Healing Family Relationships:

A Continuity of the Past

When I was a very young boy, five or six years old, my father gave me a rifle! Why would you give a five-year-old a rifle? Well, my father was in the navy—he was a “lifer,” who served thirty years in the military. My mother was a war bride from England.

So I grew up in this very military-structured family, feeling very insecure and not understanding my parents at all. By the time I was ten I gave the rifle back to my father and said, “You know I don’t want to do that.” Well, I broke his heart because in his mind I was going to grow up and be a military man just like him. But it just wasn’t in me; I could care less. I wanted to be creative but felt I couldn’t in this family situation because there were just too many blocks within my own being. There was so much resentment and anger between my father and me that we constantly butted heads. He was a full-blown alcoholic as well as being a military person.

When I was seventeen, I left home and began searching for answers. In my quest, I discovered that I have lived before, that I am an energy being, and I have to take responsibility for each situation I find myself in. I don’t have to be emotional. I don’t have to feed the fire of an argument. The fact that I was constantly in trouble with my father was not a reflection on him, it was a reflection of me. Certainly he was an alcoholic and he had problems, but I had been trying to change him so I was in this battle all the time. As I became aware that we had had experiences together in past lifetimes, I knew that these experiences needed to be changed in the present. And I could do it!
It was possible that I could change these energies between us and things could be better.

Several years later as part of my study of past-life therapy, I became aware of the reason why I had been born into this military family through utilizing one of the tools of this therapeutic science. In analyzing my childhood, writing down the positive and negative things that happened to me, I began to see that my father and I had met on the battlefield many times. I saw how I had been pushing away the recognition of my own involvement in the military in previous lives, and how I couldn’t possibly become a military person in the present, even though this was my father’s wish, because I had learned through my spiritual evolution that this is not the right way to live. It’s not okay to kill other people, even if one can justify that they are the enemy.

In particular, I remembered an experience that happened when I was seven or eight years old that showed the continuity of having confronted my father on the battlefield. My father took me to the driving range to teach me how to play golf. As he was teaching me how to swing, he walked up behind me to show me how to hold the club. Then he took a step back, behind me, and said, “Okay go ahead and swing.” So I brought my club back as fast as I could and I hit him right in the temple. I knocked him out cold! As I was look-ing at my father lying on the ground, all these people came running over, exclaiming, “Oh my god, what’s going on?” And I responded, “He told me to swing! He told me to swing!”

Well, right at that moment I was reliving the energy of fighting with my dad and defeating him on the battleground, a continuity of a past-life experience into the present. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time; all I knew was that my father was on the ground and I didn’t understand why he had been hit. I was in shock and feeling terrible—feeling guilty.

Through the process of writing out and objectifying my childhood experiences, I could see that this incident and others were a continuity of the past between my dad and me, and I understood why the resentment that I felt for him this lifetime had been so strong. As I accepted that I had murdered him in the past, there was a tremendous change toward my father in my consciousness. At that moment I knew that he had done the best thing that he could in this lifetime and that his alcoholism and all the other problems that he had in the present were a major piece of that puzzle. I realized that if I could share my recognition and over-coming with him, that it would free both of us from our feelings of resentment and anger.

So with that awareness, I wrote a letter to my father, who was living with my mother in Phoenix. First of all, on the envelope I wrote “Mom, don’t open. This is only for Dad.” In the letter I told my father, “I just wanted to tell you how much I love you. I love you for the tremendous effort and love that you’ve put forth to raise me, as best as you knew how.” A tremendous healing had taken place between my father and me.

A couple of days later I awoke from dream-state and recalled that in my dream I had been talking with my mother, and she was saying to me, “What the heck happened? Your father is completely changed!” Two days after that, without any warning—no phone call or anything—my mother showed up at the restaurant where I was working in the San Diego area. She said, “I just had to come and talk to you. What did you say to your father? He has quit drinking!”

This was such a wonderful experience. It showed me at that time, when I was only twenty-one-years old, the power there is in rectifying the energy that every one of us is carrying with us from our past lives. From that moment on the relationship with my father was never what it had been. Although at times we had differences, we never felt the stormy, anger-driven resentment that we had experienced before this healing.

—Kevin K