Humanity is moving towards a new kind of consciousness wherein the result will be a total integration of the unconscious and conscious realms. So, what was once hidden and, therefore, “nonexistent” becomes visible and acceptable due to the integration process. Even therapy systems are changing and widening their scope, with many new elements now being included in the so-called “psycho-spiritual territory.” Some of these elements involve aspects of family dynamics that were in the dark for too long, and one of the most significant of those aspects is death and its effects on the living family members. If we consider that physical death is not the end of existence itself, then the beings that were a little while ago proclaimed dead, meaning gone, are now seen as still having their presence and role in the family. Therefore, they need to be treated as such. We have to look at dead family members as not less present and influential (psychologically and spiritually, of course) than the living ones, both in therapy and in “everyday life.” They must be consciously accepted, recognized, respected, and included in our lives. Not in some morbid way, being obsessed with them, but by treating them as conscious entities that still have their place and role in the family, giving us their full support and doing their best to help us reach our goals and achieve maximum happiness. If we do not have good relations with dead family members, we need to work on making them harmonious, using the same methodology we apply when sorting out our relationships with the living ones.
This process can be done in individual therapy but is also learned in Transformation of Karmic Patterns courses. Our family matrix also includes dead family members, so it doesn’t matter if our parents or grandparents are physically dead; we can still have issues with them that demand resolution. Those issues will not somehow disappear with their death; on the contrary, sometimes we feel even more pressured by unresolved problems after somebody dies than before. Therefore, dying doesn’t end suffering either for the dead or for the living. So what if we are identified with someone who is not alive? What if some deceased family member shares their position with our own on the family map? The characteristics and consequences of such identification are specific and differ from those of living family members, so that’s why they require special attention.
Dead Person Identification (DPI in the rest of the text) and its resolution is probably one of the most significant discoveries of modern psycho-spiritual science because it has been the cause of heavy identity blocks and a whole range of different forms of suffering. With this discovery, we are a step closer to the Buddhist ideal of “the ending of suffering for all sentient beings”; that’s how significant this limiting influence can be. The ending of suffering is not just an abstract ideal that has to do solely with spiritual enlightenment but also with everyday living and the practical forms of human expression. By dissolving DPI, we become much freer and suffer less. We free not only our mind but our soul so that it can freely express and realize itself, unobstructed by some of the most significant aspects of karmic influence that were until recently considered “pure fate.”
THE ORIGIN OF DEAD PERSON IDENTIFICATION
This identification has lately become widespread because of the many wars in which people who are not otherwise supposed to die are being killed. According to the rules of nature, most casualties of war shouldn’t die since they are too young, but they die all the same because of the use of force. Some people die too early from traffic accidents, and some from the wide variety of terminal diseases which are the consequences of modern lifestyles, but also from the covert and overt depopulation measures our governments have prepared for us. Furthermore, some terminal diseases are considered “dishonorable” by religions or society (AIDS, for instance), and some deaths as well, suicide being the most prominent example. People who commit suicide sometimes lose their place in the family because they have died dishonorably.
But there is another widespread and relatively unknown contributor to this identification, and that would be miscarriages and abortions. People have always practiced some form of birth control, but contemporary medicine has allowed this act to be done more safely, with less risk, and more frequently. For some, abortions have become the primary form of family planning, so some women have up to twenty or thirty of them. We have to bear in mind here that abortions have consequences, sometimes extremely destructive ones, so we have to know how to deal with them. It doesn’t matter whether the baby is aborted, miscarried, or stillborn; other family members must also recognize and accept it. The living members have to sort out their relationships with the dead so that unresolved or incomplete relationships won’t burden and block them from realizing their goals.
