Explaining Regression Therapy -
What Does a Regression Therapist Do?

New Jersey Regression Therapist Explains ...

People come to regression therapists with a variety of problems like depression, sexual difficulties, recurrent fears, personality problems like constant self-blame or passivity, and many physical symptoms, that often have causes rooted in their past.

Regression therapy and the forgotten past

In regression therapy, the patient relives past experiences that have been forgotten, repressed, or simply ignored, but that are causing present-day problems. The regression therapist also re-awakens positive past experiences and unused talents that have not been accessible to the client's present.

The old negative experiences are the causes of unresolved emotional hurt, or have led to negative "programmed" patterns of belief, feeling, and thinking. Programs of this kind -- "character traits" as they're sometimes called -- can only be altered by understanding them and their origins: the patient has to recover and re-live the original experience, and discover why he or she has continued to hold onto the bad pattern it gave rise to. This experience releases locked-up feelings and brings insight into the way the old scenarios have brought on the present-day problems, whether they take behavioral or physical forms.

Some clients may re-live their own birth, or experiences before birth, in the womb. In regression, people who have been in serious accidents, lying unconscious and surrounded by onlookers, may remember what those around them said. Others have recalled what seem to be past lives, or find the source of present problems in long-dead relatives. Sometimes regression with mothers can resolve problems in their babies. It is not unusual for patients to have spiritual experiences. It's evident that regression therapy can be considered a form of transpersonal psychotherapy.

The role of regression therapists

Because of the "non-standard" nature of many regression therapy experiences, the therapists who train in and use this method learn to be extremely open-minded. Not least of their reasons is the speed and remarkable effectiveness of regression therapy compared to regular behavioral or psychoanalytic therapies.

Regression therapists take a different approach: they don't, for example, perform an analysis of the client's relationship with her or his father. Rather they use the technique to allow the client to re-live and explore the experiences between father and child that came to define the relationship. Re-living means just that, with full sensory memories -- having wet diapers when being lifted as a baby; hearing a passing car's tires screech when left alone in a strange playground at age five.

The regression therapist guides clients, freeing their intuitive abilities but never interfering with their rational thinking and evaluation. The therapist works with clients' emotional and physical sensations and their minds simultaneously, in an approach akin to that of an investigating detective. Fantasy and sensationalistic theorizing have no place in regression therapy. A qualified regression therapist consistently strives to be empirical and search for the facts in the client's condition and memories, and to use these to create true improvement.

Techniques

Although regression therapy developed from hypnotherapy, not many regression therapy specialists currently use hypnosis. It can be said that the patients' symptoms are actually part of a trance-like state, and the regression therapy's purpose is to release him or her from trance, not lead them into it.

Regression therapy encompasses a variety of techniques: Inner Child work, gestalt therapy, bio-energetic work, and rational-emotive therapy. The unifying principle among these is regression: the uncovering and resolution of particular past experiences and the persistent effects they have had on the patient's mind, emotions, and body.

Who will be helped by regression therapy?

Regression therapy can help some problems that other methods don't touch, but it's not a cure-all.

It can't cure mental handicaps. It will often have no effect on people suffering from autism, obsessive-compulsive disorders, or paranoia. It is not helpful for persons who get satisfaction from being classed as "patients", and often isn't useful or applicable to substance addicts, those with little emotional life, or people with very low body awareness.

But the areas in which regression therapy has repeatedly been successful are many: causeless depression, inexplicable guilt, shame, and fear, relationship difficulties, and psychosomatic ailments. It has even produced excellent results with patients suffering from multiple personality disorders, patients with auditory and visual hallucinations, and has often worked very well for suicidal patients.

It's difficult to know whether regression therapy can be called helpful for more chronic ailments like insomnia or migraine, since the numbers of successes and failures in these cases seem about equal.

However, regression therapy is usually worth trying, because it will show whether or not it's useful for a given person in very short order. One or two sessions is all that's needed to learn if it will work -- and for most people in most situations, it works, and works well.

Results: what to expect

The areas where successful regression therapy shows results are similar to those in other successful psychotherapy:

• Mental improvement, including freedom from limiting patterns of belief, mental clarity, increased understanding of others, self-knowledge, and inceased mindfulness
• Emotional improvement: new self-confidence and self-acceptance, inner calmness, renewed ability to feel empathy with others and experience pleasant feelings, and ability to express feelings
• Physical improvements: psychosomatic difficulties such as hypersensitivity, poor energy levels, physical tension, and inexplicable bodily symptoms disappear.