May 28, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and psychologist Dr. Tom Nehmy discuss his techniques to help patients overcome the grief of the death of a loved one, how long you should grieve the death of a friend or relative, and his therapy work communicating with the spirits of deceased people.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George and oor
with you. Doctor Tom Nimi with US award winning clinical
psychologist with more than twenty years experience in an incredible
passion for healing grief with induced after death communication therapy.
Having had his own spontaneous after death communications, Tom is
now a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide,
(00:27):
where he has conducted a control evaluation of IADC therapy. Tom,
welcome to the program, looking forward to this.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Thanks George. It's great to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
And our things in Australia.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Things are great. We're coming into the cool of months now.
I've got the fire going and I'm just hearing the
Adelaide Hills of South Australia and yeah, it's a lovely
day so far.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Our friend Russell Crow lives down your way. He's a
good guy.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
He is a good guy. I haven't met him personally,
but yeah, he's I think he's originally from New Zealand,
but he's adopted Australia, as I understand.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
He Let's talk a little bit about grief for a
moment and then your work is a grief therapist. But
in your opinion, what is a good definition of grief?
What is that?
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Well, grief is a really natural phenomenon. It's not something
that we should assume is in any way abnormal, but
it's this natural emotional reaction to a loss. And so
in the grief work that I do, it's usually bereavement.
And of course there can be all sorts of losses
that can be loss of a relationship or a job
(01:39):
or a life change. But in terms of bereavement, it's
the emotional reaction to bereavement and that sense of losing
someone that you really love. And this can manifest in
a whole number of ways, but of course often it's
about sadness. That's really at the core of grief. Sadness,
(02:00):
this sense of longing, and for some people it turns
into what we call prolonged grief, which is where people
get kind of stuck in that state and it really
affects the quality of their lives.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
It becomes very depressing to them, that doesn't.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
It Absolutely it's associated with depression. It can look like
depression in fact, and for some people, you know, it
becomes a thing that is a burden that they carry
around day to day and they just can struggle to
really move forward from that. You know, I see grief
in so many different forms in my work now, and
(02:38):
it's just something that can be like a People describe
it as a weight. They often say, you know, I
have this heaviness, and that's probably a good metaphor for
what grief is like.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
If you lose a loved one, what is the average
length of time one should normally grieve?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
You know, George, I don't think we put arbitrary time
frames on it. I know that sometimes people like to
think of grief in terms of stages, or that there's
an order or a particular set of time, But I
don't think it's that simple. In fact, I often say
to my clients there's really no rules when it comes
(03:18):
to grief. It can be different for everyone. Now, of course,
clinically we put some things on this, so there are
arbitrary diagnostic criteria. So they might say, well, if it's
been a year and somebody is still experiencing X, Y
or Z, then we might say that they're still in grief.
But for many people it's not that black or white.
(03:40):
It's something that can take a long time for many people,
and we want to help them get to that place
where it's not that they're kind of in denial of
the lives. It's not that they're you know, completely back
to one hundred percent, but we want them to have
their quality of life. We want them to be able
to function and not to be stuck. So it's really
(04:02):
different for everyone.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
What got you to become a grief therapist?
