘Time’s up.’ Now they were going through these painful memories, and at the end they were relaxed.”
Botkin used to worry about what would happen to the men in his care after they left the office. Now they left him saying things like, “Thanks, doc. I’m gonna go take a nap.”
Those first weeks at the Chicago VA, post-EMDR, were heady stuff. Botkin and his colleagues raced down the halls after nearly every patient session, going into each other’s offices, closing the door and engaging in joyous high-five sessions: “After all these years, where I hate to say it, we might have done more harm than good,” Botkin told me, “to see these guys getting better was astounding. It just felt great, to finally help these people.”
His own therapy was an outgrowth of all that. And, like Shapiro’s development of EMDR, it happened because he attended to a kind of accident.
BOTKIN WAS ALONE IN his office with Sam, a vet in the throes of depression over a trauma that had occurred twenty-eight years earlier. By now, Botkin had been using EMDR as his main therapeutic technique for maybe five years. He had not fully resolved his every client’s every source of trauma. Where war vets are concerned, traumatic memories can be so numerous that it takes considerable time to find and deal with each one. But Botkin had used EMDR to help Sam confront and resolve painful memories; and, finally, what seemed to be his core trauma broke to the surface.
The old solider was sitting there, blubbering in Botkin’s office chair, sharing with him the kind of tale that seemed to come straight from a horrifying war flick. Sam had, during the war, befriended a ten-year-old orphaned Vietnamese girl. He planned to officially adopt her and bring her home to the states. Then word came: all the orphaned children on Sam’s base were to be transported to a Catholic orphanage in a distant village.
Sam felt devastated at the prospect of being separated from the girl but dutifully loaded her onto a flatbed truck in preparation for transport.
Then, suddenly, shots rang out.
A sniper or snipers were firing on the base.
Sam and the other soldiers present started grabbing kids off the truck and pushing them down on the ground, shielding them with their bodies. Minutes later, after the firing stopped and the crisis was over, Sam looked around for the girl.
He didn’t see her till he walked to the back of the truck and found her—face down on the ground.
The truth dawned on him by degrees.
She was motionless.
There was a small spot of blood on her back.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her over.
And then he saw: the whole front of her abdomen had been blown away, torn apart by the bullet that entered her from behind.
Sam clutched at her lifeless body, and eventually his fellow soldiers had to separate him from the girl.
Botkin pulled this whole story out of Sam, then asked him to stay with the feeling of grief provoked by the telling.
The first phase of EMDR was complete. Now it was time for the physiological step. Like doctors dispensing medicine, EMDR practitioners speak of “administering” an eye movement. What this means, in practical terms, is that they set some object to moving, side to side, a few feet from the patient’s face. By this time, Botkin had chosen as his instrument of choice a long, white stick his clients dubbed “Dr. Al’s Magic Wand.”
Botkin waved that wand in front of Sam, watching the old soldier’s eyes track the tip dutifully, side to side.
At first, as expected, Sam’s sadness increased.
“Stay with that feeling,” Botkin instructed, then waved his wand again.
They continued on this way for a while, and Sam’s sadness slowly began to decrease, like a deflating balloon.
Toward the end of their hour-long session, Sam’s face was wet with tears. But he expressed relief. He had gotten through his story. And he felt the relaxed after-effect associated with EMDR.
Normally, Botkin would have broken off the session at this point—their work done. But this time, spontaneously, he administered one more eye movement, with no specific instruction. He says now that he thought of the extra eye movement as a “kind of treat. You know, ‘this has been good for you, so here’s one more.’ Like dessert.”
He just waved his wand in front of the soldier’s face, with no further instruction. Then he told him to close his eyes.
Botkin figured this was it, the end of the session. But then Sam did something surprising: eyes shut, he smiled. Broadly.
Botkin sat there, watching Sam intently. And then the soldier did something that disturbed Botkin: he giggled.
Botkin was thrown.
