Past Life Trauma: How It Can Show Up in Your Current Life (Pt. 1) | Tina Erwin
Season 3, Episode 5
What if some of the trauma you're carrying didn't start in this lifetime?
In this thought-provoking Part 1 episode, I’m joined by Tina Erwin, psychic, intuitive, and retired Navy commander, to explore the powerful concept of past life trauma and how it can impact your current experiences, relationships, and healing journey.
Together, we dive into what reincarnation really means in practical terms, how past lives can shape your fears, talents, and connections, and how recognizing these soul-level experiences can offer profound insights and emotional release.
Tina shares fascinating real-life stories—from memories of lifetimes in Italy and Spain to past life regressions that brought physical and emotional healing. Whether you're brand new to this topic or already curious about the soul’s journey across lifetimes, this episode offers grounded wisdom and empowering clarity.
🔑 In This Episode, We Explore:
What past lives are—and what they aren’t
How past life trauma can show up as irrational fears, chronic emotional pain, or intense relationships
The science and spiritual philosophy behind energy, memory, and reincarnation
Deja vu, soul recognition, and unexplained affinities (like feeling "at home" in certain places or eras)
Why it’s important to uncover past life wounds yourself rather than relying on others to tell you
A powerful story of healing after re-experiencing Inquisition-era trauma
🧠 Key Takeaways:
Energy never dies—your soul carries memory beyond this lifetime.
Emotional and physical symptoms may be tied to unprocessed trauma from a previous life.
Awareness leads to healing—you don’t always need full memory recall for energetic shifts to occur.
Karma isn’t punishment—it’s a law of cause and effect across lifetimes.
🌿 Connect with Tina Erwin:
Tina’s Website (insert actual link)
⚠️ Trigger Warning:
This episode contains discussions of trauma, abuse, and other potentially sensitive topics that may be activating for some listeners. Please take care while listening and pause if you need to. Your well-being is what matters most.
Speaker 2 (00:00)
Hi, Tina. Thank you so much for being here with us today. We have had some technical issues, but we are here. We have made it.
Speaker 1
It's not even working in retrograde, so we did really well.
Speaker 2
We did, we did. I am so ready to jump into this conversation with you. I'm really excited. And so before we dive deeper, can you share your understanding or belief around past lives? So explain in a simple, grounded way for listeners who may be new to the idea or just beginning to explore.
Speaker 1
We live over and over and over. It's what Christ meant when he talked about life everlasting. It's the opportunity to, if you didn't quite get it right in this life, maybe the next life things are gonna be better, or you can work it out with that person. Or maybe you gained insight between the times of birth and death and rebirth.
Speaker 1 (01:22.304)
Maybe you grew a little bit. Maybe you would love to have another life with that child or that husband. My husband and I have had life after life where one of us always died. This life, we've been together 52 years. Wow. And both of us remember several of those other lives. It's a very strange thing. And you know, you can kind of prove to yourself that you've had a past life.
If you look around at your area of interest, are you madly in love with, you know, Paris in the 1920s? Or I worked with a doctor, I functioned his office and he had, he must have been a country doctor in the old West because he had painting after painting after painting of native Americans on horseback and Western towns. he
You know, this man died with his cowboy boots on and he lived in San Diego, California. When you look around at your interests, at the things that inspire you, the art, it helps you find where your comfort zone was. And maybe that was a past life. Maybe there are places, you know, in your heart of hearts, you don't want to go there because it wasn't good when you were there. That's a, it's kind of a coconut shell definition of a past life.
And we know that energy is neither created nor destroyed as a law of physics. didn't know that. So the energy that is us, the beauty of the soul lives forever. We shed the mortal frame and we get to come back with a new frame for the next life. That's a nutshell of reincarnation.
love that and I love that you and your husband have found each other in multiple lives. Like that is so cool.
Speaker 1 (03:19.854)
It is cool. And he's the same sweetheart of a man that he has been life after life.
Wow, and to be able to actually like remember those things. I mean, I struggled to remember my childhood.