We live in a civilization that doesn’t recognize the afterlife, and Christianity, as the dominant religion, makes the afterlife look like a Hollywood fairytale where the soul goes to “Heaven,” “Purgatory,” or “Hell” and has no contact with the living, except for “existing in their memories.” But human interconnection doesn’t end with death because it is not only physical anyway. Subtle psycho-energetic relationships continue with the same intensity, sometimes even greater than before, and death does not relieve persons who haven’t clarified their relationships. On the contrary, relationships become even more intense for dead people because they are no longer limited by physical reality. Their consciousness is not divided into three separate minds – the conscious, the subconscious, and the superconscious. It is now unified because there is only one mind, which is conscious of everything that was up until then hidden in the subconscious or superconscious. Dead persons are, therefore, deeply aware of the character of their relationships with the living and wish to resolve and clarify them. That is why physically dead family members sometimes obsessively try to contact the living. But the living also have the need to resolve entanglements with the dead, although they are usually not aware of it, nor do they want to be aware of it.
So why do we identify with dead family members? The answer is – so that we can keep on being connected with them. For example, if a dead person perished too early or died “dishonorably” and his death became a family secret, some living family members will unconsciously identify with that person. They do it to stay connected to him because they have a natural, automatic, and unconscious need for such a connection. Even if the identified person isn’t aware that some family member is not physically alive, he subconsciously feels the existence of such a being. He usually isn’t aware that he feels precisely that but senses some inner unrest, longing, melancholy, or sadness, seemingly unprovoked by any outer stimulus. That’s why the most common indicator of the possibility that someone is identified with a dead family member is precisely the emotion of sadness, which runs throughout the life of the identified person. Sadness is otherwise justified when we miss someone or something, but it is neither natural nor justified to be sad all the time. Such a constant presence of sadness, melancholy, or depression indicates the need for someone or something we have lost but are not aware of such a loss.
The unconscious longing for a missing person may be compensated for in various ways. People often search for a lost family member in alternate relationships of a similar kind, so we look for lost brothers or sisters in the living ones and sometimes in our friends or partners. In this way, we may create friendships and partnerships which are basically of a brotherly or sisterly kind. If we lose our parents too early, we may also search for them in partners and tend towards much older people as potential or actual partners or simply expect them to treat us the way a parent would. We do this kind of projection anyway, even if our parents are alive because that’s how transferences work. However, if there is a missing person in the family, we shall inevitably search for him or her in other people. And suppose our mother or father died too early when we were still underage and emotionally immature. We will almost certainly identify with them and have all the characteristics of a DPI. This happens regularly because our normal emotional maturation process was suddenly interrupted. In our need to continue the relationship with the deceased parent, we identify with him or her and stay that way until we finally diagnose and dissolve our identification. At the same time, we will look for parental figures in our friends or partners and sometimes even in our children.
Even aborted children can be projected onto actual or potential partners. Here’s an excellent example of this. I once had a client who fell in love with a girl twenty-five years younger than him. This guy was a father of two and had a relatively harmonious marriage, so he considered his infatuation a kind of madness but simply couldn’t help himself. During therapy, it turned out that twenty-and-something years ago, he had gotten his former girlfriend pregnant, but she had an abortion, and the potential parents tried to forget this “accident” as quickly as possible. Interestingly, their relationship didn’t last long after the abortion; six months later, they broke up. This is, in fact, one of the typical consequences of abortion – partners either separate within months after the abortion or they are never as intimate as they were before.
As treatment progressed, this man established contact with his aborted child and concluded that she would have been a girl. Had she been born, she would have been in her early twenties. He visualized his daughter standing before him, and to his astonishment, she looked exactly like the young girl he had fallen in love with. At that moment, the whole construction of his problem simply fell apart because he realized who he was searching for. The “infatuation” was, in fact, a projection or a message from his higher consciousness that something was not right. When he reconnected with his aborted daughter, recognized her, and gave her a place in the family, he could continue with his life and stop the affair with the much younger girl, who was simply an object for his projection mechanism. He also felt obligated to tell his wife and children that another family member existed so they could be unburdened from the tension created by the unspoken truth and unfulfilled need for connecting. In a therapeutic sense, there was no need to discuss his short-term affair with the family members; sharing that information depends on the client, so it is their choice whether to do that or not.
