Past Life Therapy

Past Life Therapy is an area of hypnotherapy that used to be regarded with some suspicion until practitioners like Dr. Brian Weiss in the United States popularized it through a series of best-selling books. It is now rapidly becoming widespread as a way of tackling problems such as phobias. The technique we use is very similar to a standard regression (see "About Hypnotherapy") where the therapist guides the client's unconscious mind back to a traumatic event, which has set up a powerful negative association between an innocuous object and a supposedly horrific response. The only difference is that, instead of locating the traumatic event in the client's childhood, the event turns out to have taken place in what is clearly a past life. The therapeutic benefit - of recognizing that the event is in the past and that it should therefore no longer exercise any influence on the client - is exactly the same.

But how do we know that the event in question belongs in a "past life"? Well, because the client under regression may report being surrounded by an army marching on horseback! Or she may begin to speak fluently in a language that has long died out (Brian Weiss had a client who spoke fluent Aramaic!); and, if all this sounds a bit indirect, clients often report dates and places quite explicitly: "It is 1256 AD and I am on a taride in the Tyrrhenian Sea..." Ask the what a "taride" is when you've brought him out of hypnosis and he hasn't a clue - but in the regression he could describe it perfectly!