Healing the Inner Child and the Abused Child
RECENTLY A GREAT DEAL OF ATTENTION HAS BEEN FOCUSED on “healing the inner child.” John Bradshaw, among others, has helped popularize the technique of having a patient go back in time, in a relaxed and light hypnotic state, to discover the hurt, confused, and vulnerable child carried within as he or she grew up. This concept is one that evolved from psychoanalytic techniques. In the free associations made during traditional therapy, an intense emotional catharsis of traumatic childhood memories frequently occurs. As patients experience this process of remembering and emotional release, which clinicians call an abreaction, therapeutic changes and clinical improvement can occur.
Transactional analysis (TA) refined the psychoanalytic concept of recovering the repressed or forgotten painful memories from one’s childhood. In I’m OK, You’re OK, Dr. Eric Berne, the father of TA, stated that “every individual was once younger than he is now and that he carries within him fixated relics from earlier years which will be activated under certain circumstances. . . . Colloquially, everyone carries a little boy or girl around inside of him.”
When childhood pain has not been resolved and emerges in the adult, it can produce a whole host of symptoms, including guilt, shame, depression, low self-esteem, and self-destructive behaviors. When people exhibit childish behavior, such as pouting, temper tantrums, and seeking excessive attention, the inner child is being triggered. If these triggering mechanisms are not brought to awareness, the maladaptive behavior that the patient suffered as a child can be turned against himself or herself and/or turned around and inflicted on others. Especially vulnerable are the patient’s own children. For example, it is often found that an abusive parent was himself abused as a child. Freudian therapists label this “repetition compulsion.” Bradshaw calls it “spontaneous age regression.”
In TA theory, every person’s psychological makeup contains three parts: the Child (the little boy or girl carried inside), the Adult (the rational objective part of the person now), and the Parent (the internalization of the parent or parent figure’s thoughts, feelings, and actions). In TA therapy, actual dialogues between the Child, the Adult, and the Parent take place. The patient acts out the different roles.
A variation known as Psychodrama adds even more roles for tapping into our carried-over childhood fears and vulnerabilities during the therapeutic process. For example, an alter ego—a person observing words, behaviors, and body language—can comment as the various roles of Child, Adult, and Parent are enacted by others. Multiple participants, playing simultaneously, can shift roles, act out dramatic encounters, and experience the intense emotional release that occurs when painful childhood memories are brought into conscious awareness.
Bradshaw combined the concepts of TA with Erik Erikson’s theory of personality development. In this way, he is able to pinpoint the problems and adapt his therapy to particular childhood stages.
The common thread in all of these techniques, as well as other methods employing dialogue with our “child,” is the remembering and emotional release of painful childhood memories. In the inner child techniques, which are often effective and which are frequently used with adults who have grown up in dysfunctional, abusive, and alcoholic or drug-abusing families, contact with the memories of childhood is made while the person is in a relaxed state. Sometimes key words or phrases are used to focus in on the particular points in childhood from which the most painful memories arise. Sometimes the traumas are everywhere, in the day-in and day-out pounding of negative, undermining abuse from one’s parents or significant others. Unlearning such negative programming is a vital part of therapy.
For example, in the relaxed state, the adult is sent back to find the “child” carried within his or her psyche for all these years. A childhood house is remembered and visualized, the rooms within, the family, and then the little child. The adult, with the increased perspective and understanding maturity has brought, talks to the child, reasons with the child, hugs the child, promises to protect the child, and brings the child out of the traumatic environment into the present time. In a sense, the child is rescued.
In theory, as the perspective of what happened to the child is broadened, the reactions to the childhood traumas are changed. This is called rescripting. It is as if the life-script is rewritten, the play altered. Hopefully, the inner child can now understand that he or she was not responsible for causing the parent’s dysfunctional behavior and can now forgive the parent, or at least comprehend the reasons why the parent acted in such an irrational way. The adult becomes the loving parent of his or her own inner child.
Of course, the reality of past events has not changed at all. The only change occurs in the adult’s internalized reactions to those events. He or she can let go of the pain, release the hurt, can heal the childhood wounds. The technique can be powerful. It can be the first step toward a cure.
But sometimes even these emotional and moving childhood abreactions are not enough. Sometimes there is more than one childhood involved. Sometimes the roots of the pain go even further back.