What we can see from this example is that some people may spend their whole lives being married to a projection and not to a real person. The need for a relationship is strong, but the strongest need is for an unrecognized and unrealized relationship because the subconscious mind creates a kind of obsession with it. Until that relationship is resolved, actual relationships will suffer because they are not the priority. Therefore, the identified persons will not be fully present regarding their existing relationships and will stay disassociated, distant, or sometimes emotionally unavailable for a mature partnership. If they find themselves in a bad partnership, they are usually unable to terminate it because it serves as compensation for the missing person. The man I spoke about couldn’t dedicate himself fully to his wife and children but needed to “fall in love” with a much younger girl and waste his precious life energy on an intense internal conflict. All this time, he was completely aware of his “madness” but also of the fact that he didn’t know all the relevant factors of his problem, so he asked for professional help. And the solution came from an “unexpected” source: the need to bond with his aborted child.
So, the actual cause was nothing abstract, esoteric, or mystical, although people will often accept the craziest explanations for their problems before they finally accept the sane and sensible one. Whether we like it or not, most of our problems have their root in nothing other than the unconscious family dynamics. Although we may “think” differently, thinking will only lead us astray, into the abstract realms of who-knows-what, or into rationalizations that serve purely as justifications for our unwillingness to face the real causes of our problems. We need to follow our feelings to get to the cause, and feelings most often take us to the realms of interpersonal relationships. Since causal models are placed in the subconscious mind, feelings are the means of communication with the subconscious. When we follow our feelings, we are often surprised by what we find in our subconscious minds, but we shouldn’t be because if we had known what was there, we would have been conscious of it. The unconscious contents are what they are, not what we “think” they may be. And it is only we who can solve our problems permanently; no healer can do it for us because issues are not meant to be solved by someone else. They are here to teach us important life lessons, so we are the ones who need to learn them.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF ABORTIONS
When it comes to abortion, my aim is not to engage in the discussion of whether abortion is morally, religiously, or medically justified. I do not advocate any of the well-known stands (“pro-life” or “pro-choice”). Still, I would wish to address the possible consequences of abortion if we look at it in light of the new discoveries of modern psycho-spiritual science. These consequences vary from none or very mild to extremely harsh ones, those that can seriously damage our physical and mental health. Traces of this knowledge can be found in different parts of the world, but it seems that it originates from the islands of Hawaii. Local folk healers known as “Kahunas” have used it in their therapeutic practice for probably over a thousand years. The idea that interpersonal relationships play a crucial role in human health forms the basis of their work, especially the famous Ho’o’ponopono method. Kahunas claim that “our bodies reflect our relationships,” and that’s why their healing practice is directed primarily towards treating the unconscious dynamics of family relationships, which is also the main topic of this article and one of the main areas of my work.
According to unofficial data, around 150,000 abortions are performed worldwide every day. Regardless of the belief that abortion is a sin or, on the other hand, a completely harmless act, new teachings consider it an act that creates inevitable consequences. We all know that there are no one hundred percent reliable means of contraception, so the possibility of becoming pregnant is considerably high. If pregnancy happens and the parents decide to terminate it, they first need to know that they are stopping the life of a living being. This act will affect not only the mother’s physical body but also both parents’ psyche and energy bodies. Secondly, if they decide to keep the abortion a secret, the aborted child loses its role and place in the family, disrupting the family map. And finally, an abortion will also affect every other family member, even if they do not know of it. So, there’s no need to waste time on morality here; if we want to sort out the consequences of an abortion, there is much work to be done. If parents decide to take responsibility to face and deal with these consequences, they can be reduced to a minimum. If not, the choice is theirs, so at least they know who’s responsible if things go in an undesired direction.
After it was recognized that abortions have serious repercussions not only on our physical but also on our mental health, the way to resolve these consequences was also discovered. It is precisely this fact that has brought about a small revolution in therapeutic systems. People who underwent such a process have made significant personal changes and can finally continue their lives after many years of unproductive suffering. But before I continue, I’d like to stress once again that on no account would I recommend abortion as a method of family planning and that I consider it a harmless act, neither physically nor psychologically. So, if you decide to have an abortion, you should remember that it has inevitable consequences, which may produce great suffering. In this sense, it is much better not to have an abortion at all because we cannot fully resolve its consequences as if it never happened. It will always leave some scars. If we use the methodology I will speak about in this section, then we can at least continue with our lives. However, things will not be completely the same as before because a terminated pregnancy is also a form of violence and, therefore, subject to karmic law.
