Spirit Releasement Therapy has become recognized over recent years as vitally important to psychological healing for certain individuals, mostly as a result of the excellent pioneering work of William Baldwin. I highly recommend his book on the subject, “Healing Lost Souls.” If you are a therapist, you will want to read his “Spirit Releasement Therapy,” which covers other valuable therapeutic modalities as well, compatible with Emotional Clearing (EC) work, such as soul fragmentation and past life work. (http://www.spiritreleasement.org/)

Spirit Releasement Therapy proposes that discarnate entities sometimes come into contact with persons living on the earth plane and become “attached” to them. “Discarnate” means dwelling on the next plane of existence after the death of the physical body. There are a variety of reasons for the attachment, but generally the attached entities have known the person and have unfinished business with them, often trying to help them. However, the presence of attached entities is usually of a disturbing nature to the person. Although the person is normally not directly conscious of them, they can amplify difficult emotional states and constitute a critical energy drain, contributing to depression. They can make the person feel as if something outside them is taking them over, making them do things they would not ordinarily do. Baldwin maintains that the feelings of the entity can be passed on to the person, so that the person takes on those feelings, making them their own. He has cited numerous cases where rapid healing of stubborn psychological symptoms has resulted from a spirit releasement, a procedure in which the attached entity is contacted and directed to its true home in the spiritual world.

Spirit releasement work for me occurred spontaneously while doing standard EC therapy with clients. In a deeply relaxed alpha state, clients sensed a distressed presence that seemed to not be a part of themselves; i.e., not a split-off, suppressed, emotionally-based fragment that needed primarily to be integrated. Investigation of the presence – the attached entity – revealed it to be a distinct personality that could be conversed with through the client, and which had been drawn to the client on the inner psychic planes.

We really don’t know whether to take this paradigm as being literally true, or as just a particularly vivid, metaphoric mechanism of the subconscious imagination that is activated when we go deep into the unknown. However, literal, objective truth seems to be beside the point. Spirit releasement work has proven to be an effective, critically important part of the work I have done with certain clients. In EC therapy, we accept whatever the client may uncover in the exploration of the subconscious as being true for them, especially when there is significant emotional content. This is the same approach as when we uncover “past lives.” Past lives may or may not be authentically valid, but there is no question that therapeutically processing their emotional content can be highly beneficial to emotional counseling.

However, just as I do tend to “believe” in past lives, I have been impressed enough by my work with clients to also “believe” in the concept of attached entities, and the need, at least in some people, to release them to effect a complete emotional healing. This belief is based on first-hand experience with clients – being there with them as they discover and then interact with, converse with, and complete unfinished business with these attached spirits. The reality of it is impressive – it just seems and feels real, especially since the work can be quite emotionally moving. On a more objective note, I have been impressed, for example, in observing a client who had no previous exposure to any literature on the subject - had not heard about, didn't know about spirit attachment - go through a “textbook” release of a dark force entity (DFE), with the entity responding exactly as Baldwin explains they will to the steps of the spirit releasement protocol and particularly to the discovery of the light within itself.

Baldwin and others have adequately described the theory and practice of spirit releasement, at least in terms of Baldwin’s method. I will not duplicate their work here, but will try to add to it based on my own experience and my approach to inner emotional healing. When I was learning spirit releasement therapy I brought in two other professional releasement therapists at different times to work with my clients, with me present, for special sessions that I thought I did not have the experience to handle, to round out the guidance I have received from Baldwin’s books.

The spirit releasement process in itself is actually fairly simple, once the entity is contacted. They are usually eager to speak, and to clarify why they have been attached to this person, and to be helped. Even the dark force entities seem to respond readily to standard procedure. The key here is in contacting the entity. Because, in order to perform the spirit releasement, with Baldwin’s procedure, the client must sense the attached spirit, and be able to “hear” it speak. The client then channels the voice of entity, repeating it to the therapist so that the therapist can dialogue with it and direct it through the releasement procedure. When channeling is happening, the client channels the entity in the first person, and the therapist converses with it as if with another client, finding out what it wants, what business it may have with the primary client, and helping it to complete that business. When completed, the entity is ready to leave on its own free will.

The malevolent entities that can be attached may be vindictive spirits who have passed on from the earth plane, or may be true DFEs with no previous earth lives. These DFEs are of demonic origin. Their only purpose is to disrupt. Baldwin suggests they are always present in cases with history of sexual abuse or violence, and in my relatively limited experience, I would agree. When dealing with malevolent entities or DFEs, Baldwin advises the therapist to summon the aid of higher spiritual forces, such as Archangel Michael and the personal spirit guides of the client, and I have found this to be excellent advice. I have never summoned the Archangel Michael power without feeling a shudder run through my body, and the client feels it too. This powerful benefic force, summoned for impersonal healing purposes, never fails to respond and to take charge on the inner planes. The DFE is at the mercy of that power and eventually has no choice but to leave. Indeed, once discovered, they are on their way out.

