DR. ALLAN BOTKIN: “Afterlife TV is back with a great one. Just when I begin to wonder if I’ve seen it all, something like this comes along to get me excited again. Dr. Allan Botkin has discovered a new way to communicate with our loved ones in spirit. He calls it Induced After Death Communication (IADC) and the experience allows people to communicate directly with people in spirit, ask them questions, and even feel their hugs. Al Botkin has already proven that IADCs are a beneficial therapy technique for grief and trauma. And I believe Al Botkin or someone else will discover new and amazing uses and benefits to this IADC method of spirit contact well beyond what we can even imagine thus far.” ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV
If you’d like to watch this video, Induced After Death Communication: New Discovery for Spirit Contact with Dr Allan Botkin, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=2039
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
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Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Everybody, Bob Olson here with Afterlife TV. You can find us at afterlifetv.com. It’s where we search for evidence of life after death and ask the meaningful questions around that subject.
I should also tell you that I’m the author of this new book, “Answers About the Afterlife – A Private Investigators 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life After Death.” You can get that on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. You can download a free copy of the introduction at www.bobolson.com.
Alright, today I am so excited. I know I’m excited about a lot of things but I’m going to tell you why I’m really excited about this in a moment. But we’re going to be talking about induced after-death communication for grief and trauma healing. You’ll understand what that means a little bit more in a moment, but I’d like to introduce our guest, who discovered this new technique, really is what it is. His name is Dr. Allan Botkin. Hi Al. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Hi Bob. Thanks for having me.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. The reason I’m so excited about this is because, as someone who has been investigating life after death for over 15 years, I go through periods where I feel like I’ve seen it all. You know what I mean? I’m like, “Oh, yeah,” or I’ve seen versions of other things that I’ve seen. Then all of a sudden I come across you.
I don’t even know how it happened and I’m like, “What? What? This is new. This is original. This is something I haven’t seen,” and I get all excited about it. And I’m doing all of these promos for my new book and, while I’m being interviewed, people are saying, “What’s next?” And I’m just like, “Well, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because here’s an example of why,” and I tell a little bit about your book and your story.
So, anyways, let’s take this little bit step-by-step at the beginning. You did such a great job in your book, and I can show that now, but then we’re going to get into the interview. The book is, “Induced After-Death Communication – A Miraculous Therapy for Grief and Loss.” I want to start before you knew anything about IADC’s, is what we’re going to call them, Induced After-Death Communications. What were you doing before you discovered this?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Well, before I discovered it, I have been a clinical psychologist on an in-patient PTSD ward at a VA hospital and I have been working with combat vets, with severe trauma, for a number of years.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: What kind of success were you having? Was this mostly psychotherapy that took years or what was the story usually with most patients?
Dr. Allan Botkin: In the early years on the unit, we were essentially behavioral cognitive therapists, using cognitive behavior therapy. The philosophy of the treatment was to have the veteran re-experience their combat trauma in a safe, and supportive, and nonjudgmental environment. And the idea was that repeated exposure to their traumatic memories would eventually decrease the emotional intensity of their memories.
That was essentially, what was available to us in the early years. And I have to tell you it was very difficult and painful, grueling work, primarily for our veterans because, when they went through this procedure during the day, they generally stayed up all night. Or if they did fall asleep, they had nightmares because, essentially, what we did is we opened them up to these traumatic memories and then they began reliving them over and over again.
So while we were getting people in touch with their memories, we weren’t doing that much, in addition to that, to make them feel any better about them. But the hope was that over time that intensity would decrease.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Alright. Then, at some point, tell us what year it was, you ran into, you learned and was trained on there’s something called EMDR. Why don’t you explain to us what EMDR is and how that changed your work?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Okay, EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is now a worldwide evidence-based approach that’s accepted by professionals everywhere. I, and my colleagues on the PTSD unit, were one of the first in the country and in the world to begin using EMDR on a regular basis.
The idea of it was, and it sounded silly to us, honestly, when we first heard about it, is you had the patient pay attention to a certain aspect of their traumatic memory and, at the same time, you got their eyes moving in a back and forth direction, and the results that come out of that, and we saw them right away, were absolutely amazing.
People in a single session, often, we could eliminate that reliving component out of a traumatic memory and our patients would say thing, “You know doc, this is the first time that, when I think about what happened, for the first time, it feels like it happened a long time ago and that it’s finally over.” Now, even though on the surface of it, it seems somewhat silly just to have someone move their eyes back and forth, but I think there are some deep neurophysiological reasons behind it that we’re finding more and more about today.
