Should family therapy include your deceased great-great-grandmother? Epigenetics meets after-death c

Given that after death communication, in every way we've tried to measure it, is reality, how might we expect psychotherapy to change and adapt to incorporate in this new understanding (of family therapy)?

Is Dan's and Emily's work a step in the right direction, or might there be better and more effective ways of exploiting this territory?


First, I'm not sure I'd accept that after death communication is necessarily involved here. I mean, the idea that after death, we'll hang around and be available to get involved in things like family therapy seems questionable. If we go by NDE reports, then after death we make a transition to a spiritual mode of being--something ineffable and far removed from everyday existence.

I'm more in favour of the idea that there are "fields" associated with people who were once living that hang around and are still in some sense accessible. In a way, the perceptions by us of these fields could be allied to the perception of the processes of thought that appear to us as brains--hence no surprise in the correlation between brain processes (2nd person view, as in brain scans) and consciousness (1st person view, as in internal experience). Likewise, no surprise in the possible correlation of epigenetic markers with acquired behaviours. The markers aren't causing the acquired behaviours, but rather are how those behaviours appear to us at a certain level of detail, viz. what we are pleased to call the "molecular" level.

It's the question of causation. People tend to think in terms of physical objects (e.g. atoms) causing something else rather than being simply how correlations are perceived by us; they always go looking for some kind of mechanism based on the idea of physicalism. But an alternative view is that there's no such thing as causation; that's just an idea projected onto correlations. If there is causation, it lies beyond our view/understanding: it is simply the isness of cosmic consciousness, which is axiomatic, primal, and intrinsically inexplicable.

I'm not saying that the idea of causation isn't useful; but at some point, it always breaks down and leads to inconsistencies in our view of the universe. I think that family therapy may be thinking in terms of causation, and whilst that probably leads to useful results, at some point it may well reach its explanatory limits.
 
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That avatar? It's reminiscent of pedophilia. Could you change it?
lol

I've been using that avatar for ages and no one except you has said anything about it; your comment says a lot more about you than me. As it happens, the avatar is a symbol of how puzzled and fascinated I am by the universe, by the mere fact of existing as a conscious entity; though somewhat old and wizened, I still feel internally like a baby.

Take it or leave it, but I'm not going to change it on account of your warped thinking.
 
I've been using that avatar for ages and no one except you has said anything about it; your comment says a lot more about you than me. As it happens, the avatar is a symbol of how puzzled and fascinated I am by the universe, by the mere fact of existing as a conscious entity; though somewhat old and wizened, I still feel internally like a baby.

Take it or leave it, but I'm not going to change it on account of your warped thinking.

lol
 
...I'm more in favour of the idea that there are "fields" associated with people who were once living that hang around and are still in some sense accessible. In a way, the perceptions by us of these fields could be allied to the perception of the processes of thought that appear to us as brains...

That's the right sort of way to think about these things as far as I'm concerned Michael.
 
I take the report from Pam Reynolds (because she really did die) as a pretty good hint about this subject. She reported in an interview with Art Bell that our dead family members and others who we are connected to are able to be with us even though we can't see them. And they have great interest in the path of our lives and where things are heading.

She sensed "them" around her often and even sometimes worried about "getting in the shower." It seems impossible to believe that such a thing could be so but I've come to accept it even though it sounds so ludicrous.
 
I take the report from Pam Reynolds (because she really did die) as a pretty good hint about this subject. She reported in an interview with Art Bell that our dead family members and others who we are connected to are able to be with us even though we can't see them. And they have great interest in the path of our lives and where things are heading.

She sensed "them" around her often and even sometimes worried about "getting in the shower." It seems impossible to believe that such a thing could be so but I've come to accept it even though it sounds so ludicrous.
agreed. I mean, there are countless possibilities here, e.g. past lives, parallel lives, soul groups, spirits that have never incarnated... so it's all speculative. but a straightforward reading of the bulk of the data suggests that something like what Dan and Emily are talking about is at play.
 
agreed. I mean, there are countless possibilities here, e.g. past lives, parallel lives, soul groups, spirits that have never incarnated... so it's all speculative. but a straightforward reading of the bulk of the data suggests that something like what Dan and Emily are talking about is at play.

Yes, I think it is but it troubles me as to just where this could lead us ...sceptics would want us slung into the nut house. Are we really meant to interact with these invisible entities on a daily basis, so to speak. Is it not enough to know that they are there and get on with our brief lives here. Dunno.
 
It should lead to clinical trials. If it helps people suffering from any type of pathology, then it is a valid treatment. The person who discovered IADC was careful not to say if he thought it was really spirit communication. If he denied it, he might harm his patients. If he affirmed it, it would be difficult to get the therapy accepted by mainstream psychologists. So he just said: I did this and it worked. And everyone can accept it as a practical treatment.
 
