Hypnosis and Regression
HYPNOSIS IS THE MAIN TECHNIQUE I USE TO HELP PATIENTS access past life memories. Many people have questions about what hypnosis is and about what happens when a person is in a hypnotic state, but there is really no mystery. Hypnosis is a state of focused concentration, of the sort many of us experience every day.
When you are relaxed and your concentration is so intense that you are not distracted by outside noises or other stimuli, you are in a light state of hypnosis. All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis in that you, the patient, control the process. The therapist is merely a guide. Most of us enter hypnotic states every day—when we are absorbed in a good book or movie, when we have driven our car the last few blocks home without realizing how we got there, whenever we have been on “automatic pilot.”
One goal of hypnosis, as well as meditation, is to access the subconscious. This is the part of our mind that lies beneath ordinary consciousness, beneath the constant bombardment of thoughts, feelings, outside stimuli, and other assaults on our awareness. The subconscious mind functions at a level deeper than our usual level of awareness. In the subconscious mind mental processes occur without our conscious perception of them. We experience moments of intuition, wisdom, and creativity when these subconscious processes flash into our conscious awareness.
The subconscious is not limited by our imposed boundaries of logic, space, and time. It can remember everything, from any time. It can transmit creative solutions to our problems. It can transcend the ordinary to touch upon a wisdom far beyond our everyday capabilities. Hypnosis accesses the wisdom of the subconscious in a focused way in order to achieve healing. We are in hypnosis whenever the usual relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind is reconfigured so that the subconscious plays a more dominant role. There is a broad spectrum of hypnotic techniques. They are designed to tap into a broad spectrum of hypnotic states, from light to deep levels.
In a way, hypnosis is a continuum in which we are aware of the conscious and subconscious mind to a greater or lesser degree. I have found that many people can be hypnotized to a degree suitable for therapy if they are educated about hypnosis and if their fears are discussed and allayed. The majority of the public has misconceptions about hypnosis because of the way television, movies, and stage shows have depicted it.
When you are hypnotized, you are not asleep. Your conscious mind is always aware of what you are experiencing while you are hypnotized. Despite the deep subconscious contact, your mind can comment, criticize, and censor. You are always in control of what you say. Hypnosis is not a “truth serum.” You do not enter a time machine and suddenly find yourself transported to another time and place with no awareness of the present. Some people in hypnosis watch the past as if they are observing a movie. Others are more vividly involved, with more emotional reactions. Still others “feel” things more than they “see” them. Sometimes the predominant reaction is that of hearing or even smelling. Afterwards, the person remembers everything experienced during the hypnosis session.
It may sound as though it requires a great deal of skill to reach these deeper levels of hypnosis. However, each of us experiences them with ease every day as we pass through the state between wakefulness and sleeping known as the hypnagogic state. We are in a type of hypnagogic state when we are just waking up and can still remember our dreams vividly, but we are not yet fully awake. It is the period before everyday memories and concerns reenter our minds. Like hypnosis, the hypnagogic state is a deeply creative one. When we pass through it, the mind is completely turned inward and can access the inspiration of the subconscious. The hypnagogic state is considered by many to be a “genius” state, without any boundaries or any limitations. When we are hypnagogic, we have access to all our resources and none of our self-imposed restrictions.
Thomas Edison valued this hypnagogic state so highly that he developed his own technique to maintain it while he worked on his inventions. While sitting in a certain chair, Edison used relaxation and meditation techniques to reach the state of consciousness that is between sleep and wakefulness. He would hold some ball bearings in his closed hand, palm down, while resting this hand on the arm of his chair. Beneath his hand he kept a metal bowl. If Edison fell asleep, his hand would open. The ball bearings would fall into the metal bowl and the noise would awaken him. Then he would repeat the process over and over again.
This hypnagogic state is very much like hypnosis and actually deeper than many levels of hypnosis. By helping the patient to reach a deeper level of his or her mind, a therapist who is skilled in the techniques of hypnosis can dramatically accelerate the healing process. And when creative ideas and solutions extend beyond personal problems, large segments of society can benefit, as all of us have benefited from Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb. The process can touch the world.
Listening to someone’s guiding voice aids in focusing concentration and helps a patient to reach a deeper level of hypnosis and relaxation. There is no danger in hypnosis. Not one person I have ever hypnotized has become “stuck” in the hypnotic state. You can emerge from a state of hypnosis whenever you want. No one has ever violated his or her moral and ethical principles. No one has involuntarily acted like a chicken or a duck. No one can control you. You are in complete control.