Linda is an attractive thirty-five-year-old attorney from a small town in central Pennsylvania. She is divorced from a psychologically abusive husband. Linda came to my office well dressed in a navy-blue suit and an open-necked blouse. She wore no jewelry except for a large diamond ring. Linda seemed cool and controlled and effortlessly projected the image of a successful female professional.
As our first session got underway and Linda recounted her history, I was surprised by the violence of her childhood, by the volcanic rumblings under that cool exterior. Linda had no memories of her life before she was eight years old. She could not even picture what her parents looked like when she was young. But she did remember how her father had beaten her with belts, fists, coat hangers, and wooden beams. He had frequently choked her, calling her “whore, sleaze, bitch,” when she was just a young girl. Linda’s mother told her that the beatings had started at a very early age. At times, her mother had joined in, beating her daughter and scratching her with her fingernails. Linda had also been repeatedly sexually molested by an uncle, with her parents’ knowledge.
As I began to comprehend the level of abuse this young child had endured, I started to feel a twinge of nausea. Even as a child, Linda had been so responsible that she had assumed the role of a surrogate mother to her younger siblings and had tried to protect them from being treated in the same way. As a result, she had suffered the brunt of her parents’ abuse. Linda had even called the Child Welfare Department several times in order to get the state to intervene and protect the younger children, to no avail. Her parents denied all the allegations. Then, when the investigating social worker left, Linda’s father beat her nearly to the point of unconsciousness.
During her teenage years, Linda had developed asthma. She also had a chronic, severe fear of choking. She could not tolerate wearing anything around her neck—not jewelry, not a scarf, not even a sweater. The necklines of her clothes were stretched from her pulling on them. She could never button the top button of any blouse she was wearing.
Linda had tried to run away from home several times, but there was no place to go. Finally, she went away to college and married at a young age to ensure that she would never have to go home again.
During that first session, I began to try to unravel the threads of Linda’s tortured history, but Linda could remember nothing before the fourth grade. I wasn’t surprised. Such a memory loss can be a merciful thing, especially when the past has been so violent and abusive. But Linda was unhappy, frightened, and beset by a myriad of symptoms such as recurring nightmares, phobias, and sudden panic attacks, as well as an overwhelming dread of choking and of having anyone or anything touch her neck.
I knew we would have to explore her past.
I gave her an audiotape to take home. On the front side of this tape is a relaxation meditation, and on the back is a regression exercise. My voice guides both of the audio journeys. I told Linda that she was free to listen to either or both sides and to call me if the tape induced too much anxiety or negative emotion.
At home, she listened to the tape, playing both sides daily. The tape made her feel very relaxed. In fact, every time she listened she fell asleep. However, her symptoms and her paralyzing fears persisted unchanged.
Linda came in for her second session eager to try hypnosis. She quickly reached a moderately deep level of trance state. I guided her back to her childhood, and Linda could now remember more details of the fourth grade, such as her classroom and her kindly teacher. Now she could finally picture her father’s face as he appeared when she was eight. She began to sob. I worked with the “inner child,” instructing Linda to send her adult self back to hug, talk to, comfort, and rescue the vulnerable eight-year-old. She was filled with fear, relief, and gratitude, and she was comforted. She attempted to understand and to forgive her father.
I then used techniques I had developed over the years to help her release the fears, to see things from the adult’s perspective. I used the methods of John Bradshaw and others who have worked with the vulnerable, frightened inner child. We talked, reasoned, felt, projected light and love, reviewed, cried, analyzed, synthesized, and rescripted. For ninety minutes, the cleansing of Linda’s childhood continued. When she finally emerged from the hypnotic state, Linda felt somewhat better.
Linda started to sing again, something she enjoyed but had not been able to do since childhood, when she had sung in the church choir. Her memory was somewhat better. She felt less anxious, and her mood was improved. But Linda’s life was still filled with fears. She remained terrified of choking, and she still could not tolerate having anything near her neck. Her asthma persisted.
We had more work to do.
At her third session, I used a rapid induction technique that produces a deep level of hypnosis within thirty seconds. Linda was immediately racked with sobs and began to arch her neck.
“Someone is grabbing my hair and pulling my head back!” she screamed. “They are going to guillotine me!”