It should lead to clinical trials. If it helps people suffering from any type of pathology, then it is a valid treatment. The person who discovered IADC was careful not to say if he thought it was really spirit communication. If he denied it, he might harm his patients. If he affirmed it, it would be difficult to get the therapy accepted by mainstream psychologists. So he just said: I did this and it worked. And everyone can accept it as a practical treatment.

Botkin's work fascinates me particularly with the results he gets. I believe it is spirit communication but you just can't say it ..yet.
 
Given that after death communication, in every way we've tried to measure it, is reality, how might we expect psychotherapy to change and adapt to incorporate in this new understanding (of family therapy)?

First, I'm not sure I'd accept that after death communication is necessarily involved here. I mean, the idea that after death, we'll hang around and be available to get involved in things like family therapy seems questionable. If we go by NDE reports, then after death we make a transition to a spiritual mode of being--something ineffable and far removed from everyday existence.
Sure, they float around all airy-faerie like watching us have sex and slap the dog...Of course they don't "hang around", they have tasks to accomplish, things to do for continued spiritual growth. Since the spirit world is always capable of being in communication, lend support and can do so from a timeless existence, they can be over in the afterlife dimensions and do whatever they desire to do at any point in our earth time.

From all reports, there do appear to be a select few who are called 'guides' or 'spirit team' who have agreed to be the primary communication points but they have fuller lives than we do without the self-imposed limitations of this physical dream/life.

Maybe yours don't much care for your frequency range. <grin>
 
It should lead to clinical trials. If it helps people suffering from any type of pathology, then it is a valid treatment. The person who discovered IADC was careful not to say if he thought it was really spirit communication. If he denied it, he might harm his patients. If he affirmed it, it would be difficult to get the therapy accepted by mainstream psychologists. So he just said: I did this and it worked. And everyone can accept it as a practical treatment.

Definitely agree. There's some interest in certain therapist circles about unconventional treatments so there may be an increasing momentum for this sort of thing.

Sadly it's still a bit hush-hush at the moment, or at least this is what I get from my psychologist friends, but those genuinely interested in helping patients are excited about the possibilities.

On the bright side after embarrassing himself over medical marijuana Sanjay Gupta at least is willing to consider psychedelic therapy. It'll be interesting to see what happens when a couple hundred-thousand Westerners are seeing the face in my avatar. :-)
 
"Botkin and Hogan's book refutes the assertion that IADC are due to hallucinations and the book contains examples of veridical, shared, and concurrent IADC's."

Read the experiencers reports here:
http://www.induced-adc.com/experiences/

Once case includes veridical information, in other cases the experiencers say the experience was real. Most people can tell the difference between a dream or hallucination and a real experience.


Botkin and Hogan's book refutes the assertion that IADC are due to hallucinations and the book contains examples of veridical, shared, and concurrent IADC's.

INDUCED AFTER DEATH COMMUNICATION

A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma

ALLAN L. BOTKIN, Psy.D.

WITH R. CRAIG HOGAN, PH. D.
...
1. IADCs are remarkably consistent across experiencers, not idiosyncratic
as hallucinations are.
...
2. Many IADCs contain information unknown to the experiencer that is
later verified to be true.



3. Experiencers commonly perceive messages they don't want to hear or
don't expect to hear and would not be able to imagine because of their
psychological limitations.


4. Many messages contain perspectives far beyond the patient's ability to
stand outside of the situation, evaluate it, diagnose the need, fabricate
the perfect scenario to satisfy the need, enact it in a mental drama, and
be so convincing to the psyche that it reverses the patient's beliefs and
heals long-standing, intractable trauma and grief. Years of psychother-
apy were not able to affect the patient's beliefs that created intense feel-
ings of guilt and anger, but these experiences heal in minutes. The
IADC messages violate the patient's belief system by showing it to be
misleading or false and the patient accepts the intruding perspective as
truth, immediately reversing a deeply rooted belief system without ques-
tion.


5. Nearly all of the most reliable witnesses, the experiencers themselves,
assert strongly, at times defiantly, that they communicated with the
deceased.

...

6. The experiences are always positive and loving. They always contain the
exact comforting and insightful message the patients need. The experi-
ences are strikingly different from the scenes the patient might construct
from whole cloth, considering the normal inclinations of human beings
to be negative, judgmental, and unloving, and the anger and guilt in
which the patients are embroiled that brought them to therapy.