EMDR had the effect of relaxing patients, of helping to settle them down and stabilize their emotions. But this was a massive mood swing.
He waited expectantly, then Sam opened his eyes again and told him, he saw her—he saw the orphan girl. Sam was smiling now, clearly euphoric, and the story he told stunned Botkin.
Sam claimed to have seen the girl as a beautiful woman. She thanked him for taking care of her. She seemed happier and more content than anyone he had ever seen.
“I love you,” he told her.
In response, she embraced him and said she loved him, too. “I could actually feel her arms around me,” Sam claimed.
By now, Botkin was scared. “I assumed that the agony of his grief had somehow produced a hallucination based on fantasy or wishful thinking,” he writes in his book, Induced After-Death Communication. “I had never witnessed or heard of such a response during psychotherapy . . . If Sam had hallucinated, the intense stress of his traumatic memories had somehow compromised his ability to differentiate reality from fantasy. That worried me.”
Over the next three weeks, however, five more of Botkin’s patients spontaneously claimed similar experiences, “all with the same reported vividness,” writes Botkin, “the certainty the vets expressed that it was real, the positive assurances they reported from the person who died, and the unprecedented resolution of long-standing, intractable, traumatic grief.”
Botkin had come to expect that patients would leave his office after EMDR with less sadness. But after these unusual sessions, his clients left his office feeling joyous.
Botkin pored through his notes, looking for some common thread running among these patients. And after some time, he found one: each of these six patients had received an “extra” eye movement. There were other changes he had made over the years in the EMDR protocol, all now incorporated into his IADC therapy, but this “extra” eye movement seemed particularly important. “Usually, you’re telling them what to focus on,” Botkin later told me. “But in these instances, in my notes, I could see I had given them a final eye movement with no direction.”
This first “treat” he had dispensed to Sam had been inadvertently replicated. And all of these patients thought Dr. Al’s Magic Wand had granted them temporary passage to communicate from this life—across the boundary of death. Botkin had been trained not to dissuade his clients of their personal beliefs, unless the belief seemed to lead to some direct harm.
As Botkin put it to me, if a patient thought he could go up to the VA roof, leap off, and fly, he would have counseled him otherwise and restrained him if necessary. But this was different. He continued to monitor the patients who spontaneously had the experience. They all seemed to be doing well. None seemed disassociated in any way from reality. In fact, they seemed to be reconnecting. “I don’t consider anything that goes on in IADC to comprise scientific evidence for the afterlife,” Botkin told me. “But once I saw that it was safe, I wanted to explore it as a therapeutic tool.”
He had seen great improvement in his patients with EMDR, “but this was on an entirely different level,” he says. “People were leaving my office not just more grounded and peaceful, but happy. Even ecstatic.”
So he took the next step and started giving his clients one last eye movement, without direction, as part of his own protocol. And incredibly, they had the same experience. They met deceased friends, loved ones, even enemy soldiers they shot. They felt them, smelled them, and believed the experience, in almost every case, to be real.
Botkin told me all this in my hotel room. And I found myself unable to believe a word of it.
Then he opened his briefcase.
It was my turn.
I HAD BY THIS time talked to several of Botkin’s soldiers on the phone. And I knew what to expect. But when Botkin reached into his brief case and pulled out . . . a magic wand? I laughed. The giggle factor kicked in, big time.
Botkin smiled, waiting patiently for me to compose myself. This was, in fact, serious stuff. My brother-in-law had died after a protracted battle with cancer just a few months earlier. I had sat in his hospital room for many long nights, including the night he passed away. And I’d arrived in Chicago not just as a journalist, but as a client.
