7

Healing the Need to Protect: Uncovering the Sources of Obesity and Substance Abuse

 

 

 

KATHY IS A THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD BUSINESS EXECUTIVE who came to me for the treatment of her anxiety symptoms. Kathy suffered from a severe and escalating fear of driving a car, which was manifested by panic attacks on expressways. Sometimes Kathy would even panic in cars when she was travelling as a passenger.

During these attacks, Kathy would experience sweating, palpitations, a racing heartbeat, difficulty catching her breath, and shakiness. Her vision would become “blurry.” By the time she came to see me, Kathy had become so terrified of losing control of the wheel that she had to take a tranquilizer before driving on a highway.

Kathy had tried psychotherapy and biofeedback, but neither type of therapy had been able to eradicate her symptoms. Neurological evaluations had been normal. Kathy did not suffer from the form of heart disease called mitral valve prolapse, which is often associated with anxiety attacks. When I took Kathy’s psychological history during our first session, I discovered that nothing about her past was particularly traumatic or abusive. Her physical health was good, except for the fact that Kathy was forty pounds overweight.

During our second session, I decided to try hypnosis. Kathy quickly relaxed into a deep hypnotic state, and I could see her eyes scanning under her closed and fluttering eyelids. Before I could even direct her to go back in time to the origin of her driving phobia, Kathy began to tell me about a couple of long-forgotten, but very traumatizing, automobile accidents from early childhood. The first car she had been travelling in hit a patch of ice and swerved out of control. Kathy had been terrified by the resulting crash and the injuries that members of her family had suffered, although she herself had not been injured. In the second accident, the brakes had failed as the car went down a hill. Everyone in the car had almost been killed. Kathy cried as she remembered these dreadful episodes, but after these long-forgotten traumas had seeped back into her awareness, the driving phobia gradually disappeared. Her confidence increased, and she no longer feared losing control of the wheel. The panic attacks subsided.

Flushed with success and feeling wonderful, Kathy soon scheduled a third session to see if we could do something about her weight. Kathy stated that she had been obese “as long as I can remember.” Dieting would help for a while, but then she would rapidly regain all of the weight she had lost.

On the large reclining chair in my office, Kathy drifted into the familiar trance state. Soon she entered a past life. She reported that she saw herself as “a very bony woman, skinny and out of proportion, like a skeleton with skin. There are men in uniforms there . . . I have acid burns on my body! They are doing medical experiments—torture—on me!”

Kathy cried as she saw herself as a victim of the inhumane Nazi medical experiments conducted in the concentration camps of World War II. She died in one of these camps, by then a helpless skeleton finally being freed from its pain. She floated above her body and soon found a brilliant light to which she was magnetically drawn. The light comforted her, and Kathy experienced a feeling of incredible peace and love.

The session was not over, however. Kathy’s eyes were fluttering again.

“I am in a French-looking place. It is New Orleans. I have had many men because I am a prostitute.” In that lifetime, Kathy had contracted a chronic, debilitating sexually transmitted disease, and she was dying. She was wasting away, starving because of the illness. Once again, her body was like a living skeleton. Kathy died in the same bed in which she had contracted her lethal disease. Once again, Kathy floated above her body. And, once again, she found the brilliant light that did not hurt her eyes.

“I never found someone to love in that life,” she wistfully observed. Her spirit had starved as had her body.

In both of these past life memories, she had died in a state of starvation. She was literally just skin and bones.

“Is there a connection between these two lifetimes and your current weight problem?” I asked, remembering the original intent of this session.

The answer came quickly and effortlessly. “In this life, I needed the extra weight for protection. I needed to guarantee that I would not starve again.” After a pause Kathy added, “But now I no longer need this protection.”

Because Kathy had remembered the traumas of starvation, she no longer needed layers of fat to protect her.

Over the next six or eight months, Kathy slowly and steadily lost all of her extra weight. At the time of this writing, she has sustained the loss. Perhaps even more significantly, Kathy has started a wonderful new romantic relationship since losing the weight. Feeling good about herself and liking how she looks definitely played an important part in Kathy’s ability to let this new relationship into her life.

