The Therapeutic Value of NDEs
Lauren Maxwell, LPC, NCC, on finding hope, meaning, and purpose through near-death research
This week’s guest author is Lauren Maxwell, LPC, NCC, a practicing Licensed Professional Counselor in Falls Church, VA. Maxwell’s research centers the importance of NDEs in a therapeutic context that helps individuals navigate grief, mortality awareness, and life transitions while developing deeper meaning and purpose. Learn more here.
In this essay, you will read how:
NDEs contain common elements identified by researchers, including feelings of peace, out-of-body experiences, and encounters with spiritual beings
Personal loss and grief can lead to meaningful exploration of NDEs and their implications for understanding death, dying, and life’s purpose
Research demonstrates that learning about NDEs can reduce grief symptoms, decrease fear of death, and help individuals cope with serious illness
Knowledge of NDEs can help people confront existential concerns and develop greater comfort with mortality
Understanding NDEs promotes personal growth by fostering hope, reducing fear, and clarifying life’s meaning and purpose
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are a type of psychospiritual experience and include paranormal, life-altering, transcendental, and mystical elements.
The psychiatrist Raymond Moody, who coined the term “near death experience,” identified 15 elements present in accounts of NDEs: ineffability, hearing oneself pronounced dead, a feeling of peace, hearing unusual noises, seeing a dark tunnel, being out of the body, meeting spiritual beings, encountering a bright light or being of light, a panoramic life review, a realm where all knowledge exists, cities of light, a realm of bewildered spirits, a supernatural rescue, a border or a boundary, and coming back into the body.
Regardless of how they are interpreted, there is strong evidence to suggest that NDEs have significant, lasting effects on those who experience them, including increased hope and comfort, deeper meaning and awareness of purpose and values, appreciation for life, and a reduced fear of mortality, and that we can all benefit from learning more about these experiences.
This essay explores how learning about NDEs can benefit individuals and society and help us live empowered, authentic lives, promoting personal growth and a deeper understanding of meaning, purpose, life, and death.
Personal Experience Meets Research
When I was 14 years old, my beloved aunt died suddenly and unexpectedly, and I was left desperate for answers. What happened to her? Where did she go? I could not accept the idea that she no longer existed.
As I went looking for answers, I stumbled upon NDEs and have been fascinated ever since. My desperation turned into relief and comfort as I learned about NDEs and began to consider that perhaps my aunt did indeed go somewhere, that she still existed, and that she was alright.
Since then, I have grown more and more fascinated by the concept of NDEs and have searched for ways to weave that passion into my work as a psychotherapist.
Over the past decade, I have been fortunate enough to research and witness firsthand how experiencing and learning about NDEs can have profound, positive impacts on individuals by instilling hope, meaning, and purpose, and enhancing their ability to cope with life’s challenges.
As I started graduate school to become a psychotherapist, I was determined to find a way to incorporate my passion for NDEs into my work and studies. At the time, there was little research published on the topic of NDEs, but the research that was available looked promising.
My desperation turned into relief and comfort as I learned about NDEs
What follows is a brief overview of some of that research.
Foster and Holden (2014) found that learning about NDEs had a positive effect on grief. Their quantitative study examined the effects of a bereavement support group model that included psychoeducational videos about NDEs and their impact on adults’ grief.
The researchers found that participants had significant decreases in the areas of bereavement-related panic behavior, blame and anger, and detachment, and significant increases in personal growth.
Similarly, Winkler (2003) witnessed reduced suicidal ideation in therapy clients as a result of reading accounts of NDEs. I was captivated by the idea of individuals publishing research on what some would consider a taboo topic.
After attending a meeting with five members of a local IANDS (International Association for Near Death Studies) chapter, I felt deeply impacted by what I heard.
As I listened to these individuals recount their NDEs and discuss how these experiences had changed them for the better, it became clear that they had discovered a newly-developed sense of hope, faith, purpose, and meaning in life.
While continuing to immerse myself in my passion for NDEs, I eagerly accepted a research opportunity to better understand how learning about NDEs can benefit different populations.
For my portion of the research, I interviewed an individual who had received a serious cancer diagnosis to better understand how her knowledge of NDEs helped her cope with her experience.
Learning about NDEs empowers individuals by confronting their fears about life, death, and dying
This individual also experienced what she called a “spiritual encounter,” where she saw a being and felt an intense sensation of peace, calm, and love, and reported that this experience “profoundly changed her.”
She further reported that as life continued to challenge her, she would use the memory of her spiritual encounter and knowledge of NDEs to cope, and that the knowledge and experience “made [her] more at peace with mortality.”
Ultimately, our research showed that learning about NDEs helped this individual cope with cancer successfully by enabling her to face both ongoing medical treatment and a potential for death with greater peace, while enhancing her overall psychological and spiritual health.
These research results and personal observations can lay the foundation for understanding how knowledge of NDEs can transform our approach to life’s greatest challenges.
Knowledge of NDEs Can Improve our Quality of Life
As a psychotherapist, existential concerns like meaning, morality, purpose, love, isolation, death, and dying are some of the most common issues I see in my practice.
I also treat patients with various forms of anxiety.
Many of the patients I treat experience anxiety related to flying, traveling in cars, or developing illnesses such as cancer or heart disease. For many of these individuals, their true fears lie in death and dying.
Learning about NDEs is a way for individuals to empower themselves by confronting their fears about life, death, and dying, clarify their purpose and values in life, and to develop hope and comfort surrounding what their death and dying process could look like as well as those of their loved ones. His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote in 1992:
Naturally, most of us would like to die a peaceful death, but it is also clear that we cannot hope to die peacefully if our lives have been full of violence, or if our minds have mostly been agitated by emotions like anger, attachment, or fear. So if we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well: Hoping for a peaceful death, we must cultivate peace in our mind, and in our way of life. (ix)
Among the many ways that understanding NDEs can enhance our lives, perhaps the most significant is their ability to instill hope in the face of loss and uncertainty.
