Balancing Act—More Than One Life to Live

By Portland Helmich

Julie Charland just wanted relief. For more than ten years, she’d tried everything doctors prescribed—Percocet, Imitrex, low-grade antidepressants, even beta-blockers—to extinguish the daily migraines that once sent her to the hospital in tears. Nothing worked, and the pain was getting worse.
“It got to the point where I had a migraine more often than I didn’t,” Charland recalls.

Her neurologist offered little hope. “He told me I had them because my mother had them,” says the 44-year-old Vermont hairstylist. Convinced Western medicine had nothing else to offer, Charland decided to explore alternative therapies. When herbs and massage didn’t help, she turned to an unlikely option: past life regression therapy.

On the heels of a divorce, Charland had become increasingly interested in spiritual matters. She’d begun reading about reincarnation and experimenting with self-hypnosis. “I’d ask how I knew someone from my current life in a past life,” she explains. “Then I’d hypnotize myself, and images and answers would come to me.”

That experience led her to believe that she might unlock her migraine mystery by way of past life therapy. “I’d exhausted every other option,” she says. “I thought this might help me go deeper.”

After reading in a magazine about a local hypnotherapist trained in the technique, she made an appointment. As she lay on a chair in the dim, cozy office, furnished with lots of pillows and blankets, the therapist guided her through breathing, relaxation, and visualization exercises to bring her into a trance. The theory was that the cause of her headaches might be rooted in some distant lifetime, and that remembering that lifetime would help her put the headaches behind her once and for all.

On the surface, anyway, her former life was a far cry from her present one—and the images that came to her were shocking. “I was a farmer’s wife in Iowa in the 1800s,” Charland says. “My husband was a severe alcoholic who beat me every day.” Charland says she saw herself lying facedown on her bed after an especially brutal beating. During the session, it came to her that she’d died at the age of 27—the same age her migraines had begun in this life. “About two weeks after my session,” Charland says, “my migraines disappeared—and they’ve never come back.”

To many people, the notion of reincarnation itself is far-fetched—let alone the assertion that one can dispel a physical problem by recalling an event in a former life. But advocates say that past life therapy, which blossomed in the 1970s and retains an under-the-radar following today, can bring genuine relief to people suffering from both physical and emotional problems. Most of the evidence supporting this is anecdotal, but some small studies have shown that this therapy can help people overcome phobias and even reduce the symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome.

Other research has shown that during past life regression therapy, brain wave patterns are unlike those experienced in other mental states, such as normal wakefulness, meditation, sleep, dreaming—even hypnosis alone. There are also accounts of xenoglossy (the ability to speak a language fluently that one has never learned) during past life therapy, as well as of people remembering enough personal and geographic details to locate the graves of their (supposed) former selves.

So what about the notion of traveling back in time—must you believe in reincarnation to benefit from past life therapy? No. In fact, even some proponents say that whether the therapy really takes a person back to a former life is beside the point.

“Whatever comes from the client has relevance,” says Maggie van Staveren, a licensed clinical social worker who is president of the International Association of Regression Research & Therapies. “If it’s a made-up story and it heals, I’m fine with that.”

The process is something like using dream imagery as a tool for change, says Joel Ziff, a psychologist in Newton, Massachusetts. “Even in a dream there’s a subjective truth that the unconscious reveals metaphorically and symbolically,” says Ziff. “If working with the story leads to insight, emotional catharsis, or positive changes in behavior in daily life, then it’s effective.”

The consensus seems to be that past life therapy, like other forms of therapy, can help people change physical or emotional patterns. For some, like Charland, the simple act of remembering is enough to solve a problem. For others, techniques like “reframing” and “rescripting” help to heal ancient wounds.

Betty Moore-Hafter, the certified hypnotherapist in Burlington, Vermont, who helped Charland free herself of migraines, describes reframing as a way of perceiving a situation differently the second time around. “Maybe the past life personality died believing she’d been a failure,” she explains. “If that’s the case, I might ask the person to look at the experience from a broader perspective so they can change that perception.”

Rescripting is similar, but more proactive. It allows a part of the self that might have lacked enough strength, courage, wisdom, or ability in the past the opportunity to do or say what it couldn’t before. Van Staveren describes a client who came to her with a fear of flying. During a therapy session, the woman saw herself as a male engineer on a fighter plane during World War II. Just before taking off on a bombing mission, the engineer realized the airplane hadn’t been properly serviced, but said nothing. The plane later crashed.
Van Staveren first had her client acknowledge what she’d done. “Then she went back to before the plane took off and told her superior they couldn’t go,” she explains. “She took responsibility for her role in the event and finally spoke up. That’s what makes this work effective. Now she’s no longer afraid of flying.”

For some, one or two sessions may be enough to resolve a long-standing issue; for others, further therapy may be required. Van Staveren says one advantage of past life therapy is that it’s generally brief. But it can take a few days or weeks for the body, mind, and spirit to integrate new beliefs, insights, or perspectives. There’s no doubt in Julie Charland’s mind that remembering events that happened to her in a different body at a different time got rid of her migraines. The only thing that continued to plague her one year after her regression was curiosity. Charland wanted to know how she’d died.

In hopes of learning more, she decided to consult a channeler—and she wasn’t surprised she’d had trouble remembering her death when the channeler described it. “She said my husband cleaved my head in two with an axe,” Charland says with a laugh. “No wonder I had splitting headaches!”

What to expect
Length of treatment: 1 to 3 hours per session; typically 2 to 6 sessions are required.

Cost: $65 to $300 per session.

How to find a therapist: It’s a fairly rare specialty, but you may be able to find someone in your area by consulting the International Board of Regression Therapy (IBRT) at ibrt.org or the International Association of Regression Research & Therapies at iarrt.org. The groups list past life therapists by city or state.

Look for someone with certification through IBRT, or a hypnotherapist or psychotherapist with specific training (at least 60 hours) in past life therapy.

Cautions: Past life therapy is not recommended for people who tend to dissociate from everyday reality, such as schizophrenics. Nor is it recommended for people in crisis.