7. We now have on record a number of sessions during which people in
the room with the experiencer (observers and therapists) have had pri-
vate mental experiences while the experiencer was quietly having an
IADC, and the experiences have been identical to the experiencer's
IADCs.
...
We discovered that an observer in the room with the patient and psy-
chotherapist as the IADC occurs seems to be able to eavesdrop on the
internal IADC experience the patient is having. The preliminary evidence
for the eavesdropping appears strong, and it was replicated across thera-
pists, observers, and patients. We came to call the incidents "shared
IADCs." A variant of it, in which the observer experienced a separate ADC
during the same session and involving the same deceased people that
appeared in the patient's IADC, we termed "concurrent ADCs."
 
Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger book The Ancestor Syndrome was my first introduction to it about 10 years ago...

Now that epigenetic inheritance is hot, we can see this approach by therapists was absolutely right. Their gut feelings we're right all along, and many issues we suffer with, may not be ours at all. And it's lovely to hand them back to where - we believe - they belong.

That said, there's all sorts of ways to do this sort of stuff, and most seem to come down to two people in a room, and the relationship that exists between them.

Of everything I have come across, psychotherapy is the one thing I have some real hope in, that it has within it the potential to change the world in the fullness of time.

I've got a few reservations about all the after death stuff brought up here etc, and some of the epigenetic stuff wasn't quite fleshed out properly, but other than that, it was a sensible exploration of some of these ancestor/inheritance issues.

Schutzenberger's The Ancestor Syndrome is one of the core texts in Family Constellations training. She, Rupert Sheldrake and Bert Hellinger - the originator of the Constellation process - recorded a trialog in 1999 where they discussed their how their perspectives came together.

Emily and I are clinicians first and look for substantiation from the scientific research to support our phenomenology. The findings in epigenetics don't seamlessly connect to our observations. However, when I began in practice 15 years ago, the proposition that trauma memory was heritable was considered laughable. Now, it's confirmed and broadly accepted. Similarly, we don't claim to have mapped heaven. We don't know what becomes of consciousness after humans die. What we do know, is that the materialist conjecture that consciousness is extinguished at death has been falsified by the many instances where accurate factual information comes into the therapy room from somewhere beyond any of the brains in the room.
 
1) Under what circumstances have you seen an issue (schizophrenia was mentioned) that is being treated successfully or unsuccessfully migrate to another family member? Traditional (drugs) or non-traditional treatment? Is this pretty common? How do you avoid playing whacka-mole with the issue? Are dark spiritual entities sometimes involved?

Systemic family therapy was a vibrant branch in the professional field for about 40 years, before it was flattened by economics and politics. The migration of symptoms among family members was researched in the 1950s. We haven't seen this in our practice.

We have encountered dark spiritual entities at times.

2) what can be done to bring harmony to relationships/family if the affected individuals are not willing to participate in your spiritualist type of therapy? Is there a DIY version we can try at home?

We teach our trainees to work with fields of consciousness beyond the ordinary in their everyday life. Tuning in to the systemic intelligence that inhabits and surrounds us can be done for the ordinary, daily problems and issues of life. We are purposefully avoiding creating a class of "experts" who can access the field on behalf those who cannot. Rather, we feel that the ability to communicate with extended dimensions of consciousness is wired into the human body. Anyone has the capacity.

3) Grandparents... My Dad's Dad passed away about a month before I was born and I've always been told I would have loved to meet him because I'm a lot like him. What's going on there? Influence? Reincarnation? Epigenetics? Two other grandparents of mine recently passed away. I've been wondering if my life would change in any way now that perhaps they can pull some strings behind the veil. Does it happen that way that recently deceased grandparents bring about distinct changes in the lives of still living loved ones? Should I ask them for anything?

The best thing to ask recently deceased grandparents for is their love and support for your good life. It's a joke, but there's truth in it, that the biggest complaint of those who have passed away is they are unemployed. The next best is to ask them not to leave their unfinished business with you, your siblings or first cousins.

4) What are the effects of breakup or divorce? To what extent and effect are these ethereal ties maintained or broken afterwards? If a person breaks off a difficult relationship, is he or she missing out on something? Will that person's karmic debt merely find another avenue by which to torture them?

Great question. We do a lot of relationship intensives for couples. What we find is that Partner A is repeating a pattern of suffering that is inherited from Ancestor A. Partner B is repeating a pattern of suffering from Ancestor B. But the freaky thing is that Ancestor A and Ancestor B are in conflict casting an ancient wound forward on their descendants. For example a Jewish woman and German man fall in love and marry. The woman's persecuted great-grandmother and the man's Jew-hating great-grandfather become activated and the couple's turmoil reflects this older conflict. In our intensive, we disentangle everyone and bring the couple and their ancestors into harmony. Works wonders.
 
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