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, you know, if somebody said to me fifteen years ago, Tom,
you're going to end up as a grief therapist, I
would have told them to jump in the lake. It
was the furthest thing from my mind because you know,
whenever I faced grieving clients, I actually have to say
I felt quite helpless. I don't know if many of
my colleagues would be able to relate to this. Some
(04:28):
of them have confided in me that they can. But
you know, if someone came to me with anxiety or depression,
all of the really common psychological problems that people might
seek therapy for, I always felt like I had tools,
you know, I could do my cognitive behavior therapy, I
could do this or that, and I felt empowered to
really help them. But when somebody came to me in
(04:50):
deep grief, of course I was willing to sit with them,
I was willing to help them as best I could,
but I didn't really feel like there was a lot
I could do that would make a big difference. And
so for a long time, you know, I was a
bit of a coward when it came to grief. I
wouldn't seek out that type of therapy, and for many
(05:11):
of my clients, I have to say this is a
real confession here, but I really felt that some of
my clients just didn't come back because I wasn't helping
them to get unstuck. And so for a long time,
I was very, very avoidant of grief therapy. What changed
for me and what led me to become a grief therapist,
(05:32):
is that I found something that works. And it's called
induced aff to death communication therapy, which in a way
is a little bit of a misnomer, which I can
explain later. But I came across this in the most
mundane of ways. I was walking my dog. In fact,
I was listening to a podcast from your own Sandra Champagne,
(05:53):
and she was interviewing doctor Alan Bodkin. So Alan Bodkin's
a clinical psychologist, and he was talking about his therapy,
induced after death communication therapy, or what they abbreviate to IADC.
So I'm walking my dog hearing him talk about this
adapted form of EMDR. And for people who haven't heard
(06:16):
of EMDR, it means eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and
it's a therapy that is really now the gold standard
for traumatic stress. It's a movement of the eyes back
and forth horizontally. It stimulates the brain in a particular
way that puts it into a healing mode. You can imagine, George,
(06:37):
that when this therapy came out, and when I was
doing my clinical training twenty years ago, people kind of
laughed at EMDR. They would talk about it in these
hush tones, as if it was all a little bit silly. Well,
that silly little therapy is now the gold standard for
post traumatic stress disorder. And what I heard doctor Botkin
talking to Sandra Champlain about was that he had used
(07:02):
MDR with Vietnam veterans. He was working in a VA
hospital and he was in charge of the trauma program
and he started trying to improve the protocol for MDR.
What could he do that would make it more effective,
And he found that many of the things he tried
didn't work, but a couple of them did, and the
main one was, instead of focusing on the fear associated
(07:25):
with a lost trauma, so a trauma where somebody had died,
and of course, in this Vietnam veteran population, almost all
of them were dealing with some kind of death, either
people they had killed at war or their colleagues who
had died. And he said, if we instead focus on
the sadness, what he called the core of the loss,
(07:45):
that it was more direct, and that the fear and
the anger and the guilt he saw those as kind
of secondary emotions and that they would kind of just resolve.
So he started doing this adapted protocol focused to EMDR
and in one day he was working with a Vietnam
veteran he had focused on their sadness as the primary
(08:09):
focus for the eye movements. He noticed that it worked
very effectively. The sadness was reducing and reducing, and then
one day something extraordinary happened. One of his patients reported
that they perceived the presence of the deceased person the
person they were mourning, and he was shocked. Alan Botkin
(08:29):
was shocked, the client was shocked, but he felt this
immense love and peace when he had this experience, which
we now know is an after death communication. And that
patient recovered very very quickly and was discharged from hospital.
And that was the beginning of Alan Botkin refining what
eventually became IDC therapy. And I have to say, George,
(08:50):
when I first heard about this, it sounded too good
to be true, but it was really a turning point
for me because I thought, I really want to find
out about this from us.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
How does rapid eye movement work this way?
Speaker 3 (09:05):
There's a few different theories about it. We know that
when we go through rem sleep at night, our eyes
naturally dart back and forth, and this is associated with
a particular stage of brain activity. So when people are
feeling upset about something and they go to sleep, we
often notice that we feel better in the morning. And
(09:26):
I don't think that's just because we feel rested. I
think it's actually this healing mode of our brain during
that sleep, and so our brain processes emotions, it puts
memories in order, and it's kind of like a clearing house.
It's a healing mode and we feel better. Well, there's
something about that that we can do when people are awake,
(09:49):
where we get them to move their eyes horizontally back
and forth. Their brain goes into this healing mode and
it does seem to very rapidly process the intensity of emotions,
and so we use that therapeutically. That's how it was discovered.
