Stephen interviews Graham Maxey, a Grief/Trauma specialist who regularly administers Induced After-Death Communication Therapy — a radically successful new treatment for both normal and severe grief. Graham enlightens us on the five most important things we learn from our dead.
*The show's host is also the writer/director of the award-winning documentary film LIFE WITH GHOSTS, now streaming at https://www.LifeWithGhosts.com/ for a limited time.
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Listen to the podcast here
Chat With Guest Graham Maxey
Welcome everyone. My name is Gary Langley. I'm Stephen's co-host and friend and we have a very special guest. I'll let Stephen introduce him. Without further ado, over to you, Stephen.
Thank you, Gary. Welcome, everybody. It's nice to see that we continue to have full houses. This is our fourth episode and before I get into talking with our special guests, I wanted to mention to everybody that between now and the next episode, the next episode will be November 6th. That's the first Monday of November. Between now and then I will be doing that TED Talk I referenced last time and of course, everybody will get a link to the TED Talk once it's available.
I'm very excited about that, but TED does not let us know when they publish it. It could be two weeks until the link is available. It could be six months from now. I'm a little bit nervous on stage, I've never been on stage before giving a talk of any kind. I could speak publicly in a Zoom setting pretty easily, extemporaneously, but I've never actually walked on a stage and given a talk before. I tried it today for the first time at a local theater. They let me do some practicing and I realized I'm pretty bad. I need practice.
I'm going to introduce Graham Maxey. Graham Maxey is a Grief and Trauma Specialist. One of his favorite tools in his toolbox is something called Induced After Death Communication Therapy, which is featured in the documentary film Life With Ghosts. With this therapy, a licensed practitioner can facilitate a metaphysical reunion between a grieving client and a deceased loved one.
Graham is not only an expert at administering this therapy but he also trains other therapists on how to administer the therapy to achieve the success he has with it. What I will be talking to Graham about tonight is his unpublished manuscript, what he's learned from his many years treating bereaved clients with IADC, that's Induced After Death Communication Therapy, and he addresses what he believes are the five important things we learn from the dead.
Before we talk about those things, Graham, can you share with us an example of someone who comes to you in need of IADC therapy like the story that you shared with me when we first met? I think it involved a man who had been in a car accident. That was a story that stayed with me forever. If you don't mind, could you share that with our audience?
It's a man who lost his daughter in a terrible automobile accident. It wasn't something that happened a few months ago. When I saw him, it had happened years ago, back when there were no airbags in cars. From what I'm understanding about the situation, his daughter was not wearing a seatbelt either. When this crash was imminent and about to happen, he looked over at her and tried to do that thing parents do, which is shield the daughter but the crash happened.
Her head hit the windshield and he saw it impacting and saw her neck break, which is how she died. That image had stayed with him for probably over a decade in my estimation. I didn't get the exact time that this happened. Every time he went to the memory of I had a daughter and I love her, that's the picture that came to his mind and it was arresting. Sometimes he would try to feel what was there, but most of the time, he would block it out.
He felt bereft of her because he couldn't even visit her in memory. He couldn't think about any goodness that had happened, couldn't think about her voice or the way she looked because that image would come to the fore. That was one of the first IDC sessions that I ever did in my office. That was very fortuitous because we already had the apex of the grief or the sadness that he was subject to.
That's what we try to do in IADC. We spent the first good portion of the first session listening to their story, not just about their death but about who this person was to them. They are re-experiencing this person as a whole person and not just an event. From that story, I'm sitting there taking notes, watching, looking for indications of where is this becoming distressing to them, and of course we talk about that. We discuss it, and I discuss it with the client. After we find that point, we engage in what they call Bilateral Stimulation.
That's the active ingredient in what's becoming a well-documented but very functional and well-researched psychotherapy tool. It is called EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. We don't use the same protocol as EMDR, so IADC is called IADC instead of EMDR or something else. Quite frankly, because they didn't like the name after-death communication, they’re going onto it somewhere, but that's very accurate.