I often woke in the middle of the night, with the smell of that hospital room heavy on my face, like a rag clamped over my nose and mouth. The sense of helplessness I felt watching him go would come storming back into my consciousness. I would sputter, get up, and walk around my apartment—unable to breathe normally until I gave into my grief for a while. And the same sensation came at me at other times, too, usually after I had spent the day out in the busy, heavily populated streets of Philadelphia. Suddenly, alone, unlocking my apartment door, in the evening, I would suddenly catch that same smell, boiling up out of my own subconscious. Then the rush of emotion came—the same cycle of helplessness, panic, and despair. The only thing I’d found to do to help myself at that stage was to walk the sensation off, like a football player who just tweaked his knee. But these episodes were wearing me down. There were too many nights in which I simply lost sleep. And I had, in fact, experienced one of these episodes the day before my flight to Chicago. So IADC, EMDR—the acronyms mattered to me only as a journalist. As a person, I was hoping Botkin might help end these flashbacks.
In my hotel room, Botkin asked me to focus on the smell and the images and the sounds that were the source of my discontent. He listened, wand in hand, till I felt good and weak from the weight of these recollections. He worked with me verbally, like any cognitive therapist, trying to reach the depths of my sadness. Only after I leaned heavily forward in my chair, did he seem satisfied. “Stay with the feeling,” he said, then lifted his stick in the air and moved it across my field of view, repeatedly, for maybe ten seconds.
The act of doing first-person journalism sometimes feels incredibly silly. And at the time, this episode with Botkin ranked right up there. But I pressed through any self-consciousness, and in the first stage of the process, nothing terribly dramatic happened—or at least, nothing shot through with mysticism. Botkin administered maybe six eye movements, and by then, incrementally, my sense of sadness and despair had lifted. I felt relaxed and even yawned. I started thinking about Botkin’s departure and seriously considered taking a nap.
“Great,” said Botkin. “Now I’m going to give you one more eye movement—without direction.”
A note here: in the beginning, when Botkin’s soldiers first started reporting their experiences, the whole thing happened organically. But I had of course been given a direction before I ever arrived. I had listened to a radio interview Botkin conducted. I had spoken to him on the phone. And I had just interviewed him in person. I knew what he expected of me now was that I would have a vision of my brother-in-law. That is an awfully powerful suggestion, so in this respect I knew I wasn’t an ideal research subject. But for whatever it’s worth, over the course of two days, Botkin performed the procedure with me twice—and each time, well, something happened.
The first time the vision I had was light, relaxed, like an incredibly vivid daydream. My brother-in-law appeared to me as he had in his early thirties, with long black hair and a full, healthy face. He appeared close to me, in the pitch dark.
“You’re all right,” I said, in my mind.
“I’m good,” he told me, and laughed.
This man had been in my family since I was twelve years old. He was like a brother to me.
“I love you,” I told him.
“I love you, too,” he said.
Then suddenly, he appeared before me at a distance, swinging a Wiffle Ball bat, like he did when he played with me as a child. “All the times we had,” he said, “don’t end. They go on forever. They’re still happening.”
I wouldn’t have expected my brother-in-law to reflect with me on the nature of time. But I opened my eyes after he said “I love you” again. That first vision was over. The most logical explanation was that Botkin’s ministrations rendered me receptive to the more positive memories in my own subconscious.
I say this because, even though no one has yet pinned down the exact mechanism for EMDR’s effectiveness, the most promising area of research relates to the storage of memories. The side-to-side eye movements of EMDR recall the more chaotic motions that occur in the rapid eye movement stage of sleep. And some sleep researchers believe one function of our vivid, REM-stage dreaming is to help us consolidate, process, and file our memories—an internal historian, hard at work, contextualizing and writing down the relevant aspects of our lives.
The intriguing twist here is that, studies demonstrate that the quality and quantity of REM sleep declines dramatically in people suffering from PTSD. Is this because some events are so traumatic we literally can’t bring ourselves to process them? Unprocessed memories might explain why soldiers suffering from PTSD react to the memory of gunfire with a full-out fight-or-flight response—gripping their chairs or diving to the floor. This might also explain why my subconscious occasionally kicked the smell of my brother-in-law’s hospital room up, into my conscious mind; I had yet to make the experience a part of my past, and so there it was, in the present.
