Customer Reviews

Induced After-Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma

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When the pilot announced that we were only 30 minutes from landing, I was stunned. I was so enthralled with this book on my flight from Honolulu to Portland, Oregon that I had completely lost track of time. I would have guessed that we still had two hours to go before touchdown in Portland. While I'm always anxious to escape the cramped confines of the plane, I was disappointed at the announcement because I didn't want to put the book down.

The book is filled with dozens of fascinating stories about patients who have seemingly communicated with deceased friends and loved ones by means of the induced after death communication method (IADC) developed by author Allan Botkin, Psy.D. As I understand it, this is an offshoot of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy discovered by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D. While focusing on the therapist's hand, the patient is asked to move the eyes left or right rhythmically and focus on a disturbing thought. For those people grieving the death of someone or otherwise disturbed by someone's death, the patient is asked to focus on that sadness. It was hard for me to believe, but Botkin claims a 98% success ratio with his first 84 cases of IADC.

The typical IADC involves the patient reporting having seen a deceased person and that deceased person having told him or her that everything is OK and not to grieve. In a number of cases, the deceased person relates information previously unknown to the patient. The patients included atheists and skeptics as well as believers and religious.

The authors are quick to point out that the technique does not involve hypnosis. While hypnosis slows down information processing, EMDR accelerates it. "Nearly all of those who experience IADCs assert that these experiences are markedly different from dreams, imagination, or fantasy," the authors state. "Most insist that they actually saw, heard, touched, or smelled things with their senses, but that the sensation was not physical." Nor are they, the authors tell us, hallucinations, even though one medical doctor who experienced the process and could come up with no other explanation insisted he must have been hallucinating.

The authors sit on the fence when it comes to stating whether the patients are actually communicating with the dead. They say their concern is the healing aspect, not offering evidence of life after death. Reading between the lines, I gather that they are taking this position to protect themselves from mainstream science and its many arrogant pseudoskeptics.

I should have been able to finish this book during the five hour flight, but I found myself rereading many things, not because they were difficult to understand but because I was in such awe of the cases reported by the authors. It was one Wow! after another.

I am a psychologist who is trained in EMDR. Recently when using EMDR with a client he experienced what appeared to be a spontaneous after-death communication from a friend who had died in a car accident. That was not my first experience of such a phenomenon but I was at a loss to explain how it happened--or even IF it happened. I was therefore fascinated to read Dr. Botkin's findings in this area. Dr. Botkin admits that it is not yet possible to prove that these experiences are actual after-death communications but the experiences he writes about demand attention from researchers. I admire Dr. Botkin's courage. These topics are not automatically accepted by the scientific community and many scientists scoff at anyone who believes that after death communications are possible.
This is a fruitful area of exploration. In the meantime, I have no doubt that many people will benefit from this procedure. The book, by the way, is well-written and hard to put down, and will be of interest to researchers, clinicians, and anyone interested in after-death communication.

I've read a lot on the subject of afterlife communication, but it's rare that an author breaks new ground in this field. Botkin does so in spades, while at the same time telling a story that is perfectly consistent with both modern research and the historical record.

While metaphysical books are my favorites, I'm a genuine skeptic. My mind and heart may be wide open to a larger spiritual reality, but I'm extremely selective as to the authors I'm willing to let guide me through these realms. Psychic and spiritual matters have to be presented in a clear-eyed and intelligent way to draw me in, and I need to feel that an author's work grows from a genuine desire to be of service.

Botkin (therapist) and Hogan (writer) have satisfied me on both accounts.

One aspect of the book that is of particular interest to me is what the authors call "core-focused EMDR." I know very little about EMDR, and I confess that the notion of a psychotherapy based on eye movements strikes me as odd. But what impresses me and feels absolutely right is Botkin's insistence that the way to heal grief is to allow oneself to feel it deeply. As someone whose life story is deeply intertwined with my experience in primal therapy, I know firsthand the healing benefits of allowing/encouraging myself to cry from the depths of my being, rather than analyzing my pain, discussing it, or acting it out.

But, as I've suggested, Botkin goes beyond the emotional and into the spiritual. An unexpected occurrence in a deep-feeling EMDR therapy session ultimately led him to a procedure that enables clients to routinely have the proverbial "five more minutes" with their deceased love ones. Most of his subjects, even many atheists, are absolutely convinced that they have had genuine encounters with the spirits of those who have passed on.

If you've had a spontaneous ADC (after-death communication) yourself or if you have read any of the impressive published accounts, you won't find Botkin's basic premise impossible to believe. His work reminds me (and him) of Raymond Moody's work as a facilitator, as described in Moody's "Reunions." Except that Botkin's method is, according to his figures, MUCH more reliable.