About 75% to 80% of people will experience an after-death communication from their loved one in some form during the session. We do the bilateral stimulation which is either eye movements or alternate rhythmic tapping or stimulation or even sound for some people. We do short sets, but within say the first 8 to 10 sets, the level of sadness or the level of distress comes down remarkably fast.
The whole secret is getting the level of distress, thinking about that particular sound or instance or whatever the little image is that's stuck in people's minds. Once that begins to come down, the whole thing begins to melt. It's not like, “We got this one down and that one goes up,” usually unless we've got the wrong one to begin with.
The secret of IEDC is that we're not inducing anything. I don't like the term induced because it sounds like we're going to make you have a baby at a time when you don't want to have a baby or something. What we're doing is taking down this interfering emotion which is so overpowering. What else would you notice? How are you going to notice a subtle communication from a deceased loved one when you're in that much pain?
I think you explained it very well in the film where the key is to get to the core memory, what you refer to as the tip of the iceberg. The memory that you keep going back to over and over again when you think of you're deceased. Sometimes it's a horrible memory and sometimes it could be a pleasurable memory that you keep on going back to or is it usually something that puts you in a very dark place?
I don't think anybody would sign up for, “Let me get rid of your bad or your good memories.” My analogy has always been if it's 12:00 o’clock noon and I say, “Go out and look at the Big Dipper,” you're going to have a problem with that because there's this big incandescent ball of flaming gas up in the sky that's pretty glaring and you're not going to be able to see much else.
What we're going to do is try to get the sun to go down so you can see what's already there. We're not producing anything for you. We're not inducing anything for you. We're allowing something to come through. As Dr. Botkin who discovered the method says, “All after-death communication is spontaneous.” We're just facilitating it, which I think should be the name of the technique, but I didn't get the vote.
The real hard part sometimes is trying to convince people to give up that memory because that feels like the most visceral connection I have with this loved one. If I give it up, they may all be gone. They may be evaporated. The bargain we're striking with them is that if we can get this gone and if this can be reduced to a normal memory for you, you're going to trade it for an ongoing connection that you can go to any time you want to.
It's not something that happens in this office. It's something that happens inside of you. Can I tell you about mine? I had to train with Dr. Botkin and he said, “Come to Chicago and I'll train you and bring a client with you and I'll demonstrate it with you.” I did not have anybody who had the means of flying to Chicago with me so I had to be my own subject.
What I had discovered, I guess this was over ten years ago, was that I had never grieved the loss of my unborn daughter. She couldn't be with us and my first wife was very ill during that early pregnancy. We were very worried about her. She had to spend three tough trips to an emergency room in an ambulance because she was pretty close to checking out.
Amazement and relief that she wasn't going to die and I wasn't going to be a single parent, I forgot that there was a person involved, but I was reminded of that seventeen years later. That's who I picked to do the grieving and it was highly successful. I saw her not as an infant, but as a 23-year-old woman. I saw her in my mind.
You saw your unborn child as a 23-year-old woman. Did you recognize her? Does she look like you or have a family resemblance?
I didn't check for that to be honest with you. I was in awe of the fact that there was someone there who was for me. There was no mistaking that and when I said, “I'm sorry that I didn't get to be with you,” she said, “You did the best you could at the time.” I said, “I love you.” She says, “I love you very much.” She did something very odd to me because I was seeing her face to face. She came around behind me and hugged me from the back. I thought, if I was making this up, I would have done something different but that's the way it unfolded for me and that's what happens to most people.
People rarely will say, “Is this something I made up, something I wanted to see?” There's always something that validates that experience for them that says, “This isn't the way I would envision it. This is not the way I would write it out, script it out.” I would say something different. Sometimes, it's not full face, front delivery like that. Sometimes it's even symbolic. Sometimes it's even olfactory. I can smell them. They do, but I don't. It's not in the air. It's in their mind produced by this event.
First of all, that's fascinating. I'm sorry you lost your unborn daughter. At the same time, I feel like you're one of the lucky ones to be able to have that reunion.
