Through Time into Healing by Brian L. Weiss M.D

Author:Brian L. Weiss, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Fireside Book

The incidence of abuse against children in this country is startlingly high. Approximately one in three girls is a childhood victim of sexual abuse, and one out of five boys is victimized sexually. Past life therapy can be important to the healing process because for many adult survivors it provides a rapid, safe way of unlocking and clearing the experience, and because it also offers a larger emotional and spiritual framework in which to process and integrate the memories and feelings that are released during the healing process. Past life therapy gives victims new handles and hooks for approaching and grasping their experiences.

In the hands of a trained therapist, past life therapy for sexual abuse is not dangerous. In the therapeutic situation, no victim needs to be afraid of reexperiencing painful, repressed memories. In my experience with patients like Laura, reexperiencing memories in this context is characterized by a feeling of liberation. Therapy enables the victim to comfort this lifetime’s inner child. Many aspects of adult life, particularly relationships, are improved.

A blocked memory of sexual abuse presents a monumental challenge to our ability to find joy, satisfaction, and intimacy in adult relationships. The tendency is for adult survivors of abuse to shy away from intimacy in their relationships in a symbolic bid to protect themselves from reexperiencing the buried pain. This tendency is another manifestation of the same dynamic that prompts women to symbolically protect themselves from hurt with a sexual origin by becoming overweight to mask physical attractiveness. We will discuss this aspect further in the next chapter.

Dr. John Briere, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said that one of the most painful insights he has repeatedly heard from adult victims of childhood sexual abuse is “knowing Daddy hurt me for his benefit. Daddy was willing to sacrifice my needs for his needs.” Dr. Briere also observed that a victim of child abuse “. . . loses that notion that you can depend on a warm, caring caretaker; a sense that you often never get back.” Instead, that reality is replaced with one in which a child knows that a “seemingly ‘good’ person is quite capable of being ‘bad.’” That sense of trust is shattered.

Dr. David L. Corwin, a professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, has observed that a profound sense of deprivation and of seriously impaired self-esteem frequently results from childhood molestation by the father. The result is that “those affects and attitudes undermine a person’s ability to stand up and protect herself, to feel that she has the right as a person to expect and demand that she be treated in a respectful, caring, appropriate manner.” The women “begin to think of themselves as bad to preserve the image of an idealized . . . father.” Therapy can then “help the childhood abuse victim ‘unlearn’ negative self-concepts and become a survivor in the fullest sense.”

The abuse need not occur in the present lifetime or in childhood in order to influence the present lifetime’s relationships.

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