In fact, the discover of EMDR was just taking a
walk while she was upset, but she noticed that as
(10:12):
she moved her eyes left to right in the environment,
she started to feel better. So there's still some conjecture
over the exact mechanisms, but we do know through very
good quality research that it really helps process emotions for people.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Can we all practice that in case we need it?
Speaker 3 (10:31):
I am not aware of, you know, kind of a
universal self administered protocol. I think there's more research to
be done for that. But there are therapists all over
now who would use EMDR as kind of a mainstream
therapy for trauma, And of course there's also people who
(10:52):
now use that in IADC therapy, And although that has
been relatively obscure, I think we're now seeing a bit
more of a push out into the mainstream and certainly
that's part of my mission is that we need to
get this awareness out to other people because it helps
grieving people in a way that is unlike anything I've
seen before.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Oh, exactly, Tom, what is induced after death communications? What
is that?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
So it's a protocol of two ninety minute sessions where
we have the client fully access their sadness. And I
have to say it's quite an intense therapy. It's not
for everybody. We do go through a screening process before
we book somebody in for this because it requires them
(11:41):
to be fully feeling their sadness when we apply this
bilateral stimulation, this stimulation of each hemisphere of the brain
through eyes moving back and forth, or even through tapping.
You can tap somebody's knees or they can tap their
shoulders alternately. And as people access this sadness and fully
feel it, we apply these sets of bilateral stimulation and
(12:06):
we notice people will report that they start feeling less sad.
So we have this principle of worst first, we want
to target the most sad aspect of their experience. We
repeatedly apply this bilateral stimulation, this eigeh movement, and people report,
I'm feeling less sad I'm feeling less sad. I'm feeling
(12:26):
less sad, and we move to another aspect of their
experience that is sad, and we keep doing this until
they feel very calm and peaceful. And we also know
now that for about seventy five percent of people in
that calm, peaceful state, they will report that they've perceived
the presence of the deceased person in some way.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Hence the communication.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
That's the communication part of it. And the reason I,
you know, I always talk to people about this when
I'm doing the screening calls with them is we don't
want to make it only about the communication. Of course,
that's a very interesting part of it. It's something that
of course grieving people naturally want, but we can't control
that part of it. We can't make it happen. I
(13:12):
can't force somebody to feel the presence of their loved one.
So it's mostly about reducing sadness, that's number one. And
we can reliably reduce sadness, you know, I would say
for ninety percent of people, they will say I definitely
feel less sad about this loss afterwards. And it's a
(13:34):
subset of those people who have that after death communication.
So the name's a bit of a misnomer because it
emphasizes the ADC. But yeah, even if you don't have
an ADC, most people feel significantly better. And you've got
to remember two ninety minute sessions. This is a very focused,
very brief, intense therapy, and that's remarkable when you compare
(13:58):
it to other psychotherapy. He's like cognitive behavior therapy for
anxiety or depression, which might be ten, twelve, twenty sessions
in order to make those kind of gains.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Tom, can any of this be in the imagination or
is it actually happening?
Speaker 3 (14:16):
It's a great question. That's a question that clients will
often ask of themselves. But in my experience, mostly people
would say that they feel it was genuinely the presence
of their loved one. People can sometimes say, well, you know,
I saw something in my mind's eye, or I felt
(14:38):
a touch, or even I smelt something, I heard their voice,
and these are things that you know, they're not conjuring
because it's usually not what they expect. You know, it's
often not what they would expect, and yet they're reporting
these things that happen to them and afterwards they say, no,
that was really special. That's made a significant difference to
(15:02):
how I feel and emotionally, there is a significant change
associated with that. So for most clients, if you ask them,
I think they'd say that was a genuine spiritual experience.
But we don't impose an interpretation on anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Can you give us an example of an IADC event
and how that happened?
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Absolutely well. One that stands out in my mind was
one that was a little bit unusual. A client, a
lady in her fifties, had her husband pass away quite suddenly.
He was in a car accident, and she was very distressed.