Most EMDR therapists believe that it’s probably, in some way, related to dream sleep. When we are asleep and dreaming, our brains are processing and integrating information more rapidly and efficiently than when we’re awake. And it’s been known for some time that this increased processing, during dreaming, causes our eyes to dart back and forth which is why dream sleep is called rapid eye movement or REM sleep. The discovery of EMDR seems to suggest that you can take a fully awake person and, if you can get her to move her eyes in a similar fashion, it actually puts the brain into that higher processing mode and we can use it when people are wide awake.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I’m fascinated by that alone. This is just the beginning of your journey but, wow, what’s the name of the woman who discovered this EMDR process?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Dr. Francine Shapiro.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And I read a little bit about her story online and she found that it worked for her and took it from there. This is really quite amazing and it makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know the science behind it but, to me, that there are certain parts of our brain that, like you said, that process things that perhaps get shut down after trauma, and this kind of a process would help light those parts of the brain back up. Anything like that?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we have some consistent evidence that shows that, in fact, certain parts of the brain do shut off when a trauma is remembered.
And specifically, the frontal lobes of the brain and the thalamus that sends information to all other parts of the brain and, after EMDR, the thalamus is working again, which means that information is being sent out everywhere, instead of being isolated in one part of the brain. And the frontal lobes get reactivated so now the memory can be recalled in an abstract and emotionally detached way which fits exactly our clinical experiences.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And so instead of reliving these memories, people get some distance from them and they’re able to relive them.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I love that. I just love the way you think. So you took your work with the EMDR and you decided to tweak it a little bit so that it worked according to the results that you were seeing worked better and this resulted in something called Core-Focused EMDR. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Okay, well, as I began working with standard EMDR in the early 90’s, it was probably around 1990-1991, something like that, there were certain parts of the EMDR standard protocol that didn’t make sense to me. As wonderful as the procedure was, there were still some parts that were cumbersome that didn’t make sense to me. And I was in a clinical situation where I could experiment and I tried a number of different things. Most of my ideas didn’t work but I hit on, actually, six significant changes to the standard EMDR protocol and, after I made those six changes, things started working just much better.
Now the core focus part has to do with this. It’s my firm belief, at this point, that all human beings, as a matter of fact, all mammals are wired for certain emotions and they are primarily fear and sadness, and I see those as core emotions. Now, in all traumas, there’s either fear or sadness going on. And sadness, the only difference is somebody dies. In a fear trauma, you have fear that you or someone else is going to get hurt, or die, and so on.
Many traumas have both components but, however, all people, what we do, we surround those core painful feelings with other emotions; generally like anger and guilt. And anger and guilt has a lot to do with who we’re supposed to blame; whose fault is it? At the VA, we called anger and guilt the “what ifs.” What if my lieutenant wasn’t so stupid? Or, what if I had done something in addition, maybe my best buddy would still be alive. What if? What if? What if?
You can “what if” until you’re blue in the face and you can do therapy with that, but nothing changes. And with the core focus, I found that if I directly addressed the core issue and processed it with the eye movement, we were done. In other words, the anger and guilt, when you go back and look for it, are gone because they essentially serve a defensive function. We use our anger and guilt to protect ourselves from these more painful cores.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me.
Dr. Allan Botkin: When we were at the VA, we literally had ten-minute sessions and we were done. We would go right after the core, process it, and essentially we were done.
The anger and the guilt were gone, the irrational cognitions were all straightened out. And it’s my firm belief that, when it comes to grief and trauma, you can’t talk your way out of it; you can’t think your way out of it; you’ve got to get to the emotions, but not just get to them and bring them up, you’ve got to then do something with them which is what the eye movement does so beautifully. It changes it; it gets those parts of the brain back involved where it can then be remembered in a very different way.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Interesting. I just want to make sure people understand this part. So if we’re talking about sadness, guilt and anger, what you’re saying is, from your experience, the guilt and the anger, when we’re blaming other people, is protecting us from actually feeling the sadness.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Correct.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And so they’re masking what the true core of the problem is which is our sadness. I’m sure part of the challenge for you, as their therapist, is to get them to not focus on those other things, but to focus on the sadness because nobody really wants to do that. It’s painful, right?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Right, absolutely. Before I would sit down and work with anybody, I would explain ahead of time why we’re doing it this way. And I would build in certain safety measures. Before we got started, I would say, “If we get to a place where this and this happens, here’s what you need to do. Here’s what I need to do,” and so on.
Now, the beautiful thing about this eye movement procedure is that it does two things better than anything else. Number one, it brings up whatever the feeling is; it does that better than anything in my experience, including hypnosis. It pulls whatever it is right up but that’s only half the job. The other half of that job, the eye movement does, is it then processes it and changes it in the way it’s represented in the brain.