She had gone directly to a death experience. I assumed Linda was in France, but she corrected me. She was in England. (This confused me, as I had assumed that guillotining only happened in France. That evening, I researched the topic and found out that for a brief time guillotining was also practiced in England, Scotland, and various other European countries.)
From the trance state, Linda watched herself being decapitated. She told me that she had a five-year-old daughter in that lifetime and that this child was in the crowd, also watching. After the beheading, Linda’s head was put into a burlap sack and thrown into the nearby river. We went through the death scene several times, lessening the emotion each time, until she could calmly tell me everything that had happened. Her heart was broken because she had to leave her young daughter.
A few moments passed. I could see her eyelids fluttering and her eyes moving under her closed lids as she seemed to be scanning something. Suddenly she was sobbing again, thrashing her head from side to side.
“It’s him! It’s my father!” I knew Linda meant her father in her current life, a fact she confirmed to me after the regression was over. “He was my husband. He arranged my execution so that he could be with another woman. He had me killed!”
Now Linda understood why her mother had told her that Linda had seemed to hate her father from the moment she was born. She would cry and scream when he picked her up. She would stop when he put her down. Now it made sense to her.
Linda remembered two other past lives during this session.
Several centuries ago, she had been an Italian woman who was happily married to her present life grandfather. She could vividly see herself in the boat the couple had owned. She was wearing a white dress, and her long, dark hair billowed in the breeze. This life had been a happy one filled with love, and she had died peacefully at an old age. In her current lifetime, Linda has a very warm and loving relationship with her grandfather.
In a glimpse of a third lifetime, she saw herself on a large farm with haystacks and a windmill. She was an old lady with a large family.
I asked Linda what she needed to learn from these lifetimes.
“Not to hate,” she quickly answered from the higher perspective of her superconscious mind. “I must learn to forgive and not to hate.”
The energy of her hate and that of her father’s violent anger was what had drawn them together again in this lifetime, and the consequences had been disastrous. But now she remembered. Now the healing could begin. Linda could understand why she had immediately rejected her father and why he, tapping a wellspring of guilt, shame, and violence, had repeatedly erupted into a torrent of abusiveness. Now she could begin to forgive.
When the regression was over, I asked Linda to button the top button of her blouse. She did so without hesitation and without a hint of anxiety or fear.
She was cured.
The cure had taken three sessions. Her symptoms have not recurred. Even her asthma is nearly gone.
The intensive second session in which we worked with and rescued Linda’s inner child was important, and it did help her. But the regression to the guillotine lifetime proved to be the curative factor.
In cases like Linda’s, inner child work and the ensuing catharsis act as a doorway to healing that is best and most effectively accomplished through past life therapy. Traumas experienced in this lifetime’s childhood are sometimes variations on traumas experienced in other lifetimes. These prior lifetimes may be the true source of this childhood’s pain. Reexperiencing the source of the problem can heal the current lifetime’s inner child.
Laura, a twenty-five-year-old manager of a boutique, came in with many symptoms. Laura suffered from intermittent depression and had a long history of eating disorders for which she regularly attended support and therapy groups like Overeaters Anonymous. But perhaps Laura’s most troubling symptom was the question in her mind about whether or not she had been sexually abused as a child. Laura had no clear or even partial memories of such an experience. It was more a feeling or a pattern of kinesthetic impressions she would sometimes have about an older person touching her.
As I took Laura’s introductory history, she related that her parents were estranged and that her relationship with them was distant. There were long periods of time in which she didn’t speak to them at all, and when she did speak to them, both she and they would become overwhelmed with so much anxiety and discomfort that she felt like she was “drowning.” We also uncovered what was perhaps a more significant detail of her past. When Laura tried to remember anything about her childhood, she drew a blank. She had no memories of childhood at all.
We decided to approach this symptom initially. But first we reviewed the past life memories Laura had experienced when she had attended a seminar of mine a few months earlier that had prompted her to decide to explore her problems further in individual therapy.
During the group regression, Laura had recalled having been a thirteen-year-old French boy carrying a bow and arrow. She was shot in the chest by someone else’s arrow and died. Laura recognized that her grandmother in that lifetime was her mother in this lifetime. In another lifetime, Laura had been a London street person and pickpocket. And, in a third, she had been a fifteen-year-old girl living in Spain in the sixteenth century.