I spent the night after I left Botkin's office talking with her. That's the other nice part of IADC. This is not something that happens once and that's it. I get to go home and continue the relationship, which I have to this day.
IADC is not something that happens once and that's it. You get to go home and continue the relationship.
I want to talk about the five things because I know we're going to run out of time. I do want to talk about what I told people we're going to be talking about, which is the five important things we learn from the dead and you've accumulated a lot of wisdom from your work. You have an idea, you have an inside scoop on what the dead can teach us. We're going to go right down the five chapters and I'll give you the intro. The first chapter, Death Is Not Extinction. We go on. Tell me a little bit about that. I think Paul had a story that you could share with us and give us a few minutes. Give us the bullet points for that one.
The idea is that for every stage of your development, starting as a child, you have to find something that anchors you in that stage, but you also have to find a reason to go on to the next one. “What am I going to do when I grow up? What am I going to do now that I'm grown up? What am I going to do in the future?” Then people come to, “Then I'm going to die,” and they go, “That's not something I want to look forward to because it's this is the place I've been hanging out, and I'm not looking forward to an eviction.”
They try to cover that up. They don't even try to find a reason that developing past that point where you need to breathe is an important step in your evolution, so to speak. The existential dread that everybody talks about is gone once you've talked to people on the other side. You don't have to think about what is this world going to be when I'm not in it because you're involved with something else.
That takes a lot of pressure off of people. I realize I heard you talking about your Ted Talk and the last I looked, the fear of death was number three on adult people's fear list. Fear of public speaking was number one actually. You're in good company, but you take that off the table and lots of other things look like small potatoes. That takes care of that one.
I think you had a story that involved someone named Paul to illustrate that. What's that one?
My good friend, Paul, lost his father. He died of skin cancer, as I recall and they had been very meaningfully related for many years. A month after he died, he was sitting at a stoplight and he was thinking about his father. He said out loud to himself, “Dad, this sucks, I miss you.” Very spontaneously, what he heard in his mind was his father's voice saying, “Son, if you miss me, I'm right here. If you've missed the past, you better work on that.”
I had met his father about three times and he was a West Texas farm boy who was pretty low-key and had very few words. I thought that is the most succinct and brilliant description of successful grieving I have ever heard, “If you miss me, I'm right here, pay attention. If you're looking for me in the past, if you think that's where I am, you better work on that.”
That's a good meaningful story. Thank you. It also segues perfectly into your next chapter, which is You're Not Alone in the Universe. You're Right Here With Us. I guess chapters one and two are partners in that way.
They're all related, but the idea that I found very helpful for a long time, even before I was doing this work, was that most of the problems that plague us from fear to disgust to almost anything is because we feel alone. Pain and fear are very isolating. When people who are close to us die, we feel abandoned. We feel left alone. As a species, we're a program to look for companionship for protection.
Most of the problems that plague us with fear are because we feel alone.
That's part of our DNA. When somebody suddenly is not seen, who's been vital to us for a long time, we're liable to scramble into all kinds of problems because we feel alone. I think I told you Stephen the other day about a guy. I usually do my work in two 90-minute sessions. He had the first session, I asked him to come back the next week and while he was in the interim, he had reported to me on the phone that he had a full-body apparition of his wife appeared to him in the kitchen. His upshot was, “I don't think I need the second session.”
I said, “No, I don't think you do either.” You got what you came for. You're not alone. You don't feel abandoned. You know she is connected. You know she's aware of what's going on in your life right now. That's pretty much the key. I know a lot of people who are not alone, but they feel alone because the person with them doesn't care or doesn't communicate or in some way or another makes them feel isolated. It's not a physical presence that does the trick. It's how connected to you I feel.
One of my favorite scenes from the film that I made was when Maxine talks about her late husband and that she saw him in the garage. It closed the garage door on him and the Irene character, who happens to be my mother said, “I bet you want to see him again.” Maxine said, “No, because where he is, he's everywhere for me. I don't need to see him again. I know he's here.” You had a story also that went along with Chapter Two and it had to do with a trucker. What was that story?
