I can still remember my first real experience with Past Life Therapy. I hadn't really developed any strong personal beliefs either way concerning a therapeutic model that depended on righting the unresolved wrongs from past incarnations. I wasn't necessarily adverse to the concept, but then who knows what's really going on out there?
A client (whom I'll call Joe) walked into my office and explained he was deathly afraid of fire. A simple flickering candle could run cold sweats down his back, and he had no idea why. He explained that he was a fairly conservative Christian, and would rather I stay away from any of "that reincarnation stuff". I, of course agreed and asked him to have a seat. I explained that he was safe, that all we were going to do was look around a bit into his inner mind and try and find out the true reason why fire seemed to bother him. Reassured, he sat and quickly drifted into a very deep hypnotic trance. 

It wasn't long before I had Joe "walk into a room with a roaring fireplace". As he started to react I had him disassociate with the event, creating a mental illusion of himself leaving his body and watching, unemotionally, as the scene progressed. I then started talking to this analytical third party about the person suffering in the room, asking him to describe the fear, to explain the emotions and feelings he was feeling, etc. I finally gave the third party the crucial suggestion. "Please close your eyes, and when you open them, you're going to find yourself watching the event in that person's life that makes him so afraid of fire." After a calculated theatrical pause, I asked the third party to open his eyes. When he did, he started to describe an old man laying in bed. As the old man awakened, he noticed smoke gushing in from under his door. One thing led to another and I quickly found that a classic story of "I died in a fire during my last life" evolved. The old man, who my third party described as "Joe, before they called him Joe" rolled out of bed and tried to make it to the door. As he opened the door, a back draft of some sort seemed to gush in, throwing him back and engulfing him in flames. I soon found myself listening to all the gore and pain the man suffered as he tried to gasp for his last breath. Finally, he died. 
Assuming that for whatever reason this event, whether real or imagined, seemed to be a pivotal moment for the client, I decided to "boldly go" into what seemed to be the logical therapeutic direction. I had the man go back to the old man laying in bed. I asked him to feel the sheets around him and feel the security of being at home. I then had him wake up and look around. As he noticed the smoke, I asked him if he had done anything that could cause it. After getting a definite no, I went on to describe the individual not as a cause, but a victim. "It is unfortunate that Joe has to go through all this pain, isn't it?" I asked. But then I added, "But it will soon be over, won't it? And Joe will definitely be a stronger person because of it, won't he?" I finished off by working Joe through death, feeling there was nothing to be afraid of, and realizing he was simply going to move on to another fun filled, exciting life. In fact, it was up to him to decide if his victory over death was going to be a struggle or a strength. I then had him see himself holding a match, and asked him to stare at it intently. I suggested he was strong, he was able to conquer even the very worst that that match could do. That even death was incapable of holding him back.

It was a textbook past life therapy case. Unfortunately, I was doing it for a client who would probably sue me if he found out. I was at a standstill. How should I proceed? Should I explain what happened? How could I explain away the audio tape of the session, if in fact I tried to avoid telling him what happened? I was in a real quandary. I decided to have him forget the entire session, explaining that I would sit with him the next week and explain all that had happened. I told him I didn't want him to get preoccupied with the method to the point of not allowing the process to work. As he left the office, I wondered if I shouldn't consider relocation. 
Joe arrived the next week riding on cloud nine. It was an amazing week, he told me. It all began the night after our session when he was explaining how it felt to be hypnotized to his wife. She was in the kitchen, and almost as a test, she turned on the stove to do some cooking. Before he knew it, he was standing next to an open flame (something that would have driven him crazy a day before) quietly continuing with his story. When his wife pointed it out, they both broke out laughing and celebrating. From that point on he felt he had been "cured". He was ecstatic. 

