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Sept. 25, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:37
Edition 363 - Dr Allan Botkin

Dr Allan Botkin is a US clinical psychologist who pioneered "IADC" - Induced After DeathCommunication...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much.
If you sent an email recently, I'm trying to reply in person to as many as I can, but I will aggregate a lot of your emails and do some shout-outs probably on the first show of October.
That's going to be.
Apart from one, and I've got to do this one now because it's time-sensitive.
It has to be done now.
Michael and Claire, that's Michael Davis and his mum Claire in Oxfordshire, love this show.
Thank you very much.
And they wanted a shout-out on it.
Happy to do that.
And I'm really pleased to know that I'm making your evenings all the more interesting, you tell me.
Goes for an awful lot of people who've started emailing in saying they're new listeners.
They're going through the back catalogue and enjoying the show.
I love to hear from you.
When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are in the world, and how you use the show.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Designed and created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
You can email me from there.
And if you can make a donation to the show, please do.
You know, I've struggled for years to keep this a free show.
And somebody recently emailed to say, I can't find your show.
Have you gone behind a paywall?
That's always the battle because a lot of people who do shows like this do them on a subscription basis.
And of course, as I've said before here, and I really don't want to become a bore about it, some of those people are, as we say in the UK, absolutely coining it on subscription shows, making sums of money that you wouldn't even be able to guess at from your subscriptions.
So we don't do that here.
But life is tough.
If I tell you in my own life, and you know, I don't want to get a violin out.
That's not what I'm trying to do here.
But, you know, I've got to have some dentistry.
I've left it for years.
It's vital.
And I have been shocked at the cost of dentistry here.
Now, our National Health Service in the UK will not cover the cost of anything other than extractions.
And for broadcasting and speaking, I need my teeth.
So I am facing at the moment, and I'm not alone, am I, a massive dental bill.
And, you know, life is tough.
So, you know, the expenses of life and just keeping going these days for all of us, it isn't just me.
And, you know, I'm not saying, oh, woe is me, because, you know, there are people in much worse situations than me.
But, you know, these are tough times.
And some of these things, maybe I think in terms of how we are as a society, we're going to have to address, especially as more and more jobs will be done by artificial intelligence and robots, maybe even one day this one.
What is going to happen?
And this is a question that people are beginning to ask, at least, to all of those people who are displaced by technology.
Where will the money be for them to keep going?
That's a subject we need to discuss on another occasion, really.
Anyway, back to the point.
Thank you for your emails.
I will do a lot of shout-outs on the next edition of The Unexplained here.
We're planning more great guests as we come up to the end of 2018.
At the moment, as I record this, it is a beautiful late summer, early autumn day here.
And, you know, walking around London and going to some of Her Majesty's royal parks, they have deer in them.
And this is the time of the year here when the deer start rutting.
So this is the mating season for them.
And the big guys obviously have to assert their dominance.
And they do it by making a noise which you will know whether you're in the UK, the US, wherever you are.
A noise like that.
And it is a noise that resonates around Her Majesty's royal parks in the UK at this time of year.
It's very eerie.
And that is where the big guys assert their dominance over the other guys.
And it's quite a tough time for them, I think.
I'll just give you an update on all of that.
Topic on this show is one that may well turn out to be utterly fascinating to you, you tell me.
We're going to talk about induced after-death communication.
I didn't even know that such a thing existed, but there's a man called Dr. Al Botkin in the US who does this, and it is being done increasingly around the world.
Is it science?
Is it paranormality?
Is it hui?
You decide as we talk to Dr. Al Botkin in this.
But the only thing that I would say is if it was possible to induce an after-death communication, wouldn't we all like to do that?
You know, in my own life, I think you know that I had some dealings with Art Bell, and I could have worked with him towards the end of his life.
And a big part of me regrets the decision for financial reasons I hadn't got the money that I took at that time.
But I never really explained it properly to Art Bell, and I didn't know him well enough to be able to approach him out of the blue and say, Art, can we have another conversation here?
I want to tell you exactly why this is.
And I think he tended to keep some people at arm's length, so I'm not sure whether we could have had that conversation.
But I think we probably could.
But if I could connect with him now and explain to him and wish him well on his journey, I would.
And of course, my parents, maybe you've lost your parents too, I would love to be able to have some connection with them.
Just to be able to say, I love you again and to thank them for the enormous, wonderful things that they did for me.
You know, when I look back on it all, and maybe this goes for you too, they did things for me that were remarkable.
They went beyond the extra mile.
Right up until I was in my 30s, they were helping me in every possible way.
So, you know, I would love to connect with them.
So Dr. Al Botkin in the US, using this technique, apparently does this.
So we're going to try and get under the skin of this and see how it works on this edition of The Unexplained.
Like I said at the top of this introduction, your emails are always welcome.
And guest recommendations, if you have contact details for guests, then that is always a huge help to me because I don't have huge back office resources here on this show.
So, you know, that would always help.
But your ideas and your thoughts on the show, I always welcome.
And thank you very much for them.
Theunexplained.tv is my website.
I think you probably know that by now.
Let's cross to the US then.
Dr. Al Botkin and the subject of IADC or induced after-death communication.
Dr. Alan Botkin, thank you for coming on my show.
Thanks for having me, Howard.
Now, Alan, you're in Chicago and the weather's quite warm here in London.
I understand that you're getting the last dribs and drabs of heat there before you lapse into the autumn and then the winter, of course, which can be incredibly cold there.
You're absolutely right.
Actually, I'm looking forward to the cold.
This heat has been very difficult.
Now, I'm just going to explain to my listener that you have an air conditioning that you cannot stop, I think, going on in the background there.
