Some of what you carry may not have started in this life. That’s a big claim, so rather than argue it, I’ll just tell you three stories — two of them from a friend of mine who is one of Norway’s most experienced regression therapists, and one that’s been documented on film. Then I’ll get to why it matters at all.
Take them as accounts, not as proof. I’ll come to the research at the end.
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A 17-year-old girl with pain in her legs
Regression therapy is used to “go back” in time to look for explanations behind current events, struggles or behaviour.
One day a mother came to my friend with her 17-year-old daughter, whose ankles ached constantly. Doctors had found no cause for the pain.
As a last attempt, the mother decided to try something else. In her daughter’s first session, the girl accessed a past life on the first try — which is unusual.
She described what she saw: a house fire she was caught in as a 12-year-old girl in a previous life. The fire was intense. She lived, but it burned her feet up to the ankles.
As she described the pain, my friend reassured her — the fire couldn’t reach her now, she could watch it from a distance without being touched by it. The girl relaxed.
My friend then told her that now she could see where the pain came from, she could let it go. Her subconscious didn’t need to hold it any more.
The pain went, and it didn’t come back.
Note the order, because it’s the order these cases usually arrive in: the doctors had already had their go and found nothing. Get things checked. Then, when medicine shrugs, look elsewhere.
A young man with a temper he couldn’t control
This one came from the same therapist. She spent several sessions with a man who couldn’t control his temper. The smallest thing set him off, and it was starting to cost him his friendships and his relationship.
He was a tough guy, a lot of hours in the gym.
It was his girlfriend who finally dragged him to regression therapy. They had to try something. Neither of them had any particular knowledge of or faith in past-life work — they just wanted an answer.
Sometimes a session takes you back to a forgotten childhood memory. That wasn’t what happened here. After three sessions, he got past his own resistance to the treatment and reached something older.
He started describing a life as a Viking. It was an intense session, and as it went on the images sharpened — the scene, the landscape, the details, all of it vivid.
He and his crew had set off on a raid. As they rowed through a narrow channel they were ambushed, and a swarm of arrows came down on them.
He was furious. He and his friend tried to take cover, and his friend was hit. As he described it, the rage started building in him again, right there in the room.
His friend went overboard. In the same moment he was hit himself — and went in after him anyway. They both sank. He tried to pull his friend up until his strength gave out.
He described dying in the water, next to his friend, still enraged.
Dramatic, but the session did its job. He got an answer, and with my friend’s help he was able to put it down.
His temper improved over the following months.
The five-year-old boy who missed his other parents
This one wasn’t told to me directly — it’s a well-known case, and it’s on film.
A small boy from Scotland who, from the moment he could talk, kept crying about missing his real mother and father.
Cameron is one of the better-documented cases of a child describing a past life on film.
His mother didn’t understand it at first, but over time she realised she had to do something about it. What he kept describing were parents from a life that wasn’t this one.
The documentary is worth watching in full. It’s interesting, and quietly moving — the boy finds some peace by the end of it. It’s been aired on two Norwegian channels, which still surprises me.
And there are many more like it, from all over the world.
So why should any of this matter to you?
Fair question. Three strangers’ stories are interesting, and interesting isn’t the same as useful.
Here’s where it touches your life. Certain things repeat. You keep landing in the same kind of situation, meeting the same kind of person, feeling the same way about it. That can be long-running programming attached to a previous life — something significant enough that it left a mark on the soul.
Or you meet someone and it lands instantly, and you recognise them in a way you can’t account for. Or you have a relationship with a family member or a friend that makes no sense on the available evidence, good or bad.
Or you react to a person, a place or a situation with an emotion out of all proportion to it — and nothing in this life explains the trigger.
Why does that happen?
Because you are the total of all your past lives. Sometimes there’s a strong thread running back to one of them, and it’s pulling on what happens in this one.
