Past-Life Decision Therapy by Susan Barber

Have we lived before? When people in hypnosis seem to remember past lives, are they deluding themselves? And here's another question nobody is asking: Does it really matter?

Here are some stories to help understand how reincarnational memory can help us in this life — whether it's real or not!

First, though, we'd like to say that much of the material presented here might more properly belong in our issue on Alternative Healing. However, how we deal with past-life decisions affects the question as to whether or not we ascend from this lifetime or go back into another reincarnation. So we felt that this material would be useful to our readers in the context of preparation for what is to come.

Reincarnational Memory: Is It ''Real''?
Unlike most Spirit of Ma'at readers, people who come to a hypnotherapist for past-life regression do not necessarily believe in reincarnation. If you are on the borderline with this concept, or if you have friends who perhaps scoff at your interest in past lives, there is another way of looking at the subject that makes perfect sense, even to the most devout believer in a mechanical universe.

As a hypnotist for nearly 30 years, and a member of many professional organizations during this time, I have never personally run across or even heard of a client — mine or anyone else's — who could not come up with an appropriate ''costume drama'' when asked to go to the past-life source of some current situation.

The dramas that arise (I'll recount some doozies further on) are totally, awesomely, amazingly apt. They are like icons on our desktop that, when clicked, burst into a full audio-video presentation of a huge and complex program.

And when people access these programs and ''debug'' what went wrong — change the coding, in other words — they invariably experience almost miraculous transformations in their lives.

What If I'm Just Imagining This?
This question comes up for many people in doing past-life regressions: Is this real? Did I really live ''before''? Did this experience I just had in hypnosis really happen?

My answer is always the same: Who cares? What if it's not real (whatever ''real'' means)? What if, purposely or not, everybody simply makes up these incredibly detailed past-life stories, these thrilling costume dramas. What matters is that these stories always explain, with absolute perfection, the psychological underpinnings of current emotional problems and life patterns — and enable us to release them.

Consider this: How do we know that our past memories of this life are real? What if something totally awful happened to us when we were four years old, and all the people involved in it are dead except ourselves. Did it ''really'' happen? We can't prove that it did. Perhaps we just imagined it. And consider this: What is ''imagination,'' anyway? It's a word we use a lot, but what does it really mean? No one has ever answered this question to anyone else's satisfaction.

I think it's enough to know that everybody has these costume dramas in their heads, and that by examining and changing the programming contained within them, we can ''debug'' what's not working in our lives. That much is most definitely ''real.''[1]

In a computer program, when the coding arrives at a ''choice point'' in processing, various criteria are used to make a ''decision'' as to which subroutine the program will now use to continue processing.

The two stories that follow illustrate how decisions in past-life circumstances have created choice points in present programming — and how we can change them. They illustrate that reincarnation is a living, working idea, not just a theory that makes no difference in our lives.

Reprogramming Past-Life Decisions: Two Cases
Case No. 1: The Man Who Hated Women

When I was studying hypnotherapy in school, our teacher, John Kappas, did not believe that past-life regression had any therapeutic value. It was something we did for fun, because it was fascinating. But we were not to take it seriously.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kappas was working with a client who had come into therapy in order to release an illogical hatred of women. Weeks and weeks of positive post-hypnotic suggestions were having no effect. The man still felt an unreasoned hatred for women. Then Dr. Kappas began regressing him, first year by year, then month by month, trying to find some trauma, some incident that could explain the man's attitude. Nothing.

Not knowing what else to do, Dr. Kappas began regressing his client ''beyond birth.'' They went back one life at a time. And in each one, the man hated women! Finally, Dr. Kappas simply told the man, ''Go to a period of time immediately preceeding the beginning of your hatred of women.'' And without further ado, the man went directly to a lifetime as a slave during the Roman Empire.

The slave's owner in that lifetime, governor of a Roman province, was a sadist who got his kicks by torturing women. Or having them tortured. That was the slave's job. We won't talk about what he had to do to those women in that lifetime, but we can say this much: The only way he could bring himself to carry out his instructions, and thus avoid being tortured to death himself, was to develop a raging hatred for his victims. So this slave gave himself a ''survival suggestion''[2] to fill himself with overwhelming antipathy toward all women.

And because it was related to his own survival, and accompanied by such strong emotions, this suggestion had followed him through all his lifetimes ever since.