In hypnosis, your mind is always aware and observing. This is why people who may be deeply hypnotized and actively involved in a childhood or past life sequence of memories are able to answer the therapist’s questions, speak their current life language, know the geographical places they are seeing, and even know the year, which usually flashes before their inner eyes or just appears in their minds. The hypnotized mind, always retaining an awareness and a knowledge of the present, puts the childhood or past life memories into context. If the year 1900 flashes, and you find yourself building a pyramid in ancient Egypt, you know that the year is B.C., even if you don’t see those actual letters.
This is also the reason why a hypnotized patient, finding himself a peasant fighting in a medieval European war, for example, can recognize people from that past lifetime whom he knows in his current life. This is why he can speak modern English, compare the crude weapons of that time with those he might have seen or used in this lifetime, give dates, and so on.
His present-day mind is aware, watching, commenting. He can always compare the details and events with those of his current life. He is the movie’s observer and its critic and usually its star at the same time. And all the while, he can remain in the relaxed, hypnotized state.
Hypnosis puts the patient in a state that holds great potential for healing by giving the patient access to the subconscious mind. To speak metaphorically, it puts the patient in the magical forest that holds the healing tree. But if hypnosis lets the patient into that healing country, it is the regression process that is the tree that holds the sacred berries he or she must eat to heal.
Regression therapy is the mental act of going back to an earlier time, whenever that time may be, in order to retrieve memories that may still be negatively influencing a patient’s present life and that are probably the source of the patient’s symptoms. Hypnosis allows the mind to short-circuit conscious barriers to tap this information, including those barriers that prevent patients from consciously accessing their past lives.
Repetition compulsion is the name given by Freud to describe the often irresistible urge to redramatize or reenact emotional, typically painful, experiences that occurred in one’s past. In his Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1938), the famous British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones defines repetition compulsion as “the blind impulse to repeat earlier experiences and situations quite irrespective of any advantage that doing so might bring from a pleasure-pain point of view.” No matter how harmful and destructive the behavior, the person seems compelled to repeat it. Willpower is ineffective in controlling the compulsion.
Freud discovered that bringing the initial trauma to consciousness, cathartically releasing it (a process therapists call abreaction), and integrating what has been felt and learned is effective. Hypnotic regression therapy performed by a skilled therapist first puts the patient in a hypnotic state and then gives the patient the tools needed to bring an incident like this to light. Often, the incident occurred during childhood. This is standard psychoanalytic theory.
But other times, as I discovered while treating Catherine, the initial trauma stretches backward much farther than that, into past lives. I have found that about 40 percent of my patients need to delve into other lifetimes to resolve their current life clinical problems. Regression to an earlier period of this present-day lifetime is usually fruitful enough for most of the remainder.
For those first 40 percent, however, regression to previous lifetimes is key to a cure. The best therapist working within the classically accepted limits of the single lifetime will not be able to effect a complete cure for the patient whose symptoms were caused by a trauma that occurred in a previous lifetime, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years ago. But when past life therapy is used to bring these long-repressed memories to awareness, improvement in the current symptoms is usually swift and dramatic.
A pattern of compulsive sexual acting out would be one example of a repetition compulsion syndrome. I know of a young man who is compulsively driven by a form of exhibitionism, specifically of exposing his genitalia to certain women while masturbating in a car. This behavior is obviously dangerous and destructive. This young man has outraged women, and he has been arrested several times. Yet, his destructive compulsion continues to occur.
His therapist has traced the origins of this behavior back to sexual incidents that occurred between this young man and his mother when he was quite young. This mother used to fondle her son while she bathed him, and he would consequently have erections. Confusing, arousing, and disturbing feelings were elicited in this child. These feelings were extremely intense, and part of the young man’s compulsion seemed to be a desire to recreate the intensity of these earlier emotions.
Despite this excellent therapist’s success in uncovering an early trauma, this man’s therapy has been successful only in part, and he suffers frequent relapses. Even though his behavior causes him to feel profound guilt and shame in addition to subjecting him to other dangers, he experiences overwhelming urges to repeat it.
Based on my experience with over three hundred individual past life regression patients, there is a good possibility that the reason this therapy has been only partially successful lies in the fact that the original trauma may have occurred in a prior lifetime. The scenario may even have been repeated in several lifetimes. Perhaps the most recent manifestation, the one experienced in his current life, is only the latest in a series of similar traumas. The recurrent pattern has already been established. All of the traumas, not just the most recent, need to be brought to awareness. Then complete healing can occur.