Although DPI can appear as a consequence of the premature death of a family member, usually parents or brothers/sisters, let’s see how this identification looks in the case of abortion. If abortion is accompanied by a sense of guilt and then suppressed and hidden (denied) from the other family members, then some of these members may unconsciously identify themselves with the soul of the aborted child. They become burdened with sadness, trying to cope with it in many different ways. I have already mentioned that sadness is justified when we miss something or somebody. Still, identified persons are not even aware that they miss someone and usually ascribe their emotions to diverse false sources that have nothing to do with the real one.
The roots of this identification are based on the three rules of family maps, of which the second one says nobody dies. Deceased family members continue having their presence and position in the family matrix, not as some scary “ghosts” but as real persons with whom the living family members are strongly connected. When we apply this model to an aborted baby, we may say that such a baby also becomes a family member at the moment of conception, with all the practical implications of their role and position. Never mind that these beings exist only on the spiritual, psychological, or energy level; they still exist as family members and need to be accepted. If not, then this denial becomes the main catch when discussing “abortion consequences.”
The third rule says that there are no secrets within the family. Although some family members sometimes try to hide or cover up their actions, a family secret can become a source of deep problems for those people and other members. Secrets cannot stay hidden; the so-called “skeleton in the closet” keeps burdening a family subconsciously until it is finally revealed and sorted out. If we want to keep something hidden, other family members will inevitably sense that something is going on, although they may not connect their feelings with us and our actions. Sometimes, they become nervous, restless, confused, or melancholic. They try to explain their emotional states in many different ways, projecting their actual cause onto various inner or outer sources. But in this case, the cause of their emotional problem lies in the unfulfilled need to be connected to an aborted brother, sister, or child. This need exists independently of the physical existence of those persons, and it is unconscious, blind, and automatic. So, when we are unconsciously bonded to someone, we also experience all the well-known consequences of such bonding, although we may not be aware of the bond itself or to whom we are bonded. We just “don’t feel good,” usually being depressed, melancholic or sad. Therefore, there are no secrets in the family, energetically speaking. Although the actual content of the secret may remain hidden, it can nevertheless be felt.
The first rule of family maps says that everyone has a specific role and position inside the family. If an unborn child is not accepted and appreciated by their family, then some other members may take the place of the aborted child and identify with them, especially the younger or more sensitive ones. Living in a psycho-energetic symbiosis with a dead person cannot be healthy, so the consequences may be various. These children sometimes feel sad, have “imaginary friends,” fantasize, and spend more time in “other worlds” than in this one. Sometimes, they possess strange psychic abilities that they cannot control, or they become obsessed with death. In my opinion, some modern lifestyles express precisely this kind of karmic pattern. The so-called “Gothic look” (dressed in black, with hair dyed black and black nail varnish, looking almost like a vampire or the “living dead”) usually expresses this kind of obsession on the conscious level. Other forms may include hard drug addictions, extreme spirituality (membership in cults), a promiscuous lifestyle, or suicidal behavior. The film industry also contributes to expressing DPI through genres like horror movies, occult thrillers, or fantasy/fiction works. The director Tim Burton made many films that seem to represent DPI, probably without even noticing it, Beetlejuice being the most significant.
Although there are many consequences, the most common denominator of all post-abortion effects is the incapability of living a happy and fulfilled life, at least in one of its major aspects. In a more or less subtle way, happiness means nothing to such a person, and the same goes for being successful. If a DPI person is very persistent, he can succeed, but this will be a complex process, usually accompanied by a high-stress level and various crises. Sometimes, such a person even reports having a kind of “dark stain” inside him or a “black cloud” following him wherever he goes. This black stain or cloud may sometimes stand exactly in front of him, but he is unaware that it represents his aborted brother, sister, son, or daughter. This identification can also manifest as emotional hypersensitivity, inner tension, a “frog in the throat,” strain in the chest, or constant pressure in the solar plexus area. The identified person usually believes that it is normal to feel discomfort most of the time and, therefore, tries to find relief in alcohol, drugs, or prescription pills. At other times, he attempts to find alleviation in so-called “serial monogamy” or the constant changing of sexual partners. Sometimes, these people involve themselves in spiritual activities that aim to overcome or ” destroy” the ego. So, when manifested extremely, this problem makes people unable to achieve deep personal fulfillment, happiness, or self-realization in relationships or any creative activity. They only want to eliminate their constant inner discomfort and are primarily attracted to instant pleasures and having a “good time.”