Dr. Kappas then asked the man, in hypnosis, ''Do you still need this suggestion?'' No. ''Would you like to have a new suggestion now?'' Yes. So together they searched for a new way of looking at love and hatred and men and women, a way of looking that the man in his current lifetime could accept, opening him up to harmony, love, and compassion for the opposite sex.

When they were both satisfied, Dr. Kappas gave the suggestion that from now on this new way of looking would replace the man's previous decision to hate women. Further, Dr. Kappas suggested to him in hypnosis that all memory of that past life and its horrors would disappear. Nothing that happened in that lifetime would ever affect this man again, he suggested, except for whatever positive learnings had been gained.

And that was that. After going through the hypnotic ''awakening'' ritual, the man had no memory of the session. And he no longer had negative feelings toward women.

(His wife was ecstatic.)

Case No. 2: The Witch Who Wasn't

My own introduction to reincarnational therapy began early one Monday morning in 1978, when my student Claudia (not her real name) made an emergency appointment to visit my office.

Claudia was a very beautiful and genius-brilliant high school girl with enough energy for three people. When she talked, a mile a minute, everything moved — her arms, her hands, her feet, her head, everything. But today, nothing was moving. Her face was bruised, one eye swollen shut, and there were scrapes, scratches, and bruises on her arms and legs. ''Alicia is trying to kill me,'' she whispered.

Alicia? I'd known Claudia for two years at this point; she was in my weekly group of teenage girls. But who on earth was Alicia?

That was when Claudia revealed to me what she had never told another soul. She had multiple personalities. Alicia was one of them.

Unlike most MPD cases, Claudia's main personality had so much strength that when her alter ego — usually Alicia — emerged, Claudia did not always become completely dissociated but remained cowering in the background, powerless to intervene. There were other times when Alicia managed to take over completely, and Claudia would ''wake up'' afterward not knowing how she got where she was, or how much time had passed.

Her adventures as Alicia involved Claudia's older brother, a man we'll call ''Rob.'' Their parents were very wealthy — maids, butlers, gardeners, a multimillion-dollar home. But Rob had run away years before. He was now living in the barrio, in a filthy crash-pad where he supported himself by dealing heroin.

And Alicia, whenever she could gain control of Claudia's personality, lived a life of drug addiction and incest with her own brother.

The prior evening, while Claudia had been going down her parents' long driveway on the way to visit a girlfriend, Alicia had tried to take over — for the last time. Claudia fought. Fortunately she was driving very slowly, for in the ensuing struggle Alicia drove the car smack into a tree. This morning, pleading her injuries, Claudia asked her parents' chauffeur to drive her to my office. She knew that she needed to be protected and institutionalized, and had come to beg me for help. She did not want to be turned over to psychiatrists and their drugs.

Claudia's parents and I then kept her under guard until we could find an institution that would allow me to work with her. But once she was safely committed, something else happened: Claudia became totally terrified. Beating her fists against invisible walls, she screamed, over and over, ''I don't belong here!''

So we used hypnosis, and I asked Claudia to ''Go to the point immediately preceeding this feeling of being closed in and not belonging here.'' I was expecting to find a childhood trauma. I'd never before done reincarnational regression in a therapeutic setting, and hadn't intended to do so this time.

But Claudia went straight to a scenario in Salem during the time of the witchcraft trials. In that lifetime, her name was Alicia, and the closed-in place where she did not belong was a dirt hole under the Salem prison, where she was being held pending ''questioning'' for the practice of witchcraft.

One day, while walking in the countryside outside of Salem, Alicia had met Joshua — a beautiful, dreamy young man who secretly practiced astral projection. They had become friends, and Joshua had taught Alicia how to do out-of-body travel. It was such fun. It was so beautiful. Joshua had told Alicia that what they were doing was spiritually okay, but that she should keep it a secret. Alicia agreed — but eventually the secret became too big, and she confided in her younger sister, Anne, who promptly became her accuser.

The ''questioning'' happened in a dunking chair. They would hold her under water until she almost drowned, then bring her up, choking and spluttering, and demand she confess that she was a witch. This happened over and over. If she drowned without confessing, so the theory went, then they would all know that she had been innocent!