So when somebody comes in and they’re not ready to go after their sadness, they know ahead of time that that’s what they need to do to get to a better place with whatever it is. And so, even on a scale from one to ten, if they start off and their sadness is only a two and I give them eye movement, that two’s likely to jump to a nine or a ten pretty quickly, and now it’s available, and now we can process it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, that’s really interesting. So usually, through this process that you do, it goes up because of what you just said and then from that point, you can bring it back down.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Right. But you have to access it or bring it up before you can do anything with it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah. That makes perfect sense. Wow. Alright, so we’re just talking about the tip of the iceberg here; there’s so much more to this. I’ve got to say, you do such a great job in the book explaining this the way you did. I don’t know how you chose what stories to tell but it was brilliant.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Anyways, how then did you discover what you’ve now termed Induced After-Death Communications? What was your first case?
Dr. Allan Botkin: My first case was a Vietnam veteran I call “Sam,” and, while in Vietnam, he became very close to an orphaned ten-year-old Vietnamese girl, who basically lived at their base camp, and helped out with the chores and so on. And he developed a very close father-daughter relationship with her and his intention was to bring the little girl, named Leigh, back to the states with him and adopt her. In fact, he had even called his wife back in the states and she agreed to go through the process and so on.
But anyway, one day she was shot and killed right in front of Sam and that was really the cause of his psychological undoing in Vietnam. And he covered that sadness with rage, and he then started volunteering for dangerous missions and so on and so forth. But anyway, I was doing the core-focused eye movement with him on his sadness and it went up pretty fast, as it usually does, and, at one point, he nearly fell out of his chair, but he did the right thing and kept his eyes moving, and we processed and changed that.
And part of the procedure is I have all of my patients close their eyes, after I give them some eye movement, and when we brought that sadness way down, Sam was sitting there and a big smile came over his face. And I had never seen that before and I wondered what the heck is going on? And he opens his eyes and he tells me that Leigh appeared to him privately, as a grown woman, with long, beautiful black hair in a beautiful white gown and surrounded by the most beautiful light he had ever seen.
And then Leigh told Sam, “Thank you for taking such good care of me back then.” And Sam responded privately, “I love you, Leigh.” And then she said, “I love you, too, Sam,” and reached out and gave Sam a hug. So Sam told me all of this after he opened his eyes. And, to be honest, I didn’t know what to think. As a matter of fact, I was a little worried because I thought maybe the stress of going through that trauma had caused him to somehow psychologically decompensate and that he had just hallucinated.
Well, he left my office full of joy and happiness, and I’d never seen that kind of a result even with eye movement. He went skipping down the hallways. So, anyways, this is an in-patient unit, so I told the p.m. shift to keep an eye on Sam. I was a little worried about him.
Well, I came in the next morning, and the p.m. shift, and then the night shift did keep an eye on him, and they reported to me in the morning that Sam had a great night, he was in a real good mood, and that he got about an eight-hour night’s sleep that night and woke up refreshed.
Sometime after that, it might have been the next weekend, he went home on pass, and he lived in the Chicago area, and he had been living in the basement and he had a daughter at home, who he had completely avoided for years, because every time he became close to his daughter, or even looked at her, that triggered memories of Leigh’s death. Well, anyway, he goes home on this weekend pass and, because he’s essentially resolved the trauma, his daughter no longer served as a trigger and he did his best, as he called it, making up for lost time with his daughter, and really did a great job in terms of establishing a relationship. So the consequence kind of spread into every part of his life. It was really, truly amazing.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. When you were treating him, how many years since Vietnam had it been for him?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Oh, I’d have to guess on this one. Probably 25 years, something like that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It was a year later; it wasn’t five years later; it was a significant amount of time.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Correct.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And he has these issues that he’s not able to overcome and then, all of a sudden, you see these changes after this one experience.
Dr. Allan Botkin: One session; that’s all it took.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, pretty amazing. I know we have to jump ahead here in time but the reality is you ended up, not purposefully, but kind of randomly, by accident, see more of these. Correct?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yes. You know, it might have been a week or two later, and I was working with another vet, and he, too, had a similar experience. After my session with Sam, I thought that was a one-time thing and I would never see it again. So now, here this other vet is having a similar experience, and then another, and then another, and about 15% of my patients were having this experience at the end of the session.
So I went back and looked in my notes of my 15% and of my 85% to see if I’d done anything differently in those two groups and I saw it. It was as clear as could be. I’d simply added one more extra set of eye movement at that end, when they were in that state of feeling really good, because their sadness had just come down.
And that extra set, without any suggestion, nobody knew what was about to happen so there wasn’t any kind of leading or anything like that. They would just naturally go into these experiences. I didn’t know what they were. It was soon after that, I read the Guggenheim’s book, “Hello from Heaven,” and was like, “Oh my God, this is what my patients are saying.” There’s actually a name for these things. I didn’t know that. We never covered this in ten years of studying psychology in school.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh God, no, right.