So, if they can hear some whirring noise on the back of this, I don't think it affects our conversation once you know what it is.
That's what the sound is.
Okay.
Got to tell them.
All right.
Tell me a little bit about you then.
You are a doctor.
What sort of doctor are you?
Are you a doctor of psychiatry?
I am a doctor of psychology.
Okay, and in your instance, what does that mean?
Well, it's pretty much the same thing as a PhD in psychology, although the coursework is slightly different, but it is considered and it's accepted all over the country as a viable doctorate in psychology.
Right.
And what brought you to what is, to some people anyway, they would perceive it to be a branch of paranormality or paranormal research.
You know, what takes you away from hard science and into that sphere?
Well, I'll say right from the beginning, I don't see what I do as paranormal because the more involved I get in it, the more normal it seems to be.
But anyway, I started out as a psychologist in a VA hospital for veterans, and I was working with veterans with PTSD as a result of being in combat.
And I worked with people in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and so on.
And a new technique came out called EMDR or eye movement desensitization that really changed everything for us because for the first time we could truly help our veterans find some peace in their life.
Eye movement desensitization.
I think I have an idea what that might be, but I think you need to explain.
Okay.
First of all, I want to say it's accepted as a legitimate evidence-based therapy all over the world at this point.
There are tons of scientific research to back up EMDR.
But what it basically involves is the patient attends to a certain aspect of their traumatic memory while at the same time, the therapist gets the patient's eyes moving back and forth, left to right, kind of similar to what happens in dream sleep.
Now, when we're asleep and dreaming, our brains are actually processing and integrating information more rapidly and efficiently than when we're awake.
And we've been known for some time that that increased processing causes our eyes to dart back and forth.
Well, the person who discovered EMDR, which is not me, the findings seem to indicate that you could take a fully awake person, and if you can get them to move their eyes in a similar way, it actually puts the brain into that higher processing mode, and we can use it while people are wide awake.
Sounds like you've got a call.
Yeah, and I just hung it up.
So, okay.
Okay.
This is good.
Right.
So how does the movement of the I understand how observationally you can tell that when people are dreaming, their eyes are moving, but I don't understand how inducing eye movement in people who've perhaps been traumatized can help them, what it's actually doing.
Well, what it does is it puts the brain into that higher processing mode that typically only occurs during sleep.
And so we can turn that same high processing on when people are wide awake.
And we can use it.
So it's a natural healing mechanism we all have.
It's just not turned on all the time.
But when we do eye movement therapies, we turn that on and things just in therapy move very rapidly.
Right, I think I get that.
So it's almost a portal.
It's a way in.
Yes.
And what it does, it's a way of kind of kick-starting the brain and putting it into high gear so memories can be processed extremely rapidly.
When we first started using EMDR many years ago, our patients would tell us things like, you know, this is the first time I can remember the trauma, but it doesn't feel like it's happening all over again.
It finally feels like it's something that happened a long time ago and it's over.
And the reason they say things like that is we also have a lot of neuroscience studies based on EMDR.
And the brain's before and after eye movement look completely different in neuroimaging studies.
Prior to the eye movement, there's a subcortical looping deep in the brain where the memory just gets replayed over and over again.
But after eye movement, the rest of the brain is back online and involved in the traumatic memory, which allows people to remember it in a more abstract and logical kind of way.
So if it was being looked at in a computing sense, it's some kind of data dump, is it?
It's something that allows people to get past something that is constantly bugging them.
I mean, I can tell you from my own life, I had a car accident.
A truck drove into the back of my tiny little car years ago when I first came to London.
The impact was horrendous, and I relived the noise, the impact, the jarring trauma of that for a very, very long time.
In fact, I can still recall it now, and it's 20 years ago.
That's the kind of thing you're talking about, I think.
Exactly, exactly.
When people have a traumatic memory, they just don't remember what happened.
They also relive the event over and over and over again.
Well, this sounds to be an enormously useful technique.
And that is something, I guess, that can be deployed to help people who've suffered trauma, whether it's on the battlefield, whether they've had a car accident, whether they've witnessed a murder, whatever it might be.
It sounds to me to be something that's been enormously useful to you in that way.
Absolutely.
And I took that basic EMDR protocol and I made a number of changes to it.
And I had no idea where those changes were leading me.
But after I made five or six very technical changes to the procedure, my patients, and they're too technical to get into on this show, but what it led me to was my patients began to have these ADC or after-death communication experiences.
And when they first started reporting these to me, I didn't know what they were talking about.
As a matter of fact, I thought the first time it happened, I thought my patient had hallucinated and I was worried about him.
Well, the mind is a remarkable thing.
I was telling listeners to a radio show that I was doing a few days ago that I was reading a book by a neuroscientist.
In fact, it was edited by a leading neuroscientist and it included essays from many people who were leaders in the field.
And the conclusion of all of them is that the brain, the mind, is a very complex thing and has capacities that we're only scratching the surface of.
Absolutely.
So what you're doing here is unlocking something heretofore we didn't understand and supposedly uncovering another aspect of that part of the brain.
Yes.
Yes.
Now, some people would say that the brain creates consciousness and other people would say that that materialistic point of view no longer explains all the data and that really, in some important ways, mind and brain are two different things.
For example, people who have near-death experiences, like during cardiac arrest and so on, they frequently have these very elaborated experiences when there's no neuronal activity going on in the brain.
The brain's not doing anything, but people have these experiences and report being separated from their bodies and brains and so on.
I have no scientific or medical expertise to speak of, but could it be possible that when you were accessing, when you were seeing, when you were hearing of these communications, so-called, that perhaps the people who were coming up and coming out with these things were in some way extrapolating from experiences and memories of departed people that they'd already got in their memory bank and simply building something else.