Many of my patients have recalled different traumatic patterns under hypnosis that repeat in various forms in lifetime after lifetime. These patterns include abuse between father and daughter that has been recurring over centuries only to surface once again in the current life. They also include an abusive husband in a past life who has resurfaced in the present as a violent father. Alcoholism is a condition that has ruined several lifetimes, and one warring couple discovered they had been homicidally connected in four previous lives together.
Many of these patients had been in conventional therapy before they came to see me, but their therapy had been ineffective or only partially effective. For these patients, regression therapy to past lifetimes was necessary to completely eradicate symptoms and to permanently end these recurring cycles of harmful, maladaptive behavior.
The concept of repetition compulsion seems valid. However, the scope of the past must be enlarged to include past lives if uncovering the present lifetime’s sources proves unsuccessful. I am certain that the young man who is compelled to masturbate while driving needs to explore his past life realms, to identify the traumas, and to bring them into his current awareness. When the pathological foundation is still covertly present, the symptoms will inevitably recur. Only when it is brought to light can he really be cured.
I have found that hypnosis combined with regression therapy plumbs the unconscious more deeply than do psychoanalytic techniques like free association, in which the patient remains in a relaxed but conscious state while merely closing the eyes. Because it promotes a deeper strata of associations by tapping memory storage areas unavailable to the conscious mind, hypnotic regression therapy offers many patients deeper and dramatically rapid results.
The material tapped by past life therapy is in some ways like the powerful universal archetypes described by Carl Jung. However, the material of past life regression therapy is not archetypal or symbolic but actual memory fragments of the ongoing current of human experience from ancient times to the present. Past life regression therapy combines the specificity and healing catharsis that is the best of Freudian therapy with the healing participation and recognition of deep symbolic meaning that is the hallmark of Jung.
But regression therapy consists of much more than hypnotic technique. Before the hypnotic process can be initiated, a skilled regression therapist will spend a great deal of time taking a history, asking questions, getting answers, and going very specifically and in great detail into particular areas of importance. This increases the success rate of regression from about 50 percent to about 70 percent. And after the regression is completed, after the patient has emerged from the hypnotic state, it is then necessary to integrate the feelings, insights, and information the session has elicited into the current life situation.
This integration requires considerable therapeutic skill and experience because the material evoked is often powerful and emotionally charged. Therefore, I do not recommend past life therapy done by a therapist who is not certified or accredited by a traditional accrediting body, who does not have a degree such as M.D., Ph.D., M.S.W., or other traditional degrees. Nontraditional past life therapists may be less likely to let a memory evolve at its own pace and less likely to have the skills necessary to help the patient integrate the material.
Experiencing a past life regression alone at home, however, is beneficial and relaxing in most cases. The subconscious is wise and will not provide the conscious mind with a memory it is not capable of assimilating. There is a slight risk of adverse symptoms such as anxiety or guilt, but these can be alleviated, if necessary, by a visit to a trained therapist. An individual who has even a slightly adverse reaction while working alone will simply stop the experience, his subconscious protecting him, while an untrained therapist might try to override the subconscious and push that individual to continue before the client is ready.
As a psychiatrist with a hectic clinical schedule, my main priority is to cure my patients rather than to validate their past life memories—although such validation is also extremely important.
I find that actual past life memories are accessed and described by the patient in one of two patterns. I call the first pattern the classical pattern. In the classical pattern, a patient enters a lifetime and is able to offer a very complete level of detail about the life and its events. Almost like a story, much of the entire lifetime passes by, often beginning with birth or childhood and not ending until death. It is possible that the patient will painlessly and serenely experience the death scene and a life review, in which the lessons of the lifetime are illuminated and discussed with the benefit of the patient’s higher wisdom and possibly by religious figures or spiritual guides.
Many of Catherine’s lifetimes were recalled in the classical regression pattern. Here is an excerpt of one of them, a lifetime, apparently Egyptian, in which Catherine began by recalling a water-borne plague that had killed her father and brother. She had worked with the priests who prepared the bodies for burial.
At the time the memory began and also in this excerpt of it Catherine was sixteen:
“People were put in caves. The bodies were kept in caves. But first, the bodies had to be prepared by the priests. They must be wrapped and anointed. They were kept in caves, but the land is flooding . . . They say the water is bad. Don’t drink the water.”
