Lost identity — the experience of having become so disconnected from who you actually are that no external landmark points back to it — is among the most disorienting things that can happen to a person. Past life regression and LBL therapy found an unexpected approach to this in the case documented here from Memories of the Afterlife: the soul, it turned out, knew exactly who Laura was. The problem was not identity. It was access. And the between-lives session provided a way back that no other approach had managed to locate.
The client in this story — the woman the therapist came to call «Laura» — arrived in this condition. She was, in every external sense, fully functional. She was also, in the internal sense that matters most, profoundly lost.
The Session: Looking for a Self That Had Gone Missing
Laura’s situation was complex by the time she reached the TNI-certified therapist who would conduct her LBL session. She had experienced a series of significant losses over a concentrated period: the end of a long marriage, the death of a parent, a health crisis that had required a significant recovery, and in the aftermath of all of this, a dissociative quality to her relationship with herself that she described as «feeling like a stranger to myself.»
She was not dissociating in a clinical sense that required crisis intervention. She was experiencing something more common and, in some ways, more insidious: the gradual erosion of self that happens when a person has spent years defining themselves primarily through their relationships and roles — and then those relationships and roles change beyond recognition. Who are you when the marriage, the parental role, the body you trusted, the future you had planned — when all of these dissolve at once?
The LBL session began with a past life that emerged with unusual clarity and immediacy: a life as a woman of strong, independent character in 19th-century America — a teacher in a frontier community, someone who had carved out both an identity and a contribution without the scaffolding of the social roles that women of that era were typically confined to. The client recognized this woman immediately and deeply. She recognized her spine, she said — a quality of inner uprightness that she had lost track of somewhere in the years of her marriage.
In the between-lives state, the picture deepened. Her guide showed her the soul she had been before this incarnation: the same quality of self she had encountered in that past life, recognizable, stable, clear. Not the roles. Not the relationships. The soul itself — the specific energy, the particular quality of awareness, that was hers across all her incarnations.
Identity at the Soul Level: What Actually Persists
One of the most significant contributions of LBL therapy — as documented across thousands of sessions compiled by Newton Institute therapists — is the consistent portrait it offers of identity at a level that transcends any particular life. What we typically think of as identity is a complex of roles, relationships, memories, and habits, all of which are real and all of which are, by definition, temporary. They are the costume the soul wears in a given incarnation.
But beneath the costume, the accounts suggest, there is something that persists — that is the same in every life, that can be recognized by soul group members across incarnations, that constitutes what might be called the soul’s essential character. This is not the personality (which shifts between lives) but something more fundamental: a particular quality of consciousness, a signature note, a way of being in experience that is specific and consistent and irreducibly you.
For Laura, this distinction was transformative. The losses she had experienced — the marriage, the parental role, the planned future — had been losses of costume. Devastating, real, requiring genuine grief. But they had not touched the soul beneath the costume. The soul, her guide communicated, was intact. Had always been intact. Was, in fact, thoroughly recognizable to every being in her soul group who had known her across lifetimes.
The Recovery of a Lost Thread
The between-lives experience did not immediately restore Laura’s sense of self. What it did — which was, the therapist noted, arguably more useful — was give her a reference point. A felt memory of who she was before the roles, beneath the roles, independent of the roles.
This reference point functioned as a compass in the months that followed. When she felt herself disappearing into the habits of her former identity, she could now locate, somewhere in her body-memory from the session, the quality of the soul she had encountered in the between-lives space. When she felt directionless, she could ask not «what should I be doing?» but «what would the self I actually am do?» — and find, increasingly, that the answer was available.
The therapist observed that what Laura had been calling an identity crisis was, from the soul’s perspective, something rather different: a stripping away of accretions that had obscured her actual self. The losses, as profound as they were, had performed a kind of necessary clearing. The LBL session had provided the light by which she could see what was left after the clearing — and discover that it was, in fact, something substantial. Something she recognized and wanted to build from.
What This Means for You
If you have lost the thread back to yourself — if you have looked in the mirror and found someone whose outline you recognize but whose depth escapes you — this story is offered as evidence of something the LBL accounts consistently suggest: the self that you are looking for is not gone. It cannot be lost in any final sense, because it is not stored in any of the places where loss can reach.
The soul, according to the model developed through Newton Institute case files, is not a product of its circumstances. It precedes every circumstance, continues through every loss, and carries its essential character across the vast span of its incarnational history. What we call an identity crisis is, at the soul level, a question of access — of finding the angle from which the deeper self becomes visible again.
LBL therapy is one path toward that visibility. The between-lives state, accessed in deep hypnotic regression, can provide what no amount of present-life therapy can quite substitute: direct contact with the soul itself, in the space between lives, where it is neither obscured by circumstance nor confused by role. Where it is simply, clearly, recognizably — itself.
You have been here before. The self you are searching for is older than this life, more durable than this loss, and waiting to be remembered. It has not gone anywhere. It has simply been waiting for you to be still enough to find it.
Ready to explore your own between-lives experience? Find a certified LBL therapist →