Actually, I have found so far that the kind of DFEs encountered at this level are not intellectually bright and may be easily dominated by the will of a savvy and assertive therapist. They may be likened to a nuisance that may be readily attended to and resolved, once attention is turned in that direction. However, if left unattended, their continual unconscious presence and negative pressure can build up and seriously add to tendencies of depression and destructive acting out. Certainly, there is no need to be in fear of them, as is usually our first uninformed reaction, based on exposure to such sensationalistic sagas as The Exorcist.

Why do we attract such entities? This is a key point that I feel needs to be recognized and emphasized more than Baldwin and other spirit releasement professionals have, and is possibly an area where I can make a contribution. This point also aligns spirit releasement work very much with EC work. We attract inner-plane entities because of the unreleased negative energies we hold within. These negative energies, which can be equated to suppressed emotions and feelings, attract discarnate beings with a similar or corresponding energetic. Our weakened condition, because of the suppression we carry, makes us vulnerable. For example, if we are carrying large amounts of suppressed anger based on an unresolved authority conflict, we can attract a similar discarnate being who will amplify our negative feelings and urge us to act out the anger, in a misguided effort to resolve its own dilemma. If we approach spirit releasement with the intent of only releasing such an attached entity, we do not resolve the inner condition that allowed the spirit releasement to occur in the first place, and any spirit releasement is only a partial step towards healing. What needs to happen is for the inner suppressed negativity to be healed.

When this is understood, it puts a new light on spirit releasement work. In fact, it has been my experience that the actual spirit releasement is just a small part of the program. Even if we suspect that an attached entity is present, we will take counseling time to carefully address the emotional issue, bringing it through the process, clearing the feelings. Most of the work requires subtle, skilled, sensitive therapy. At a certain point in the process, usually as intense feelings are called up from the subconscious for clearing, it will become apparent if an entity is present and needs to be released. We get to the entity through the emotion. The session shifts to dialoguing with the entity, and the spirit releasement protocol is used. Spirit releasement is typically just part of the process, and is even somewhat mechanical compared to the soulful, emotional therapy that has been done. Let me cite a few examples from actual client work to illustrate:

It is desirable to release any attached entities as soon as possible in the course of therapy, so they don’t interfere with the emotional healing that the client needs, but this is not always possible. As we invoked an attached entity that corresponded to a client’s childhood sexual abuse trauma, we came upon the perpetrator, her grandfather. We came to this point after several sessions of intensely processing the incident, which in itself was not at first within conscious view of the client, but only became apparent as we explored feelings of sexual inadequacy and disinterest with her husband. The grandfather had stayed with the little girl out of guilt, and wanted to apologize, not only for abusing her, but her mother as well. After we heard his moving apology, he left. However, it was also the young girl’s/adult’s unconscious blame that had attached the spirit of the grandfather. After the client was able to finally and authentically drop blame and reach forgiveness, did she release the spirit. So, it was a two-way deal – the client was unconsciously inviting the spirit to attach because of her blame, and the need to get even. In fact, I have often asked a spirit if it is ready to leave, and it will say that the client does not want it to go. This does not refer to the conscious mind of the client, but to unconscious attachment of the client to the entity. It does no good if the therapist urges the client, “Are you ready for it to leave? / tell it to leave,” etc. It’s the unconscious that invites.

Another client suffered childhood trauma with the loss of her father, who died when she was young. Her severe grief was suppressed, and the grief-stricken child part of her fragmented into the unconscious with an intense call to him to not leave her. He heard her anguished call on the other side, and has stayed with her until the present in an effort to help her. However, his presence has not helped but has only been a source of emotional confusion, pain, and burden. Almost all of our work was on recalling the split-off fragment, processing the grief and abandonment that the young girl experienced. Several intense sessions were needed until the young girl/adult reached the point where she no longer called out for her father to stay. At that point, she had released him, and the spirit releasement process took only a few minutes. But if we had simply barged right in, trying to bring this spirit into a dialogue with the purpose of “releasing” it, we would have done little good.

Another client discovered a husband from a previous life with her, attached in spirit form. In that life, he had severely sexually abused and humiliated her. His intent was to apologize and obtain her forgiveness, but his inner turmoil was only compounding the unresolved negative emotions in her. We were able to release him as soon as we discovered him, but then she needed several sessions to completely work through her own feelings of lack of self-worth as a woman and being used, abused, and humiliated sexually. Taking responsibility for the feelings, and ceasing to blame her husband (from that life) was a critical element of the therapy.