If somebody is a parent of an aborted child, then the sadness they feel belongs to them and the aborted baby, but they are usually unaware of this pattern. They think their undesirable emotions have some other source, that being too soft or oversensitive is a “natural aspect” of their character or even their genetics. But nobody is genetically sad, melancholic, or depressed, nor is depression only a “chemical imbalance” in the body, as pharmaceutical companies would like us to believe. A depressed person misses something and has to discover what or who. What he actually misses may not be visible at first sight and usually belongs to the domain of “inconvenient truth,” so a depressed person must scratch under the surface and explore his unconscious mind to find the actual cause. The information I have just presented may be of some help here, but everyone has to do their own research to discover precisely what the source of their depression is. And no “anti-depressant” can permanently alleviate the sadness – only finding the actual cause can do that. In this case, it is always the reconnection with someone we deeply miss.
When it comes to partners and their partnership, once they have had an abortion, their relationship will never be the same. Unless they take care of the consequences of the abortion, they usually break up within six months or cannot achieve the same level of intimacy and closeness ever again. Many partnerships are in big trouble after an abortion but seldom are these troubles connected with the abortion itself. Usually, one partner thinks that the other one has “changed for the worse” or vice versa or that some insurmountable obstacles have suddenly appeared, which block the development of the partnership satisfactorily. For this reason, partners often conclude that their relationship has no perspective, so they end it.
Well, the fact is that something does stand between the partners – it is the soul of an aborted baby, trying to become recognized, accepted, and given an adequate position in the family. It stands between them to attract their attention and will continue to stand there until it reaches its goal. Partners are usually unaware of this and think their relationship became problematic “just like that.” That is not true because nothing appears just like that, not even children, although partners believe that sexual intercourse is just a game or entertainment and that it is impossible to get pregnant that way. Yes, many people are pretty surprised when they hear that the possible consequence of “sexy time” may be a baby because they cannot take even basic responsibility for their actions. Therefore, they are also unaware of the relationship as the third force in human interaction, so they project its influence onto outer circumstances. What changes with abortion is not the other person but the relationship itself. So, besides sorting out the immediate consequences of the abortion, we need to know how to fix the partnership because otherwise, it tends to become frozen or even terminated.
Contributing to such a lack of awareness is our contemporary society because, even nowadays, there is a tendency towards underestimating relationships as an independent force in interpersonal interactions. However, the importance and influence of human bonding are visible in examples of persons who had terrible relationships with their parents while they were still alive, but the death of their parents hits them just as strongly as if they were in good relations with them. Moreover, while treating drug addicts, I found out that they share the almost unanimous view that when the dominant parent of an addict dies, they will also die within a year. Although having a bad relationship with that parent, addicts do not feel relieved after their death. On the contrary, they also die intentionally (by committing suicide) or unintentionally (from an accidental overdose or disease). Of course, drug addicts are rarely capable of taking care of themselves, but the real reason for such a quick departure after the death of the dominant parent is psycho-energetic or emotional. Unpurified toxic bonds will pull junkies toward their dead parents. Since their addiction already weakened them, junkies simply cannot resist the pull, so they also die. Their death is, therefore, a natural consequence of the enormous energy loss coming from the unresolved limiting bonds and identifications with the deceased parent. For this reason, we should never underestimate DPI because it sometimes dramatically shapes our lives.