As Laura entered that Spanish lifetime, she was being tied to a stake to be burned as a witch because she had healed a boy in her village. Laura recognized that the judge who had pronounced her death sentence in that lifetime is her father in this lifetime. These memories had not scared Laura. Thinking that she might be eternal made Laura feel very free and happy. It also made her feel there was hope for her problems, and her depression had lifted somewhat.
The next time Laura came in she could again access no memories from childhood, but she still wanted to uncover the root of her problem. Because Laura was so successful with past life regression in the seminar, we decided that this was the easiest route for her therapy and that we should approach her problems with regression again.
Once more, Laura accessed memories of dying at a young age. This time she was a fourteen-year-old boy in fifteenth-century France and a member of a well-to-do family. Her parents owned an apple orchard. Tragically, a fatal epidemic overtook the community and the mode of transmission involved Laura’s family’s apples. However, the family members were completely unaware of the danger their crop posed, and they were not at fault. Laura had died in this epidemic, but not before she recognized that her parents in this lifetime had been her parents in that lifetime.
As we reviewed the lifetime after her emergence from hypnosis, issues of anger, love, and forgiveness came up. Laura had to forgive her parents in that lifetime because they hadn’t purposely poisoned her. She needed to release that anger.
At home, Laura had used my relaxation and regression tape to explore the answers to the question of what had happened to her during her childhood. The intuitive answers she obtained were often spiritual in nature, advising her that the experience concerned learning about balance, moderation, and harmony. By experiencing the unbalanced, immoderate lifetimes, she had become patient and loving. And, her intuitive mind told her, these experiences were really the foundation of true wisdom.
After this regression, it was as if a logjam had been somehow loosened. Laura’s childhood memories from her current lifetime began to surface, and when they did, it was clear why the memories had been blocked. Laura’s fleeting impressions of abuse had been accurate. Laura had indeed been sexually abused by her father and her uncle. From the time she was two, they had fondled and touched her, and had forced her to perform oral sex. This abuse had continued for years. Worst of all, Laura remembered that her mother had been aware of this abuse, but she had done nothing to stop it.
These memories, particularly the memory of her mother’s complicity, heightened Laura’s symptoms and problems for a brief time. Over time, she had the opportunity to integrate these experiences and feelings in therapy. As she did so, Laura began to release the anger about these memories, and her eating disorder started to improve rapidly.
Laura was also able to put her father’s and her uncle’s abusive behavior into perspective. She was able to see that the history of her father tormenting her goes way back. Although he did not specifically abuse her in that past lifetime, he did have her executed. Therefore, this man’s perception of the usual boundaries between parents and children may have been blurred in this lifetime. His sexual impulses toward her may have been stronger than if there had been no past life connection between the two. She was also able to see that she had been in a series of lifetimes in which parental figures had not been able to protect her from death or poverty, and that this series of lifetimes had provided lessons in love and patience and wisdom.
Laura’s past life connection with her father is typical in present life abusive relationships. Often, a past life history in which the current abuser has somehow jeopardized or harmed the current victim makes it more likely that an abuser will transgress boundaries and incest taboos in the present lifetime. It is as if the essential boundaries and limits that maintain safety and well-being between the two are already weakened; they have already been crossed. This seems to make it harder for both participants to avoid falling into a new variation on that long-standing pattern of abuse, pain, and abandonment. This does not mean that victims of abuse deserve or ask for abuse or that they are destined to repeat this pattern lifetime after lifetime. There is always free will. Such a volatile situation can create very special conditions for accelerated emotional and spiritual growth. Temptations can be overcome and lessons learned.
It is significant that Laura had not been able to access any real childhood memories until the past life context was established. Only after Laura had gained that larger perspective could the memory of her current, painful childhood be released to the surface. Only then could the inner child be comforted. A catharsis could take place. The healing could begin.
It was almost an anticlimax when we discovered that Laura’s eating disorder was alleviated. Today, her weight is still slowly dropping, and she is no longer on a cycle of binging. Her depression has lifted. She meets occasionally with her parents to try and resolve their relationship, and her anxiety about these meetings has lessened greatly. After many years of struggling with her symptoms and trying to understand them through other forms of therapy, Laura found a rapid and lasting cure.