If all this is true, the waking, directed eye movements of EMDR facilitate a physiological process in the brain, similar to REM sleep, and get the process of memory storage moving again, putting traumatic memories where they belong—in the past.
“You won’t know what kind of effect this had until later,” Botkin advised me.
But I already knew one thing: seeing my brother-in-law swing a Wiffle Ball bat, and run after he hit the ball, felt invigorating after last seeing him unconscious and in bed. I felt lighter, like I had a new memory of my brother-in-law now, sitting between me and all those darker visions. Looking back, I wonder if processing the negative memories on which I was stuck cleared a path for more positive associations to come back to the fore.
The next day, Botkin put me through the same steps. We talked about my brother-in-law. But when I closed my eyes, I saw my oldest brother. He had died more than ten years earlier. But I’d been thinking of him that morning, so perhaps the power of suggestion had already been at work.
He suffered horrible acne as an adolescent, leaving his face as an adult still pitted and scarred. He had contracted diabetes many years before his death, and he lost a lot of weight he never regained. But in my mind’s eye he appeared whole and strong and healthy again—his weight up, his face unblemished. I was surprised to see him this way, so different but still looking just like my brother. And this episode, like the one with my brother-in-law, seemed marked by that interplay between my conscious thoughts and sudden, spontaneous happenings.
We exchanged “I love yous.”
We embraced.
I asked my brother if he liked it where he was, and he said, “It’s great.”
Then just as I’d seen my brother-in-law suddenly appear with a bat in his hands, I saw my brother standing there with a guitar. He used to play electric guitar when I was a child, and I can still remember arriving home from a trip to the grocery store with my parents to the sound of then-current, now-classic rock, exploding out of his bedroom window. These Herculean, arena-rock riffs, played without drums, vocals, or any great talent, marked the soundtrack of my childhood. But in this vision, when he played a chord, an array of colors flew from the strings. I can’t say I recognized the song. But the sensation was exhilarating.
I wasn’t certain what brain process triggered this. But I liked it. Still, my skepticism created a gulf between me and Botkin’s soldiers.
We sat together for somewhere between three and four hours—me, Botkin, and six veterans of the Vietnam War. Botkin had secured us a big conference room for the day, and I sat and listened as each soldier took turns sharing his individual story. I wondered if the people not speaking might be bored, being forced to sit through everyone else’s tale. But the camaraderie they shared was clear. They liked being there in the same room with each other, for each other; and a couple of times, when one of them started to cry, the others urged him on. “Don’t bury it,” they might say, or—echoing Botkin—“Stick with that.”
The amount of misery these men suffered, not just in war but for decades after arriving home, was staggering. As hard as they tried, they simply could not turn on all the old feelings and behaviors that comprised their former, civilian identities. They hurt, and they self-medicated. They drank, smoked pot, or turned to harder drugs like coke and heroin. They tried to talk to their mothers, their fathers, their wives or kids, but they felt as if they were hollering across a chasm and into the wind, their voices lost in the space between. But they at least understood each other—their fellow soldiers. And so they came to the VA, and the best relief they got, for many years, was just being around other similarly wounded men.
“I see another vet,” one soldier said, “and I don’t even have to like him, as a person, and I love him. You know what I mean?”
Another told me, “I’m not saying this to scare you. But if I had to kill you right now I could just turn off all my feelings and do it, like a job, and not feel anything.”
I had heard similar statements before, from ex-cons, who were trying to tell me what prison life had done to their minds. So I was neither shocked nor scared when this soldier talked about how easy it would be to kill me. But the next part moved me. “I don’t like that,” he said.
To a man, they said the closest they’ve come to normal was through “Dr. Al’s Magic Wand.”
EMDR provided them the first real progress they had felt since coming home. But IADC took them to a whole different level of healing. One solider said he used his IADC session to resolve his differences with his mother, who died feeling estranged from him after he returned from the war; he still felt pain at the loss of her, but IADC had allowed him to acknowledge that pain. Another vet told me he spoke to an enemy solider he had killed, and, incredibly, the enemy forgave him. “He’s in a better place,” he said.