We know through dreams that we can do that.
Well, yes, except my experience with these after-death communications, and I've done thousands of them at this point as a result of doing my procedure with people, it doesn't really fit our normal perceptual processing.
People can have, first of all, people are generally very surprised by the content of their ADC.
Sometimes they're very surprised, but in almost all cases, it feels unanticipated to them.
It feels like it came from somewhere else.
It doesn't feel to them like their brain generated it.
Is it meaningful, usually?
In other words, is there a message within it that is not just a series of mice images?
As a matter of fact, that's the hallmark of these ADC experiences is that people, when they have them, at least from a psychotherapeutic point of view, they get exactly what they need for their healing.
But they don't get what they want in most cases, but they do get what they need.
So again, if the brain was somehow constructing all of this, it wouldn't feel surprising to people.
They would construct what they would want to experience, not what they need to experience, and so on.
And I could go on and on about that, but it just doesn't seem to fit any kind of construction that the brain would come up with.
Now, you've done, as you told me at the top of this conversation, Alan, a lot of work of a serious medical nature with people who needed assistance, people who'd been the victims of traumas in conflict or whatever.
It must have been a stretch.
I would guess maybe it wasn't, but I would guess it must have been a stretch for you to accept this, being a man of medicine and a man of science, because this is so counterintuitive.
Right.
However, when it first started happening, yes, it was very difficult for me.
It didn't fit my worldview at the time.
But what was interesting was when my patients began reporting these experiences, I did a little reading, and a number of authors had written books about spontaneous ADCs.
People have spontaneous ADCs that have just kind of come out of the blue, not during therapy.
They just kind of come out of the blue and there they are and they're known to offer healing to people.
And when I read the stories in these books by these researchers, I thought to myself, that's the same, those are the same stories my own patients are telling me.
And I realized there was a name for these kind of experiences, and the name was ADC or after-death communication.
And so I realized it was a much more general phenomenon than what I was seeing in my office.
And they are very similar across people, across cultures, across belief systems.
As a matter of fact, my patients who come to see me, some of them believe in an afterlife and others don't.
And it doesn't Really make a difference what people believe because this is a very naturally occurring experience.
And what we do in my IADC or induced after-death communication therapy is put people into a state of mind where these natural experiences can then occur.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
Can you talk to me then about the first one or two maybe times that this happened?
Obviously, you don't have to name patients because I know there's confidentiality issues here, but what it was like, what they were coming out with that led you to believe that there was something very unusual going on here.
Well, I always tell the story, in fact, it's in my book, that I was working with a Vietnam veteran who became very close to an orphaned Vietnamese girl who was about 10 years old, and her name was Lee.
And he had made plans to adopt her and bring her back home with him.
He didn't realize it at the time, but the Marine Corps would not have allowed that as far as I understand.
But anyway, he had called his wife and they had made arrangements, and he developed this very loving father-daughter relationship with this young girl.
And then one day, shots rang out, and a sniper put a bullet right through Lee, and she died right in front of Sam.
And that was the cause of Sam's psychological undoing after that.
And anyway, he had horrible sadness for this loss, traumatic images as well.
And so when I started working with him, I had already made a number of changes to standard EMDR.
And I was going through the steps that I had put together.
And at the end of the session, Sam closed his eyes.
He stopped crying.
He had stopped crying.
And a big grin came over his face.
He was sitting there with his eyes closed.
And I thought, that's strange that he'd be sitting there smiling.
And he opened his eyes and told me that Lee had appeared to him as a young grown woman with this beautiful white gown with long, beautiful black hair and surrounded by the most beautiful white light he had ever seen.
And then Sam privately, I'm not privy to any of this, Sam said privately to her, I love you, Lee, and she said back, I love you too, Sam.
And then Lee reached out and gave Sam a hug in this private experience.
And when he opened his eyes, he was gleeful and told me that he could actually feel Lee's arms around him.
And then he was, when he left the office, I was worried about him.
I thought he had hallucinated all of that.
And I was concerned, so I let the evening, this is an inpatient unit, so I let the evening and night shift know, you know, to keep an eye on him.
And Sam was happy and in a great mood all night.
And as a matter of fact, those good results lasted.
In fact, I even saw Sam years later, and I asked him about how he was doing with that traumatic experience.
And he said, oh, it still brings up so many happy thoughts.
Well, that's a wonderful thing, and that was clearly curative, restorative for him.
And that's good that he had that experience.
But how could you be sure, as a man who probably had to evaluate this thing subsequently, that what was not happening here was that he was just simply creating a coping strategy to deal with something that most of us would find a terrible thing to have to carry with us through our lives?
Well, that may be one hypothesis, but after doing thousands of these, that just doesn't fit.
If he were to develop his own coping strategy, his own hallucination, his own imagination, you know, now maybe not in Sam's case, but in nearly all other cases, the content of the experience is very different from what they could have constructed on their own.
Yes, I take that point.
I guess the first thing, if you were making that up in your brain for yourself, but who knows what the mind is capable of, and I'm using those terms probably shouldn't interchangeably, you know, you would create a situation where you are seeing the little girl again, where you're not seeing a grown woman and you're not having that kind of contact and that kind of reassurance.
It wouldn't be the first place I would guess logically you would go.
Right.
And that goes back to what I said earlier about the experiences are felt to be unanticipated or surprising.
You know, Sam was not aware of ADCs.
He wasn't aware that people showed up surrounded by light and they were radiantly happy and all of that.
He was not aware that people had those kind of experiences.