 

When Dee, a banker’s wife, came to see me, her primary symptom was obesity. Dee was fifty to sixty pounds overweight, and she had been trying to lose that weight for years. Dee had tried everything—special diets, hypnosis, psychotherapy, medications, fasting, spas, and exercise regimens. But nothing had worked. Dee was a classic “yo-yo” dieter. She would get down to a certain weight, become anxious, and then quickly regain all the lost pounds.

All told, Dee had lost and gained hundreds of pounds over the years.

Dee is a very striking woman, and one therapist she had consulted suspected that Dee was afraid that men would be attracted to her if she were thin. However, exhaustive therapy in this area proved as futile as everything else.

In my office, Dee slipped into a trance and saw herself two or three hundred years ago as a young Native American woman who had been “stolen” by a male from another tribe. He had singled her out for her great beauty. She had been kidnaped, raped, and mutilated by this man. Dee had spent the rest of that lifetime in suffering and agony. Although the experience had not killed her, the pain she had endured made her resolve never to be beautiful again.

Instead, the Native American woman became fat. That obesity persisted even into the current lifetime.

Dee’s earlier therapist had been correct. Dee was indeed afraid of becoming thin and of then having strangers become sexually attracted to her. Dee had not entered a sexual relationship with her husband until their courtship was well underway and a feeling of familiarity and safety had been well established. But since the root cause of Dee’s problem had not originated in her current lifetime, the therapy had failed.

In one hypnotherapy session Dee had remembered, and she was cured. The pounds dropped off quickly, and she passed below her previous threshold weight. Dee kept losing until she decided to level off. As she lost the weight, she did not reexperience any anxiety, fear, or reflexive binge eating. And, as a bonus, she no longer feared death. Not only had she become thin, she had also realized that she was immortal. One session!

Dee has now maintained her ideal weight for almost four years. Her regression experience has also stimulated an interest in spiritual matters, and this aspect of life is now a very important and rewarding one to her.

 

Dee and Kathy are only two of a group of patients, mostly women, who have successfully conquered chronic obesity with the help of past life regression. In my experience, the need to protect the physical body from a previous experience of pain, starvation, sexual abuse, or violence is a cause of obesity that often originates in past lives and that can thus be ameliorated by past life regression.

Some people think that they can use obesity as a kind of magical protection against certain types of wasting illnesses. For example, people who are afraid of cancer often put on weight because they think that being heavy means that they are healthy. Others feel that added weight provides an insulating layer between the self and the body, dulling awareness of any perceived danger (real or imagined) and appearing to protect the heavy person from the “hard knocks” of the world.

When sexual abuse is the cause of the obesity, past life therapy can successfully treat both the symptom and the cause, the cause being as severe psychologically as the physical burden the symptom places on the body. The whole person is treated. There is no need to regain the weight, to repeat the process again and again. The causative trauma is no longer hidden. Simultaneously, both the inner and outer selves are healed.

For some patients, regression to childhood in the present lifetime can be enough to cure chronic and health-threatening obesity. For a brief period several years ago, I was a consultant to the Gastroenterology Division of the hospital. I interviewed patients suffering from severe obesity preliminary to their entering a research program that involved an invasive procedure to promote weight loss.

One of the patients whom I had previously interviewed was later referred back to me by a colleague. Sharon weighed 295 pounds, and like some of the other participants in the program, she had failed to lose weight. Sharon had also tried a form of hypnotherapy that employs positive suggestions to aid in weight loss, but this had not been successful for her either. Traditional psychotherapy also proved unsuccessful. Numerous diets had failed. Any weight loss had been quickly reversed as her weight ballooned back to the familiar three-hundred-pound plateau.

In childhood and adolescence, Sharon had been only ten to twenty pounds overweight. The explosion to three hundred pounds did not begin until shortly after her marriage. During their courtship, she had idealized and fallen deeply in love with her husband. Meanwhile, her subconscious mind was denying (not allowing her to see or bring into awareness) some of his less perfect personality traits, such as his compulsive flirting with other women. Soon after they were married, however, Sharon could no longer ignore reality. An affair of her husband’s became public knowledge, and with this disclosure had come the onset of Sharon’s severe obesity.

Hypnotic regression revealed that Sharon had been publicly humiliated in early adolescence by a teenage boy who had made fun of her developing figure. This was progress, but there was more. Tearfully and still in a trance state, Sharon recalled the original cause of her obesity. Her stepfather had fondled her when she was a little girl of four. These memories had been deeply repressed for many years.

