Past Lives: Fact or Fiction?
Every so often I get a request for or a question about past lives and past life regression. Despite my experience with these subjects, I find I am still agnostic about the question of whether or not we have had past lives, and if we have, whether or not we can recall them.
I say ‘agnostic’ because there is little evidence and not much written about this issue in mainstream psychiatric literature. There is a general view in the field that this topic is too esoteric to consider. This, despite the fact that electroshock therapy, polypharmacy (prescribing four or five or more psychiatric medications to the same patient) or (in years gone by) lobotomy, are not.
Some years ago, I was treating a professor at a local university. The professor suffered from chronic depression. When he started to see improvement, he referred his wife to me, as he thought she was also depressed. In therapy, she reported that her husband had been emotionally abusive for many years. Abusing this woman had been easy; her very low self-confidence and self-esteem made it difficult for her to assert herself and set limits against his abuse. Over the next few sessions, she brought up the idea of previous lifetimes. I told her that I knew nothing about it and that standard medical thinking would consider the ideas of previous lives and reincarnation as having no scientific basis at all.
She knew that hypnosis was a technique I was familiar with, and asked if I would regress her to a previous lifetime in order to explore possible roots of her depression. She was convinced that she had lived before and that something traumatic had happened that was still troubling her in the present. I thought that the abusive relationship with her husband was an obvious and complete explanation of her depression.
There was nothing in my training at the University of Toronto Medical School or in my psychiatric residency that even remotely touched on the issue of past life regression as a solution for psychiatric problems. At first, I was reluctant to go along with her wishes. But she did not give up, and eventually, I felt that therapy was coming to an impasse. I finally consented to give past life regression a try, but only on the condition that we have only a single hypnosis session. That session she could use for her own purposes and that there would be no repetition. She agreed and we proceeded. I must admit, I was not prepared for what happened next.
She entered hypnosis easily and deeply, which is usually what happens when a patient is as well motivated as she was. She was quietly relaxed for a while but then started to breathe more deeply and rapidly, eventually coming to a point where she was gasping and fighting for her breath as if she was choking. This shocking and unexpected development was frightening for me. My directions to her to stop what was happening had no effect whatsoever. It appeared that she did not even hear me or, if she did, she was not paying any attention to me. She seemed to be in her own world and in an experience that was severely traumatic. Her lack of response to my directions gave me the impression that she needed to be in that experience and to finish with whatever was going on. I could do nothing but wait.
In time, the gasping stopped and she became slowly more comfortable and composed. After she emerged from hypnosis, she reported a terrible experience. She experienced a time when she had been living with her mother in a cottage in the woods outside an English village. One night, an angry crowd of villagers came to her house, demanding that she come with them and be tried for witchcraft. She protested but the enraged rabble threatened to kill her on the spot or have her undergo the dunking test. I knew that this test involved being held under water and if the accused came out alive she was proven guilty. She would then be tried as a witch and burned at the stake, a terrible lose-lose proposition.
She believed herself to be innocent and agreed to accept the test, not realizing what she was agreeing to. She thought that if she survived, it would prove her innocence and she would be allowed to go free. She was taken to the village, tied to a chair and lowered into the river from the bridge. There she drowned and experienced the drowning in all its terror.
To my surprise she appeared quite calm, even relieved, after this harrowing but apparently profoundly cathartic experience, which she recalled in its entirety. In our next session together, I was amazed at the dramatic change in my patient. She was no longer diffident, insecure or unassertive in the face of her husband’s emotional abuse. Instead she had become a confident woman, comfortable with herself and easily able to set limits in her relationship with him. The depression that she had originally come in for was apparently resolved as well.
I have not been able to come to a conclusion one way or the other about past lives and reincarnation, as this has been my only personal experience in this area. What I do know is that to produce the therapeutic effects that had come from this one session would have taken many weeks, perhaps months to achieve with standard therapy.
It certainly is food for thought…