So in his case, the idea that he would have an experience like that seemed to go well beyond what he was capable of construing on his own.
What were your beliefs prior to all of this?
Well, you know, I've always been agnostic, kind of open to different ideas.
And I always saw myself as a scientist, which is that, you know, the best we can do as scientists is follow the evidence and actually leave our beliefs aside, you know, while we follow the evidence.
And people ask me, does this prove there's an afterlife?
And my response is generally, well, I'm a scientist, and as a scientist, we don't use the term proof.
You know, we use the term proof in mathematics and then legal situations.
But in science, we just go with our best evidence.
And I guess you talk more about verification than proof.
Yeah, and repeatability and effect.
Now, I am mostly interested, As interesting as all these speculations might be, I work with people who have had the most horrible things happen to them that go well beyond what other people can even imagine.
I've seen people with such profound suffering.
And my primary goal is not to figure all this out.
My primary goal is to help people find some peace in their life.
And that's what this is doing.
Well, look, most of us, we will become acquainted with grief and loss in our lives.
I certainly have.
I think an awful lot of people listening to this will have, and I'm sure you have too, Alan, in your own life.
There are a number of stages that psychologists tell you about, and when you get pamphlets after you've lost somebody, they explain these things, of grief.
Does any of this interrupt or augment, add to the various stages of grief?
And those stages of grief are denial, and at the end, it's a kind of sad acceptance that you get to, but you have to go through a number of other stages to get there.
I don't follow those stages religiously.
People are in, and they don't always follow that same order.
The way I think of it is when people, when you first lose somebody important to you, somebody you love, the initial stage of grief is generally characterized by shock and disbelief and emotional numbing.
It's like the full impact, the full impact of the grief, which is primarily sadness, it takes a while for that even to sink in.
As a matter of fact, I generally don't work with people if their loss is less than six months ago.
So it takes some time for that sadness to become fully assimilated and then available for therapy because the way to get to an IADC is to first go through and process the sadness.
And it's the sadness that's getting in the way of the experience.
People who have spontaneous ADCs, which is something like 30% of the population, they all say, and I've talked to many thousands of people who have had spontaneous ADCs, they all say the same thing, which is when they have the ADC experience, it's not during a time they're feeling sadness.
It's in those moments of no sadness, in between sadness.
And most often they're not even thinking about their lost loved one.
It has a sense of just kind of coming out of the blue.
What happens, just turning to something else, what happens in situations, and I'm sure you've dealt with these situations in your work, where somebody has a traumatic experience that affects them, but they live through it, and other people close to them die through it?
Are you able to, does this experience apply to people, I'm thinking perhaps of plane crashes, boats sinking and those sorts of terrible things, or people who suffer together in weather-related tragedies, climatic conditions, that sort of stuff.
Does this work in those cases?
Absolutely.
However, when I and my colleagues, and by the way, my IEDC colleagues are all over the world at this point, and I hope you mentioned my website, but when in the kind of tragedies you talk about, there's both loss and probably a high level of fear.
And I see both sadness and fear as core components of traumatic experiences and grief as well.
But when you treat a complex event like that, you have to treat the sadness and fear separately because they're both very powerful core issues.
Now, I don't know if that entirely makes sense, but yes, certainly many combat situations, there's fear that one is going to die and somebody else does die.
And so those are generally the two core issues that one has to address in traumas like that.
So messages and communication beyond death.
How do you think that works?
What do you think the people that you've seen and you've experienced and you've worked with, what are they tapping into?
I think it probably will ultimately be explained by energy.
You know, our energy, our spirit, our personality, our soul, whatever you want to call it, animates our body.
We have an energy that animates us.
And apparently, when we physically die, that energy is still there.
The energy doesn't die with the body.
And so a deceased person who is in just pure energy may be able to communicate, empirically so, with a person who is alive.
So you think these ADC experiences, and we'll get on to the IADC, the induced ones, in a moment, you think that they are just simply a way that the person, the subject, the patient is tuning into something that is already there and is always there?
Yes.
Right.
I mean, it's a big leap.
What do your colleagues make of this in the profession?
I guess it's not universally accepted.
Well, you know, when I first went public with this, which is in about, well, it was many years ago now, I first expected a lot of criticism.
But, you know, I didn't overstep what I knew to be true.
I didn't go around claiming this was proof of an afterlife and so on.
And you know what?
There's a chance I'm being fooled by all of this.
And again, I'm trying to follow the evidence as best I can.
I thought there would be a lot of skepticism out there.
And in fact, I got many emails from people in very conservative scientific circles who emailed me and thanked me for what I was doing and encouraging me to keep going.
And I've actually received a lot of acceptance.
But again, my emphasis is on how this heals people.
And I'm happy to say a control group design study of IADC is about to be published.
And studies being conducted at the University of North Texas.
So that will be a control group design study is the gold standard in the field of science.
And it will show hopefully the therapeutic value of this procedure.
So those people who've been through this ADC experience and it's sort of in a way cleansed them.
It's allowed them to carry on a little better with their lives.
Is that something as far as you're aware?
And you told me you've been doing this for a long time.
Is it something that is permanent as far as anything can be permanent?
As far as I can tell, yes, it is.
We have done follow-up studies and we do follow people as best we can, and it does seem to be permanent.
Now, let me add one more thing.
At the very core of grief is profound sadness, and that sadness is based on a sense of disconnection from the deceased loved one.
Now, what IADC or an ADC provides is an experiential reconnection that helps resolve that deep, painful sense of disconnection.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I mean, it essentially re-familiarizes you with the person you thought was gone forever.
Or directly reconnects you.
Right.
And that communication, I should have asked this before, and I'm sorry I didn't.
