Roger Woolger is a psychotherapist who helps people experience painful events from their past lives to unblock the "frozen" emotions connected with those events. Very often it's a memory of a violent death, causing a fear that doesn't make any sense in this lifetime. Woolger gives the example that someone may have an exaggerated fear of cats. But, in therapy, the person may relive a past life memory where they lived in Africa and were mauled by a lion. Woolger says that the fear that seems exaggerated in this lifetime, turns out to be totally understandable when the past-life cause is discovered.
Woolger helps the person relive the experience with techniques taken from the therapy schools of psychodrama and Gestalt. In psychodrama, the painful memory is acted, with the help of other people, as though it was a play. Gestalt therapy, originated by Fritz Perls, uses various methods to encourage the person to stay with their feelings rather than escape from them as is the natural tendency.
Woolger says that just as our memory is not perfect in this lifetime, so it isn't perfect in remembering past-life events. A person undergoing this treatment is probably remembering a core of real memories, mostly tied in with strong feelings. Then, they may make up some of the details to fill in the story. Thus, the story they tell is probably a mixture of real core memories from a past-life, and made-up details.
Once in awhile, the past-life stories can be tracked down and proven. Woolger tells the story that a lady in one of his workshops had detailed memories, in a therapy session, of having lived the life of a not very well known painter in Italy in the town of Sienna during the Rennaissance. After a lot of searching in the library at a big art school, she was able to find the name of the person (a man). She decided to go to Sienna with her husband for her holiday. When she got there, she knew exactly where she was and how to get around without a map, went straight to a little house in the old section, and there on the wall was a plaque honoring that painter, the man she had been in the past life, by name.