It comes about in an unusual way that something sparks your memory. And sometimes you are in a location where you pick up your current life where the last one ended. And you get those clues. My husband and I worked for the submarine force for 20 years, 20 plus years. And we were in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His submarine pulled into New Bedford.
And he invited me to come up and share the weekend with him where they blessed the fleet. And I went, my gosh, I've been here before. Everything is familiar. I know this place. It wasn't good. It was a great time. And in a past life regression, I realized that I had been murdered there as a witch. And my husband was my husband and my mother-in-law was my mother-in-law and my mother was my mother and my sister was my sister.
Wow
Speaker 1 (04:37.806)
We had seven different family members were in that we were all in that life together. It was so significant. You're not going to remember all of them, but I had one client who remembered, I think, 15 past lives. Sometimes the veil is thin when you come in and maybe you need to remember that because this time you get to do it once. And they say, you know, if you only live once, well, you don't, you get to live over and over.
That is amazing. And I was gonna ask, so when you were explaining that, like that feeling of I've been here, is it similar to deja vu?
Yes, Deja Vu is like, my husband and I lived in Italy three years and everything was familiar. I would turn a corner and it's like, I've done this before. I know I've done this before. When you live in Naples, Italy, it's a massive city. We were never lost. Italian was easy. Just came, mean, was fluent in Spanish, but Italian just wasn't that hard. So,
My daughter minored in Russian. I think she was a Russian princess. Russian comes easy to her. mean, learning the Cyrillic language. I'm sorry, you know, shoot me now because I cannot do that. I mean, she had classmates who just it was a nightmare for them. And it's like, no, this is just really easy. I don't understand what your problem is. OK. That kind of thing is.
Thousand different clues that help you understand what you were before but I do have a few caveats about that. Okay and one of them is I'm a psychic. I'm an intuitive whatever you want to call it. I Never ever ever tell someone what their past life was hmm You can't prove what you think, you know and when a psychic tells someone you had a pipe past life as
Speaker 1 (06:45.26)
And this person was this and this person was this to you. I'm not disparaging other psychics, but I'm saying you have no right to take that path of discovery from another person. There's their path alone. I do pass life regressions and I am really, really careful when I talk to the person. I don't guide them.
This person ends up somewhere and they go, my gosh, this makes so much sense to me because it's original. Don't let them... When someone says, I know you had a past life as, stop them right there and say, please don't. I want to find it out for myself.
Wow. Yeah, I love that. And your comments about Italy. You are making me think that I may have had a past life in Italy. I am obsessed and I am like determined that at some point in this life, I am going to live in Italy and I'm just completely drawn to it. And I have actually been learning Italian in preparation. And like you said, it does come quite easily.
Exactly.
It because your subconscious remembers it. And although maybe several hundred years ago, the syntax might have been different. The the word phrasing, the grammar of the sentence structure, the basic words are the same. And that feeling, there's, I mean, for me, there's no place on earth like, like Italy. I've been all over the country. I have a different, I have a different situation with Spain.
Speaker 2 (08:30.83)
Do we want to go into it?
I was thrown out of a window and murdered by the Inquisition.
my
Word. And we were in Spain and my husband's submarine pulled into road to Spain and we still had a submarine base there. And I met him and we toured the city and I just got sick. And I've had three or four other clients who we had to go back and find out what was happening to them or why one individual had a trip that he was
taking with a school group to Barcelona or Madrid, and he literally started to go blind. And he was blinded by the Inquisition. When that reality came to him, he realized that that's not going to happen in this life. You really are going to be all right. And you can go have a trip, and his sight was restored. Not because a miracle was performed.
Speaker 1 (09:38.882)
but because an insight into a past life trauma was brought to the surface and the person was given some basic emotional healing to help them understand that was a different time. You're in a different place now. Those things are not going to happen to you. You're going to have a wonderful trip. And he did.
Amazing. And that is actually a perfect segue into my next question. So can you explain what post life trauma is and how it might manifest in someone's current life experience?
