How Neil, a Wall Street Investment Banker, Healed from Past-Life Trauma

Image: Sanjog Shankar

Nowadays, Neil can be found in crumpled white shirt and pajamas, pottering around in his kitchen trying out recipes for an incipient gourmet foods business. Breads bake and soups simmer around him as he throws in a dash of spice or deftly kneads a ball of dough. Always fond of cooking (and eating), Neil is following his passion, as the saying goes. He exudes a relaxed and laid-back air, except when he pushes a new concoction towards you, his eyes gleaming “Here, try this and tell me how you like it!”

It wasn’t always like this. Not when Neil was a partner at a major Wall Street investment bank jet-setting all over the globe, rubbing shoulders with senior government officials and doyens of industry, and funding large scale energy and infrastructure projects to the tune of billions of dollars. And definitely not when he was a Roman General leading a highly trained and professional army against barbarian hordes in the periphery of the Empire. But more of that later.

His rise at the investment bank, a household name, was meteoric. The graduate of an Ivy League MBA program and a prestigious west coast liberal arts college, he was the perfect product. Neil rose to be the youngest member of the CEO’s inner circle, an elite club of 10 or so senior-most executives in the bank. It was a pressure cooker environment surrounded by driven and ambitious people, entailing 16 hour days and over 300,000 miles annually in business travel, but he loved it. With his head for numbers, knack for the deal and capacity for managing stress, Neil thrived. However, the pace of work took its toll on Neil’s health. Once the captain of his college soccer team and a judo blackbelt, Neil gained weight, tipping the scales at an unhealthy 260 lbs. He also developed high blood pressure, insomnia and more.

Somewhere along the way, things really went off-script. On a visit to headquarters for a crucial meeting, Neil was suddenly overcome by an overwhelming feeling of breathlessness and suffocation, a debilitating sensation which he could barely suppress. The walls of his hotel room seemed to bear down on him with a crushing weight, and he spent the next few nights with the sliding doors to the balcony wide open, in an effort to stay calm. His return flight was a disaster. Overcome by panic, Neil had to muster every ounce of will power to resist the urge to jump up and fling the door of the aircraft open. Back home, Neil discovered that his symptoms would not relent. He would eventually discover he suffered from cleithrophobia, the fear of being trapped, which is often confused with claustrophobia, the fear of enclosed spaces.

In the dog eat dog world of Wall Street, to admit to anxiety and panic attacks is often seen as a sign of weakness. However, Neil met with sympathy and understanding when he confided his situation to his manager. He was excused from business travel and started seeing a therapist, breaking another taboo. This is when things took an unexpected turn. We are familiar with modalities like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Therapy), both of which are used to treat a range of issues including fears and phobias. Results are often slow and mixed. Neil’s therapist, however, took a more unconventional path. Using hypnosis, she put Neil into a deep trance. In this state, she had him examine his fear of being trapped and recall any associated memories or images, a technique known as regression.

In the course of a marathon three hour session, Neil recalled images not from work or even his childhood, but from much further back: memories of a time when he was a Roman General commanding a legion, of intricate battle formations and maneuvers. Of being betrayed by a rival, gagged, bound hand and foot, put in a stone sarcophagus, and entombed in a cave. As the montage of images played in his mind’s eye, the therapist stuffed his nostrils with cotton to heighten the sensation of suffocation. We are talking about the stuff of past lives, a topic normally reserved for daytime TV (see Dr. Mehmet Oz hold forth on the Oprah Show on this topic) or your local New Age meetup. So, what was a hard-bitten investment banker like Neil doing on a therapist’s couch reliving events, real or imagined, from two millennia in the past?

Let’s start with the outcome: Now that Neil had an explanation for his symptoms, he was able to exorcise his inner demons and put the panic attacks behind him. He was able to fly again, to stay in hotels, to resume a more or less normal life. Under stress, the feelings might well up again, but he could now attribute a reason to them and stay in control. As Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, says in his best-seller The Body Keeps The Score, “Understanding why you feel a certain way does not change how you feel, but it can keep you from surrendering to intense reactions…”.

The rational mind might balk at the concept, but hypnosis and regression are used by some therapists to tap directly into the subconscious mind, a mysterious domain that follows its own logic. Even while many of the same therapists maintain a healthy skepticism about the reality of such memories, they find it to be a powerful and effective clinical technique when other approaches fail.

As anyone who has taken a workshop on subconscious or implicit bias knows, the subconscious mind is mostly hidden from view and speaks in a language of reactions, gut feelings and emotions. Emotional stress and trauma are stored in this hidden part of ourselves in the form of stories and metaphors, emerging as dis-ease when the subconscious wants to remind us that we have overdrawn against our line of credit.

Neil’s therapist believes that the timing of his panic attacks, occurring when he was the toast of his company, was no coincidence…his mind was programmed to believe that a fall from grace was inevitable at the peak of his career, and triggered the hidden trauma at exactly the right juncture. So much then for free will and agency, which are deemed to be so pivotal to success in Corporate America.

Neil eventually quit investment banking to pursue his goal of starting a food business and to regain a healthy work-life balance, but instead of fleeing an intractable situation, he was creating a new future for himself that aligned with a lifelong passion.

When asked whether he believes in past lives, Neil smiles. To him, it is irrelevant. As he puts it, he has been healed of his legionnaire’s disease, and that’s what matters.

Post-Script: To protect confidentiality, names and some other specifics have been changed. The core details of Neil’s experience, however, are accurate and are retold here as narrated to me by him.