The benefit becomes easiest to see once the question of literal truth is set aside on purpose. A past life story can be valued not as a record of something that happened, but as a symbol a person works with knowingly. Held that way, it stops needing to be real and starts being useful, and the usefulness is specific rather than vague.
Consider what a story actually does that a feeling alone cannot. A diffuse sense of fear or unworthiness is hard to hold or change. A scene, even an invented one, gives that feeling a shape: a character, a setting, a turn of events. Once the feeling has a shape, a person can look at it, walk around it, and sometimes rewrite its ending. The borrowed distance of “that happened to someone in another time” can make a painful pattern approachable in a way that naming it directly often cannot, and that distance is one of the few things symbol does better than plain statement.
A second benefit is coherence. People reach for explanation, and an unexplained struggle, a fear with no origin, a pull they cannot account for, can feel worse for being senseless. A symbolic story supplies a thread, a sense that the difficulty has a place in a larger arc. The thread does not have to be factually true to ease the disorientation of a pattern that otherwise seems random.
There is also a quiet shift in agency. When a person treats a regression scene as a story they are authoring rather than a verdict handed down, they hold the pen. They can decide what the story means, what the character learns, how it resolves. That is a different posture from receiving a diagnosis, and for some it restores a feeling of authorship over their own life that pain had taken away.
The honesty that makes all of this safe is simple to state and worth stating plainly. None of these benefits depends on past lives being real, and past lives have not been shown to be real. The value is in the meaning a person makes, not in any historical claim, and the moment a symbolic story is treated as literal fact it loses this footing and can mislead. A symbol that knows it is a symbol can carry real feeling and real change. The same story mistaken for evidence trades a working tool for a claim it cannot support, and for anything serious or persistent in a person’s emotional life, the story belongs beside real care, never in place of it.