(15:43):
She came to me, I think it was a couple
of years after this had happened, and she described her
grief as overwhelming her. She said, I can't shake it.
I just can't seem to get past this. And it
was every day, she said, I feel like I'm on
the verge of tears continuously. So naturally, I was really
(16:03):
motivated to help her, and she did a very good
job of stepping into her sadness, letting the emotions come up.
And you know, people are in grief are used to
managing their emotions. They're used to going to the shops
or going to work and kind of pushing it down.
And yet with IDC therapy, we're saying, don't push it down,
(16:24):
let it come up, let the emotions come up, and
we want to just let your thinking brain sit to
the side. So she was very good at doing that.
We did many sets of eye movement and she was
very open. So that's another thing that's quite important. We
need people to be open to whatever they might experience.
And I say to people, you don't have to believe
(16:46):
that this is going to work, but you do have
to believe that it might work, because if people are
sitting there thinking, oh, nothing's going to change, you know,
I'm going to be like this forever, it just puts
the brakes on it. But when we got to the
second session, she reported seeing something quite unusual. A photo
of her husband in the photo frame started changing. And
(17:08):
this this was a physical object right next to her computer.
I was doing this therapy with her over zoom and
she said, it looks like there's different images appearing in
the picture frame. Now, this is I've learned, not completely
uncommon when people have after death communications. But I wanted
her to have an internal experience, so I said, well,
(17:29):
that's great, let's keep note of that, but I want
you to carry on. I just want you to focus
on how you feel when you close your eyes, be
open to anything. And she reported this intense lava like color,
this orange, this bright orange that she said she was
seeing under her closed eyelids. And the biggest telltale sign
(17:49):
that something was going on was the emotion. She said,
I just feel surrounded by love. I feel incredible joy.
And she I asked her, where's this coming from, and
she said, it's from my husband, it's him. So she
went in two ninety minute sessions from on the verge
of tears from intense sadness to tears of joy and
(18:13):
love and peace. And that's one that stands out for
me because it highlights just how dramatically this therapy can work.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast tocoastam dot com
for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George and oor
with you. Doctor Tom Nimi with US award winning clinical
psychologist with more than twenty years experience in an incredible
passion for healing grief with induced after death communication therapy.
Having had his own spontaneous after death communications, Tom is
now a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide,
(00:27):
where he has conducted a control evaluation of IADC therapy. Tom,
welcome to the program, looking forward to this.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Thanks George. It's great to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
And our things in Australia.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Things are great. We're coming into the cool of months now.
I've got the fire going and I'm just hearing the
Adelaide Hills of South Australia and yeah, it's a lovely
day so far.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Our friend Russell Crow lives down your way. He's a
good guy.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
He is a good guy. I haven't met him personally,
but yeah, he's I think he's originally from New Zealand,
but he's adopted Australia, as I understand.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
He Let's talk a little bit about grief for a
moment and then your work is a grief therapist. But
in your opinion, what is a good definition of grief?
What is that?
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Well, grief is a really natural phenomenon. It's not something
that we should assume is in any way abnormal, but
it's this natural emotional reaction to a loss. And so
in the grief work that I do, it's usually bereavement.
And of course there can be all sorts of losses
that can be loss of a relationship or a job
(01:39):
or a life change. But in terms of bereavement, it's
the emotional reaction to bereavement and that sense of losing
someone that you really love. And this can manifest in
a whole number of ways, but of course often it's
about sadness. That's really at the core of grief. Sadness,
(02:00):
this sense of longing, and for some people it turns
into what we call prolonged grief, which is where people
get kind of stuck in that state and it really
affects the quality of their lives.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
It becomes very depressing to them, that doesn't.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
It Absolutely it's associated with depression. It can look like
depression in fact, and for some people, you know, it
becomes a thing that is a burden that they carry
around day to day and they just can struggle to
really move forward from that. You know, I see grief
in so many different forms in my work now, and
(02:38):
it's just something that can be like a People describe
it as a weight. They often say, you know, I
have this heaviness, and that's probably a good metaphor for
what grief is like.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
If you lose a loved one, what is the average
length of time one should normally grieve?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
You know, George, I don't think we put arbitrary time
frames on it. I know that sometimes people like to
think of grief in terms of stages, or that there's
an order or a particular set of time, But I
don't think it's that simple. In fact, I often say
to my clients there's really no rules when it comes
(03:18):
to grief. It can be different for everyone. Now, of course,
clinically we put some things on this, so there are
arbitrary diagnostic criteria. So they might say, well, if it's
been a year and somebody is still experiencing X, Y
or Z, then we might say that they're still in grief.