So Alicia, being in fact innocent, drowned in the dunking chair. And her dying decision was that it was Joshua who had caused this to happen to her. And this hurt so very, very much because she loved him.

Today, in this lifetime, she and Joshua — now her brother, Rob — were still playing out the drama. The astral ''flying'' had become heroin and sex, but Alicia's decision that Joshua had some mystical power over her was unchanged. Consciously, Claudia could not even imagine participating with Rob in their sordid activities — but as Alicia, she could not help it. She had turned her power over to Rob-Joshua, and that ''decision'' was running — and ruining — her life.

Unmaking that decision was pretty easy, and having done so, Claudia's fear and dissociation came to an immediate end. Within a couple of weeks, she had managed to get herself out of the institution. Later on, she graduated from high school, and within a couple of years was managing a small company and engaged in a healthy relationship! Not only that, but she had gotten her brother out of the barrio and helped him to overcome his addiction to heroin. He no longer had power over her — but the power of her love remained to transform both their lives.

The most remarkable thing about this story is that, after the past-life decision was rescinded and Claudia stopped dissociating, she never had another episode. This makes her case unique in the annals of MPD treatment. The ''party line'' on MPD is that it can be managed but never cured.

How Decisions Create Problems
In order to live in the spirit of Oneness, we need to rise above polarity, ''me versus thee,'' ''us versus them,'' ''man versus the elements.'' But in order to have a world, polarity is required! Polarity is simply a limitation that is applied, at first by choice, to that which is in its essential nature limitless. So how, then, can we resolve this seeming paradox.

We do this by being ''in'' but not ''of'' the polarized situation. And we actually do this every day, in some way or another. For example, when reading a book, we can immerse ourselves in the characters and feel what they feel, live what they live, experience the beauty or terror or whatever the characters are going through. But we can also set the book down and go on with our lives. We can get ''into'' the book without being ''of'' it. We can thoroughly enjoy Wuthering Heights without seeing Heathcliff in every man we meet.

Another instance in which we experience harmless polarity in daily life is in the games we play. A golf course, for example, without the ''rules of golf,'' is just acres and acres of beautiful real estate. There is no universal rule that we must bring our golf clubs along when all we want to do is walk the course's verdant hills and fairways. But when we want the rules to be there, we can accept them. So in one reality — one set of polarities — we can pick up that little white ball and drop it into the hole if that's where we want it to be. And in another reality — totally by choice — we have to hit it with a golf club. If we touch it, we will be accused of cheating and no one will play with us.

In both cases — the book and the game — there are two realities side by side. The limitations, or polarities, of one do not necessarily apply to the other. And we can be ''in but not of'' either one of them, if we see that this choice exists.

Sometimes actors get caught up in their roles. They accept the polarities defined by the drama, and no longer relate to the wider context of their own lives. But no matter how caught up an actor may be in playing Hamlet, if the theater starts to burn down in the middle of a performance he has no trouble stepping ''out of character.''

Yet here in physical reality, most of us have forgotten the larger context. We are so caught up in our roles that we step out of them only by dying. If the theater starts burning, we burn right along with it, playing Hamlet to the bitter end.

And every decision that we make from this vantage point becomes a new rule in the game of our life, creating unnecessary and usually inappropriate limitations. For example, going back to the golf analogy: Many golfers play golf as though sand traps exert a magnetic attraction over golfballs. Somewhere along the way, when they didn't know how to hit the ball very well yet, they ''decided'' that when there's a sandtrap, their ball will usually go into it. And so it usually does! (Arnold Palmer apparently never made that decision.)

So decisions become rules, they become how reality operates. And when survival is in question, and there is strong negative emotion present, these rules create a new reality. They operate as ''the nature of things.'' To change the reality, we must change the ''decision.''

Falling Out of Love
From my experience, strong, self-destructive attraction to a romantic relationship is the most difficult feeling to overcome. We try to extricate ourselves from these negative situations, but when we try to put new behavior into effect, even if we succeed, it is with gritted teeth and inward grieving. And inevitably, this behavior modification fails us, as we find ourselves in yet another, probably more destructive, relationship of the same kind. Or else, in no relationship at all. Because we still have not dealt with the lessons of the first one.

Trying to change behavior without changing the ''decision'' that motivates that behavior simply doesn't work.