Is it ongoing?
Is there a way that it can be ongoing?
Or is it merely a one-off cleansing experience?
Generally, it's not just one experience.
With additional sets of eye movement, we can further elaborate the experience and go back to it and get more.
That's not always the case, but in nearly all cases, we can do that.
I do have many people call me before they come see me and they say things like, you know, if I have an ADC, I'm not going to want to come out of it.
When those same people come see me and they do have an ADC, because they get psychologically exactly what they need, they no longer have a strong desire to keep the experience going over and over again.
Okay, before we, and we will talk about the induced communications because that's the whole point of this conversation, but just the last point on this.
This state that they're in afterwards, would you call it euphoric?
Would you call it calm?
Would you call it at peace?
How would you describe it?
Well, euphoric may be a little bit strong, but yes, people, when I ask people how they feel, a word they use often is peaceful.
I just feel so peaceful, and yes, I feel so calm.
Those are probably the two main words people use to describe how they're feeling after.
Right.
And I'm fascinated by the fact that this is a permanent experience and that there's nothing that can happen to them that can tip them.
You know, sometimes there are prompts that happen in life that can remind you of bad things.
There are prompts in life that can remind you of good things.
But it's a pretty stable thing by the sounds of it.
Well, the thing is, is before we induce the ADC, if it's a grief trauma or a grief issue, we have to get all the sadness processed first.
We have to clear the sadness before the person can have the ADC experience.
So if all the sadness is significantly reduced, then if someone encounters a trigger in real life, that trigger is going to have less of an impact because that sadness has been resolved to a good extent.
Right.
Like somebody who's been through a train wreck is going to be less traumatized by the sight of the same sort of train making the same kind of noise next time.
Absolutely.
As a matter of fact, the example I gave of Sam in Vietnam losing Lee, the 10-year-old girl, after our session, he went home on a weekend pass and he had a daughter that he had avoided even talking to for her whole life because every time he saw her, that triggered his traumatic memories of losing Lee.
But after we went through this procedure, he went home and spent the weekend talking to his daughter.
And he came back and he happily said, I'm making up for lost time.
So she no longer triggered that trauma.
And that would have been a benefit to the entire family.
Of course, it would be.
Absolutely.
Okay, so it's a bit of a step from seeing these things appear as a spontaneous byproduct of something that you were doing to thinking, okay, this is something I want to induce.
I want to make this happen for people's benefit.
Talk to me about that process.
Well, people, when I was making the changes to standard EMDR, people started to respond more than they did to standard EMDR.
The changes I made seemed to be very helpful, and they too often, after the processing of the sadness or the fear, whatever was involved in the trauma, they talked about feeling calm and relaxed and so on.
When some of my patients started spontaneously having these ADCs at the end of a session, their therapeutic benefit was even greater.
They seemed to be even more calm, more peaceful, happier.
And our research does show that the ADC, although the processing of the core issue accounts for most of the psychotherapeutic change, but the addition of the ADC at the end of a session is in an additive way offers more therapeutic benefit.
So when I saw that and realized that, I thought, gee, wouldn't it be nice if more of my patients could have this experience?
And then I went back through my notes and studied them to see if there was maybe something I had done differently when my patients had the experience versus when they didn't.
And I was able to figure out what the difference was.
And then I started purposefully inducing the ADC at the end of the session.
And then almost everybody started having the experience.
And you're sure that in every experience they were connecting with something that was outside them.
You said that you had a small amount of doubt.
And you said that you accepted that you may be wrong about this, but the evidence was so powerful.
But in the cases that you saw when you started to do this, it appeared that they'd unlocked something, that they were making that contact.
Yes, that's exactly the way it appeared.
And I've in the best the best attempts at alternative explanations are always tied to brain function.
And I have a good background in neuroscience and brain function.
And a lot of those attempts to explain these experiences away, their arguments and their evidence was very weak.
Now, medicine in this country and in your country is highly regulated, and it's also quite litigious both sides of the Atlantic.
Did you have to go through any particular procedures?
Did you have anybody to persuade before you started doing this?
Anybody to persuade, like in terms of a government or something?
Well, in terms of a medical committee of some kind or some kind of standards agency?
Well, actually, no, I kind of avoided that.
And I've been in private practice the last 15 years or so.
So there are no committees that I have to satisfy.
You know, I'm on my own at this point.
Because I'm sure there will be people, I'm sure they're listening to this now, thinking that this is Mumbo Jumbo, and you're just trawling through depths of the mind that we don't as yet understand.
And it's something that is internal and in no way external.
Well, you know, even if it is, it's still healing people to a remarkable degree.
And that's why this control group design study at the University of North Texas is so important, because it will demonstrate the therapeutic value.
So, you know, whether, you know, I think the evidence leads towards these experiences not being based on the brain.
They're based on certainly something else.
But even if they are in the end, it's still healing people.
And, you know, that can't be a bad thing, I guess, if it doesn't have any deleterious effects to it, which you say it doesn't.
This study, I don't know how long it'll take, but if it comes out with the conclusion that there is maybe something there, that surely will make news around the world, don't you think?
Yes, but the University of North Texas studies is simply a study of its therapeutic value.
It's not going to help decide one way or another where these experiences are coming from.
Is there any way that that part of the research can be furthered, do you think?
Yes.
You know, you know, we do have a lot of anecdotal examples that seem to indicate the objective reality of these experiences.
For example, when I was still in the VA hospital, every now and then I'd be working with somebody, and sometimes in an ADC, the person you're grieving shows up, but sometimes other people do too.
And I don't know, it was maybe three or four times that another person showed up, and my patient told me that that's strange that he would be there.