I think everyone is affected by this to some degree. We just don’t know it’s happening — and we’re not supposed to. We couldn’t hold all of it. Most people are fully occupied handling the life directly in front of them.
Some people are aware of their past or parallel lives, since time doesn’t work the way we think it does. But those tend to be people who went looking.
The body can carry it too
I’ve read a great many accounts of people struggling physically and emotionally while carrying something unfinished from a previous life. A doctor won’t find that. They can see the symptoms perfectly well; the cause isn’t in the place they’re looking.
So the patient gets medicated, patted on the shoulder and sent home. That gap — real symptoms, no explanation — is exactly why people end up in regression therapy in the first place. The girl with the burning ankles at the top of this article is the same story.
Relationships that keep repeating
The other place this shows up is in the people you choose. I’ve met plenty of people running the same unhealthy relationship on a loop.
Very often that’s straightforwardly childhood — something that happened with parents, family or friends, sending ripples out across everything after it. But go deeper and you can find the pattern is older than that.
“Hold on — I didn’t make those choices as a child.”
No, you didn’t. Not directly, and not then. But you made a choice before you arrived, at soul level.
Once the cycle of birth, death and rebirth stops being an abstraction, your current life starts making a different kind of sense. It’s all one continuous thing — one long story of growth rather than a series of unrelated accidents.
The day that lands, life stops being quite so dramatic, and you get the room to handle your circumstances better than you were.
We choose our parents
One more, from another friend — a single mother of two. We were in a café one afternoon and got onto spirituality, as we usually did.
She told me her older son, five years old at the time, had come to her one day and said: “Mum, you know before I came to be in this life, I decided you were going to be my mother, and daddy was going to be my daddy.”
Not much surprises her. That one did.
My own view: you choose your parents before you arrive. There’s an agreement, and there’s a plan behind it. Your life isn’t random. Your parents aren’t random. Nothing about the whole arrangement is random.
There are countless accounts like this — children who start describing details they have no way of knowing, and adults who simply recognise it when they hear it.
They all describe a plan. I chose you, mummy, before I came here. A particular journey this life is meant to be for.
Did you think you were a piece of dead meat and bones with no life force in it?
Did you think your soul was going to grow on ONE life?
Don’t make yourself so small
Once you accept that your existence might be more complicated than one run at it, the events, the struggles and the highs and lows start to make more sense. There’s a reason under it.
Deciding you’re a small one-time thing that vanishes at the end is the same as deciding you’re meaningless.
Every part of you — spirit, higher self, and everything you’ve been through — has worked together to build the person reading this.
When regression therapy is actually worth doing
Plenty of people are drawn to this material, and to mysticism and ancient knowledge generally. That doesn’t mean you should treat past-life regression as a day out.
You can, but don’t expect much from it. Going in for the entertainment tends to produce nothing. It can take three or four sessions before your subconscious stops blocking the door — as it did for the man with the temper. You may simply not be ready, and that’s a legitimate answer.
It isn’t dangerous, though. You won’t be shown more than you’re able to look at. And very often the work turns out to be less about previous lives than about making peace with this one — with things that have been running since childhood.
The research, if you want it
If you want something more solid than my friend’s caseload, start with Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies. He took over a project started by Dr. Ian Stevenson that has now been running for around sixty years and has catalogued thousands of cases of young children reporting memories of previous lives. Tucker also appears in the documentary above.
Then there’s Dr. Brian Weiss, a Yale-trained psychiatrist and former chairman of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, who nearly ended his own career by talking publicly about his patients’ past lives. His book Many Lives, Many Masters is the usual starting point.
And if you want the accounts collected straight from regression sessions rather than filtered through a clinical frame, the author I point people at is Dolores Cannon. There is a lot of it, and it goes a long way out.
Mainstream psychiatry doesn’t accept any of this. Worth knowing, not worth being ruled by — read Tucker’s actual case write-ups and decide for yourself rather than taking either side’s word for it.
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