Past life trauma, for instance, okay, I'm thrown out of a window by the Inquisition. I have a big time fear of heights. If you, I drowned in at least three or four lives. So I am really careful of the water. Those were traumas from that life as a method of death. But a past life trauma can manifest in
I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (10:49.836)
some astounding ways. was a my neighbor, the Western doctor, had was married four times, had two children by each wife. Everyone got along and all of the kids were friends with each other. You know, that was a happy thing. He, thus his only son and one of his other daughters by another wife, his son and his one of the daughters went to
Madrid on a vacation. I don't mean to pick on Spain, honestly. This is the story. And in the middle of the night, I get a phone call and it's the son. And he said, you know, my sister won't stop vomiting and she's having endless diarrhea. It's the biggest mess. We're in a hotel and you have to help me. And I said, dude, your dad's a physician. You called a psychic. Are you sure this is?
Okay.
Speaker 1 (11:46.77)
sure this is what you want to do and he said yeah my dad said it would be so long before he could actually get some kind of a help for me that you're the fastest bet it's like okay well no pressure there and i questioned him did you do the same things did you eat the same place he said we went to the get to places together we ate the same food there's no rhyme or reason for it i said okay so i i have some odd skill sets one of them is remote viewing so i got
the name of the hotel and the room number and I remote viewed her and I had her permission under spiritual law. You cannot remote view another human being without their permission. Unless they're under the age of 18 and a parent gives consent, but it's civil law and spiritual law closely mirror each other. So I had her permission and I remote viewed this woman's body. And what I saw was this was a woman who was racked in
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:44.11)
agonizing pain. She was being repeatedly sexually assaulted by these members of the Inquisition and then they killed her. And that trauma was probably not more than 200 years ago, maybe 300. I don't remember how long ago the Inquisition was, 1400s I think. And
Speaker 1 (13:09.972)
That was during the time of Philip II of Spain, so it would have been probably 400 years. But the echo of that trauma was so massive, she was still feeling it. And this had been a young woman who had struggled all her life to feel like she could accomplish anything or achieve anything. I mean, she's over 21 and her father's still covering things for her and she can't seem to get her life to work. Well, I'm looking at her body.
And the trauma this woman received was staggering. So my first thing was, I have some tools and I was able to stop the vomiting, stop the diarrhea, start healing, bring in angels, create a situation where she could begin to feel safe. And then I went back through her eyes and I could see they visited a museum dedicated to the Inquisition.
And she went into the room where she had been tortured.
And for her subconscious, which is always recording your lives, it went right back to that moment, to those horrific moments. And she was flooded with the horror of what happened to her. And the toxic energy of that experience completely saturated her body. she, you know, they, she asked to leave quickly.
They had supper and they got to the street and she threw it all up and then they barely made it back to the hotel in the bathroom. And so I was able to calm all of that down, reassure her subconscious that it isn't 400 years ago, it's modern times. She's safe with her brother, he loves her. He's there to take care of her, everyone loves her. She's going to be all right now and her body is literally being cleansed of that horrific darkness because you have to remember,
Speaker 1 (15:09.312)
You have a serious trauma in a past life.
You don't get to grieve it. You grieve your death, but when something happens to you, you have to process, you have to grieve it. But when you die like that, how do you grieve that? So very unusual concept. I don't think too many people think about. And I said, you're grieving what happened to you. No one was there. No one saved you. You were utterly alone. And I'm so sorry, but I've assigned these angels to be with you.
And that soul who died at that time, we've crossed over and now you're back. And from this point on, you're going to be just fine. And so. He called me back about four hours later, it was a lot of work to project that, you know, 9000 miles is a lot. And she stopped vomiting, the diarrhea stopped, she was sleeping peacefully. And they said, if she wants to know.
She has to call me and ask, but she never called me. She didn't want to know, but something happened after that. She was a different person. Her confidence returned. It's like this dark cloak that had really imprisoned her was destroyed. And this beautiful, capable, intelligent woman took care of her own affairs. She got married, she had children. And...
she became a much happier person, but she had to go through a really dark moment to get there.