But for many people it's not that black or white.
(03:40):
It's something that can take a long time for many people,
and we want to help them get to that place
where it's not that they're kind of in denial of
the lives. It's not that they're you know, completely back
to one hundred percent, but we want them to have
their quality of life. We want them to be able
to function and not to be stuck. So it's really
(04:02):
different for everyone.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
What got you to become a grief therapist?
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, you know, if somebody said to me fifteen years ago, Tom,
you're going to end up as a grief therapist, I
would have told them to jump in the lake. It
was the furthest thing from my mind because you know,
whenever I faced grieving clients, I actually have to say
I felt quite helpless. I don't know if many of
my colleagues would be able to relate to this. Some
(04:28):
of them have confided in me that they can. But
you know, if someone came to me with anxiety or depression,
all of the really common psychological problems that people might
seek therapy for, I always felt like I had tools,
you know, I could do my cognitive behavior therapy, I
could do this or that, and I felt empowered to
really help them. But when somebody came to me in
(04:50):
deep grief, of course I was willing to sit with them,
I was willing to help them as best I could,
but I didn't really feel like there was a lot
I could do that would make a big difference. And
so for a long time, you know, I was a
bit of a coward when it came to grief. I
wouldn't seek out that type of therapy, and for many
(05:11):
of my clients, I have to say this is a
real confession here, but I really felt that some of
my clients just didn't come back because I wasn't helping
them to get unstuck. And so for a long time,
I was very, very avoidant of grief therapy. What changed
for me and what led me to become a grief therapist,
(05:32):
is that I found something that works. And it's called
induced aff to death communication therapy, which in a way
is a little bit of a misnomer, which I can
explain later. But I came across this in the most
mundane of ways. I was walking my dog. In fact,
I was listening to a podcast from your own Sandra Champagne,
(05:53):
and she was interviewing doctor Alan Bodkin. So Alan Bodkin's
a clinical psychologist, and he was talking about his therapy,
induced after death communication therapy, or what they abbreviate to IADC.
So I'm walking my dog hearing him talk about this
adapted form of EMDR. And for people who haven't heard
(06:16):
of EMDR, it means eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and
it's a therapy that is really now the gold standard
for traumatic stress. It's a movement of the eyes back
and forth horizontally. It stimulates the brain in a particular
way that puts it into a healing mode. You can imagine, George,
(06:37):
that when this therapy came out, and when I was
doing my clinical training twenty years ago, people kind of
laughed at EMDR. They would talk about it in these
hush tones, as if it was all a little bit silly. Well,
that silly little therapy is now the gold standard for
post traumatic stress disorder. And what I heard doctor Botkin
talking to Sandra Champlain about was that he had used
(07:02):
MDR with Vietnam veterans. He was working in a VA
hospital and he was in charge of the trauma program
and he started trying to improve the protocol for MDR.
What could he do that would make it more effective,
And he found that many of the things he tried
didn't work, but a couple of them did, and the
main one was, instead of focusing on the fear associated
(07:25):
with a lost trauma, so a trauma where somebody had died,
and of course, in this Vietnam veteran population, almost all
of them were dealing with some kind of death, either
people they had killed at war or their colleagues who
had died. And he said, if we instead focus on
the sadness, what he called the core of the loss,
(07:45):
that it was more direct, and that the fear and
the anger and the guilt he saw those as kind
of secondary emotions and that they would kind of just resolve.