The incidence of abuse against children in this country is startlingly high. Approximately one in three girls is a childhood victim of sexual abuse, and one out of five boys is victimized sexually. Past life therapy can be important to the healing process because for many adult survivors it provides a rapid, safe way of unlocking and clearing the experience, and because it also offers a larger emotional and spiritual framework in which to process and integrate the memories and feelings that are released during the healing process. Past life therapy gives victims new handles and hooks for approaching and grasping their experiences.
In the hands of a trained therapist, past life therapy for sexual abuse is not dangerous. In the therapeutic situation, no victim needs to be afraid of reexperiencing painful, repressed memories. In my experience with patients like Laura, reexperiencing memories in this context is characterized by a feeling of liberation. Therapy enables the victim to comfort this lifetime’s inner child. Many aspects of adult life, particularly relationships, are improved.
A blocked memory of sexual abuse presents a monumental challenge to our ability to find joy, satisfaction, and intimacy in adult relationships. The tendency is for adult survivors of abuse to shy away from intimacy in their relationships in a symbolic bid to protect themselves from reexperiencing the buried pain. This tendency is another manifestation of the same dynamic that prompts women to symbolically protect themselves from hurt with a sexual origin by becoming overweight to mask physical attractiveness. We will discuss this aspect further in the next chapter.
Dr. John Briere, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said that one of the most painful insights he has repeatedly heard from adult victims of childhood sexual abuse is “knowing Daddy hurt me for his benefit. Daddy was willing to sacrifice my needs for his needs.” Dr. Briere also observed that a victim of child abuse “. . . loses that notion that you can depend on a warm, caring caretaker; a sense that you often never get back.” Instead, that reality is replaced with one in which a child knows that a “seemingly ‘good’ person is quite capable of being ‘bad.’” That sense of trust is shattered.
Dr. David L. Corwin, a professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, has observed that a profound sense of deprivation and of seriously impaired self-esteem frequently results from childhood molestation by the father. The result is that “those affects and attitudes undermine a person’s ability to stand up and protect herself, to feel that she has the right as a person to expect and demand that she be treated in a respectful, caring, appropriate manner.” The women “begin to think of themselves as bad to preserve the image of an idealized . . . father.” Therapy can then “help the childhood abuse victim ‘unlearn’ negative self-concepts and become a survivor in the fullest sense.”
The abuse need not occur in the present lifetime or in childhood in order to influence the present lifetime’s relationships.
Emily was a forty-three-year-old woman who came into the office suffering from what she described as “unrealistic fears.” She had anxiety and panic attacks, fear of abandonment and loss, and an aversion to sex, particularly to ejaculation. As a result, her relationship with her husband was very troubled. She was afraid of this man with whom she had shared so much of her life. Needless to say, many conflicts in the relationship had resulted from these feelings. Emily’s high-school-aged son had recently died in an automobile accident, and she was still grieving. Emily was also a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, where she was doing well with no relapses.
In past life therapy Emily returned to a time when she was a dark-haired woman wearing a red dress, dancing dreamily with a young man at a party. This young man was Emily’s dead son.
In the second key memory of this session, Emily recalled having been a destitute young mother in the time of King Herod. The ruler’s command to kill all children two years old and under had just been issued, and Emily had accidentally smothered her own son in an attempt to hide the crying child from the king’s soldiers.
In the Middle Ages Emily had another lifetime with her lost son. This time she had been his sister, and the two had shared a very close relationship. The brother had been slain by sword while he was riding on horseback in the midst of a battle. Both she and her father had been devastated by the boy’s death. The father never recovered from the loss. Emily married a rich man to escape her father and their shared sadness. The husband had subjected her to rough, crude, and unpleasant lovemaking with no sensitivity to her pleasure or comfort. This physical relationship had terrified Emily. It had also resulted in the birth of three children.
In a subsequent session, Emily recalled having been a French gypsy and peasant woman in the mid-nineteenth century. She had several children who depended on her, and she had to resort to prostitution to feed them. Emily was despised for her trade, and although she cared for some of the men, she was violently abused by others. In a particularly harrowing incident, some of them even spat at her during the abuse and degradation.
As she grew older in that lifetime and her children no longer depended on her for their survival, Emily turned to alcohol, and she eventually committed suicide.