Dr. Allan Botkin: I remember I was so excited, when I read the Guggenheim’s book, and I started calling them ADC’s, After Death Communications, from that point on because they coined that term.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. And it put it all into perspective, and I agree, I recommend their book all of the time. I interviewed Bill maybe a year ago or so; great interview and it helped a lot of people. They’re way ahead of their time, he and Judy, and it’s amazing what they’ve come up with. And they’ve helped millions of people because they were able to put a name to an experience that people were having, many different types of experiences, and for you as well.
Now that you’ve figured out what you were doing with these 15%, you were able to try to replicate it.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Right.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And what was your success rate with that?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Believe it or not, my success rate actually jumped to 98%. Essentially, everyone that I was using this procedure with was having this experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, that’s mind blowing. So you’re going from 15% to 98%. You finally figure out what it is. Is this when you decided to start calling it Induced After-Death Communication?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, it was soon after that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: We should mention, I don’t think the universe, I say the universe, sets things up by accident. Here you are, you’re working in a setting where all these vets have had a lot of trauma experiences that involve people who died; and you’re in the perfect setting to be working with something, testing something like this, and figuring out how it works. Do you agree with that? I mean, you were in the right place, at the right time, and you had the right brain?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely. You know, I had some background. I had some interest in Raymond Moody’s first books, particularly, “Life after Life,” and so on. When my patients started reporting these experiences, of course, I thought maybe they were hallucinations. But to me, they also sounded a lot like near-death experiences. Sometimes my patients went through a tunnel to see the deceased. They both reported beautiful, rich, radiant landscapes. There was a lot of overlap between the two experiences, so I sort of wondered if there was some relationship there. But in that sense, I was kind of ready for it; at least I had some background but not a lot.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So briefly, we’ll make the long story short, you ended up teaching this to other people. First one, then more, and they ended up having the same results, correct?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely. And that was another huge breakthrough, for me and IADC, was finding out that this technique can easily be taught to other therapists. I had no special powers. It wasn’t me and I was fine with that. But the technique itself is very powerful and robust, so it works across therapists, it works across patients, it seemed to work for just about everybody.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Which is great. Every scientist wants to be able to replicate it.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s the big thing. Investigators, we just like to observe and draw conclusions based on all our observations. The one thing about scientists is, if they can’t replicate it, they don’t really believe it.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely right; correct.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So that’s great. So you were able to do that. It’s interesting because you do talk about, you know, there’s some differences between healing – I don’t know if you would call it healing, but doing therapy for grief and therapy for trauma. I noticed there were two different reasons why IADC seemed to work so well with them. I don’t know if I got this right. So for the grief, it seemed to be all about the reconnection. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Actually, let me clarify a little bit. Grief and trauma are much more interchangeable to me than maybe, to perhaps, some other people. Even people who are experiencing normal bereavement, and there’s no real traumatic aspect to it, they may have troubling images of someone in the casket didn’t look like them and every time they think of their lost loved one, they just see this horrible image of the person in the casket.
That’s like an intrusive symptom just like PTSD. And actually, whether it’s normal grief or traumatic grief, the issue is the same; you have to process sadness.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So one of the things, in terms of the trauma, one of the things that you were able to do is replace the traumatic memory with a new memory?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, and that seemed to happen automatically without me having to do anything extra. In other words, let’s say somebody saw his best friend get shot in the head and his brains were coming out. It was a bloody, traumatic image.
After the ADC with his buddy, and he’s looking happy and younger, and he’s got no wounds, and he seems to be in great shape, my vets would frequently say, “This is weird but I try to remember the original traumatic image and it’s really hard to get back. All I see is his smiling face now.”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It makes it really exciting because, like you say, there’s healing going on that you’re not trying to make happen. It’s just happening as a result of all this. That’s pretty cool when that happens.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah. It’s all a matter of processing their inner pain and getting to it. And once it’s processed, people frequently report feeling relief, or a word people often use is peaceful. And once they’re feeling peaceful and their sadness is gone, or almost gone, they’re in a state where these ADC experiences come very naturally.
People who have researched spontaneous ADC’s, like the Guggenheims and so on, some of them have been kind of slow to accept what I do because they believe that all real ADC’s are like gifts from heaven, that they’re something we have no control over. You’re either lucky to have one or you’re unlucky and you don’t have one.
Actually, my response to that is an IADC, we don’t directly induce the ADC experience. What we do is induce a state of mind where the ADC then naturally unfolds. And when that happens, we’re not really controlling it. A big belief I have is that probably the main principal of IADC is sadness prevents ADC’s from occurring. And so when we purposefully remove the sadness and get people to a state where they’re feeling good, and ADC is much more likely.