When I played the audio tape back for Joe, he accepted the fact that I never suggested a past life or in any way tried to point in that direction. At that point he was so happy, I guess he decided to take the issue up with his preacher instead of me. I'm assuming I'll get a call offering me a free exorcism any day now.
Did I really go back to another generation for answers? Was Joe cured by the therapeutic "tying up of loose ends" in a past life? I thought so, and it had a profound impact on me. For close to 10 years I became a firm believer in life as a progression of chain links all needing closure. I started many sessions by suggesting that the client might want to consider that they were currently suffering from issues they hadn't resolved in their distant pasts. This all happened right around the time when the New Age movement was looking for "new and exciting" beliefs (mid seventies) so I soon became quite popular at conventions and seminars. Over the years my focus shifted from therapy to exploration. Instead of resolving past issues, clients were willing to pay more and more just to charting their past lives. Several discovered almost uncanny details. 

One guy in particular not only remembered a life as a farmer in the American Mid West, but remembered doing a speech at a county fair (in the mid 1800's). He also remembered his marriage, where it took place and to whom. He then remembered his wife dying and where he buried her. All the facts were so exact and vivid, that at my suggestion, he hired a detective agency to go out to the Kansas area and see if they could verify any of the facts (the client, at the time, lived in the Los Angeles area). Several months later, the agency came back with a portfolio that ran chills up my spine. There sitting in front of me were pictures of the man, birth certificates of both the man and his wife, a program from the fair where the guy had spoken, listing him as a speaker, a marriage license and a picture of his late wife's tombstone, right where he said it would be. It was possibly one of the most startling experiences of my life. I certainly parlayed it into a considerable amount of new bookings and interviews. 

Then I started to notice a trend that disturbed me. If I was really tapping into past lives, how was it possible for every 4th woman to believe she was Cleopatra? Just how many a Mahatma Ghandi's were there?  Why were most of my clients either famous people, or, at least very close friends with the glorious icons of our past? Where were the vast majority of us, the commoners who at best once watched a president drive by? Yes they popped up every now and then, as in the case of the Kansas area farmer above, but the percentage was way off. And why were there more than a few women who had once lived as men, but rarely did I come across men who remembered tying corsets?
Then I found a strange phenomenon at work. I could treat 4 different Julius Caesars the same day for entirely different issues, and within a couple weeks all four of them would come back "resolved" and "cured". 
Puzzled by the dilemma, I found a group of my students who agreed to allow me to "try a new approach to therapy" on them. I basically started creating causes for their maladies and then resolving them. The lady who walked in afraid of heights was told she was a small girl on a Danish farm. I'd paint a beautiful, believable picture of a little girl playing in the field. And then I'd have her slip on the edge of a very high cliff and die from the fall. I'd then back things up and deal with the "unresolved issue" just as I might have with a legitimate "past life" client. I found that my success rate was just as good when I created the past life "catastrophe" as it was when the client suggested it.

Then one day I chanced upon an ad in a national magazine that started me thinking. A hypnotherapist guaranteed to "uncover past lives". For a $500 fee (which was fully refundable if you weren't entirely satisfied) she would explore the details of at least one of your past encounters with mankind. She did mention, however, that she had close to a years waiting list you'd have to sign up on if you were interested. I couldn't help but wonder who this mental maven was. Imagine being booked solid a year ahead at a rate of $500 a session. If you allow for intro time and a lighter schedule, that would work out to 30 or so visits a week, adding up to 1500 visits in a 50 week year. At $500 a pop, that would work out to $750,000 a year! Of course, if I were making that kind of money, I'd probably push a 40 hour or more week just to "make hay when I could". Then I wondered why I wasn't reading about her everywhere. Surely anybody making that kind of money taking people back into the past would be on the cover of every national magazine in an age when the New Agers were a highly targeted consumer group. And why was I reading a tiny classified ad? Surely someone making close to a million a year could afford more than $45 a week in advertising. Heck, I'd be taking out full page spreads in the Wall Street Journal. There really were only two possibilities. Either she was so popular that she didn't need to advertise (and reporters would have been lining up for interviews), or it was all part of an act.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized she had a pretty solid con job going. Think  about it. If you believed in reincarnation and past lives enough to mail $500 off to some lady you had never met, and then you spent a year waiting for your session, what would happen? Would you forget about it until the date popped up on your day timer? Of course not. You'd spend a year day dreaming. Every free moment would consume you with the illusions of far off lands and famous people. Every television special or movie you saw about some historical event would conjure up hidden affinities with either the heroes or sidekicks who just happened to be present at the time. Long before your actual session you would probably, at a subconscious level, target in on one or more characters you felt you had once been, and spend a month or two filling in details. It would actually be difficult to find a client, introduced under those set of circumstances, that wouldn't be intensely biased. 