In the years since, these men learned how to hold down jobs and feel optimistic again. They still cried sometimes over the past. But now they felt in control of the experience rather than subsumed by it.
I waited a long time before I popped the paranormal question. But eventually, I had to ask, “So, do you feel these visions were real, that you were really visiting with the spirits of the people you saw?”
“I know it,” said one soldier, immediately.
Another said, “I can’t prove it, but I believe it’s real.”
Then a big bear of a soldier interrupted: “Dr. Al said he gave you the stick. What do you think? Was it real?”
I understood that the most parsimonious and logical explanation for my visions was that they were some form of spontaneous, waking dream—an imagining triggered by the power of suggestion. I also knew those visions felt great and seemed to provide me with fresh, positive memories of two people I had lost. Today, I wonder if those visions are so clear in my mind because EMDR does mimic the REM stage’s role in memory processing. But none of that mattered to me then. What mattered to me was that I had just listened to this group of soldiers tell me their painful stories for several hours, and I was not about to come between them and a hard-won sense of peace.
In this book, we have already learned that the brain mediates all experience. Divining the objective reality of what the brain shows us is harder than we think. Call that my intellectual out, if you like; or simply call me a coward, if you’re of a mind, for failing to raise my own sense of disbelief. But more than five years later, I remain comfortable with how I responded. Strict philosophical materialists usually hold that all paranormal belief is harmful. But that isn’t what I found in talking to the men at that table. So I had one job that I could see: to get the hell out of their way, as fast as possible.
“I don’t know,” I told them. “It was such a strange experience. And I’m still trying to process it.”
“Give it time,” one of the soldiers advised me. “You’ll see.”
I nodded and moved on. And in time, I did see. I never did have another flashback to my brother-in-law’s hospital room. And even to this day, when I think of my brother, or my brother-in-law, I no longer first see images of them in failing health. I see the men who appeared in the wake of Botkin’s wand. I see the men from my IADCs.
This is not an argument for the objective reality of what I saw. This is not an argument for life after death. But it is an argument that we might do better to set aside some of these epistemologically unanswerable questions from time to time. It is an argument that, at least in the case of Botkin’s soldiers, sometimes paranormal belief simply works. Whether it points to an objective reality or not.
There have been no well-researched, controlled studies of the effectiveness of Botkin’s method. He has been trying to get that kind of project together for many years, looking for some independent researcher to come in and assess whatever it is he’s wrought. He has told me, at various times, about psychologists and institutions that have expressed an interest. But as of the summer of 2010, he is still looking.
Is IADC effective? In a scientific sense, we don’t know. In an anecdotal sense, hell yes.
Botkin, in the absence of independent research, has now trained sixty therapists in eight countries who are using the IADC procedure to help patients deal with trauma and grief. I spoke to a few of these therapists, who felt IADC was working for their clients. And Botkin’s soldiers have remained willing to promote IADC, largely because they want soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to hear about it. “I went many years till I got what I have,” one soldier told me. “I don’t want them guys to have to wait twenty years for this.”
The problem is that name—induced after-death communication. The problem is the way we respond to topics with any paranormal association at all. There could be other applications for Botkin’s method. The visions he elicits might even be used, like lucid dreams, to rehearse for real-life tasks. But in promoting his therapy, Botkin may get his sternest challenge from fellow practitioners of EMDR—people who know how hard it is to gain acceptance for an idea associated with the fringe. In the course of my research, in fact, I called psychologist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of EMDR’s leading champions. We had a great discussion, until I brought up Botkin’s method.
“That sounds like the patients are making reconstructions after the fact,” he said. “No one reports experiences as dramatic as that, and it just sounds . . . too flaky. We’ve been dismissed, EMDR, in the psychological community for too long. We’re getting over that now because people see it works. And nobody wants to go back, to being seen as flaky.”