And people who report spontaneous ADC’s do not have them when they are feeling real sad or wanting contact; they just kind of come out of the blue. Oftentimes, people are asleep, or most often, in my experience, they’re asleep. But they describe them as very different from dreams in terms of their quality and clarity. They tend to be remembered for a lifetime as opposed to forgotten over 24 hours. But if people are awake, they’re brushing their teeth, or putting their socks on, these experiences come out of the blue.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s right. And so you’ve now, you’ve done this how long? How long have you been doing this now?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Since about 1995; since my first work with Sam.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So now you’ve had long enough to see – just like you were sort of saying the dreams – we call them dream visitations. People remember them years later like they happened the night before. The same thing, you’re having these long-term benefits from the work.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, all of the data that we have seems to indicate, much of it’s clinical data, but we also did a research project and all the information we have seems to indicate that these results hold up very well over time. As a matter of fact, we don’t even have exceptions to it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Alright, beautiful. Some interesting things; I’ll jump around a little bit because there are just some very interesting things that I recognize. One is – because it goes along with so many other things we’ve talked about here on After Life TV. One is that sometimes the ADC’s that you see in your work, these are happening over a small period of time, like seconds, and yet for the patients, who are having the experiences, they feel like it’s been much longer. Right?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah. There seems to be some sort of time differential that’s going on here. I remember once I was working with a vet and I did the eye movement to do the induction. And he closed his eyes and then he popped his eyes open in about five seconds. And I remember thinking, “Well, that didn’t work.” And then he goes on into this long, elaborate explanation of this ADC he experienced. Then I asked him, “How long do you think you had your eyes closed?” And he said, “Oh, two minutes.” It was like five seconds.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, exactly. This goes along with anything we’ve heard from people who’ve had near-death experiences to all kinds of different ADC’s that Bill and Judy talk about in their book. Also, people are not just seeing one person’s spirit. Some are seeing more than one person, correct?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yes, we always, when we do the therapy and work on the sadness, it’s always in relation to one loss. However, it’s not at all rare, fairly frequent, that in the ADC, not only is that person there but other people also show up. But in most cases, they’re related to that deceased person. It’s most often family. In other words, you work on the death of mom and mom shows up. And there’s grandma and grandpa, and there are aunts that died years ago, and they all seem to be together.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Have you ever had an experience, with a patient, where they wanted to see a certain person but they saw someone else instead?
Dr. Allan Botkin: You know, I have heard, in fact, one of Raymond Moody’s early books, he talked about a case like that. The answer is, no, that’s not happened.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I think that tells us a lot. I won’t get into it but I think that teaches us a lot. Mediums don’t have that luxury. A lot of them will say, “I can’t just conjure just anybody. It’s a telephone without a dial. Whoever ends up being there is who we get.”
But that’s why this is, again, thrilling to me to see that kind of response that you have, even if there were one or two over the many years that you’ve been doing it, that’s fine. But, for the most part, if everybody’s getting who they were hoping to get. That’s pretty exciting data that you have there.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, and I’m kind of thinking, I think there have been one or two times where somebody else did show up.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Sure. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me, but if it’s so insignificant that you can’t even really remember what those incidents were, then that shows me that it’s low incidence.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely, and I’ve done thousands of cases at this point.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, exactly. I also like, because it surprised me as I’m going along in the book, it surprised me that, if someone would come out of the experience where they saw a loved one or someone in spirit, and they had a question, you were able to just do another eye movement thing and they would be able to go right back in and ask their question of that person.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah. That’s one of the beauties of induced after-death communication. That is something that generally doesn’t happen with spontaneous after-death communications because, if not all issues are addressed or resolved, it’s easy to just give another set of eye movements and take the person back into the experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And this has happened, at least the examples you gave in the book, it just seems like now it’s just a common part of the experience.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Absolutely.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: This leads to another thing I want to talk about, is that if someone misinterpreted information and you thought, “That doesn’t sound right,” usually because it was in the negative, you can say, “Why don’t you go back and ask about that.” And usually they recognize that they misinterpreted what they were getting the first time.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Actually, so far they’ve always recognized that they have misinterpreted. My favorite case is I worked with this guy who had had other IADC experiences and this time he was working on the death of his brother. And this guy was kind of a general high anxiety kind of guy, but when we went for the induction, he opened his eyes, jumped out of the chair, and said, “There’s a giant claw around my neck trying to choke me to death.”
