In recent years a new avenue for ADC research was rather fortuitously discovered. Psychologist Allan Botkin in his 2005 book Induced After Death Communications describes a revolutionary new therapeutic strategy for helping people resolve grief from the traumatic death of a loved one. His approach involves deliberately inducing an after-death communication (ADC) of the type reported by the Guggenheim’s and others through the use of the therapy strategy of EMDR.
EMDR, short for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a therapeutic procedure for treating painful memories which involves the client rapidly moving his or her eyes back and forth while recalling a target memory.
Botkin and his colleagues began using EMDR in their post-traumatic stress disorder unit at a Veterans Administration hospital. One day he was conducting a psychotherapy session with a patient, Sam, a Vietnam veteran experiencing PTSD symptoms involving the shooting death of ten-year-old orphaned Vietnamese girl, Le, to whom he had grown close. After returning to the States, he spent much of the next 28 years secluded in the basement of his home, separated from his family because being around his daughter triggered deep sadness, anger, and guilt involving Le, and gruesome images of her dead body.
Botkin administered eye movements during which Sam’s sadness first increased notably, then with more movements began to decrease as was expected. Botkin then administered a final eye movement procedure and asked him to close his eyes. Sam’s tears suddenly stopped, he smiled broadly, and when he opened his eyes, he was euphoric. He reported that he saw Le as a beautiful woman with long black hair in a white gown surrounded by a radiant light. She seemed very happy and thanked him for taking care of her before she died. He told her he loved her, and she said she loved him. She embraced him then faded away. Sam was convinced that he had just communi-cated with the girl, saying he could actually feel her arms around him.
Botkin assumed the agony of Sam’s grief had somehow produced a hallucination based on fantasy or wishful thinking, but he had never seen or heard of such a response during psychotherapy. Within a brief period of time several other patients had the same kind of unusual experience during EMDR treatment.
Botkin carefully reviewed his clinical notes to see if he had done anything different in the procedure with these patients and discovered that he had. After the last eye movement procedure, where he had lowered the level of the patients’ sadness, he administered another set of eye movements without any specific instructions. That is when the experience happened.
With this information he varied his procedure and was able to deliberately induce an ADC. As of 2005 over 3000 people had experienced ADCs through this EMDR procedure.
Botkin was initially very pleased by the remarkable transformations he was seeing but expected the joyous reconnections with the deceased being reported would fade, as most hallucinations do. However, in a three-month follow-up Sam reported that the feelings of reconnection with Le had not changed, and that for the first time he was able to relate to his son and daughter in a much more open and loving way because of the experience. Eight years later Sam told Botkin he continued to feel a profound connection to Le and that his relationship with his daughter had improved greatly.
Botkin believes that the IADC experience helps patients suffering from grief and traumatic loss resolve the issues involved rapidly through reconnecting experientially with the deceased person. Rather than encouraging withdrawal from emotional attachment to the deceased, IADC therapy provides psychological resolution through the “profound, life–changing experience of reconnection with the deceased.” Through the new relation-ship that is established patients rebuild meaning and continue their bond knowing their loved one is OK and close by. It is the experience of reconnection that heals.
The experience of an IADC is natural and normal and not populated by angels or people in white robes playing harps. The deceased appear as they were when alive, although now they are healthy, whole, happy, and often younger. The primary message from them for their loved ones is also remarkably normal: “I’m OK.” That simple statement heals the grief. The therapist doesn’t lead the patient, but, after administering the last eye movements, sits by as the IAIC unfolds. He learns about it from the patient who might report that it was not what she expected or wanted to hear but is always wise and insightful. In the more than three thousand IADCs Botkin and his colleagues have induced, not one has contained negative content.
Although IADCs might be dismissed by some as simple wish fulfillment or hallucinations, Botkin points out a number of factors that show that they can’t be explained in this way. Sometimes they violate the experiencer’s beliefs, expectations, past experiences, and current emotions. Wish fulfillment would not do so. ADCs are remarkably consistent across experiencers, while hallucinations are idiosyncratic. All the deceased express willingness to forgive; all communicate I’m OK” messages; all express unconditional love; all have feelings of calm, contentment, and happiness.