He's still alive.
Why would I see him in an ADC?
And in each one of those cases, we were able to verify that this other person had indeed died.
That's, I mean, I don't know how you would explain that.
That does sound remarkable.
Unless, of course, they subliminally had heard that the person had died and simply had forgotten it or never really took it in properly.
But how can you know that?
Well, I mean, certainly that's possible, but that, you know, it's kind of like you're left with, well, which explanation is more of a stretch?
The other thing being messages, the sorts of communication, the sorts of things that are said.
If there is something that points to something that the subject, the patient, couldn't possibly have known, and you saying that the other people who appeared had died, but the patient didn't know that, that's one thing.
But to say that there's $50,000 in a safe underneath the bed that you may not have seen before, something like that.
I mean, that's a ridiculous example, but something of that sort.
Well, I understand exactly what you're saying.
And no, I can't come up with a real clear example like that, because primarily that doesn't happen much, if at all, because the content of the communication is always about healing.
And the deceased person always is experienced as saying, I'm okay, I want you to be okay too.
You know, my suffering is over, you know, and so on and so forth.
But, you know, there's another angle to this, and that's just the perceptual nature of these experiences.
I have a few examples of why I think it couldn't be the brain generating this, because I was working with one patient who has having an ADC with his father, and he wanted to have an ADC with his father, number one, because he was grieving over him, but his father also always gave him good advice.
So we worked on the grief and brought it down, and he had an ADC with his father, and his father advised him to use his tools.
And so he opens his eyes and tells me, my dad says, use My tools.
Why would he say that?
You know, they're sitting in the back of the garage.
They're rusted out.
They're out of date.
They're 20 years out of date.
You know, why would he have me use my tools?
He was a car mechanic of some kind.
So he went back and we induced the experience again.
And his father said, not those tools, the tools you're learning in therapy.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, I mean, there could be some conscious or subconscious element to that.
But again, we simply don't know.
No, no.
And I'm not saying we have proof or that I'm 100% sure.
I'm just saying, you know, we're in a position of what's the best evidence, what's the least of a stretch in terms of an explanation and so on.
Right.
Do those who return in this way talk about, in any way, communicate about where they are and what they have been through?
In other words, do they say, I'm in heaven and it's a beautiful place?
Well, they say that, and not only that, my patient can see the place they're in very often.
And just like in near-death experiences, and by the way, there's a huge overlap between near-death experiences and ADCs.
But anyway, people are seen in beautiful gardens that seem to, you know, the trees, the bushes, the flowers seem to radiate their own inner light.
It's very earth-like in appearance, but more gorgeous than stuff on Earth.
And in fact, I remember one guy said, he said, Doc, you're not going to believe this.
I was in a strawberry patch, and the strawberries were as big as cantaloupes.
And it was the deepest red I've ever seen.
There is no red like that on Earth anywhere.
And how does this tie in with the perception or the thought that some people have and some people have written about?
That place that you've talked about, that beautiful, ultra-beautiful place, is merely a waste station.
It's a halfway house to wherever the departed go next.
Is there any evidence of that?
Or does it look like that's where we go and that's where we stay?
Well, that's interesting.
I haven't got any idea that it's like a first step and there's more after it.
I have worked with people who their loss was two weeks prior to our session, although I generally don't do a loss, you know, that quickly.
But I was working with one old guy who lost his father many years ago.
His father had been dead for 77 years.
And he seemed to be in the same beautiful place without going further than that.
But anything beyond that is, I have no idea.
The patients don't report it.
And what about the mental state, if you can call it that, of those who've departed?
Do they have weights lifted off their mind if they've been suffering and in pain?
Of course, we've said that goes.
But do they have a different set of priorities, a different outlook on, I can't call it life, but on death, on whatever comes next?
You know, a big thing that goes on over there is there's continued learning.
And people who have near-death experiences say that too.
But I'm spacing out.
I lost your question.
Well, whether they have a complete change of personality.
In other words, there are lots of things I'm worried about here.
You know, half the time I'm worried about going bust.
I'm worried about my health.
I'm worried about all sorts of things in my little life.
They are in all cases, or nearly all cases, very peaceful, very happy with where they are.
The two most important things over there are love and knowledge.
If they lived a difficult life, they learn from those times in their life where they did not show love or were mean to other people.
There's something called the life review part of the near-death experience.
Are you familiar with that?
I am.
I'm surprised that's part of all of this.
Okay.
Yeah.
But people experience, for those listeners who are not aware of this, it's part of many near-death experiences where people relive their whole life, either in a brief moment or instantaneously, you know, every day of first grade, second grade, third grade, all the way.
And they also re-experience the feelings they had in each one of those moments, as well as the feelings they caused in other people.
So that can be a real eye-opener to people.
You know, if we were jerks in life and were mean to other people, when we have a life review, we're going to feel the hurt that we caused in other people.
And, you know, when we have ADC'd fathers, let's say, as an example, who were very mean people in life, who beat and abused their kids.
And my patient was one of those kids.
And in the induced ADC experience, the father always comes through as very different.
He's no longer mean.
He's no longer cold and uncaring.
For the first time, he seems genuinely concerned, taking responsibility for what he did and wanting to help my patient in any way that he possibly can.
Of course, that is what the patient would have wanted, though, when they came into your session.
They'd have wanted that, wouldn't they?
That would be their desire.
It may have been, but it was the last thing they expected.
Right.
Okay, so you've seen some surprise in this.
What does all of this do then to the idea of reincarnation?
If we're over there in the garden of beauty permanently and loving it, then we're not coming back, are we?
Well, that's a good question.
It's also a difficult question.