It is precisely this success rate that is the hardest aspect of the book for me to believe. In the Veterans Administration hospital where he practiced, he says that "the rate of induction [of ADCs] was about 98 percent of all patients in the PTSD unit." Now I'm not saying he's exaggerating his success rate. Just that it is, without passing judgement in the least, hard to believe. I look forward to further studies to see if that success rate can be replicated in other environments by other researchers.

I'm writing this, my first Amazon review, because I'm enthralled by this courageous book and want to do my small part to draw attention to it. Botkin's work helps to bridge the unfortunate rifts between psychotherapy and spirituality, and between spirituality and science. I hope it finds the wide audience it deserves.

Yet another book that I couldn't put down (I'm on a roll this month - smile)!

This book, "Induced After-Death Communication", (IADC for short) provides a fascinating look at this powerful new technique, and how it's currently being used to help people resolve their feelings of grief. And, I must say, the results are truly amazing!

IADC is a technique where the client is asked to do various sets of rapid eye movements, and through these movements keep their focus on the sadness (because anger & guilt serve to keep us from feeling the sadness - which we need to really feel before an IADC will be successful). During this time, their sadness will increase to a "peak", and then the therapist will do another set of eye movements to bring the feelings "down a notch". At this point, the client is asked to just let whatever happens naturally to happen.

What tends to happen naturally is a reconnection with the deceased - where the client can see, hear, feel &/or smell the person they are grieving for. This "reconnection" seems to have amazing healing power, and the client needs only 1 or 2 IADC'S before the grief is gone, and they can begin to remember the person in more healthy ways.

An important point to note is that the therapist's and patient's beliefs about an afterlife (or non-belief) does not appear to impact the results. Even atheists have had IADC's.

The author, Allan Botkin, was trained as a behavioral psychologist - and as such, believed that the only things that warranted further study were those things that could be seen and measured. So, it goes without saying that when his first client mentioned what happened during an "accidental" IADC, he was skeptical... But now, after seeing & hearing about the thousands of people healed through IADC, he is convinced of its efficacy, and puts out a call to all therapists to experience it for themselves before they make any judgments.

The author also included many personal accounts of how IADC's helped various clients, a discussion on what this might mean within the psychology profession, the changing views re: grief therapy, and an appendix with a more detailed look at how IADC works.

Overall, I found this book to be very interesting & important in its' implications. As such, I would recommend it to anyone in the psychology profession, as well as those who are interested in the possibility of after-death communication. This is definitely a pioneering work!

Allan Botkin is a psychologist who worked for many years in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Chicago. He had been using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) for several years to help veterans of various wars process post traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs), with excellent results from this treatment.

He was surprised when some of the people he treated reported spontaneous communications with the spirits of people who were involved in the traumas that caused their PTSDs. Veterans who had been releasing their long-buried fears and hurts from major wartime traumas were transformed by the messages they received from the spirits and by being able to converse with them. This was all the more impressive because many of the Vets had had no prior belief in or experiences with spirit communications. Botkin himself had not had any such beliefs or communications, having trained in hard-core behavioral psychology.

Botkin found that he could regularly induce these experiences through specific ways of using EMDR. He came to call this Induced After Death Communication (IADC). In a series of 84 people he treated with IADC, there was almost 100 percent success in producing profound positive changes.

This book provides clear details of successful therapies and instructions for others to use EMDR similarly for this transpersonal therapy. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in spiritual dimensions of psychotherapy.

As a psychotherapist for nearly thirty years, Induced After-Death Communication was riveting to me. I have had many clients who sought relief from grief, anger, or guilt towards a deceased friend or family member who tried to get through these overarching emotions with cognitive tools alone. The work was slow and they could get tired of plowing the same ground over and over, and often give up in the name of "acceptance". "Empty-chair" work, where they would talk to and for the deceased worked better, but they tended to snap back to old feelings after remembering, "It was just my imagination." Several times, my clients had spontaneous realizations that they must have had an ADC while doing these sessions, and these were very healing. But getting them to these moments was not something you could count on. Something more was needed.

After reading Botkin/Hogan's book, I determined to get this training, and did. In the years since then I have found IADC to be not only effective and reliable, but it does its work in a short period of time. As a therapist, what more could you ask for?

I think that reading this book can give anyone who faces grief (and that's all of us) not only a new means of getting through grief (which is the healing process), but also a new motive to do so. When you understand that processing the sadness first is a means of "going-on", not "getting-over", it changes the whole set up for paying attention to grief at all. That's really good news for everyone.