Well, I talked him into going back, and he trusted me, and he had had other ADC’s, but he did go back and he found out what that was, was his brother giving him a hug. And he misinterpreted the sensations around his neck.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s pretty funny. A lot of people get hugs and they’re not just virtual hugs; they’re feeling the sensation that someone’s actually hugging them, right?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah. As a matter of fact, that’s something Sam said on my very first case. He said, “I could actually feel Leigh’s arms around me.” He could feel it like it was a real tactile kind of thing. And that was certainly the case with the guy who jumped out of his chair thinking there was a giant claw around his neck. He felt something there.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: He just wasn’t sure what that was at first.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Right.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So that’s kind of exciting that you can go back multiple times, really, I would imagine. Is there a reason why someone wouldn’t want to keep going back? Or is there only so much time?
Dr. Allan Botkin: That’s a good question. I’ve worked with many people that, prior to their coming in to do the work, some of these people have said things like, “Once I have an ADC, I’m going to want to stay in that. I’m going to want to have more, and more, and more.” And I could understand why people would say that, but what’s interesting is once people have the ADC experience, in really all cases, they get exactly what they need. Their desire to keep going back kind of goes away. They’re fine with what they got.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s beautiful. What a great message there is right there for all of us to learn. There was one exception you had made. I thought it was pretty funny about a gal who wanted to keep asking her mother the same question because it felt so good to be there. Tell us about that.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Again, I’ve done thousands of cases. It’s hard to remember some of the individual ones, but I remember somebody keep going back and asking the same question over and over again. Then I think, if I’m right, the deceased mother said, “Why do you keep asking me that? I already told you. I already gave you an answer.”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, she said something like, “Get over it,” or something like that. I love the sense of humor of people in spirit. I love it.
Dr. Allan Botkin: There’s plenty of that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: There is, isn’t there?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, there’s a lot. People, sometimes, when they’re in the middle of it, break into laughter.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Do they?
Dr. Allan Botkin: I did one woman –I’ve got to tell you this. This is a funny one. One woman was working out an issue regarding her deceased sister, and these two sisters are really close, and they were always giddy and funny when they were together, and all that kind of stuff. And in the ADC, they were still acting like that with each other.
And then I went to induce the experience again and I had to sneeze. So I held my nose so I wouldn’t interrupt the process. And then my client closes her eyes and then she starts laughing and laughing. And she opens her eyes and she said that her sister told her that the reason I did that is because she stinks.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Nice, nice. Some things never change.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, they’re still being sisters.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, exactly. No, that’s great. There’s also something that you call a shared experience, and I think the best evidence that exists for the fact that these are not a product of one’s imagination because I know that that was a concern of yours and other skeptics, especially. What’s the best evidence of that regarding these shared experiences?
Dr. Allan Botkin: We have only very anecdotal evidence. The very first time it happened, I had an intern observing me working with a veteran and he had seen IADC before. As a matter of fact, he was pretty good at it himself, but he just didn’t have anything to do and asked if he could sit in on the session and it was fine with the vet.
So here I am, I’m working with the vet and my intern’s over there with his eyes closed. And I kind of look over at him and I think, “Gee, I hope he didn’t fall asleep.” But what he was doing, he was giving himself eye movement. And what happened was, is when my patient had his ADC experience, my intern observed the whole thing, and it was an extremely unusual ADC. It had to do with a backyard scene of an uncle, who had died, and in tremendous detail. It was pretty shocking when that happened. And we may have done that maybe two more times only more on purpose and we got the same result.
There was a psychologist where I worked, when she would do the induction, she would close her eyes and give herself eye movement, and she would observe her patient’s ADC experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Boy, I’m sure there’s something we can learn from that. It’s kind of interesting. They’re not having their own experience, but somehow they’re able to share this experience of this other person. That’s pretty fascinating to me. I’d love to look into that more.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Now what we need to do, we haven’t really done it yet, is formally study this, actually do an experiment. And we tried it once but it didn’t work, but we didn’t do it right. But, yeah, that’s something that’s sort of in the future as something I’d certainly like to do. Now there is an alternative explanation, which is that somehow there’s something telepathic going on, it’s not that they’re both observing the same objective reality but it’s something telepathic which would be pretty amazing within itself.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s what I was thinking. Okay, even if that’s it, that’s pretty good. That would be hard to know. I don’t know how you’d figure that one out but that’s for anther interview for another time trying to figure that one out. Sometimes, now I don’t remember what this was about, I write these as I’m writing the book, and now I don’t – people in spirit will sometimes assist with the therapy. Does that even make any sense to you because I don’t know if you even know what I was reading?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, I remember working with somebody once, and my patient asked a very good question, and I didn’t have a good answer. And he had had an ADC before with his mother, and his mother gave him good advice, and he brought up another issue, and I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it so I said, “Do you want to ask your mom?”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s good.
