I mentioned in passing in my post last week that I’m not a big fan of doing past life regression as part of hypnosis. You can catch up here, but I thought I might expand on my thoughts a little. Fair warning, I’m going to be quite opinionated this week. You are of course under no obligation to agree with me!
Bluntly, the reason I’m not a fan of past life regression is because I don’t believe we have past lives. Or at least, we don’t have compelling evidence of such, beyond peoples’ extremely subjective experiences. And in fact, most of the evidence we have around the experience of past lives suggests that it’s a fabricated experience. People experiencing regression will often describe details of their lives that, when checked by appropriately knowledgeable experts, turn out to be totally historically inaccurate.
Despite this, past life regression therapy remains a staple of many a hypnotherapy room. But why? I think because in the moment it’s entirely convincing to the person experiencing it, and can be so strange and even unsettling to the therapist witnessing it that they can be drawn in as well. I’ve seen a video of someone regressing to a past life as a German woman who starved to death during the second world war, and to describe the experience as spooky hardly does it justice. These sessions are compelling and bizarre, and so real to the people experiencing them that to deny the reality of it can feel uncomfortably dismissive.
But just because something feels real, doesn’t mean it is. I spoke to some Mormons once, who told me their beliefs in Joseph Smith and the Latter Day Saints were real because they ‘knew in their heart that it was true’. Their conviction was so powerful it actually gave me pause, even though in my heart I knew that it wasn’t. ‘Heart knowledge’ is such a powerful feeling, but ultimately it’s subjective and unreliable.
So why do people experience past lives? My feeling is that it comes from either a prior expectation that clients bring to the therapy room, or, more often than not, it is a suggestion that the therapist themselves introduces, that the hypnotised mind is all too happy to jump on.
Going back to the starving German in the video I’d seen, the session began without a hint of any kind of past life. The therapist was talking to the part of their client’s subconscious that was responsible for their problem (more on parts work at a later date), and was getting a series of very grounded responses. It was only when the therapist started asking if the part of the mind had a name and a gender that this German woman emerged. My feeling is that without the line of questioning, the regression would never have occurred.
A similar experience is found in evangelical churches – something I actively engaged with in my youth. But rather than past lives found in hypnosis, it was demons discovered (and exorcised) in prayer. This is something I have first hand experience of. And although I would now classify that experience of possession and subsequent exorcism as my own imagination running wild, at the time it felt entirely real and terrifying.
What I find interesting, and what compels me to think of all of these experiences, however real they may seem, as purely imaginary, is that in each case it seems like we find exactly what we expect, and nothing more. Possession was somewhat commonplace in the church I grew up in; but no one, to my knowledge, ever found themselves experiencing a past life. The church framed a lot of emotional problems as demonic, and so we found demons. Similarly, the hypnotherapist who suggests past lives will inevitably find them. But they won’t find or cast out too many demons.
That’s not to say it can’t be helpful for people. Many people have found closure, explanations, and solutions for their problems by experiencing past life regression. Similarly, many people have felt huge weights lifted from them by having demons cast out. And if you’ve had that experience and your life is better for it then that’s great. It would be churlish of me in the extreme to begrudge a person a positive change just because they didn’t do it ‘right’.
If you see me for hypnosis and find yourself regressing to a past life I’m certainly not going to end the session and tell you you’re doing hypnosis wrong. But I would always caution you to treat such experiences lightly, and I would always frame such an experience as your unconscious mind utilising your extremely fertile imagination to help you find a helpful solution in an unconventional way. After all, it isn’t a requirement that an experience be real in order for it to be therapeutic.
More on that last thought next time!