David (not his real name) came to me seeking help with a relationship that was destroying not only his personal life but his business. DJ, the woman he was romantically involved with, worked for his company, yet she rarely showed up and was performing no useful service. This created havoc with his other employees, yet he could not bring himself to let her go. Also, although she lived with him, DJ had no interest in sex with David but ran around with other men. Yet she would not leave, and forbade him to see other women. Again, he could not make himself go against her wishes.

David had been an incredibly successful businessman who lived for his work and truly loved his employees. Now, he quite reasonably thought that he was going crazy.

I recognized the symptoms of a past-life decision and decided to ''go for the cause'' right away. But since this was going to involve doing reincarnational regression, I first had David do some practice runs with remembering past lives. He came up with various images, but no cohesive ''drama'' emerged. I told him that was fine, we were just practicing, and that between appointments his mind would prepare him for the next step and it would be easy.

David didn't believe in reincarnation, so I also told him what I have said earlier in this article: ''It doesn't matter. Belief is not required.''

In the next session, David gradually began to see himself as a rich man named Petrus who lived on a huge estate on the seacoast of France during the early Middle Ages. At this time in history, slaves were often prizes won in war, and not necessarily looked down upon. So it was unusual, but not unheard of, when Petrus fell deeply in love with his slave Serafina and married her. They had three children. And although in those days even free women were like slaves — totally dependent upon their masters — he loved and honored her above all other beings.

Then one day, while Petrus was in town, a pirate ship pulled up at the beach near their villa and ransacked it, carrying Serafina away with them on their ship. But they did not go far, not at first. Instead, they anchored offshore, and the entire crew raped and abused Serafina. Then they threw her overboard.

She swam to shore and survived. But throughout her ordeal, her husband, returned from town, had been forced to stand helplessly watching on the shore. Overcome with shame at not being able to go to her aid, and seething with disgust at what had been done to her, Petrus never talked to his wife again. He could not even look at her. He closeted her in an outbuilding on his estate, swallowed his love, and tried for the rest of his life to pretend that she did not exist.

But he felt sad and guilty. A part of him went out to her. He wanted to mend their relationship, but he could not erase the loathing that had gone through him when he saw what happened to her on the ship. ''If I had the strength,'' he told himself, ''if I could, I would comfort her, I would take care of her. But I can't. I just can't.'' In this lifetime, David had the strength to accept this woman who was wrecking his business and his life. Subconsciously, he was still seeing DJ as Serafina, a wronged woman, totally dependent upon him, a woman who deserved his love and protection. ''If I could, I would take care of her.'' Well, now he could. And he did.

In hypnosis, David allowed that his decision to take care of Serafina ''if I could'' had nothing to do with DJ and his current situation. He felt that he was free to act in a way that would support his other employees and his own life. And even if karmic debt were somehow involved in the scheme of things, David saw that by allowing his own victimhood now, he was saddling DJ with a new karmic debt of her own. Karma, seen in this light, is a little bit like the Hatfields and the McCoys in a blood feud that never ends. We end it when we decide to love and allow and move into the Light. David chose that now.

Afterward, he calmly, kindly, but firmly gave DJ two weeks' notice, helped her find a place of her own, and went on with his life. He loved, but he was no longer ''in love.'' He was free.

It's Not About Emotional Release
People often feel that past-life memory is all about ''accessing'' the traumatic feelings that underlie some current behavior pattern. They think they have to find the trauma and ''go through it'' in order to get results. I and many of my colleagues have hundreds of case histories to prove that this just isn't true. In fact, it doesn't work. If going through something once is traumatic, going through it twice or ten times simply locks us even further into the drama.

Emotional release work is therapeutic whenever we have been forced to repress emotion for some reason (e.g. an adult who was told as a child, ''If you don't stop crying, you little brat, I'm going to make you wish you were never born''). If such a repressed person can be coaxed into raging, crying, and screaming in front of a group of people who encourage this release, that person then finds out that the world does not end because we express how we feel. This is healing. It enables people to become free to allow their own emotions.

But emotional release only works at first. After one or two releases, the group are now training each other to bring up negative feelings and act them out. People who keep on doing emotional release work are actually being rewarded for feeling bad and for expressing it. They now have a new program: Don't get ulcers, give them! Perhaps that's an improvement, but only a slight one, for they've only flipped the coin over, trading karmic ''tails'' for karmic ''heads.''