So he started doing this adapted protocol focused to EMDR
and in one day he was working with a Vietnam
veteran he had focused on their sadness as the primary
(08:09):
focus for the eye movements. He noticed that it worked
very effectively. The sadness was reducing and reducing, and then
one day something extraordinary happened. One of his patients reported
that they perceived the presence of the deceased person the
person they were mourning, and he was shocked. Alan Botkin
(08:29):
was shocked, the client was shocked, but he felt this
immense love and peace when he had this experience, which
we now know is an after death communication. And that
patient recovered very very quickly and was discharged from hospital.
And that was the beginning of Alan Botkin refining what
eventually became IDC therapy. And I have to say, George,
(08:50):
when I first heard about this, it sounded too good
to be true, but it was really a turning point
for me because I thought, I really want to find
out about this from us.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
How does rapid eye movement work this way?
Speaker 3 (09:05):
There's a few different theories about it. We know that
when we go through rem sleep at night, our eyes
naturally dart back and forth, and this is associated with
a particular stage of brain activity. So when people are
feeling upset about something and they go to sleep, we
often notice that we feel better in the morning. And
(09:26):
I don't think that's just because we feel rested. I
think it's actually this healing mode of our brain during
that sleep, and so our brain processes emotions, it puts
memories in order, and it's kind of like a clearing house.
It's a healing mode and we feel better. Well, there's
something about that that we can do when people are awake,
(09:49):
where we get them to move their eyes horizontally back
and forth. Their brain goes into this healing mode and
it does seem to very rapidly process the intensity of emotions,
and so we use that therapeutically. That's how it was discovered.
In fact, the discover of EMDR was just taking a
walk while she was upset, but she noticed that as
(10:12):
she moved her eyes left to right in the environment,
she started to feel better. So there's still some conjecture
over the exact mechanisms, but we do know through very
good quality research that it really helps process emotions for people.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Can we all practice that in case we need it?
Speaker 3 (10:31):
I am not aware of, you know, kind of a
universal self administered protocol. I think there's more research to
be done for that. But there are therapists all over
now who would use EMDR as kind of a mainstream
therapy for trauma, And of course there's also people who
(10:52):
now use that in IADC therapy, And although that has
been relatively obscure, I think we're now seeing a bit
more of a push out into the mainstream and certainly
that's part of my mission is that we need to
get this awareness out to other people because it helps
grieving people in a way that is unlike anything I've
seen before.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Oh, exactly, Tom, what is induced after death communications? What
is that?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
So it's a protocol of two ninety minute sessions where
we have the client fully access their sadness. And I
have to say it's quite an intense therapy. It's not
for everybody. We do go through a screening process before
we book somebody in for this because it requires them
(11:41):
to be fully feeling their sadness when we apply this
bilateral stimulation, this stimulation of each hemisphere of the brain
through eyes moving back and forth, or even through tapping.
You can tap somebody's knees or they can tap their
shoulders alternately. And as people access this sadness and fully
feel it, we apply these sets of bilateral stimulation and
(12:06):
we notice people will report that they start feeling less sad.
So we have this principle of worst first, we want
to target the most sad aspect of their experience. We
repeatedly apply this bilateral stimulation, this eigeh movement, and people report,
I'm feeling less sad I'm feeling less sad. I'm feeling
(12:26):
less sad, and we move to another aspect of their
experience that is sad, and we keep doing this until
they feel very calm and peaceful. And we also know
now that for about seventy five percent of people in
that calm, peaceful state, they will report that they've perceived
the presence of the deceased person in some way.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Hence the communication.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
That's the communication part of it. And the reason I,
you know, I always talk to people about this when
I'm doing the screening calls with them is we don't
want to make it only about the communication. Of course,
that's a very interesting part of it. It's something that
of course grieving people naturally want, but we can't control
that part of it. We can't make it happen. I
(13:12):
can't force somebody to feel the presence of their loved one.