“Is there a way of treating it? Did anything work?”
“We were given herbs, different herbs. The odors . . . the herbs and . . . smell the odor. I can smell it!”
“Do you recognize the smell?”
“It’s white. They hang it from the ceiling.”
“Is it like garlic?”
“It’s hung around . . . the properties are similar, yes. . . . You put it in your mouth, your ears, your nose, everywhere. The odor was strong. It was believed to block the evil spirits from entering your body. Purple . . . fruit or something round with purple covering, purple skin to it . . .”
. . . “Is the purple a fruit of some sort?”
“Tannis.”
“Would that help you? Is that for the illness?”
“It was at that time.”
“Tannis,” I repeated again, trying to see if she was talking about what we refer to as tannin or tannic acid. . . . “What in this lifetime has buried itself in your current lifetime? Why do you keep coming back here? What is it that is so uncomfortable?”
“The religion,” Catherine quickly whispered, “the religion of that time. It was a religion of fear . . . fear. There were so many things to fear . . . and so many gods.”
“Do you remember the names of any gods?”
“I see eyes. I see a black . . . some type of . . . it looks like a jackal. He’s in a statue. He’s a guardian of some type . . . I see a woman, a goddess, with some type of headpiece on.”
“Do you know her name, the goddess?”
“Osiris . . . Sirus . . . something like that. I see an eye . . . eye, just an eye, an eye on a chain. It’s gold.”
“An eye?”
“Yes. . . . Hathor! Who is that!”
I had never heard of Hathor, although I knew that Osiris, if the pronunciation was accurate, was the brother-husband of Isis, a major Egyptian deity. Hathor, I later learned, was the Egyptian goddess of love, mirth, and joy. “Is it one of the gods?” I asked.
“Hathor! Hathor.” There was a long pause. “Bird . . . he’s flat . . . flat, a phoenix.” She was silent again.
“Go ahead in time now to your final day in that lifetime. Go to your final day, but before you have died. Tell me what you see.”
She answered in a very soft whisper. “I see people and buildings. I see sandals, sandals. There is a rough cloth, some type of rough cloth.”
“What happens? Go to the time of your dying now. What happens to you? You can see it.”
“I do not see it . . . I don’t see me any more.”
“Where are you? What do you see?”
“Nothing . . . just darkness. . . . I see a light, a warm light.” She had already died, already passed over to the spiritual state. Apparently she did not need to experience her actual death again.
“Can you come to the light?” I asked.
“I am going.” She was resting peacefully, waiting again.
“Can you look backward now to the lessons of that lifetime? Are you aware of them yet?”
“No,” she whispered. She continued to wait. Suddenly she appeared alert, although her eyes remained closed. . . . Her voice was louder. “I feel . . . someone’s talking to me!”
“What do they say?”
“Talking about patience. One must have patience . . .”
“Yes, go on.”
The answer came from the poet Master. “Patience and timing . . . everything comes when it must come. A life cannot be rushed, cannot be worked on a schedule as so many people want it to be. We must accept what comes to us at a given time, and not ask for more. But life is endless, so we never die; we were never really born. We just pass through different phases. There is no end. Humans have many dimensions. But time is not as we see time, but rather in lessons that are learned.”1
The details of burial, the herb that was used to ward off sickness, and the statues of gods are all typical of classical regression.
So is the wide span of time that the memory covers, from sixteen until death. Although Catherine did not remember the actual death experience here (she had recalled the death experience from this lifetime in a previous session), she did pass through it to receive illuminating spiritual information on the “other side.”
The second pattern of past life recall is one I call the key moment flow pattern. In key moment flow, the subconscious knits together the most important or relevant moments from a cluster of lifetimes, the key moments that will best elucidate the hidden trauma and most quickly and powerfully heal the patient.
Sometimes the flow includes the between-life review, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes the lesson or pattern is subtle and does not become clear until close to the end of the flow or when I specifically ask the patient what it is. Other times the pattern is telegraphed instantly by the pattern and flow of key moment memory.