Dr. Allan Botkin: So we did another induction and, of course, mom had the answer he needed.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, that’s right, alright, that’s great. You just never know with these things. Oh, man, I would love to just spend a week with you. And some people, now we talked about there being other people there, I know there’s been a couple of incidences where living people have come through in the IADC.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yeah, those are extremely rare and the only times this happened was very early on with IADC. It’s been years ago. Well, actually, I do remember one of my favorite cases that relates to that. And this was years ago, but a patient I was working with had a severely retarded son. I believe he was microcephalic, and even though he was 20 years old, he never developed beyond a mental age of about six months or something like that.
So anyway, it was actually my patient’s idea. He said, “Can you use IADC to contact somebody who’s severely limited like that?” And I said I didn’t know. The patient wanted to try it so I was willing to give it a shot and we actually did. His severely disabled son came to him as whole, complete, and without any disability. And they actually had a conversation and, of course, he’s not able to talk in real life but they went on and had a conversation.
And then his son said to him – I’ll never forget this. He said, “Don’t feel bad for me because I really have it the best. I get to live in both worlds at the same time.”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, man, yeah, beautiful. That’s nice.
Dr. Allan Botkin: And then he said he went home on pass and saw his son. He said, “Boy, I’ll never look at him the same way again.”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, that’s right. I know, exactly. So true. It makes me wonder about intentionally trying to do the same thing with people who are in a coma. You know what I mean? If you had a patient in, who knew someone who was in a coma, perhaps they were experiencing grief or trauma around that. Maybe they’d be able to get in touch with that person.
Dr. Allan Botkin: That is something I’ve wanted to try for many years.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That would be amazing. After that last story, my guess would be that you could. That would be my guess. You’ve learned a lot of really important things. I think that they’re all spelled out so well in this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough to people. Here it is again, “Induced After-Death Communication – A Miraculous Therapy for Grief and Loss,” Allan Botkin. People need to read this book if they’re interested in this subject.
There’s so many new things in here and yet, when I say that, in a new way you’ve discovered what we’re learning in so many other ways, like you say, through ADC’s, through near-death experiences, through a lot of research that’s been done with mediums. It’s all parallel; they’re all overlapping. But to me, this is new; it’s a new way of getting similar information. I shouldn’t say one more piece of evidence, but it’s one avenue toward lots of evidence that draw the same conclusions that we’ve drawn in these other ways.
Dr. Allan Botkin: You know, I probably should say something before I forget. We left off – I mentioned that, when I was at the VA hospital, I had a 96% success rate in terms of inducing the after-death communication. For technical reasons, that might take a long time to explain. That 98% has not held up but the success rate now is about 75 to 79%. And the good news is, is that people I train also fall in that same range.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: If I read it correctly, and it made perfect sense, through my own experiences, it made perfect sense that the difference is the people at the VA are in a different situation than the people who are maybe coming to you from the outside and it’s that difference that makes it. You explain it very well in the book so we don’t have to go through it here, but it’s a different situation because it’s different. And mostly, it has a lot to do with preconceptions and expectations. That would probably be the reason for the difference, the 75 to 79 versus the 98.
Dr. Allan Botkin: When I worked at the VA and I would introduce this to my combat patients, they looked at me like I was an idiot. And they would say things like, “That’s not going to work with me, doc. I don’t believe in that crap.” Actually, that makes them easier to work with because, when I get to the point of doing the induction, they’re wide open to this natural experience.
Now I get a lot of new age-y people who think they know what this experience is supposed to be like, and they have beliefs and expectations that they try to insert into the experience, and when that happens, nothing happens. It completely blocks it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, well, you’re right. You do make an exception. You separate what you’re doing from hypnotherapy, from hypnosis, and you do it well in the book. Basically, we can just say that they’re two different things. What I thought was interesting was that from way back, I don’t even know how long ago, but we all have that image in our mind that hypnotists don’t even use anymore is the watch swinging back and forth.
And I have to wonder, if many years ago, hypnotists were sort of onto this and then it took a different direction and they got away from the eye movement thing.
Dr. Allan Botkin: That is probably the best explanation I’ve heard. I don’t think we know exactly how that turn can be made, but all of our brainwave studies, EEG studies, indicate that, in fact, the two are very different brain states.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, right. Anytime I’ve experimented with hypnosis – we don’t use the eye movement thing anymore at all. I think they were onto it years and years ago, and they took a right turn somewhere.
Dr. Allan Botkin: I think that’s probably a pretty good guess, yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah, fascinating. So all the things that you’ve learned, I thought one of the most interesting ones, and we’re kind of ending here, but one of the best messages came from the things that you’ve learned and experienced regarding forgiveness. What can you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Whoa. In all cases, when there were issues of horrible guilt, and so on, and even anger, forgiveness has always happened. I need to go at this from two perspectives.