So it's mostly about reducing sadness, that's number one. And
we can reliably reduce sadness, you know, I would say
for ninety percent of people, they will say I definitely
feel less sad about this loss afterwards. And it's a
(13:34):
subset of those people who have that after death communication.
So the name's a bit of a misnomer because it
emphasizes the ADC. But yeah, even if you don't have
an ADC, most people feel significantly better. And you've got
to remember two ninety minute sessions. This is a very focused,
very brief, intense therapy, and that's remarkable when you compare
(13:58):
it to other psychotherapy. He's like cognitive behavior therapy for
anxiety or depression, which might be ten, twelve, twenty sessions
in order to make those kind of gains.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Tom, can any of this be in the imagination or
is it actually happening?
Speaker 3 (14:16):
It's a great question. That's a question that clients will
often ask of themselves. But in my experience, mostly people
would say that they feel it was genuinely the presence
of their loved one. People can sometimes say, well, you know,
I saw something in my mind's eye, or I felt
(14:38):
a touch, or even I smelt something, I heard their voice,
and these are things that you know, they're not conjuring
because it's usually not what they expect. You know, it's
often not what they would expect, and yet they're reporting
these things that happen to them and afterwards they say, no,
that was really special. That's made a significant difference to
(15:02):
how I feel and emotionally, there is a significant change
associated with that. So for most clients, if you ask them,
I think they'd say that was a genuine spiritual experience.
But we don't impose an interpretation on anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Can you give us an example of an IADC event
and how that happened?
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Absolutely well. One that stands out in my mind was
one that was a little bit unusual. A client, a
lady in her fifties, had her husband pass away quite suddenly.
He was in a car accident, and she was very distressed.
(15:43):
She came to me, I think it was a couple
of years after this had happened, and she described her
grief as overwhelming her. She said, I can't shake it.
I just can't seem to get past this. And it
was every day, she said, I feel like I'm on
the verge of tears continuously. So naturally, I was really
(16:03):
motivated to help her, and she did a very good
job of stepping into her sadness, letting the emotions come up.
And you know, people are in grief are used to
managing their emotions. They're used to going to the shops
or going to work and kind of pushing it down.
And yet with IDC therapy, we're saying, don't push it down,
(16:24):
let it come up, let the emotions come up, and
we want to just let your thinking brain sit to
the side. So she was very good at doing that.
We did many sets of eye movement and she was
very open. So that's another thing that's quite important. We
need people to be open to whatever they might experience.
And I say to people, you don't have to believe
(16:46):
that this is going to work, but you do have
to believe that it might work, because if people are
sitting there thinking, oh, nothing's going to change, you know,
I'm going to be like this forever, it just puts
the brakes on it. But when we got to the
second session, she reported seeing something quite unusual. A photo
of her husband in the photo frame started changing. And
(17:08):
this this was a physical object right next to her computer.
I was doing this therapy with her over zoom and
she said, it looks like there's different images appearing in
the picture frame. Now, this is I've learned, not completely
uncommon when people have after death communications. But I wanted
her to have an internal experience, so I said, well,
(17:29):
that's great, let's keep note of that, but I want
you to carry on. I just want you to focus
on how you feel when you close your eyes, be
open to anything. And she reported this intense lava like color,
this orange, this bright orange that she said she was
seeing under her closed eyelids. And the biggest telltale sign
(17:49):
that something was going on was the emotion. She said,
I just feel surrounded by love. I feel incredible joy.
And she I asked her, where's this coming from, and
she said, it's from my husband, it's him. So she
went in two ninety minute sessions from on the verge
of tears from intense sadness to tears of joy and
(18:13):
love and peace. And that's one that stands out for
me because it highlights just how dramatically this therapy can work.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
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