This question only makes sense inside a particular belief, the idea that a person carries memory from earlier lives and can revisit it. Past life regression is the practice built around that idea, usually through guided relaxation and imagery. Whether the scenes that surface are literal histories, symbols the mind produces under suggestion, or a mix of both, has no way of being verified. What can be described honestly is the emotional work people do with the material, and there the two roles in the question behave quite differently.
People drawn to this work tend to arrive expecting to find themselves wronged. A scene in which one was hurt, exiled, or betrayed slots neatly into a story already half-told in the present, and it can be moving to feel that an old fear has a shape. The emotional value, if there is one, comes from the same place it does in ordinary therapy: a vague dread gets a narrative, and a narrative can be examined, grieved, and set down.
The harder material is the lifetime in which the imagined self caused harm. Within the framework, practitioners often regard these scenes as the more demanding ones, because they ask a person to sit with guilt rather than grievance. Outside the framework, the same observation holds for a different reason. Facing one’s own capacity to do damage, even in a story, tends to require more honesty than nursing an injury does.
So the phrasing of the title, equally healing, is worth slowing down on. The two roles are not interchangeable in their emotional demands. A victim scene can offer relief; a perpetrator scene can offer something closer to accountability and self-forgiveness. Calling them equal flattens a real difference.
A few things are worth keeping clear:
- the scenes are experienced as meaningful, which is not the same as being established as real
- relief and insight can be genuine even when their source is unknown
- guilt explored through an imagined life still has to be reconciled with the actual life being lived
There is also a real limit here. A person carrying heavy guilt, shame, or trauma is in delicate territory, and a session that surfaces a vivid scene of harming others can deepen distress rather than ease it. This kind of exploration is not a treatment for that pain and does not stand in for it. Anyone working through genuine trauma or persistent guilt is better served seeing a licensed therapist, with regression at most a companion to that care and never a substitute.
What the question really points at is not symmetry between two roles but the difference between feeling hurt and facing oneself. The second is usually the more uncomfortable, and for that reason often the more useful, regardless of which lifetime it is dressed in.