It's not really about all the emotionalism, all the drama, all the big and impressive stories we uncover as we ''go for cause.'' It's about the decisions we made at that time, decisions which became cemented in place by pain and fear, decisions which we need to ''unmake'' in order to move into the Light and move on.

The only ''decision'' I have ever found that really works in the long, long haul is: ''I am a Conscious Co-Creator with God.''

And we don't need pain and fear to remake our decisions. All we need are a loving space, an understanding heart, and a willingness to change.

Then Why Remember Past Lives?
Rather than providing emotional release, these ''reincarnational dramas'' enable us to see our issues in full relief. They help us understand why we are feeling what we are feeling. They show us, in exaggerated form, the patterns we are replaying over and over like a song.

But when we access a past-life scenario, it's a no-brainer for us to realize that we are no longer that person — to realize that the dire consequences our subconscious mind is trying to warn us about are not actually part of the here and now.

I particularly remember one lady of medium height who weighed over 220 pounds. When we regressed her, she went to an experience of drowning in a past life. She had been a very skinny five-year-old who could not swim, she remembered, but had nevertheless gone out in a rowboat without adult supervision. The boat tipped over, and you know the rest.

How could drowning relate to a weight problem? Well, as the little boy was sinking for the last time, he remembered that his grandmother had always told him, ''Eat, eat, that's why you can't swim, you need some fat on your bones so you can float.''

This story points up an interesting aspect of the kinds of self-serving decisions we make, in past lives and in this one. We make many of our ''decisions'' in an attempt to exonerate ourselves for what is happening, rather than taking responsibility.

A sensible ''decision'' in this little boy's circumstance would have been something like: ''If I had it to do over again, I would not go out in a boat alone unless I knew how to swim.'' Instead, my client's past-life child decided, ''If I had it to do over again, I would eat, eat, like my grandmother always told me, so I'd have some fat on my bones and I could float.''

He/she now ''had it to do over again,'' and boy, could she float!

Can I Do This At Home?
Some of the people, some of the time, can access past decisions and remake them in the light of present knowledge and understanding. But even those few people who may have a few successes are probably going to fail when it comes to their larger issues. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason that ''decision therapy'' is tough to do alone is that we need to get deeply into right-hemisphere functioning. And when we do that, most of us just drift into sleep or associative thinking. With no guide there to keep us on track, our minds tend to wander away. A good therapist is like someone who is driving the car for us and knows the way. As passengers, we are free to focus on the scenery.

The second reason for obtaining help is that our biggest decisions are what we are looking with. That makes it literally impossible to look at them. A good therapist can see the assumptions that we have hidden from ourselves, and bring them into the Light.

But whether we have a therapist or are attempting to remake past-life decisions on our own, none of it works if we get all caught up in the dramas. ''I am like this because I was buried alive in Ancient Egypt'' is probably more interesting than, ''I am like this because I didn't have a normal home.'' But we all have to experience everything in this reality. And normalcy in the home is no guarantee of a ''normal'' life. Whether we blame other people, the government, past lives, or Karma itself, we are not taking responsibility.

We begin the process of creating our own reality when we realize: ''It's not what happened to me that matters. It's what I thought it meant.'' By changing the meaning, we can change our lives.

Footnotes:

We can ignore the folks who claim that past lives can't be valid because everybody remembers being Jesus Christ or Napoleon. That's just not true. People almost never remember being anyone we've ever heard of. Paranoid schizophrenics often think that they are famous and powerful historical characters, but reincarnational memory usually involves lifetimes as slaves and peasants and householders and soldiers — just folks, living in another time and faced with the same poverty and cruelty and repression and rejection that has characterized life on Earth since the beginning of recorded history.

I use the word ''suggestion'' here instead of ''decision,'' because that was how Dr. Kappas looked at these things. I later became deeply influenced by the work of Thomas Szasz, M.D., and his book The Myth of Mental Illness (Rev. ed. September 1984, HarperCollins, paper; ISBN: 0060911514). Szasz found in his research that all psychotic behavior was preceded by a moment of decision. However brief and subconscious, the decision was there. But truly, a life-changing decision is very much like a hypnotic suggestion — except that many types of hypnotic suggestion will eventually wear off. The types that reflect decisions never wear off. We have to consciously ''unmake'' them.