When Tom, a sexy, handsome, forty year old doctor called me for help, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve helped more than a few medical doctors with problems that their classical medical training couldn’t solve. Tom was beside himself, because he’d been in a long-term relationship with Jenny, a feisty, free spirited, young hairdresser, who had no desire to “better herself.” She loved what she did for living, and had no desire to be changed by his needs. On his part, because he was from a conservative Middle Eastern, well-to-do background, he felt embarrassed when he was out with her in public. His friends continually assured him that “he could do better,” and his mother wasn’t pleased with the match. Because of all that, he began to treat her with disrespect. When she had the courage to stand up to him, and just leave him cold, it shook him to his core. After all, wasn’t he a doctor? Didn’t every girl want a doctor?
Because he is such a good man, he knew in his heart that he hadn’t really loved her. He realized that he had kept himself from loving her, and that it wasn’t the first time he’d kept himself aloof in a relationship. He wanted to know why? “Why am I so afraid to love,” he asked.
The first regression we did, his control issues prevented him from going deep enough into the hypnotic trance — the focused concentration — that’s necessary to achieve good results. My own teacher, Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist, spent almost three months trying “to get in,” before he got the results he wanted. This is the reason I don’t do “hit and run” regressions. People can’t expect to walk into a stranger’s office and feel relaxed enough or safe enough to “relinquish control.”
On Tom’s second regression, he found the answer to his question. When he went through the door in his mind that read: Recent Times, I said, “Look at your feet. Are you male or female?”
“I have really expensive shoes on. I’m male. Wow! I’m so tall! Wow! I’m in my office, high above New York City. I’m a very powerful newspaper publisher. I’m blond and so tall!”
I asked him to look out his window and get an idea of the era, or year.
“It’s the late 40s,” he said. I took him back in time to his childhood, and he saw himself as a Nebraska farm boy, who came from a loving, but struggling family. He recounted his high school career as an athlete and then he got a scholarship to Princeton. He saw his wartime experience, and then back to where we began. I asked him to look at his desk, and see if he had any pictures on it.
“My wife! Or my wife… She’s amazing! I love her so much.” So I took him home to her, and he smiled from ear to ear as his totally devoted, opinionated, gorgeous wife greeted him in a rushed, good-natured flurry. He was late, as usual, and they were due at charity event. And he kept smiling as she tied his bow-tie and his seven year old son came in.
“Do you recognize your son? Anyone you know in this life?”
“Yes! He’s my best friend now! My god we’re such a happy family. She’s got both of us wrapped around her little finger and we let her, we love it!”
We went “forward in time,” to the events of that life, his son got married. He had trouble at the paper, and then he saw the birth of a granddaughter. “Do you recognize her as anyone from this lifetime?”
“It’s Jenny!” (The hairdresser from this lifetime.) “Weird!”
I moved to the next pivotal experience. And he started breathing fast. “I’m at Belleview Hospital – Emergency room. My wife’s collapsed. Where are all the fucking doctors?” It was too late. His wife died in his arms there. And as that happened, Tom ripped at his button down shirt as if to tear out his heart!
I said, “Float above the pain.” But he didn’t. He needed to stay there, watching the medics take away his wife. When we went forward in time, he saw that he lived out the rest of that life as a loving father and grandfather, and then he died surrounded by his loving family. When he came back to room awareness, he understood the source of his resistance to falling in love again. He knew that he was afraid to be in that much pain again. And he understood that to love again, he would need to be braver and more open to love. Courage and love. Can’t live without either.