Out of people who research afterlife experiences, reincarnation is pretty much divided down the middle, 50-50, in terms of those who think we have good evidence for it and those who think that we don't.
But nothing in the thousands of ADCs I have done really says anything about reincarnation either way.
Sometimes people have asked me, well, after they're dead a certain period of time, are they no longer available?
Well, I gave you the example of a guy whose father had been dead 77 years.
He didn't seem about to be going anywhere, anywhere else soon.
And then, of course, reincarnation people would say, well, reincarnation doesn't work like that.
Part of you reincarnates and part of you doesn't.
But it's a very complicated question that, I mean, I have thoughts about, but I even thought about writing a book about the pros and cons and so on.
But I'm getting too old and I don't have the energy for that anymore.
Have you ever tried, have you ever thought of involving mediums in this work to see if that augments it in any way?
Or do you think that would be devaluing the science of it?
Oh, as a matter of fact, one of my trained IADC therapists in Texas, his wife is a medium.
And they are in private practice together.
And somehow they kind of work together and help each other out.
I'm not sure exactly how all that works.
You know, before I got into doing what I was doing, what I am doing, I was very skeptical about mediums being able to do this.
But, you know, after I saw that, you know, average everyday people could have the experience, it wasn't such a big leap to think that mediums could have it as well.
So.
We've told a couple of stories so far in the induced experiences that you've been part of.
Which of them have impacted?
Maybe you've got a story or two.
Those that have moved you impacted you particularly.
Well, I was a member, I was working with a Vietnam vet at the VA, and he had had a number of induced ADC experiences with people he lost in war and so on and so forth.
And he came up and asked me a question one day, and he said that he has a 25-year-old son who's microcephalic and never developed the brain capacity beyond like a two-year-old or something like that.
In fact, even more diapers and so on.
But, you know, he loved his son and so on.
And one thing they, I remember he said, one thing they used to do together, they used to love to turn on music and kind of dance around the room.
But, you know, there was no communication.
So anyway, he asked me, he goes, you know, my son's not really fully all the way in life.
There's a part of him that's not here.
Could we ADC the part of him that's not there?
That's not here.
And I thought, well, I have no idea if this is going to work, but I told him I'd give it a shot.
And in his ADC experience with his son, he saw his son is completely healthy, communicated very well.
And he told his father, who's my patient, the son said, don't worry about me, Dad.
I have it the best because I get to live in both worlds at the same time.
Okay, well, I mean, that's fascinating and somewhat moving.
But I guess, again, that could have been an instance where that was what the patient wanted.
Yeah, in that case, yeah.
But I mean, look, you can argue this both ways.
You know, a skeptic will always say that, I guess.
But I'm just putting that kind of point of view.
After so many years of doing this, and it's a period of decades from what you said.
Let me just add the only problem with, you know, in some cases you could say, oh, yeah, that's probably what he would have wanted to picture or see or experience.
But in so many cases, people don't get what they want.
Again, they get what they need, but not what they want.
Can you think of an example?
Yeah.
A guy was getting advice from his deceased mother, and he, and my patient, and his wife had divorced over the death of their son, which caused stress in their marriage.
And when he went to his deceased mother for advice, his mother told him he needed to get back with his ex-wife.
And he opened his eyes and said, there's no way I'm doing that.
Okay.
So it's like, I hear what you say, but I'm not going to do it.
So, yeah.
In other words, if he got something he wanted, it would be his mother saying, you know, stay away from her.
And he would think, good, I will.
Unless, of course, there was a part of his subconscious that in a way wanted to be punished for what he was doing.
Yeah, I suppose.
But again, you can argue that any way you like.
Now, I suppose the point we're coming to, isn't it, is that there is going to be research done on the therapeutic benefits of this, but no research being done on the existence of the afterlife.
How do you think that can be taken forward?
Would you like it to be, and is there a way?
You know, that's a good question.
And I know that there are people, people like Dr. Sam Parnia and people like that who are researching near-death experiences.
For example, they're putting targets, which are just simply pictures, in, I guess, surgical rooms where people are having their hearts worked on and so on.
And people, when they have a near-death experience, one of the first things they do is float above their body and look down on the hospital bed.
Well, they were going to put up pictures that only somebody could see from the ceiling.
And then when the person came back to life or back in the body or was revived, however you want to put it, they would ask what was on that picture.
And if, of course, the person could say what it was, that would be some kind of objective substantiation of the fact that they were indeed out of body and it wasn't just brain generated.
However, the problem with that, as far as I know, was when they started doing that kind of research, people who were out of body were paying attention to their own body on the hospital bed and what the doctors were doing.
They weren't looking around the room to see what the pictures looked like.
I suppose one test might be, and maybe this is a stupid example, but if you were the willing participant, if you had agreed to hide something that meant something to both the deceased and to your patient, to hide something somewhere,
an item that neither side, either the other side or this side knew about, then if the other side, if the deceased person came through and identified that item and where it was to the patient who also didn't know what it was and where it was, then you'd be getting somewhere, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, again, in near-death studies, there are a lot of anecdotal kinds of stories.
And there's one that's called, it's the famous Jim Shoe story.
But a guy was in a hospital, and he was in New York somewhere.
He was on the 66th floor.
It's like way up, way up high.
And during his surgery, he floated out of his body, you know, went down to another room and looked out a window.
And he was surprised to see that there was a funny-looking gym shoe on the shelf outside the window.
And he thought to himself at the time, how could a gym shoe get way up here?
Right?
So anyway, you know, he survived and was back in his body.
And he told the nursing staff about seeing this gym shoe out there.
And it was an odd gym shoe.
It was like green in color or something like that.
