Woman Finds Forgiveness for Father Who Abused Her: Near-Death Experience

Though she only ‘died’ on the table for a matter of seconds, the NDE lasted long and she had a ‘life review.’
Woman Finds Forgiveness for Father Who Abused Her: Near-Death Experience
In her NDE, Angela Harris found love and forgiveness. (fizkes/Shutterstock)
Maria Han
Tara MacIsaac
10/11/2023
Updated:
11/17/2023
0:00

Angela Harris says she flat-lined for some 30 seconds after going into cardiac arrest—a severe reaction to a medical test doctors were performing on her at the time.

She says she had a profound near-death experience (NDE) in which she left her body. Ms. Harris watched a nurse and doctor working to revive her, and then she caught a life-changing glimpse of the afterlife, she explained in a video posted earlier this year by the International Association for Near-Death Studies.

Ms. Harris saw during this experience that there were other versions of herself in other dimensions. They were part of her and shared her experiences, but were also separate from her. She saw what she believes was the life plan she had chosen for herself before she was born.

Though she only “died” on the table for a matter of seconds, the NDE lasted long and she had a “life review,” which is a common experience reported by NDEers.

One of the most difficult parts of that review involved her father. He sexually abused her as a child and she had disconnected from her parents for that reason.

During her NDE, she seemed to see things from his perspective, to experience what it was like to be him.

“I learned that he, too, was abused in the same way as a child,” she recalled. “While he knew that it was unacceptable—I could feel that in him … it was built into his expectation of what he was supposed to do as a father.”

“It was a raging battle in him,” she said. “I felt all those confusing emotions with him.”

She also remembered choosing him to be her father before she was born, despite knowing the abuse she would endure. Her wish was to give him the chance to overcome what he had been battling through multiple lifetimes—she says she could see the big picture of not only one lifetime but of many.

“We had a plan,” she said. “I remembered that I intended to speak out against him more than I did.”

She meant to encourage him more to be “his true loving self.”

“While speaking up took longer than intended, when I did speak up it made a profound change in him,” she said. “My father is not evil. He didn’t come here with an evil intent.”

She saw many other experiences in this life and past lives, she said, and she felt all of them not only from her own perspective, but also from others.

“I made mistakes,” she said. But, she also realized that she shouldn’t be too hard on herself for them. She was learning.

“It was like I was combining all my lives of learning,” Ms. Harris said.

She described a feeling of oneness and of connection with the creator.

“Like a single cell of a human body, we are one,” Ms. Harris said. She felt we all come from the “Source,” she said, emphasizing that it’s with a capital “S,” that we come from God.

She had the homecoming experience also common to NDEers. She said she was greeted on the other side by her mother-in-law who had passed and her grandparents. She felt a love that “permeates everything.”

She felt no pain. Before her NDE, Ms. Harris had long been in pain. The test that threw her into a medical emergency was one of the diagnostic tests doctors were doing to try to figure out what was wrong with her.

It was a tilt test, which involves a patient being strapped to a bed that tilts to test how blood pressure and heart rate respond. It is rare, but cardiac arrest has been known to happen during a tilt test, and that’s what Ms. Harris says happened to her.

When she left her body and first entered a “velvety black void” before proceeding to her homecoming and life review, she realized her pain was gone.

“It was really in that moment for the first time that I realized how much pain I had been in for such a long time,” she said.

“That’s where I’m truly from,” she said of heaven. “[It’s] more real than anything we can experience here. Life here is equivalent to a dream.”

Maria Han is an arts and beyond science writer.
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