Here is a list of the most common characteristics of dead person identification:
● feeling sad, melancholic, and easily bursting into tears;
● living a completely abstract or too spiritually oriented life;
● acting childishly, especially concerning one’s emotions;
● being hyper-sensitive to outer impacts;
● being afraid of any kind of changes;
● refusing to participate in an every-day-life, finding excuses such as fear, cynicism, sarcasm, aggression, sorrow or guilt;
● being unable to stand sentimental music, movies, or literature; or being overly sentimental;
● being irritated by little children or pets or too attached to pets;
● being inclined to extreme sports – those people like to “provoke their destiny“;
● getting physically hurt pretty often (in car accidents, sports injuries);
● deep inside, this person is indifferent toward life and death; she lacks the natural fear of death;
● possessing occult powers which they cannot control;
● having problems concerning pregnancy; a person cannot get pregnant;
● having unreasonable fears for their child during the pregnancy;
● showing a tendency towards promiscuity;
● being attracted to drugs, with a special tendency to hard drugs (at least 90% of hard drugs addicts are the dead person identified);
● having a preference towards black color, black clothes, black hair;
● creating specific behavioral patterns, especially this one: „Betrayer – Abandoned person – Comforter“;
● identified person often uses expressions like „I am dying to…“, or „We have demolished ourselves at the party“…, or ”You are killing me…”;
● showing fascination with graveyards, battlefields, ex concentration camps;
● having interest in morbid stories, horror movies, and occult or astral worlds;
● in a more or less subtle way, this person is preoccupied with death, sometimes openly suicidal.
DISSOLVING THE DEAD PERSON IDENTIFICATION
When it comes to identification with aborted brothers, sisters, or children, the transformation of this pattern usually starts with revealing the truth. We must tell our children and the rest of our family how many potential brothers or sisters, children or grandchildren they have lost. “The truth shall set us free” is why telling the truth relieves other family members and us. If we do not tell the truth, then the consequences can be quite destructive because children growing up in families with abortions or miscarriages never become completely successful and happy. Too often, they become drug addicts, promiscuous individuals, hyper-sensitive dreamers, or even cult members. These people hardly ever reach their goals, have trouble forming intimate relationships and become losers with no desire to live constructive life. Since this can be the price of a lie, I think it isn’t hard to evaluate what’s better – to express the inconvenient truth and free yourself and your loved ones from long-term suffering or conceal the truth for the sake of your comfort and burden yourself and others with unnecessary suffering.
Once we have revealed the truth, we may continue with balancing our relationships with aborted children, brothers or sisters, and other family members. This usually requires professional assistance, but any attempt to solve these problems is still better than none. The aborted child (brother, sister…) must be accepted, appreciated, and allowed to take their appropriate position in the family. Then, the sharing of blessings may follow, and in the case of DPI, such a process is extremely important. Every child comes into a particular family carrying special grace and blessings for the entire family and specific gifts for each member individually. The aborted child is not some demon chasing and accusing other family members of what they have done. It only wishes to be accepted as a part of the family and to communicate with its members, expressing love and blessings. Once all these processes have been settled and the soul of the aborted child has taken its position, it very often assumes the additional role of a family guide or protector. Existing free of material limitation, with a perspective much more comprehensive than ours, these souls become a true blessing for the whole family, guiding us towards unconditional love and creative self-realization.
The last phase consists of creating a plan and program of positive activity that we can occasionally perform in honor of the aborted child, brother, or sister. This can be any constructive activity we can think of – a lecture or an article on the consequences of abortion, a donation to a humanitarian institution, some spiritual work, or a creative project, but also a change in our behavior and letting go of some personal weakness, overcoming a vice or systematic work on developing some positive, unique quality. This activity can later become a source of great fulfillment. And finally, the proper handling of the consequences of abortion may turn into a powerful spiritual experience for the person who works on their resolution. A former problem has now turned into a profound blessing and one of the most significant spiritual lessons ever learned in our whole life. So, now that we know how to deal with them, it is a matter of personal choice, not “destiny,” whether we will resolve the consequences of abortions or let them continue to block our happiness. The process usually doesn’t take more than a couple of hours of work and can be done in just one session. Most people cannot, in their wildest dreams, imagine that some of their huge problems could be dissolved in such a short period, and so they continue to suffer. But with new times and new knowledge, even hardcore suffering has an alternative. We choose to continue or end it for good. And since the methodology exists, intelligent people will use it.
© Tomislav Budak, December 2005