After this second session, Emily was able to make many connections to her present life issues. Realizing that she had known her son many times before, Emily was able to resolve the lingering grief over his death.
One very strong theme for her was her love of children. Emily works in the pediatric ward of a hospital and volunteers with children.
Another theme was sexual abuse and cruelty. Emily was able to understand the past life roots of her present life aversion to sexual contact. She could see that in this particular constellation of lifetimes, sex had been primarily a vehicle for degradation and pain. She also made a connection between her aversion to ejaculation and the humiliating spitting she had endured in nineteenth-century France. Emily was able to shed some of her fear of sex. She understood that the fear was a protection against pain that she did not have to endure in this lifetime, that this pain belonged in the past.
With understanding came the beginning of healing. Emily had been in traditional psychoanalysis for years, with no improvement of her symptoms. This was not the fault of her analyst, but rather had more to do with the scope of the material covered. The roots of Emily’s problems simply lay beyond her present life experiences. It was necessary to address past life memories and traumas in order to effect a cure. In this sense, past life therapy for abuse is merely an expansion of psychoanalytic thought and treatment into a larger arena.
Today, Emily’s sexual fears are diminishing. As a result, her relationship with her husband has become less charged. It is still not a perfect relationship. However, it has important strengths, and Emily is able to evaluate its pros and cons from a more realistic perspective. She is also no longer afraid of having a future relationship with another man, should she eventually decide to make that choice.
The shadows of the past have lifted. Her fears of sexual contact and of men have been fading away. Whatever choice Emily makes about her marital relationship, it will be clear-sighted and realistic as a result of her past life memories, and not the result of a projection of her own fears onto the marriage.
Once the memories are accessed, the healing process begins. Some typical patterns of healing from sexual abuse are documented in the excellent book The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Linda Davis. The first step in that process is the decision to heal, to seek help.
Like Laura, victims often have partial or shadow memories of their abuse as those memories first start to surface. Often, as in Emily’s case, there is a symptomatic inability to form intimate relationships. And, as all of the cases indicate, there is a high level of discomfort.
As we have seen, frequently the memory of abuse becomes more easily accessible during regression therapy. Victims can begin to become aware that the frightening elements of their dreams and daydreams and the tips of those elusive memory fragments are really all connected to the overriding childhood trauma.
A subsequent stage in the healing process is the ability to accept that the memories of the abuse are real. Doing so is a vital part of the healing process. Hypnotic regression to this childhood and to other lifetimes is a technique that is ideally suited to accepting such memories. Patients see and feel their experiences vividly, yet they feel safe and are able to integrate their memories afterwards in the protected therapeutic situation. The patient knows that these are memories, not fantasies, due to the intensity of the memories and emotions accessed through regression, and the experience of this intensity counteracts the mental defense mechanism of denial. Dr. Wayne Dyer, author of Your Erroneous Zones, reminds us that mental acceptance often lags behind emotional when he says that “You’ll see it when you believe it.” But for many patients seeing is still believing. And seeing the past with hypnotic regression does allow some otherwise denial-prone patients to accept their pasts more effortlessly, thus speeding the healing process.
Survivors of abuse often pass through another stage of healing—that of feeling shame about their experiences, shame for participating in an activity that is taboo. But patients who access these memories through hypnotic regression are able to integrate more easily the fact that as small children they were never responsible for the adult’s behavior. Past life memory also helps dissipate shame as it helps explain why boundaries that should have been impermeable in these formative relationships with significant adults were broken.
This brings us to the highly charged subject of anger. Survivors are typically encouraged to experience their anger toward their abuser, to feel that this anger is healing. While anger is certainly a stage that must be traversed, I have found that when past life therapy is employed, anger is often rather quickly transmuted into understanding. In my practice, this stage is often comparatively short.
I am not exactly sure why this happens, and more research certainly needs to be done. It may be that the greater perspective that is afforded by past life experience allows the victim to become more dispassionate more quickly. Or, perhaps, the spiritual component of the therapy can, in some cases, provide a quicker growth and healing curve.
Ever since Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross delineated the stages of grief, it has often been assumed that one must go thoroughly and methodically through every stage of every process for complete healing to take place. But not every individual who is undergoing a healing process needs to go through every stage in a rigid time sequence. It is not essential, for example, that anger be expressed for a protracted period even though your therapist may think it is necessary. After reexperiencing the visual and empathic review in past life therapy, understanding sometimes quickly follows. This type of therapy does seem to have a special facility for short-circuiting the anger phase.