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One reason I am so passionate about NDEs as a concept is that learning about NDEs gave me a sense of hope when I felt lost in the depths of my grief after losing my aunt.
Years later when I would lose a close friend in a sudden, tragic way, I again leaned on my knowledge of NDEs to cultivate a sense of hope and comfort. According to neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl, hope is the difference between those who are able to survive life’s challenges and those who cannot.
Grief is one of those life experiences that cannot be cured, and it is also one of the only experiences that a human being is guaranteed to experience.
Deborah Drumm’s (1992) letter to the Journal of Near-Death Studies underscored her solace after learning about NDEs. After being diagnosed with breast cancer and surviving, she wrote a letter discussing the sense of healing she experienced after reading narratives written by individuals who experienced NDEs. She also suggested that others could benefit from psychoeducation based on NDE accounts:
I am stronger and more confident than I was before my illness, because I have finally dealt with my fear of death. . . . [NDE accounts] give peace of mind and renewed purpose, and allow life to move ahead. (69)
Comfort and Reduced Fear of Mortality
Similar to hope, NDEs can offer a profound sense of comfort, particularly for those grieving the loss of a loved one. Cherie Sutherland (1996) described her personal experiences of bereaved parents conveying to her that learning about NDEs had positive effects on their grief processes.
Psychotherapists Bruce Horacek (1997) and John McDonagh (2004) reported case studies in which they exposed clients who were grieving the deaths of loved ones to NDEs and that they subsequently experienced a reduction in grief symptoms.
In a related study, Delgado-Guay and colleagues (2011) found that 98% of 91 advanced cancer patients considered spirituality to be an important part of their coping processes and that spiritual coping served as a source of comfort and strength.
The comfort I experienced when learning about NDEs after losing loved ones in my life greatly and positively impacted my experience of grief and made the grieving process and the process of confronting mortality much more bearable.
Most individuals who experience NDEs also report losing their fear of death. Lundahl (1993) reported that it is reasonable to assume that knowledge of NDEs can help all people better understand the process of death and reduce their fear of it.
After an NDE, one individual plainly stated: “The terror I had of death is gone” (Nelson, 1989, 146).
A reduced fear of death and dying can empower individuals to live more intentional, purpose-driven lives and experience their own death and dying processes and those of their loved ones with more intentionality, meaning, and purpose.
Knowledge of NDEs can transform our approach to life's greatest challenges
I can personally attest that learning about NDEs led to a reduced fear of death and dying in myself when confronting the reality of my loved ones’ eventual deaths by providing a sense of comfort and hope.
Sogyal Rinpoche discussed in his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying how the modern Western world, while advanced in many ways, still lacks a real understanding of death or what happens during or after death.
Rinpoche wrote that people are usually taught to deny death or associate it with destruction and loss, meaning that most of the world either lives ignoring death or in terror of it.
As death and dying have increasingly become taboo topics in our culture, it is no wonder that these universal human experiences are some of the most feared and that the further away we get from discussing topics like death and dying in our society and culture, the more we see humanity dealing with a crisis of purpose and meaning.
Perhaps it is only those who understand just how fragile life is who know how precious it is (Rinpoche, 1992, 23), and understanding how precious life is can help clarify what gives life meaning and what values are most important to us.
Meaning, Purpose, and Values
Learning about NDEs can help individuals develop or clarify their sense of meaning, purpose, and values.
Ring (1980, 1984) found that individuals who experienced NDEs reported a greater appreciation for life, a renewed sense of purpose, increased awareness and value of service and love, greater compassion for others and sense of spiritual purpose, and decreased concern with personal status and material possessions.
Furthermore, Bruce Greyson (2006) reported that near-death experiencers tend to see themselves as integral parts of a benevolent and purposeful universe in which personal gain, particularly at others’ expense, is no longer relevant.
Foster, Maxwell, and Butler (2020) also found further evidence of clarified purpose when interviewing individuals who learned about NDEs following cancer diagnoses.
One interviewee reported that once she entered the remission phase of her cancer diagnosis, knowledge gained from learning about NDEs brought her peace and she realized that every life, including hers, has a purpose. She wrote: “Before the whole experience, I was obsessed with finding the perfect rug for my living room, and that seemed very important at the time. Now I look back and I am like, are you kidding?”
Understanding how precious life is can help clarify what gives life meaning and what values are most important to us
After an NDE, another individual said, “I also received the strong impression that positions at work, in society, and in the church are not important at all. What matters is how we treat people, whether or not we are kind to them and what kind of relationship we build with our families” (Nelson, 1989, 21).
Another man told Kenneth Ring (1984):
I realized that there are things that every person is sent to earth to realize and to learn. For instance, to share more love, to be more loving toward one another. To discover that the most important thing is human relationships and love and not materialistic things.
The conclusion of this research is that NDEs can help us develop a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and values by clarifying and helping us reflect on what really matters for each of us in life.
These experiences and the research surrounding them offer a unique opportunity to explore the mysteries of life and death, and the insights learned from such experiences can benefit not only those who undergo them but also society as a whole.
From instilling hope and comfort, reducing fear of mortality, increasing appreciation of life, encouraging discussion and thought surrounding death and dying, to clarifying meaning and purpose, NDEs can inspire lasting changes in our lives.
By embracing these lessons, we can examine how the wisdom gained from NDEs can enrich our understanding and motivate us to live more intentional, meaningful, and authentic lives.
Thank you for putting all this together. I too hope that information about NDEs and other phenomena studied by parapsychologists can be woven into our tending of the bereaved. I know it helped me immensely when I lost a loved one.