Speaker 2 (16:49.718)
Yeah. Wow. That is an incredible story. I like, I can't even imagine. So first of all, your capabilities, like being able to do those things that must, what is that saying? With great power comes great responsibility. That's that's making me think of.
That's exactly right and God help you if you I cannot even put my toe on the line. You have to have a very strong respect for karma. If you have ability at this level, karmic law weighs very heavy on you. You can't violate that.
Speaker 2 (17:36.012)
Wow, what are some ways people can begin to uncover their past lives or access memories that aren't immediately conscious?
Well, let me caveat that by saying you don't have to remember a past life. It isn't necessary. But if you, I would say look around you. Let's say you have a sibling and you and this sibling just cannot get along. Nothing seems to work. It's just nails on a chalkboard.
That would be a pretty good indication that karma has placed the two of you together so that you can try and work through this. And I'll give you an example. My mother-in-law engineered my demise in New Bedford, Massachusetts, know, the, you know, late, late 1600s. And when I met her for the first time, I didn't know any of this. I started...
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (18:43.958)
I started to vomit. What a great way to meet your future mother-in-law. Didn't go over too well. subconscious recognized her. So that's a huge clue. If you meet someone for the first time and it's, know, danger Will Robinson, danger, danger, your subconscious is recognizing someone or a similar situation, warning you.
choose differently this time. All I knew is that I had never felt rage on the level that I felt when I was in this woman's presence. And she couldn't stand me either. was really, you oil. It was really bad.
Mmm.
Speaker 1 (19:28.394)
And it took us, I would say, I don't know, 25 years of marriage and some outside help. And I finally realized that this life had taken place and that my rage stemmed from being falsely accused. The injustice of it was it creates this rage in a person.
Hmm.
And then I did a lot of personal inter, you know, work. And I realized that she has no power over me this lifetime. It's an unreasonable fear triggered by a past life. In this life, she's this elderly lady who lives 3000 miles away. She has no power over us.
And she and I, she had no knowledge of any of this, nor did I share it because I did follow the law. And my husband and I reached out to her and we set some conditions and some boundaries which she abided by. And she had been praying that the family would come together. And as the years went by, we developed a tenuous friendship. She would never be my favorite person.
Honey?
Speaker 1 (20:48.962)
But I no longer hated her. I no longer felt those horrible feelings. And she told me I was a wonderful mother and that I'd been a wonderful wife to my husband. And she changed. I changed. You can't change anyone else. You can only change yourself. And when you look at those things from that view, then
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (21:17.708)
you're looking at a person that you can't stand and maybe there was something there before. If you step back, you may gain perspective. It doesn't mean you're going to see that life. means that something happened between you. It wasn't healed and it came forward in karma. Being ever fair is now offering you an opportunity to work through it and heal it. my spiritual teacher said, how many lifetimes are you going to go through this with this woman?
Thank
Speaker 1 (21:47.798)
And I okay, that's it. We have got to figure this out this lifetime. I will not do this again.
Yeah. So you've mentioned karma a few times and I'm wondering if maybe we could just talk a little bit more about karma specifically. like how can we have good karma? I mean, I feel like the immediate answer that comes to my mind is just be a good person. But I'm wondering if you have a more thorough or in-depth answer to that.
I've written three books on it, so yeah, would say so.
Karma is basically a Sanskrit word for action and reaction. Another law of physics. It's not mystery. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But what makes Karma so fascinating is that Karma does not have a clock or a time limit. You have a very long time to work things out.
When you look at action and reaction, it causes you to edit what you say before you say it. It causes you to think through, if I do this, what are the expected actions? If I control my emotions here and I respond in a measured way, how might this outcome be different? If I want something
Speaker 2 (23:20.622)
Yes.