He originally came in to see me. He was a Long Haul Trucker between Texas and California. He noticed that pretty regularly on those long trips over desert roads at night, particularly, everything was dark. He started developing a lot of gastrointestinal problems to the point that it was interfering with his hauls. They couldn't find anything physically wrong with him so we started doing traditional EMDR work, which involves starting with the symptoms.
I said, “When does this happen?” “In the dark at night on the road?” “Let's do some tapping around that.” I said as we do on every set, “What do you get now?” He said, “I'm back in the closet. I'm four years old. I'm hiding from my abusive alcoholic father who is beating my mother severely and I'm huddling in there with my siblings.”
That was pretty helpful for him to get that. He very quickly realized that similar situations evoke similar responses. Here I'm in the dark at night on the road, same as I was in the closet. I'm being attacked by feelings. That's the way our nervous system works. When you develop a memory, you have two ways of encoding those memories. The first one, particularly traumatic memories, comes right to your amygdala and into your hippocampus.
What you get is a memory. It is the emotional reaction that you had to that event. It's like a little tape that every time you go there or something reminds you of it, that takes place again. The physical reaction to it is always the same. It takes a lot longer for you to cognitively develop a response to that memory, which is something that bilateral stimulation seems to be pretty magical at doing.
Here he is in the dark and here he is being subjected to a horrific event, hiding from it. From that, we got the information that he was involved in some kind of lawsuit with his company. That was problematic and I said, “Who would you go to for advice?” He said, “I would always go to my grandpa.” I said, “Why aren't you talking to him?” He said, “He died a few years ago.” I said, “Aha. What would you like to hear from him or when would you like to hear from him?” We started the IADC routine.
He came in to do that and at some point, he found himself standing in his grandpa's kitchen, listening to the radio, playing The Carpenters singing For All We Know. He went, “That's odd because he's about as Latino as you can get. That's pretty White bread music, but okay.” He saw his grandpa in the recliner. Finally, I asked him, I said, “What do you want to ask Grandpa?” He says, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Grandpa told him, “Don't worry about it. It's all going to be okay.” I said, “How do you feel about that?” He said, “If Grandpa says it, you take it to the bank.”
Just as a kicker, after he left, I saw him walk across the parking lot, get into his truck, move it about 10 feet, stop it, back it up, and come running back across the parking lot. I said, “What's wrong?” He said, “I turned on the truck, and the radio started playing, it was The Carpenters playing For All We Know.” I went, “Okay, a little cherry on that top for that purpose.” You're not alone. People are there even when you're not sure anybody is.
That is a reassuring story because I always hope that my deceased loved ones are around me and cheering me on, but I don't have that much solid evidence. There's sometimes when I hear stories like that, I have the faith that they're there. The next chapter is called, Hurt Doesn't Last. What does that mean exactly, that hurt doesn't last?
It means that the information that I've collected is that nobody has ever contacted somebody on the other side and they said, “You know how pissed I was at you in life? How angry you made me? Well, I'm still carrying that with me. I'm going to get you sooner or later sucker.” Nobody has done that. It has always without fail been, “I misunderstood and I didn't understand the situation fully and I reacted badly and I am sorry about that.”
Abusers don't remain abusers. The upshot of that or the bigger picture of that is that we always think about a dichotomy, that there's good and bad. Those are two opposed forces that will always be at war with each other all the time forever but the information is that that template is something that we have developed, that we have concocted. That does not exist.
The only way that anger, hurt, and evil propagate is because people misunderstand their situation. They're protecting themselves, protecting their self-image, protecting what they think is their situation, and that's not the case. Hurt is temporary. Hurt is temporal, as you would say and that is a freeing conclusion.
It also says that if the hurt is going to be resolved, why do I carry it anyway? Why do I even want to engage in it? Why would I look for it to protect myself? I'm not saying that you're going to engage in risky activities with people to make sure that if they hurt you, you go, “That's okay.” What I'm saying is that this dichotomy of good versus bad is a movie cliche. That's not the way the universe is.