With some patients, key moment flow has a fragmentary quality that can expand either into a more detailed key moment flow or a classical pattern in later sessions, according to the optimal flow of memory and healing for the particular patient as determined by that patient’s subconscious. Frequently, key moment flow moves dramatically and yet gently and peacefully from trauma to trauma, from death scene to death scene, as it weaves its own unblinking yet deeply healing form of illumination. Here are some examples of key moment flow, again from Catherine’s case. These memories all come from Catherine’s first past life regression session:
“There are trees and a stone road. I see a fire with cooking. My hair is blond. I’m wearing a long, coarse brown dress and sandals. I am twenty-five. I have a girl child whose name is Cleastra . . . She’s Rachel. [Rachel is presently her niece; they have always had an extremely close relationship.] It’s very hot. . . . There are big waves knocking down trees. There’s no place to run. It’s cold; the water is cold. I have to save my baby, but I cannot . . . just have to hold her tight. I drown; the water chokes me. I can’t breathe, can’t swallow . . . salty water. My baby is torn out of my arms. . . . I see clouds . . . My baby is with me. And others from my village. I see my brother.”
She was resting; this lifetime had ended. She was still in a deep trance. . . .
“Go on,” I said. . . . “Do you remember anything else?” . . . “I have on a dress with black lace, and there is black lace on my head. I have dark hair with gray in it. It’s [A.D.] 1756. I am Spanish. My name is Louisa and I’m fifty-six. I’m dancing; others are dancing, too. [Long pause]. I’m sick; I have a fever, cold sweats . . . Lots of people are sick; people are dying . . . The doctors don’t know it was from the water.” I took her ahead in time. “I recover, but my head still hurts, my eyes and head still hurt from the fever, from the water. Many die.”2
Clearly, in this key moment flow the pattern is trauma experienced through natural disaster. The emotionally concentrated nature of key moment flow pattern may seem intense, but, in my experience, reliving the trauma or death scene runs only a minimal risk of incurring a disturbing reaction within either regression pattern. In the hands of a trained therapist and even working at home alone, most people handle and integrate the memories without difficulty. They actually feel much better. The therapist can always instruct them to float above the death scene, if they feel it is necessary, to observe without emotion, and the subconscious mind can always remove a patient from the regression experience. People can choose not to experience the death scene at all. There are always choices. But the intensity of past life therapy does not frighten those who experience it.
Past life therapy that flows from key moment to key moment is a very practical, successful therapy modality, one in which the necessary connections between past lives and present life may take place in perhaps less than one hour rather than in several hours. However, key moment flow tends to provide less validation for the patient than does the classical pattern, because its focus is on essence, not details.
I myself cannot predict which of these patterns a patient will adopt. Both heal equally.
Finally, not everyone needs to remember prior lifetimes through regression under hypnosis. Not every individual bears the weight of past life traumas or scars that are significant in the current lifetime. Often, what a patient needs is to concentrate on the present, not the past. However, I teach most of my patients self-hypnotic and meditative techniques, since these skills are enormously valuable in day-to-day life. Whether a patient wishes to cure insomnia, reduce high blood pressure, lose weight, stop smoking, augment the immune system to fight off infections and chronic diseases, reduce stress, or achieve states of relaxation and inner peace, these techniques can be effectively used for the rest of his or her life.
Despite the benefits, there are times when patients will nevertheless decline hypnosis. Often the reasons are surprising.
When I was a resident in psychiatry at Yale Medical School, a businessman was referred to me for treatment of his fear of flying. At that time, I was one of the few therapists at Yale who used hypnosis to cure monosymptomatic phobias, which are fears of one specific thing, such as flying, or driving on highways, or snakes. This businessman’s job required a considerable amount of travelling. Since he would only use ground transportation, he clearly needed to overcome his fear.
I carefully outlined the hypnotic procedure. I transmitted my confidence and optimism that he could be cured, that he would no longer be paralyzed by his fear. Not only would this cure greatly help his business prospects, I assured him, but he would be able to vacation at more distant and exotic places. His whole life-style and quality of living would improve.
He looked pensively at me, frowning. Moments slowly passed. Why wasn’t he more excited?
“No thanks, Doc,” he finally said. “I’ll pass on the treatment!” This caught me completely off guard. I had successfully treated many patients with similar symptoms, and none had rejected my help.
“Why?” I asked. “Why don’t you want to be cured?”
“Because I believe you, Doc. You will cure me. I won’t be afraid to fly. Then I’ll get on the plane, and it’ll take off, then crash, and I’ll be dead. No thanks!”
I had no argument to counter his. He cordially left the office with his phobia intact, but he was undeniably still alive.
I was learning more about the human mind, its resistances and denials.