When IADCs contain new information that could be and was checked out, that information turned out to be true. Experiencers commonly receive messages they don’t want to or expect to hear and would not be able to imagine because of their apparent unlikelihood.
Many messages received in IADCs contain perspectives far beyond the patient’s ability to arrive at on his own which, when integrated and acted on, reverse beliefs and heal long- standing, intractable trauma and grief. Years of psychotherapy often are unable to help patients accomplish this.
Nearly all of the experiencers assert strongly, and at times defiantly, that they communicated with the deceased. They say that they have had no other experiences in their lifetimes that resembles the IADC unless they have had an NDE or spontaneous ADC experience. IADCs are always positive and loving and always contain the exact comforting and insightful message patients need.
Dr. Mo Hannah analyzed seventy-one of Dr. Botkin’s IADC cases, finding that 79 percent of his clients experienced an after-death communication during his two-session treatment. These patients exhibited a statistically significant decrease in associated sadness, guilt, and anger; an increased belief in an afterlife, an increase in the belief that the person they lost is still with them in an important way, and a decrease in feeling disconnected to that person. These results held up in a six-month follow-up.
Dr. Botkin also tabulated the survey results with the first sixteen therapists he trained in the IADC procedure who performed a total of 211 IADC sessions. They reported a 75 percent success rate in terms of inducing an ADC and rated their therapeutic results as between “much better” and “dramatically better” than any other therapies they had used to treat grief.
Work with a large number of patients has revealed a number of characteristics of IADCs and the people experiencing them. For example, the belief system of people receiving IADC treatment doesn’t influence the success of that treatment. They include adherents to all the major religions and spiritual practices as well as agnostics and atheists. It also doesn’t seem to matter what the therapist believes either.
Botkin points out that there are essential differences between IADCs and ADCs written about by the Guggenheims and others. Whereas ADCs occur without warning, the psychological state necessary for the experience to occur can be induced. Once this happens, the ADC itself unfolds naturally without interference. IADCs tend to be richer in content and more multisensory than most spontaneous ADCs, typically involving a combination of the sensory experiences present in visual, auditory, and tactile ADCs.
Although both spontaneous ADCs and IADCs almost always accelerate the grieving process, because of their more extensive, controlled nature, the latter usually completely resolve the grief. If there are any additional leftover issue, these can be resolved with another induction.
IADCs in many respects resemble NDEs, which we will discuss a bit later in this chapter. People who have an NDE often report an out- of-body experience in which they float above their physical bodies and watch medical technicians trying to revive them. Although IADC experiencers don’t report out-of-body experiences, they frequently do report going back to the scene of the death of the person for whom they are grieving and observing the spirit moving out of the body. This most often occurs when there was no personal relationship between the survivor and the deceased such a soldier witnessing a battlefield death.
NDErs who report meeting loved ones who have passed away usually describe them as being whole and healthy, even if they had physical difficulties in life. IADC experiencers report the same thing. People who were very old or sickly before death are always experienced as younger and healthier. Often children who die very young appear in IADCs to be older. NDErs usually report a sense of peacefulness and well-being. For IADC experiencers, it is the deceased who is described as feeling peaceful and happy, and this feeling is somehow is transmitted to them. Experiencing the deceased to be in such a profoundly positive emotional state does much to facilitate the resolution of their grief.
Some of Botkin’s patients have also had an NDE, and they are convinced that the two experiences are essentially the same phenomenon, having the same qualities and psychological impact. They also believe, with great certainty, that their NDEs and IADC experiences arise from the same source.
The fact that we can now reliably induce these experiences in a controlled laboratory setting provides us, for the first time, with a means to evaluate them in an objective and scientific way. A number of different competing beliefs and theories can now be put to a more rigorous test, and perhaps we can understand the source and nature of these phenomena”