This dichotomy of good versus bad is just a movie cliche. That's not the way the universe really is.
It's good to know that once you cross, I guess you're pretty much ego-free at that point and you have a lot of forgiveness in you.
You find out, first of all, that your self-image is something you spent a lifetime building. It didn't come with you. You didn't get here with it and it's not original equipment. You're free to be who you are. I'm not going to presume to make that pronouncement. I can tell you my experience with it, which I think you remember.
My closest encounter with it was being a part. Not just in it but being a part of this amazing acceptance, blissful, oceanic, and yet individualistic environment. It wasn't a person. I've heard particularly religious writers talk about the mystic experiences being both oceanic, specific, and particular. It's like I am the ocean. I'm feeling the depth of that. I'm feeling the immensity of that but at the same time, I'm not lost in it. I'm still particular. That's the best experience I can ever point to as who I am. It is what is the most meaningful experience I've ever had.
Let me get this straight now. I'm going to put it in my own words only because I'm trying to make sense of what you're saying. Tell me if I'm on base. It sounds like what you're saying is once you cross over, the edges that you feel are not there. We're part of a much larger landscape. Does that sound right?
I'm not sure where the edges are. The idea that I felt or the sense that I made of the experience was that it is all around me and yet it is me. Yes, there is a me. I'm not sure where that extends to, but there is a particular. The edges, as you say, are things that I had to form. When I got here as an infant, the whole world was me. I didn’t have any differential.
Let me ask in a slightly different way. We've all heard the creator is in the creature. When you cross over, you feel the creator in your creature.
Yes, it is that biblical thing of, “What's your name?” “I am.” That's the best I can do at this point, but the content of it is the most euphoric thing that I've ever been aware of. If there's something better than that, I don't want to know about it.
I guess I shouldn't look forward to feeling that because it means that that's death, but I am looking forward to that feeling of palpable love that I've heard spoken of. Chapter Four, Life Is Not an Immortality Project. It's About Discovering Your Real Nature. This feels like what we're talking about. Is that what that means?
As a therapist, I have spent so many hours with people trying to convince them that what they're aiming at isn't achievable. They're not going to be immortal in terms of their deeds and in terms of getting more people to approve of them. Getting to the top of the ladder and all of that stuff because that's junking up your relationships and everything else that you've got going on trying for this one home run bit of I'm going to be in the hall of fame or I'm going to be recognized as the best of whatever.
It has taken a toll on people in my experience. If you're trying to be immortal and it's already part of the deal, what the hell? What are you doing? That is something that I think most people will get basically from a near-death experience and sometimes from a shared death experience or from a lot of other different ways of saying, “Why am I doing this? This is already part of the landscape. I don't have to spend my life trying to make it. I already did.”
This is great because this feeds right into Chapter Five, which is You Don't Have To Have Control of Your Life. This is my favorite chapter, by the way. You don't have to have control of your life. I'm one of those people that I guess I'm a little bit of a control freak, you would call me. I want that control very badly. When you told me what this chapter was about, it was very comforting. Tell the audience please for me what this chapter's about.
What we've documented over and over again is that people don't come back or communicate with us and say, “Boy, what a jip. I only got to be here till age 37 and I didn't get to do a lot of the things that I thought I was supposed to do.” On the other hand, “What the hell? I've been here and I made it to 97 and I'm decrepit and I'm dependent and this is junk.”
Everybody without exception has said, “I got a chance to experience what I needed to experience.” This is from even pre-birth through the farthest age that we get to. I got to come here for a particular thing, for a particular set of experiences that I got a chance to participate in. I may not have done it. I may have blown it somehow, but I got what I came for. I don't have to make sure that I get that position or I marry this person or I have this many children or I got this many degrees.
None of that is why you got here. That's what we get from that. The control you're looking for is elusive anyway, but it also contradicts what's important for you, or at least what your higher self says is important for you. The experience of how did you react? How did you respond? How did you adapt? How did you make it any better if it was bad? What kinds of things did you do that were part of the world that you got into?