As I considered the kind of person that was calling on me for "past life encounters" I realized, that at least to some extent, I was fostering the same suggestive environment. Newspaper articles on the walls about people that had once been kings and explorers were sure to have had an impact on clients sitting in a lobby. Word of mouth would promote me not as a therapist who could "get to the root of the problem", but instead as a practitioner who could help you discover "wild and exciting" lives in your past. In much the same way Mesmer was self deluded into believing his abilities came from magnetic currents that were projected from the stars,  I had fallen into a self made trap that allowed me to believe in some uncanny ability of mine to transcend life itself, and my delusion was easily transferred to my clientele. 

But then, what about the detailed facts? How could we remember the burial grounds of our spouses or long lost programs at small county fairs? I don't know. Any answers I gave here would have to be purely speculative. I do know that, at least in my mind, it would be easier to believe that the combination of a series of suggested facts picked up by a willing subject at a subconscious level could blend together to create a very real sounding (and maybe even verifiable) story. 

Personally, I believe in psychic ability. I can't help but conclude that if I can listen to someone on the other side of the world talking through my $2 radio, based on a series of electrical impulses somehow floating around the room, then the human mind, which is immensely more complex, and also works on electrical impulses, should be able to do the same. Maybe some of that 80% of brain tissue we don't understand is somehow able to send out signals that others can pick up. And if that is so, perhaps, in the same way that radio and television signals are never lost, but instead continue to float out into space, maybe individuals suffering traumatic or highly emotional events in their lives are able to send out a projected scream that may be picked up years later. Personally, I would find it easier to believe that Joe somehow picked up someone else's pain and the details of his last minutes in the flames than to dive into the complete realm of new religion. There just seem to be too many lose ends in the reincarnation model of past life therapy. 

Obviously non of us will ever really know if there is such as thing as "past life therapy". Short of being born looking identical to who you used to be, it's going to be a hard one to prove (or disprove, for that matter). But as we consider hypnotherapy, and the dangers implied by a subjective form of analysis, we need to be very careful not to allow ourselves to sell out to social trends. Mesmer's concept of magnetic fields was quite popular, but if we had moved on accepting his theories as axioms to build on, the scientific community would eventually have come up against a wall that would have destroyed a lot of progress. Does the end really justify the means? Is it okay to create delusions in order to cure neurosis? Are we establishing firm foundations on which to build character?
As a policy I have decided not to promote past life therapy as the "answer". Instead, if a client comes in believing (either consciously or unconsciously) that their problems stem from unresolved past life issues, I'll humor them while trying to keep the disassociation live. Instead of using phrases like "you are now walking towards the fire" or "you need to let go of your past", I now talk in terms of "that person needs to move closer to the fire, and he needs to deal with his fears and to free you from the responsibility of his actions. You haven't done anything wrong, have you? Just let him go. You live today, and are not responsible for what someone else did in years gone by. It is great, however, that you can benefit from the experience. You can feel the pain and experience the loss without having to actually be there. And it isn't as bad as you thought, is it? Isn't it great the way you can pull past that person's trauma? You can be sensitive, yet strong." 

Using this third person approach to therapy, I find I'm having just as much success with the "past life" set. Of course, maybe all of this is really a reflection of some biased belief system I bought into in some past life. Who knows?