It encourages a patient to work at his or her own pace, whatever that pace may be. Why experience anger for months when you can rid yourself of it in an hour, a day, or a week? As Laura’s and Linda’s cases demonstrate, through the understanding that past life therapy provides, anger can be diminished and the trauma can be more quickly resolved.
This is not a promise of a “quick fix,” nor a “scolding” for patients and therapists who proceed at a slower and, in their cases, more appropriate rate. It simply highlights another choice a survivor can make.
Once you understand the roots of your anger, you can choose to release it whenever you want. You can keep it, if you feel more comfortable about that, but you can also let anger go at any time. The choice is yours. Everyone has his or her own unique and perfect pace of healing and growth.
A patient who unlocks memories of abuse in this lifetime and perhaps other lifetimes through hypnotic regression does not forget the memory of the anger. But such a patient seems to be much quicker to forgive himself or herself and others. A deep level of forgiveness often seems to be the spiritual lesson of abuse experiences.
Lorraine knew forgiveness was part of her lesson even before she came to therapy. As she sat in my office, this thirty-seven-year-old college professor and administrator recounted how unnurturing her parents had been to her when she was a young child. Her mother had suffered from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, and this illness demanded all of her parents’ attention. Lorraine felt that her mother and father had both been cold and unaffectionate toward her. To make matters worse, Lorraine’s father had died of a heart attack when she was six years old.
Lorraine felt that her relationship with her parents and her father’s death had made it very difficult for her to be intimate with other people, and also to be forgiving of herself and others. She was afraid that if she got close to people that she would either lose them or become very angry with them. Lorraine had been a DES baby, and her fears of infertility played into this fear of intimacy.
In past life therapy, Lorraine recalled a lifetime in ancient Greece. In that lifetime, her present father had been her father once again, and in that past lifetime he had abused her sexually in her early childhood. Eventually, he had been discovered and taken away. Lorraine thought he had probably been killed by the authorities for what he had done. Significantly, in this lifetime Lorraine’s father had also left her life in her sixth year.
Mixed in with her anger, Lorraine also felt a great deal of guilt that she had been the cause of her father’s punishment in the Greek lifetime. She realized that in this present lifetime she felt not only angry toward her father but guilty about feeling angry, that the pattern of abuse was in fact an old one, and that she had to forgive herself and him in order to let go of the anger. It was also clear that Lorraine’s inability to forgive in other relationships was also tied up with being abused by her father in her past lifetime.
Lorraine also recognized that she had to forgive her father “twice” for leaving her at such a young age. She is working on that now and is feeling much better about her relationship with him in this lifetime. Her feelings of both abandonment and anger are abating. She has come to realize that experiencing a fatal heart attack is not the same as being taken away for committing abuse. She is able to see her father’s life pattern more clearly, to see that many of the events in this lifetime of his had played out in a kind of karmic counterpoint to the lifetime in which he had abused her. She believes that, in a way, he was forced to leave her again when she was six as a kind of repayment for the abuse he had committed in the other lifetime and that, in fact, he had not wanted to leave her at all. She has also seen that the character of her father in this lifetime was a vast improvement over his in the Greek lifetime. This, too, was healing. Lorraine has become very sympathetic and compassionate about her father’s difficult path of growth.
Lorraine’s ability to be understanding and feel forgiveness resulted quickly, largely from her being able to see her father’s flow of lifetimes. Simply perceiving an overall purpose or logic to events that have been painful can be enough to heal by releasing anger and replacing it with forgiveness. This process is not necessarily logical, but I have seen it take place many times.
Lorraine is also now much less fearful of intimacy than before, because she now knows that her father’s abandonment and abuse took place in a very specific situation. It was not due to a defect or impairment in her. Therefore, she has no reason to believe that others will also leave her.
Like so many cases, Mercedes, a forty-year-old single woman, came into the office complaining of stress, anxiety, nightmares, and headaches. A successful businesswoman, Mercedes had been educated in parochial schools. Mercedes was spiritually aware in many areas, and had meditated for many years. One odd symptom that she recounted to me occurred when she meditated. During meditation, she would experience a sudden involuntary turning of her head to one side, as if protecting herself from something.