But this other person wants it. How do we work toward a common goal where everyone saves face and everyone wins? No one leads a perfect life. We are all in a process of learning what action and reaction is. And karma can come back to you in a thousand ways you would never possibly imagine. And
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:49.131)
you
When you look around you, if you have good health, have a stable marriage, you have a wonderful family, you love your children and love is returned, obviously that karma is coming back to you. And you really see this and the karma of how you manage your own body. Some people, I wrote a book called The Lightworker's Guide to Everyday Karma. And one of the chapters is the spiritual closet of body and soul. And some people,
come into a life and they just abuse the living daylights out of their bodies. And some people are conscious that although this is a temporary frame, how we treat this frame, what we put into it creates a karmic ripple effect, which is notably visible as you as you age. And you truly see that. And if you
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:50.994)
Study karma not because you know it's a bad thing and it's going to punish you. It's action and reaction. That what you do for others will be done for you. You know Christ do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And every spiritual tradition on earth has a statement that describes karma. Action and reaction. Drop a pebble in a pool.
And sometimes you get just these few little concentric circles. And if you drop a boulder, sometimes you have catastrophe. It's how you respond in each moment. It's your respond ability. How clever are you? How mindful are you? Does that help?
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:38.646)
Yeah, absolutely. It's just like focusing on the moment to moment. Like you don't need to try and plan out your life based on karma. It's like, it's taking a step like each paying attention to each step that you take kind of.
Exactly. Whether you're a spouse, an employee, a boss or a child, instead of being critical, sit down with someone. mean, my daughter's an amazing cook. And when she was learning to cook, if you're teaching someone, you have to expect mistakes. God expects us to make mistakes. No one leads a perfect life. We wouldn't reincarnate anymore if that was the case.
A great master was once asked, what is your final life on earth in the mortal body? Are you a great guru sitting on a mountaintop in Tibet? And he said, no, you're a housewife in Peoria. You know how hard it is to run a family and be a parent and a sibling and a spouse and a daughter or son? It's the day to day moments.
that define us.
Yeah, I love that. I absolutely love that. Is it necessary to know all the details of a past life to release the trauma it carries? Or can healing happen energetically without full awareness?
Speaker 1 (27:16.43)
Healing can absolutely happen energetically. There are so many different forms of healing. I would be totally remiss if I in any way limited that. A human being's capacity for healing is astounding, frankly. So let's say that you study past lives and you read about it. I had a client who had
We did, I don't know, six or 10 regressions. And she had a lot of extremely traumatic deaths. And in this life, she had a horrible childhood. It terrible. And it causes the soul to have this grinding, perpetual depression. When we looked at the past lives and we looked at her death,
and that she gets to live again. And maybe the method was gruesome.
And at the same time, she is in a good place in this life. is a very responsible position. although, because of what happened to her as a child, the abuse, sexual abuse, she did not marry. But she also, we did a lot of work, she did not kill herself this life. I had another client who,
She came for a variety of other reasons. We ended up doing several regressions and there was a person in her life and she adored this person beyond imagination. And in every life he died and in every life right after he died she killed herself because she couldn't live without him.
Speaker 1 (29:11.552)
Well, in this life, not long after we started working, she met the same person on an airplane. He was a Marine pilot. And she knew him. I mean, it was so instantaneous and they were engaged and about to this wonderful life. And she knew that in past lives what had happened and she was very conscious of it. So when his, was a jet pilot for the Marines, the plane crashed.
And as soon as I saw this on the news, went, I know who that is. I know, I immediately knew who the pilot was. So I called her and she said, no, I'm not leaving this time. And we did a little more work. And then she said, you know, I have to live this life. I I'm going to be all right. And about a year later, I got an invitation to her wedding. She was marrying another Marine. and I said, you know, I don't know any of your friends. Are you sure you want me to come?
She said, yes, because you're the only person on earth who will know the significance of my living and remarrying and living every day. It means that I want it to mean that I passed the test and maybe there will be a life where we'll get to have a whole life together. You're the only person who will know that. So my youngest son and I went because my husband was at sea.