Another client discovered a DFE whose only purpose was to hold him down, make him fail, and make him depressed. It was easily released with the help of the higher powers, but we had to do a lot of work before and after the releasement regarding suppressed feelings of lack of self-esteem, inadequacy, and guilt over early childhood sexual abuse. These were the feelings that created the vulnerability for the DFE to come in and to amplify the feelings, and if we had released this DFE before the inner work was done and he was made psychically strong, another would have come along to take its place. The guilt, and the impulse to punish himself, was a central part of what enabled the DFE to attach, and we had to work on releasing the guilt before he could release the DFE, because he had, indeed, formed an attachment to it and even unconsciously considered it to be a part of his identity.

Baldwin’s method may be said to be somewhat confrontational. The therapist brings the client into a hypnotic state, and in that state of expanded inner awareness, may ask the client to look inside and find anything that “does not belong there.” Or, the therapist may ask that any attached entity come forward that corresponds to the client’s stated concern, such as a recurring emotional or bodily pain. Results can be obtained in this way, and I use this approach if I feel the client has the capacity and is ready for it. But if this direct approach is used too soon, it is likely the client will not be able to respond – the capacity to channel will not have been developed yet. It is similar to trying to regress a client to a past life by simply telling them to go there – to find the past life that is responsible for the present condition, which many past-life “therapists” think is all you need to do to practice past-life therapy. I have found that, unless the client has a developed psychic ability, it takes several, maybe five or even ten sessions to get to the point where they can channel an entity or a past life. And then, I prefer it to happen spontaneously, as a result of the raw, suppressed emotion coming up and the guidance of the higher self, whom we always invite to direct the session. It’s the emotion, rising from the subconscious, in a skillfully directed therapy session, that opens the door to the awareness of an attached entity or the memory of the past life.

For people who are reluctant to accept the idea of entity attachment, or are totally unfamiliar with it, I have found that I am able to incorporate spirit releasement in subtle ways without needing to go through a long explanation of what it is that might get them nervous and may promote performance anxiety. This may be my approach unless I know that the client is at ease with the metaphysical concept of spirit attachment. For example, I worked with one client who felt guilt over an abortion. We processed the feelings behind the guilt, and at the right point, I simply asked the client if she was ready to release her child, and allow her to go into the light. She said she was, and the spirit was released. I sensed right from the beginning, as we went into the alpha state induction together, that the child was attached to the mother, but we did not need to discuss it.

Clients who have finished work with me, of course, still continue working on themselves. I don’t believe there is really any end to inner work as long as we are on the earth plane. They have reported that they are able to perform spirit releasements on themselves. The key is to get to the releasement through the emotion. Don’t try to do a spirit releasement with the conscious mind. Sit with your feelings, processing them, as I have described in detail in my book Emotional Clearing. Surround yourself with white light to protect yourself. Let the feeling build, and when the feeling is intense, if you suspect an attachment, look inside. Allow that feeling to become personified, and to form an inner image of some sort. Any image will do, but seeing it as a type of being will probably be most effective. Start to talk, inwardly, with the being. It’s ok to use your imagination. Find out what it wants, why it’s there, what it has to tell you. If you listen, you will hear it speak. You may not know at first whether it is a split-off part of your own or an authentic attached entity, but if it’s really an attached entity, you eventually will be able to discern it. Any feelings that come up, take as your own. FEEL them – move them through the EC process by accepting, experiencing, and witnessing them. Then, when it seems like the feelings are settling or lessening, release the entity if you think there might be one present:

Again visualize brilliant white light around yourself, protecting you inside your aura. Visualize the attached entity and put it outside your aura. Now bring the light to the attached entity. If the being is dark or ominous, the light will have an affect on it. It will seem to get lighter. Keep surrounding it with light, watching it get lighter. Ask your spirit guides (and Archangel Michael if the entity seems very dark) to guide the process, to protect you, and bring the entity to the light. As you continue to watch, the being will vanish. All this can take only seconds.

At this point, it is important to keep bringing in white light to fill up the space vacated by the entity. If the releasement was successful, you should feel a bodily-psychic sensation of lightness where there was heaviness. Keep filling the space with light, and especially feel the joyfulness of the light. Let the joyfulness empower you, and lift you out of the space of darkness where you were. Thank your spirit guides and ask that they be with you always. See the light surrounding you on all sides again and affirm that it always stay with you, protecting you. Use any other image of protection that may occur to you. I have used an army of ancient soldiers with big rectangular shields close together with spears pointing out from between them on all sides of me.

If you feel different after the procedure, consider it a success. Don’t doubt the experience – asking yourself if was it real, or if you imagined it. Treat it like a past life. We don’t really know for sure whether these experiences are “real,” but it doesn’t matter. At the very least, they are effective metaphors for bringing up emotion for processing – this is always the key, and this alone makes them valuable. Always go with the emotion, or feeling behind any inner experience, and always let your feelings bring the spontaneous experience to you. Don’t push. Trust you are being guided. Peace.