This is one of the hardest questions for me, and the answer is that I don't know what to do in any strictly knowledgeable sense.
The safe response would be simply to say to the client at the end of their sequence, that I do not believe in past life regression, then to refer them on to someone who does.
The next safest answer is to tell them of my disbelief but offer to continue my work with them promising to try and maintain an open mind.
While I do not believe in past life regression, I can't lay claim to ultimate knowledge of the universe's processes. I know that on the one hand I feel shame around my own lack of total awareness in this and other areas, while on the other hand I pride myself on being therapeutically grounded in what I see as "reality".
What to do?
Being an explorer, I would continue the work, with constant reference to a healthy skepticism and the application of basic clinical experience.
First I would observe the quality of the process to see if there might be other possible causes for this kind of regression. I would look for such things as a psychotic delusion. I would watch for other clues in this area, such as any disorder of thought, like loosening of associations, unusual tangential thinking, etc.
Next I would watch for the sense of the past life regression's integrity, looking for such things as an overall sense of reality, coherence, logic etc. I would want to see if the experience was unusually histrionic and overblown which might give me a clue to any possible hysterical dissociative base. In the last century there were many instances of florid symptoms appearing when the therapist expected them to do so, especially during demonstrations to other colleagues!
At this point I recommend a review of the more subtle symptoms in Schizophrenia and in Hysterical Dissociative states.
Even if everything seemed to make good sense, I would probably continue to see the past life regression as a symbolic statement of an earlier problem in the primal sense. I would perhaps in my own mind treat the production as a dream sequence and let my clients work their way through it.
It is a fact that in play therapy children may work their way through a fantasy and heal without the therapist ever having to make actual interpretations of the symbolism.
If relief were obtained (believing in openness with my clients) I would point out the possibility that this "reliving" might be a symbolic experience.
I would do this in a gentle way, trying not to be dogmatic and hurtful toward something that I don't truly understand. Thus I would try and prevent the client, "spinning out" into more and more florid past life experiences, and the possibility that they might ultimately be building for themselves a deeper and deeper belief system rooted in avoidance.
At the same time, knowing that I don't have the final answer, I would be respectful of the client's beliefs.
Thus I would try to walk the line between respecting something I didn't comprehend on the one hand, while on the other, trying not to be sucked in to something which might be an avoidance.
If the client is showing definite signs of improvement and their personality remains stable, it would I think be very arrogant of any therapist to be rigid in the face of such growth.
I see myself as a medically and psychiatrically trained therapist and thus as having a very solid bias toward what I would call work that is grounded in reality.
I am at the same time very aware that my ship is small and that the Universe is large, and that I am in the end powerfully ignorant. I am also aware that with each passing year I am more and more believing in, and marveling at, what might be called "psychic" events, i.e. that we are all broadcasting and receiving on levels I would never have given any credibility to as a medical student.
The sub atomic ground of things, the void, it's laws and processes awe and entice me. Until I know for certain however that any given process does in fact exist, I will open myself to examining it, but I will not unqualifiably base my client's mental or physical health in such "unusual" phenomena.
If you want to travel with me, you will have to put up with what I would call a healthy and unwavering skepticism, and my "narrowness" of view.
Paul Vereshack
P.S. Because I get my articles in early I usually have time to review in my mind, what I have written for the PPP. In this case I have felt incomplete, as though there is something I avoided saying.
What I have avoided is this. I do not believe in past or future lives. I see this as a vast oversimplification of Universal Processes, a fairy tale.
The notion that the universe is so simple as to scoot our little chunk of Universal Consciousness back around in Karma driven circles, like the next ride on the midway, is to me blatantly ridiculous, one more attempt to reassure our greatly constricted consciousness that everything is really Ok. There, I have said it and can put it all down now.
I believe that past Life regressions are the mind's way of dealing with primal material in a symbolic manner. I believe that worked out within the past life framework and with no dissolving of the metaphor/dream/symbolism we can still heal just as the child heals in play therapy without the necessity of interpretation. I believe that the healing is probably slightly less complete than if we actually "woke up" to the underlying or latent content. I also believe that it is possible to be derailed into a false positivity and a false belief system by remaining within the past life framework
Yes and by the way, I do not myself believe that consciousness ends at death. I believe that we recoalesce with the Universal Intelligence. Maybe I am a little childlike in this area myself. This is a belief secondary to the experiences I have discussed in the third section of my book which is available on line at, www.interlog.com/~bbk/paulcvr.html in the section dealing with Sudden Illumination, or Satori.
P.V.
P.P.S. In thirty five years of being a therapist, not one person has ever
spontaneously, or in any other way, brought a past life into my practice.
Now they are popping up everywhere.
I find this very very telling as an argument against the reality of past
lives.
P.V.
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