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, because you and I had this conversation. Let's say you have somebody that feels like they had a crappy life. They had several divorces and several failed marriages. They feel like they have a number of diseases. They feel like they're handicapped physically. They couldn't keep a job.
They die at a very young age just disfiguring tragic circumstances. Even those people are pleasantly surprised when they cross over because they realize, “Wait a minute, I guess what I thought was important, what was important to me and my plan, I got.” Whatever that was. How often would you say that is the case versus they were right, they did have a crappy life.
From our perspective, nobody is going to sign up for that. Let me not have diseases and let me have a relationship that works and stuff like that but the reality is that not everybody gets that. What we are here doing is responding to the sets of variables that we engage in and saying, “Who is the person, not what did they do, but who is the person doing it? That's what we get to take with us. It's not our accomplishments. It's not necessarily even our memories. It's the person who's developing within those circumstances and that's worth the price of admission.
The soul is always like a work in progress. We're living these lives, we're developing, we're learning skills and we're learning lessons. Is that what it is? Even if you feel like this life we're currently in feels like a little bit of a jip, we did learn most likely, or very likely we learned what we came here to learn.
At least we had the opportunity. I have encountered places where people said, “I didn't take advantage of that opportunity. I was busy being resentful or I was busy with something else but I set it up so that I could learn this or I could develop this and didn't quite get there.”
I see that we're getting close to the top of the hour. I want to make sure I give the audience a chance to ask you some questions. It's time for me to hand the reins over to Gary. Gary is going to let everybody know this, but I'm going to let you know too. We need to keep the questions fairly short because there are a lot of people here and we want to be fair to everybody.
If we can have people try to ask their question within one sentence, ask your question and I'm going to ask Graham if he could be mindful also of the timing because there are a lot of people. Graham, I don't want to keep you much past the hour, but how long could you afford to stay past the hour? Could you stay a few minutes past the hour?
Sure, yes.
You'll let us know when it's time. I wouldn't keep you here longer than 9:15 on my end, 20 more minutes from now but let's see how many questions we can get through tonight.
Thank you, Stephen and Graham. We're going to jump right into questions and I want to quickly remind everyone that a wonderful resource is the Friday Afterlife Report, which was put up by Victor and Wendy Zammit. If you google Friday Afterlife Report, you can sign up for free. It's in your inbox every week. It's a great resource. We'll go ahead and start with Kathy. Go ahead, Kathy, ask your question.
Hi, everyone. Hi, Graham. It's nice to meet you. I've been looking forward to this. My question is, in Botkin's book, he mentions an instance where he induces after-death communication and the person across the veil says, “Don't forget we're the ones in charge.” I'm curious about what you'd like to say about that.
That's one of my favorite stories from his book that he asked the client to say, “Can I ask a question?” The client says, “Sure.” He says, “Ask your brother, I think it was, what he thinks about IADC.” The brother says, “We think it's fine, but remember, we're in charge of it, not you.” Truer words were never spoken because I don't have any magic to do that.
I can't summon people but what I hung on to and clung to for several sessions was even if you don't experience after-death communication, what I have done for you in 180 minutes is take your sadness with you down to a level you can live with. You don't have to be in the pain you have walked in here with, but they're in charge of it, not me.
I would say reading that book and listening to your videos has been very helpful to me in my grief journey. Thank you.
Thank you, Kathy.
Leah, go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you so much. I appreciate this talk so much, Graham. I was wondering, do you have to be a licensed clinician to get trained in this modality to deliver it? I know with EMDR, you don't necessarily. I was curious as to your take. Thank you.
Since Dr. Botkin started training people, he has always insisted on people being licensed as a mental health professional. That's Clinical Social Worker, Marriage and Family Therapist, LPC like I am, Psychologist, Psychiatrist. I think there are a few places in California where they call it something else, but you do have to produce a credential for us to continue with the training.