The betrayal of her husband was the trigger, but the bullet was loaded at age four and the hammer drawn when Sharon was humiliated at age thirteen. She could not trust men. She had to be protected from them. The answer was to become so obese that no man could ever find her attractive, and, therefore, she could not be hurt again.

After this hypnosis session when she remembered her childhood sexual abuse, Sharon began to lose weight. Her voracious appetite abated, and she was able to eat sensibly. Short-term psychotherapy quickly reversed her distrust of men. Since our session, Sharon has lost 165 pounds and has maintained that loss.

 

Gerald Kein, a prominent hypnotherapist, has treated literally thousands of people for obesity during his professional experience of over twenty-five years. When I asked his opinion of these cases and others like them, he told me that, in his experience, posthypnotic suggestion alone—the type of hypnosis Sharon had tried before coming to me that had proved unsuccessful for her—is not successful in helping the patient achieve the desired weight loss if the patient is more than thirty or forty pounds overweight and has been obese for a long period of time.

In other words, he believes that traditional hypnosis employing direct suggestion—e.g., “You will eat only three meals a day; your stomach will feel full between meals; you will eat only foods that are nutritious”—does not successfully treat chronic obesity. The suggestions might help the patient diet and temporarily lose some weight, but the weight will nearly always come back.

However, Kein has found that regression to the cause of chronic obesity—whether that cause is found in significant childhood experiences or in the patient’s past lives—does cure the condition. And he has also found that when obesity is successfully treated with regression therapy, the weight loss is usually permanent.

My experience with Kathy, Dee, Sharon, and other obese patients echoes Kein’s observations. When the real reason for obesity can be uncovered by regression to the source, whether to childhood in this lifetime or to past life sources, the excess weight seems to simply drop off. Most of my regression patients have been able to resist any significant subsequent weight gain. If a patient does start to gain weight again, a session in which the memory is reexperienced or reviewed is often enough to reverse this trend.

This method also works for patients who have inherited tendencies toward obesity. These days, much attention is being given to the possibility that some of us may inherit certain genes that predispose us toward becoming chronically overweight. While such a genetic inheritance may indeed exist, it is important to remember that a tendency is just a tendency—it is not a certainty.

Past life regression gives patients the strength and also the tools to overcome any sort of tendency. Tendencies are not inevitable, irresistible, or irreversible. With past life regression and the subsequent understanding, a physical tendency can be reversed just as easily as any of the psychological ones we have discussed in these chapters.

Perhaps knowledge of the source of this cure is already deeply embedded within us. Whenever I ask an obese person how long he or she has been overweight, the answer is usually “forever.”

 

Substance abusers are also often deeply aware of the “foreverness” of their problem. Sometimes the tendency toward substance abuse itself is one that has been carried over from previous lifetimes. Or, the problems that a person hopes can be masked by using alcohol or drugs may be the issues that have been carried over from another lifetime, giving the feeling of timelessness and eternity.

In either case, patients facing the challenge of recovery often have an underlying need in common with the obese. And that need is the need to protect.

Like excess weight, drugs and alcohol can seem to provide a layer between the person and his or her feelings, fears, and the hurts inflicted by others. Drugs can also insulate an addict from taking responsibility for his or her life because the addict can always blame the drugs or alcohol for problems. It is easy to use addiction as an excuse for failures, disappointments, or mistakes instead of accepting such setbacks realistically and using them as opportunities for growth.

In contrast to obesity, the motivation for substance abuse behavior often involves an element of escapism or avoidance. Substance abuse typically provides a method of suppressing memories or feelings.

In this sense, the dulling of awareness with drugs and alcohol can be a form of slow suicide. Like suicide, substance abuse is a way of avoiding or escaping intolerable issues. Substance abusers who undergo past life regression therapy sometimes discover that they have committed suicide in other lives and that the issues they wanted to escape from previously have resurfaced with a vengeance. This time the need to escape has been translated into the slower suicide and escapism of addiction.

In some cases, the opportunities for growth in a past lifetime were “wasted” when painful issues could not be confronted. Perhaps in that previous lifetime, significant issues were avoided through the veil of altered states induced by alcohol or drugs. Although the issues might now be different, the temptation to use the same “escape hatch” to avoid pain may have recurred.

Either way, the only way to get rid of both the core issue and the trap of substance abuse is to meet them both head-on and solve them in a spiritual and realistic manner.