If the deceased person was the bad guy, and was a horrible, abusive, drunken father that abused his kids, and then he dies, and then in the ADC, always, so far, that person comes through as very, very different. They come across, for the first time, very aware of the pain they caused in other people. They come across as sincere for the first time, wanting to do whatever it takes to fix what happens, taking full responsibility, and so on. And I think the reason for that is because they have been through a life review.
And when it’s the other way around, when it’s my patient who did something awful, and maybe killed somebody, like an enemy soldier, which we did a lot of, my patient needs to feel grief and sadness for his victim the same way he would for his own mother. And so it’s not an easy out; it’s not an easy forgiveness and get off the hook kind of thing. You really have to allow yourself to feel your humanity and connect on that level with your victims. And when the sadness is accessed and processed, forgiveness has, so far, always come about.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And what I got from your book and this is, in addition to what you’re saying, is it’s not the words, it’s the sentiment. When it comes from the heart, and when the people are having these experiences, the IAD experiences, if the abuser is now deceased, they can feel what’s in their heart now and they feel the regret and the remorse about it. And so it’s easier for them to be forgiving. I know a lot of people; that’s one of the hardest things for living people to do.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Well, of course, a life review, you experience every moment in your life, the feelings you had in every moment, and the feelings you caused in other people. So for those abusive, psychopathic people, when they die and have a life review, for the first time they can feel the pain they’ve caused in other people. That’s a real eye opener.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You’re right because they’re not psychopathic anymore. I love the idea that when people, who are living, have this experience with you, or other people who do this work, they can actually feel that sense of remorse from the person who is in spirit, and that makes it easier for them to be forgiving. You explain, again, so well in the book, too, that it heals everybody. It’s as healing for the person who is forgiving the other person as it is for both parties.
Dr. Allan Botkin: It’s healing for both.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: And I’m sure you’ve seen some amazing results for people who have the courage to do that work because that really does take courage, doesn’t it?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Yes, it does, yeah. And it takes a sense of humanity and, on some level, a recognition that we are not all separate beings; that we are, in a much deeper way, very much connected.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: If people want to have one of the experiences, how might they go about having one?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Well, the very first thing you want to do is check out my website.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Which is?
Dr. Allan Botkin: Which is www.induced-adc.com.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, I’ll have a link below the video for that and people can go there. What will they find on the website?
Dr. Allan Botkin: They’ll find, for people who want to go through the experience, I have an explanation of all the particulars of how that works. And I have a list of trained IAD therapists on my website that are all over the world at this point so you can, hopefully, find somebody close to you.
Many people travel to see me for a weekend and I work with a person on a Saturday and Sunday, which is plenty of time, and we’re done. Also, on the website I have information about training for people who are already licensed. Then I have a few stories and a few other general things. Pretty much everything is explained on the website and the contact information.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s great. So they can contact you through the website. Again, the link’s below the video, and, once again, I’ll mention the book. There’s the book. “Induced After-Death Communication – A Miraculous Therapy for Grief and Loss by Allan Botkin, Ph.D.” Any last words that you’d like to say?
Dr. Allan Botkin: I don’t want to be a buzz kill.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Go ahead; be a buzz kill.
Dr. Allan Botkin: People often ask me, “Well doctor, do you think that IADC proves there’s an afterlife?” And the way I generally respond to that is, “Well, why are you asking me? I’m only a psychologist.” The only people that have a truly informed opinion are those that have had the experience.
So when someone asks, “What do I think?” You know, go ask somebody who’s had the experience. They know what it’s like. And as a psychologist, I’m all about healing. I work with people who suffer so profoundly it’s beyond imagination of the kind of terrible things that I work with.
I really don’t want to engage in the debates between the skeptics and the believers. There’s other people who do that much better than I. And, plus, what I do works with people who don’t believe in this stuff. It works just as well. Professionally, I remain neutral about what these experiences “really are.”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Spoken like a true scientist. We’ve got people calling already and we haven’t even finished the interview. That’s pretty good. I like that you keep that perspective and you also mention in the book, even if there were some other reason for this, some other explanation of this, it could be acceptable because you see how people are being helped, and that’s just amazing in itself.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Right, absolutely.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well I can’t thank you enough. I hope more people will go out and have this experience. I’ve got to do it myself. I can’t believe that I haven’t done it yet. But, anyways, this was a lot of fun for me. I really appreciate you being a guest.
Dr. Allan Botkin: Well, thank you, Bob. You were great; you were fun to talk with.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, thank you.
Dr. Allan Botkin: You’re good at this and I appreciate it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You’re very, very, very kind. I’m going to end the interview but I’m going to talk to you in a minute so we’ll just say goodbye to everybody, alright, good bye everybody.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
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