I understand Botkin's concern. This could quickly become some kind of popular Ouija board which we don't want to engage in. I have a couple of times had instances where people accessed another memory than the one we were going for. It switched on me and they had some kind of reaction where one lady balled up into a fetal position on the floor. That takes some training, takes some experience. “How do I deal with this?” You can't just let anybody loose with this stuff. We do license people only.
I need to interrupt for one moment. I forgot to give out Graham's information. Graham Maxey has two email addresses. One is for people who live in Texas and Pennsylvania and want to inquire about IADC sessions with Graham. That email address is Graham@GrahamMaxey.com. The other email address is for Licensed Mental Health Workers from any state who want to be trained in IADC therapy. We’ll look the email address up later.
I can only see people who are in states that I am licensed in or who are in those states at that time. They don't have to live there permanently, but I'm only licensed in Pennsylvania and Texas.
Jessica, go ahead with your question.
Thank you so much. In a sentence, with your training, I wonder what you might make of an experience that I had after my husband's sudden death. When I would go to see a bodyworker like a massage therapist or that sort of thing, it started happening that they would have visions. They come back and tell me about them. That didn't use to happen before. I'm wondering if that overlays with some of the protocols or if there's some way of understanding that that makes sense to you.
I've heard that so often from massage therapists that being that connected and whether it's your aura or whatever it is, I'm dealing with it. Anyway, the issue is you can be connected to other people's stuff, particularly if you're intimately involved with them. I've had one shared after-death experience with one of my clients.
It was the same guy I told you about who was the truck driver. He was seeing his grandfather and I knew exactly what he was looking at at that point. I knew where he was and I saw his abusive father sitting behind him. I said, “Travis, do you want to talk to your dad? He's here too.” He said, “No, I don't want to talk to him.” That's something that IADC therapists have talked about too. They have occasionally wandered into a joint awareness with their client. I'm very convinced that's the real deal, Jessica.
Much like shared death experiences that people experience. Go ahead, Leslie.
Graham, thank you so much. I was so impressed by that movie and I started to think about the thing. I wanted to ask you about memory because our culture says you have a good memory, a bad memory, you're losing your memory, and Alzheimer's. I'm wondering if memory is a real portal. By remembering someone, you can go through to connect with them on the other side. Does that make sense to you?
I think what I would validate is that like any other relationship, if you don't spend time in that relationship, one way or another, it doesn't become as important anymore. It evaporates, but when you're doing memory work and you do that with living people, “Remember the time we went and did this and you said that and this happened?” I've had people in IADC tell me, “If we didn't do anything else, but we get to tell you the story of this person, that was healing by itself.” I don't get a chance to do that a lot.
When you're engaging in that kind of activity about your loved one, I think it's very likely that you're going to be putting yourself in that spot that we try to get to in the therapy sessions, which is really, that's all the magic there is. You have the spot, it's there. We're just trying to get you there. Whether it's done in remembering stuff or, and I guess in this case, it usually would be, but yes, I think that's a real hot possibility that you're putting yourself in the spot where that awareness can happen.
Thank you. I won't take up any more time, but I've been thinking about this for months. Thank you.
Sheila, go ahead.
Is linear time finite on the other side? My son died more than twenty years ago, and I would like to think we're still in communication, but being a human, I'm not sure because we're more constrained by today and tomorrow than yesterday.
There is no time. We're looking at it from the standpoint of 3 or 4 dimensions, but as I understand it, we live in a universe. If you ask any physicists, how many dimensions are there, they're going to look at you real quickly and say 11. Einstein said that when you travel at the speed of light. There isn't a time. Time compresses to absolute zero. I'm pretty sure that’s infinite.
So, communication is still possible then?
Absolutely. Time does not matter at all.
Graham, thank you so much. I'm going to turn it over to Stephen and let him wrap things up. Go ahead, Stephen.
Graham, I think I speak for everyone here to say thank you so much. That was very informative and exciting to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us. That was very fun for me and I think for Gary too.
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