Once acute intervention is accomplished, past life therapy can treat the underlying causes of addiction, which may have roots in challenging family relationships and/or prior childhood abuse. For some patients, the core issue may revolve around a theme of anger or violence, since the expression of these qualities is facilitated by alcohol and drug use. For others, core issues may involve problems in courage or self-love. Alcohol can provide a pseudo-confidence.

I rarely treat patients who are in the acute stage of an addiction to alcohol or drugs. Hypnosis is not effective when a person is under the influence of these substances. In this acute stage, a substance abuser should seek help from an inpatient intervention program or from a support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). Those who come to my office have usually completed the detoxification process and are interested in healing core issues in their lives. Often, they have come to recognize that substance abuse is a symptom that has blotted out or provided escape from painful life traumas. These patients frequently recognize that their substance abuse was much more painful than the original traumatic event.

Inner child work and past life regression therapy provide a method for releasing both the primal pain and the maladaptive behavior. From the perspective of the inner child, harmful habits seem worth the price of alleviating such enormous pain. But from the adult perspective, the pain can be made to appear manageable. It can be released, and with it the need for dulling, desensitizing, and protective habits is also released.

Recovering addicts can make excellent candidates for past life therapy, because the problem of alcoholism or substance abuse is so often at the heart of a spiritual path. The reward for overcoming substance abuse is a precious one. The process may provide an accelerated path of spiritual growth. It is through understanding, faith, and wisdom that alcoholism and drug abuse are overcome.

 

Sarah had been an alcoholic for many years. She would also go on periodic spending sprees. However, she was not manic-depressive and did not require lithium. Careful exploration of her childhood revealed marked dysfunction in her family. She was involved in a classic codependency situation with her husband. Psychoanalysis, which had lasted eight years, had not changed her behaviors. She had failed in group therapy and in a chemical-dependency inpatient unit.

It was not until she began to explore her past lives that a dramatic improvement began. She discovered that in prior lifetimes she, her parents, and her husband had repeatedly been together in abusive, alcoholic relationships. There had been violence, murder, suicide, and all sorts of chaos and mayhem. The actual details were not as important as the recurring pattern. Sarah resolved to break the pattern, realizing that the family would be condemned to endlessly repeat this destructive play until they had learned their lessons.

“I must forgive them,” she mused after recalling a previous traumatic death, “. . . and I can only do that through love. I must express my love by letting go . . . must forgive them . . . and myself.”

And she did. Sarah now meditates regularly, volunteers with the severely handicapped, and no longer abuses substances or uses money for ego gratification.

Sarah’s understanding of the repetitive destructive behavior patterns in herself and her family, patterns spanning lifetimes, aided in her recovery. The experience of the extremely relaxed, almost blissful state induced by the hypnotic regression also helped her. She seemed to be talking to me from a higher, more detached and more aware perspective. Sarah was neither angry, anxious, nor judgmental. She could clearly see patterns, causes and effects, roots of symptoms, manipulations, and so on. It was as if her perception of reality was much sharper.

 

I have found that the experience of regression therapy can be supportive of the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve-Step recovery process. For your information, here are the Twelve Steps of the AA program:

Step One:	We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.
Step Two:	Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step Three:	Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
Step Four:	Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step Five:	Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Step Six:	Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Step Seven:	Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Step Eight:	Made a list of all persons we bad harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Step Nine:	Made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Step Ten:	Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Step Eleven:	Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Step Twelve:	Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Many of the issues addressed in past life therapy correspond to these Twelve Steps. The basis of both is spirituality. Both recognize the primacy of a higher power or plan. This does not imply a formal religious context. The power can be discovered within.

Spirituality is a vitally important force. Lives change because of it. Values change. People become less violent, greedy, self-centered. They become less afraid. Having had these experiences, they tell others, who in turn carry the same message to many more.

Ultimately, in both obesity and substance abuse and really in any form of suffering, the mechanism of healing involves the process of getting rid of fear.

The core healing mechanism of past life regression therapy is the transmutation of fear into love. This is the message of healing that those who have experienced past life regression carry to others and, hopefully, practice in all their affairs.

How do you do it? By knowing yourself. By looking within and seeing clearly. By understanding and acquiring wisdom. By becoming more joyful and peaceful. This is the essence of any past life healing.