EMDR and My After Death Communication

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Connecting with the Deceased

After Jake died, I made it my goal to connect with him again. I was willing to do whatever it took. I tried mediums. I tried meditation. I drove two hours to do a hypnosis that didn’t work. I finally experienced a connection with Jake when I wasn’t even trying, while doing EMDR therapy.

What is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It involves moving your eyes back and forth while thinking about a traumatic or difficult memory. This motion helps your brain reprocess the memory and store it in new ways. It can take the emotion of a traumatic memory from disturbing a person 10/10, to 0/10. See https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/ for details. There are very specific methods for this therapy, so I recommend seeing a trained therapist.

How Can EMDR Connect You with a Loved-One?

After experiencing Jake in my own therapy session, I did some research to see if others had experienced anything similar. It turns out communications from deceased loved-ones were incredibly common and life-changing. Researchers had even developed methods to perform “Induced After Death Experiences” (IADCs) in up to 75% of clients. For more information on the creation of this technique and it’s benefits, visit https://afterlifeinquiry.com/induced-adcs/. According to this source, the majority of people who experience an IADC during EMDR “assert strongly…that they communicated with the deceased” rather than believing it was just a fantasy.

My Story

I started EMDR to deal with traumatic grief memories associated with Jake’s death. The memory that haunted me the most was the final time we took Jake to the hospital before his seizure (which ended up being caused by meningitis). It was our fifth trip to some kind of medical service. Jake lay on the hospital bed, lethargic and pale. The doctor said, “We could do a blood test, but I don’t think it’s necessary.” For one second, I thought, “What if it is necessary?” Then that thought went out of my head and I was reassured by the doctor’s confidence. After Jake’s death, my mind kept taking me back to that moment. Even though I knew I had fulfilled my legal obligation to bring Jake to the doctors, and that it was not my job to diagnose him, I felt that as his mother, I should have known how sick he was. If I could only take a time machine back to that moment, I was sure I could have saved him. I should have worried more. I should have begged the doctor to do a blood test. Jake was later discovered to have blood sepsis, so there is a good chance the doctor would have found something and done more tests. I talked it through with friends and family. I worked through it logically. None of that could help for more than a few minutes at a time. Finally, I came in for my EMDR session.

“It’s a problem without a solution,” I said to my therapist. “No matter what anyone else says to me, what I really need is Jake’s forgiveness, and I’m never going to get that until I die, and see him again.”

I started EMDR by visualizing the memory. As I moved my eyes and my mind wandered, I envisioned myself with Jake, up in the clouds. He was Robin’s age – Robin is his twin, so it was the age he should have been on Earth. He hugged me. I asked him when I would see him again. He said, “Soon.” I asked what soon meant and got an image of Aslan from the Narnia, saying, “All times are soon to Aslan.” Then Jake and I were standing in the hospital room, watching the memory. This time, I wasn’t reliving the memory. I was observing it from the outside, in the way that Scrooge watches his memories in A Christmas Carol. While we stood there, Jake held my hand and said over and over again, “You didn’t know. You didn’t know. You didn’t know.” Then he said, “You can come back to this memory as many times as you want, but I will always be with you.”

This experience could have just been my brain giving me what I needed, but I didn’t consciously form any of those images. I think this must be what psychic mediums feel like when they describe “visions.” I have read about near death experiences, hypnosis, spontaneous after death communications, and psychic mediums. My reading suggests that spirits can communicate with us by putting thoughts into our heads. According to authors of Hello from Heaven, after death communications that happened spontaneously were most common when people’s brains were in a slightly altered (possibly more receptive?) state (e.g. falling asleep, during a dream, or driving in the car without distractions, which they suspect created a more meditative state) (Guggenheim, 2012). My hope is that EMDR put my brain into an altered state that allowed Jake to visit me.

Another reason this doesn’t feel like something I could have made up, is that I was looking for Jake’s forgiveness, but Jake didn’t indicated that he forgave me. Instead, he repeated over and over that I didn’t know. Indicating that there was nothing to forgive. It wasn’t even what I was initially looking for, if I could have imagined a connection to Jake in which he forgave me. But whether this was a real spiritual experience or not, it gave me exactly what I needed. After that session, the memory stopped haunting me. My memory of the scene now includes Jake, holding my hand, reminding me that I truly didn’t know how sick he was.

This is just one of the many many ways that EMDR has helped me. I have used EMDR to deal with my feelings and perceptions about all other issues in my life, from childhood to present. I always end up with a more balanced, compassionate understanding of myself, others and the situation, which feels highly spiritual, even if I didn’t have a “spiritual experience” during therapy. I highly recommend it to anyone dealing with anything.

Here is a podcast done by my EMDR therapist, Natalie Nowkawalk, explaining more about EMDR. Natalie has now been trained in techniques to induce ADCs. I look forward to trying it with her. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/emdr-natalie-nowkawalk/id1587513113?i=1000540844610

Resources

Here is the list of books I have read in my research on spirituality:

• Understanding About the Unfairness of Life
  • Falling Upward (Richard Rohr)
  • When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Harold Kushner)
• Near Death Experiences
  • Evidence of the Afterlife (Jeffrey Long)
  • God and the Afterlife (Jeffrey Long)
  • The Purpose of Life (David Sunfellow)
  • The Wisdom of Near Death Experiences (Penny Sartori)
• Hypnosis
  • Journey of Souls (Michael Newton)
  • Destiny of Souls (Michael Newton)
  • Wisdom of Souls (Ann J. Clark, Karen Joy, Joanne Selinske, Marilyn Hargreaves)
  • Memories of the Afterlife (Michael Newton)
• After Death Communications
  • Hello from Heaven (Bill Guggenheim & Judie Guggenheim)
  • A Systematic Review of Research on After Death Communication (ADC) (Jenny Streithorn, 2011)