And so the nursing staff thought that was kind of crazy, but they went and looked out the window.
And sure enough, there was the green gym shoe.
Okay, well, that's pretty spectacular.
And people, in fact, cardiologists are really into this because they work with patients who have near-death experience quite often.
And when patients come back, they say they come back in their bodies, they describe things that happen during surgery that the patient has no knowledge about.
What certain instruments looked like, what the nurse said when she was standing there, and so on.
So it's not just auditory, it's visual memories well out of body and so on.
So there's a lot of stuff like that.
And I think people are, scientists who have the time and the wherewithal are trying to put studies like that together.
And it all ties into the nature of consciousness that we still don't understand at all and the nature of the potential afterlife that we certainly don't understand at all.
How has this changed, if it has changed, your own personal view of death?
Do you fear death less?
Do you fear death more?
What's your view of it now?
Oh, I would say, you know, with the kind of work I do and sort of being a student of near-death experiences and so on, people with spontaneous ADCs, people who have deathbed visions, it's called nearing death awareness.
As a matter of fact, most people who are near death and they're terminally ill are unconscious.
But of those who are conscious, 60% of them report an ADC experience.
So I suppose that could be wishful thinking too, but the thing is, is whether it's a deathbed vision, an ADC, or a near-death experience, people are basically reporting the same kind of content.
They're reporting the same thing generally, even though they're coming at it from very different points of view.
It's fascinating work that you do.
How many patients, how many clients do you see in an average month or week?
Well, I'm getting close to retirement and I've really cut back.
I've done thousands.
I think I stopped counting after two or three thousand a number of years ago of how many patients have had induced ADCs with me.
Right now, I just work with people on weekends.
And so it's usually only one or two people a week at this point.
Are there some people for whom they can't have this experience?
You know, there's some people it doesn't work for.
Yeah, well, the reducing of the sadness works for just about everybody, but I do screen people.
I do accept about 85% of people I screen.
Roughly 79%, maybe 80 now, have an after-death communication experience.
Out of the 20% who don't, sometimes I have a good idea of what it is that's getting in the way.
Maybe we didn't completely process all the sadness which was blocking it.
Some people just have too much mind chatter going all the time and they can't quiet their brain.
No, I guess that would be me, actually, if I came to you.
Yeah.
But some of those folks also go home, and since their sadness is reduced and not blocking their ADC, some of them go home and have a spontaneous ADC on their own.
And I don't track everybody, but every now and then people, you know, tell me that that's what happened.
So, you know, most people have it.
Not all people do.
Sometimes I don't know why they didn't have an ADC.
You know, I can only make a wild guess.
How many decades have you been doing this for?
If you were doing it with Vietnam vets, you must have been doing it for at least four decades, I would think.
Maybe five decades.
Well, no, I mean, I wasn't doing it right away.
I accidentally discovered this, as I described, in 1995.
Right.
Okay.
So, I mean, that's 23 years ago.
That's a fair chunk of time.
It's more than a quarter of a, well, it's almost a quarter of a century.
Why do you think then, if you've been doing it for that long, and if it is such a powerful thing, it is not more widely used?
Why hasn't it been more widely recognized?
Well, we're growing All the time.
We have IADC therapists all over the world.
We have now IADC trainers in both Italy, France, hope to have one in Canada soon.
We've got a few here in the United States.
So I always describe our growth as slow but sure.
Now the reason large organizations haven't jumped on the bandwagon is because studies like the University of North Texas, control group design studies, aren't there yet.
And doing that kind of research always lags behind clinical experience.
But we're finally getting around to doing the basic research.
And when that happens, we will get larger organizations to jump on board.
I'm not suggesting that anybody has ever said this, but you know, the thing that is often said about mediums is that they're making money off giving people reassurance.
In a way, you're doing the same thing, but it's a more scientific technique.
I don't know if you've ever heard that thought, but what would be your response to it?
Well, mediums connect with your deceased person for you.
And so you judge that medium based on how many hits and misses they come up with.
And that can be tricky sometimes.
But what I do, the patient has the experience him or herself.
And I never push anybody to believe that it was real.
And, you know, somebody might say, well, you don't expect me to believe that was real, do you?
And I go, it's up to you to think about it, you know, in any way you want.
But those folks heal to the same degree, too, because it is the experiential reconnection that resolves the sense of disconnection from the loved one.
Well, it's fascinating.
And Alan, thank you for talking with me about this.
I wish you well with your work.
If people want to read about this, I know you would like them to know about your website, and so would I. And my book?
A new book.
Okay.
What's the website?
www.induced-adc.com.
Induced-adc.com.
And I guess the details of the book are on there.
Yes.
And the name of the book is Induced After Death Communication, a Miraculous Therapy for Grief and Loss.
Alan Botkin, thank you very much, and have a good Chicago day.
Enjoy the last of the summer.
Well, thank you much.
May I add one more thing?
Please do.
I am about to go through some major knee surgery where I'm going to be cooped up for some time.
And even answering all my emails is not going to be easy.
And so if anyone out there has an interest in contacting me, please wait till sometime around the early November.
Okay, and good luck with the knee surgery.
I know some people who've had that stuff, so you've just got to wait it out.
Good luck, Almond.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Howard.
Nice talking to you.
Great questions.
Al, as ever, you are the jury in these things.
Tell me what you thought of Dr. Al Botkin, and if you have a guest recommendation to make, maybe you have some contact details for that guest.
Get in touch with me at theunexplained.tv and I will look at your email as I see them all.
More great guests coming up as we sail towards the end of this year, 2018, here at The Unexplained.
So until next, we meet in one week from now here.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained and please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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