For many sessions we tried traditional therapy methods; there was only a slight improvement in her symptoms. Finally, Mercedes decided to try regression therapy. The therapy, which at first was directed to this lifetime’s childhood, brought out quite a bit of hurt as Mercedes began to recall being molested by her drunken and surly father, a man who had died ten years ago. In this session, she found herself turning away and gagging from the oral sex that had been forced upon her by her father. Here was the cause of the head turning that took place during Mercedes’s meditations.
Mercedes also remembered her shame and confusion, becoming somewhat upset and depressed when her father ended his abuse and went back to her mother. Unfortunately, the abuse was the only affection or attention this child ever received. When Mercedes recalled the childhood emotions attached to the abuse, fear was not the first one on the list. Disgust was the more salient emotion, as if she were already quite used to this experience. Apparently, the abuse had been ongoing for some time.
In subsequent sessions Mercedes uncovered memories of physical abuse from her mother. Her mother had beaten her frequently, impulsively, and without warning, frightening the child terribly. She now understood why she doesn’t trust women.
She uncovered a memory of her father fondling her at the age of one while she was in her bassinet, a very early memory. But Mercedes also recalled how much she loved her father and how much he loved her, even though he abused her. This was extremely confusing to Mercedes.
In her next session Mercedes regressed to a past life. She had been a twenty-six-year-old woman who lived in the Dark Ages. She remembered being a slave who was chained to the wall of the castle kitchen where she had constantly labored. In this lifetime, Mercedes had only been removed from her chains for one purpose—to be taken to a locked room in the castle to meet a man who used her sexually. Mercedes recalled feeling more disgust than any other emotion after these encounters, a disgust that was not dissimilar to her feeling of being abused by the father who loved her.
Mercedes felt immediate relief after this session. She had achieved much more understanding about her sexual attitudes and biases. Like other survivors of abuse, intimacy was an overwhelming challenge for Mercedes. Mercedes enjoyed sex, but for her sexual contact was shielding and mechanical, not at all intimate. After this regression, she felt happier and more hopeful. She is now beginning to understand and resolve her past and her present, to look forward to the future.
One of the most interesting points about Mercedes’s case is the experience of her siblings. She had two sisters, but only one of them had been abused by her father. The other, who was the middle sister, was always left alone.
One possible explanation for this is that the untouched child did not have a history of abuse or taboo transgression with the father in a previous lifetime. Their connection, if any, may have taken place in a different sphere, a different constellation of behaviors, lessons, and circumstances.
People often bring up the idea of “karma”: that as far as lifetime experiences and circumstances go, what we sow in one lifetime is what we reap in the next. This is not always strictly true. I believe that experiences like these are not necessarily punishments from the past, or even lessons or patterns carried forward from past lives. By choosing to come into a particular family or constellation of circumstances you have not agreed to submit to abuse. However, you have agreed to participate in a certain lesson or type of drama. You still have free will about how a particular lesson or teaching is carried out and so do the other individuals who have chosen to share the lifetime with you. Just because you have agreed to play a role in this family, abuse is not the invariable result. Part of the learning process is learning not to choose the more harmful or destructive paths. Growth can occur easily and joyfully as well as through struggle, and there are many gradations between the two.
The potential for abuse will exist, but it is not inevitable. In this sense, all families are like little interactive worlds or universes, small emotional and spiritual ecosystems that constantly interact, readjust, and interact yet again. This is one way to understand why abuse occurs between certain family members and not others.
Past life therapy fosters greater awareness of larger issues and more complex and expansive situations. When the shadows are there and memories aren’t clear, there is nothing tangible to grieve about or to release. But when appropriate memories are recalled, an abusive victim has a place to “push off from” into future growth.
When we understand reasons, patterns, and causes, we experience what many call grace. The grace of understanding allows us to transcend the traditional idea of karma, so that we do not have to reenact the same old dramas. We absolve ourselves of the need to repeat them, the need to experience pain. We enter a higher flow where the keynote of our lifetimes can become one of harmony and joy.
Finally, victims of abuse need to remember that even in these challenging circumstances, the soul is never harmed. The spirit is indestructible and immortal.