And it was a beautiful wedding and this girl is gorgeous. Really, really bright. She's an accountant. sometimes you have these situations where you might not know, but if you look around and start studying things, you start to put the pieces together. had a client, a guy.
And the hatred between he and his brother was just so epic. And I did not do a regression with him, but I could clearly see there was a past life there that was terrible. And so consequently, I encouraged him to step away and try to work on himself, which he did. But he could only go so far. And I think this is an important point.
Speaker 2 (31:12.59)
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (31:37.954)
A lot of times we want people to just make huge emotional spiritual progress and that would be wonderful. But sometimes a soul can only go so far. That's not right or wrong or good or bad and it's not up to anyone else to judge that. It's simply a function of the soul is working through what it needs and sometimes when it reaches its limit
that's as good as it's going to get and that's all right.
That's a very interesting point. Are you able to expand on that a little bit more?
Speaker 1 (32:24.692)
One of the things that always bothered me, because I was considered a Vietnam era veteran, and I spent 20 years in the Navy and I worked for the submarine force. And I had a spiritual teacher and I said, I'm so concerned about these veterans from Vietnam and they're on the street corner everywhere and they're super traumatized. And I. I was still young at this, and so I said, what? What can be done for them? And he said sometimes.
The trauma a soul receives is so great they have to die and come back. That is the beauty of reincarnation. Maybe this life you'll get to work through it. There's another element here. Let's say that this is super complicated concept, but you're in a family where there's a lot of abuse and I have a lot of clients like that. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, spiritual abuse.
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (33:23.374)
You know, you're a sinner, you're going to hell. mean, why we do this to each other, I don't know, but parents are constantly punishing the children for imagined wrongs. And the soul comes in to that family thinking, you know, this time, maybe I'll be able to do something that can help this family and it will all be so much better.
But when you're mired in it day after day from birth, you realize your limitations. So sometimes the best you can do is work on yourself.
Okay.
If you work on yourself, if we're all connected like cogs, you know, in a wheel, you can really only change yourself when you change because we're all connected. This goes back to string theory and quantum entanglement. Because we're all connected through what are called akka chords that come from your solar plexus, which is the creation of akashic records. That's the root word.
memory of everything that's ever happened to a soul, everyone around you is affected. Everyone begins to feel something shift and change. When you change, this ripple, karmic ripple effect begins to go out. And I offer that change should be gentle, gradual, methodical, not
Speaker 1 (34:59.404)
snap your fingers and because most emotion emotionally most people can't handle that. So the best you're going to be able to do is offer them the opportunity to begin these changes slowly. And sometimes people will say, you know, feel like the glass is full. I can't do anymore. OK. But one of the things they learn is that if they were to stay with a family that's abusing them,
And they continue to allow that family to abuse them no matter what they try to do or help or anything. And they earn the karma, very negative karma for continuing to allow the abuse. If they say, no, I'm not going to participate in this abuse or some families gossip, I mean, it's so vicious. It's like...
Wow.
Speaker 1 (35:56.994)
Some people feed on the soap opera of family drama instead of enjoying one another and finding love and the pleasure of company.
Yeah.
When you say, no, I'm not going to participate in that drama. No, I don't want to know about so-and-so. I'm not going to gossip about this. Let's respect the other person's privacy. They're going to get mad at you because you're not playing that game anymore. But if they want to continue to hurt you, you have stepped away. So they don't earn the karma of hurting you. And you have stopped that.
Some parents play games and they pit one child against another. My mother did this. And so there are four of us. We got together as siblings and we would never be on the phone with her alone. Another sibling was always on the phone with her. So there could be no tales told. We didn't harm her.
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (37:00.13)
But we also made sure that this backbiting, know, she said this and he said that and, know, would mom lie? You can see where this goes. She was getting much older and was having some dementia problems, but she'd always play games. When we stopped allowing her to play games, she got mad one by one. She basically got mad at every one of us because we wouldn't play her game anymore. But we stopped her from perpetrating negative karma on any of us, if that makes any sense.