I am convinced that Dr. Allan Botkin's book, Induced After Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma, will someday be regarded as the most important book ever written on the afterlife. His book offers much more than a collection of afterlife experiences, or the usual pro or con viewpoint of the available evidence. Like Galileo's telescope, Botkin's IADC provides us with the means to scientifically peer into a realm that has for many centuries remained elusive and mysterious. This discovery will do much to eventually resolve, once and for all, the longstanding and ongoing debate between afterlife "believers" and "skeptics". Although Dr. Botkin maintains his focus on the profound healing associated with IADC experiences, the broader implications of his work are very clear

Induced After Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing and Trauma, written by Dr. Allan Botkin, Psy.D, scientifically presents the discovery of a controversial new treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, insistent grief, and trauma. Although the title begs for a lengthy and raucous discourse on the after-life, mysticism, the paranormal, or just the blatantly spooky, it is in fact, an in-depth study of a new healing process discovered by Dr. Botkin. He invites you to leave your preconceptions, fears, and judgments at the door as he takes you into the lives and healing therapy of his patients.

Induced After Death Communication (IADC) is a therapeutic healing technique that requires the use of EMDR therapy, a proven tool for therapists employed to reduce the intensity of intrusive memories. While using EMDR, Dr. Botkin discovered IADC as he explored new ways to relieve war veterans of the life-altering pain associated with their horrifying experiences in the field. As a result, most but not all of the case studies in this book are war veterans and male. All are from diverse professional, experiential, and religious backgrounds. In 3000 plus real cases, occurring in the therapist's office, 98% of the vets in the hospital experienced an IADC, a robust number.

Remarkably in case after case, patients insist that their experiences communicating with a deceased loved one or enemy soldiers killed in battle are real and not dreams or hallucinations.

The universality of these experiences is impressive. Across the board, IADC therapy is shown to resolve feelings of intense grief, guilt, anger, and sadness, replacing them with contentment, happiness, and a sense that the deceased are well and at peace. In addition, Dr. Botkin's research shows that the effects hold up over time. Some readers say, "Dr. Botkin's book presents too many case studies," however, that may be the best thing this book has to offer the skeptics.

Induced After Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing and Trauma is structured like a textbook, gently written and conversational in tone. It is a frank scientific discussion -- objective, non-judgmental, and compassionate. While it confronts our individual notions about death and dying, Dr. Botkin does a superb job of easing the reader out of that old uniform, and to hang it in the closet for a while. His research shows that personal beliefs have no effect on outcome and are considered, irrelevant.

Dr. Botkin fully understands what he is up against professionally and socially. He clearly states late in the book, " If there is no afterlife, which would mean that IADC's are pure hallucination, then perhaps our brains did evolve a hidden healing savant that reveals itself at times of great personal need such as when we approach death or suffer the death of a loved one. If the healing savant exists, then all of us have the capacity to heal." For Botkin this discovery constitutes a major breakthrough, one that should be fully explored. To him IADC is within the realm of possibility. He has put his skepticism aside for the sake of healing and hopes others will do the same.

Allan Botkin, Psy. D. is a psychotherapist, expert in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and grief, and Director of the Center for Grief and Traumatic Loss, LLC.

I'm a pastor, chaplain and an EMDR trained trauma therapist. Over the years I have heard a few people talk about experiences similar to those cases in Dr. Alan Botkin's book, Induced After Death Communication. I have to admit that I was skeptical when I first picked up the book. But after reading it, I was inspired to take Dr. Botkin's training on IADC. As part of the training, I had such a profound experience in my dad communicating with me that in my heart, I knew the communication was real. To be honest, I was blown away.

Since then, I have used IADC with many clients, some with multiple experiences. It has been my privilege to witness contact with deceased loved ones and the grief process accessed.

The cases in this remarkable book are right on target in terms of both the variety and how real these communications are to those who experience them. While they cannot be proven, they don't need to be for those who receive heartfelt relief from the images, words, sounds and yes, even smells that come from what I believe to be, the spiritual world.

I highly recommend Induced After Death Communication. Thanks to Dr. Botkin for having the courage to write this groundbreaking work. For those who are skeptical, including members of the clergy and mental health professionals, I hope you read the book with an open mind. It might just change your life and those around you. It did for me.

As a licensed professional counselor who practices EMDR (Eye Movement Desesitization and Reprocessing) which is the core technique used to induce after death communication, I was anxious to read Dr. Botkin's book. The stories that Dr. Botkin tells are truly amazing and riveting. I liked that the book focused on the evidence and research done in this area. While the clinical evidence is fascinating and makes for great reading, at no point does Dr. Botkin lapse into sensationalism, nor does he draw erroneous conclusions that this is "proof" of an afterlife. However, he makes a good case that these techniques are genuinely beneficial and healing and does so in a linear, analytical and even-handed manner. A great book for counselors, those who have lost family or friends and those interested in apparent glimpses into the afterlife. I liked that the book was written without the "psychobabble" or "new age speak" often found in this subject matter, making it an exciting, moving touching and accesible read to the general pulic.