What Does Primal Therapy Offer that is Different From Other Therapies?

Love.

Oh no,  I don’t give you love; I give you the capacity for it.  If I give you love, all would be lost, and that is one error in touchy-feely therapy.  Our apotheosis, our goal and ultimate aim is to allow patients to feel loved so as to enable them to give love.  But there is a caveat:  first they have to feel unloved, painfully unloved.  As they do that they open up the repressive gates and allow feelings to flourish.  We liberate buried feelings.  Feelings that we have no idea exist until we meet them.   The doctor asks, “Did you have a loving childhood?  And we answer  “Yes of course.”   Because “unloved” remains hidden beneath layers of chemical barriers of repression.  They are hidden so we do not suffer inordinately.  Unfortunately, these are also the agents of serious disease later on as they do their damage surreptitiously.  It is a stealth invader that moves into key organs and warps their destiny.

No other therapies, that I know of emphasize love as its goal.  I have seen patients come from new age therapies where they yelled out “I feel unwanted and unloved,” and the therapist rushes in to do the opposite of what is needed.   He becomes the good guy who loves.  (He too wants to feel loved).  That blocks the pain that has to come out and be experienced.    If that does not happen, he will go on screaming for a lifetime. Only they will be silent screams that only his system will feel and be ravaged by.

We cannot love neurosis away.

It was set in because love was missing, something important for development and survival was missing and he must find it. His system will be drawn to it if given enough freedom and help.   And  what will he find?  Better put, what will find him?  The missing link in his development; love.   And when he finds it, it will hurt.  He will agonize because it was the key ingredient for proper maturation.  In its place, a void.   Love is the great ineluctable force, a force that when missing drives so much of our behavior.  And by love I mean, inter alia,  fulfilling basic needs from the start: enough nutrients, oxygen,  no strange drugs allowed into the system.  No massive anesthesia.    We do not want the baby meeting his world drugged out of his mind.  Because I have found that we replicate how we first meet the world in our sleep; how we wake up and get active. Those drugged early on have to spend a good deal of time in bed trying to get fully conscious to meet the day.
They are just not ready.

Therapy has been dominated by intellectuals and those who prefer ideas, insights and cognition.   How could it not be, since doctors study and study ad nauseam to learn about human cognition.

But therapy should mean unlocking the gates. Of repression.  No pain, closed gates. They are there to protect us against deep pain; once we begin to feel that suffering there is no longer the need to sequester it. Other therapies are looking at cognitive dominance.  Getting our thoughts and head straight.  Neurosis to them is just bad thinking; negativity. And that is why addiction therapy must fail; they left out the body and its history. They have group lectures and and infinite discussions that remain up high, never touching the body.

What is the point of life if we cannot feel and love others?  Without feeling, life becomes empty and sterile.  It, above all, loses its meaning. Those who live in their heads miss this crucial point….feeling.  Remember, feeling is meaning; meaning is feeling.  Extract feeling and meaning disappears.  Our early life effectively suppressed feeling.    We need to get our life back.

No more classes about how to rear children.  Feeling parents sense when what they do is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy.  No more counseling to learn how to get along; because you have so much of yourself, you will know the difference between an act-out and normal behavior.  Having uplifted the unconscious there will be far less of being driven by deeply submerged forces beyond our control; no more drinking to excess. Gambling and out of control behavior.

Life gets a lot simpler when feelings take over, not in the old Freudian where they surge forth, escaping repression and doing harm. These are not the usual feelings; they are a great and often damaging force because they were hurtful from their origin. And we equate feeling with being dominated by “feelings.” “he is so emotional” when we do not know what lies deep inside we have to guess and assume they are harmful and dangerous; and the great part of psychotherapy today is learning how to control or “manage” feelings.  That is what addiction therapy is all about……holding back needs and feelings.

In the courts today there is an endless number of managing solutions: managing anger, addiction, fear, etc.  It is never about feeling them because soto voce, those feelings are deleterious to our well being and are not to be approached.  So we learn feeling management, like a business, and what we really learn is how not to feel.  How to keep self control, all because buried feelings springing forth can be dangerous.  “Oh, he has such temper tantrums!  When he gets like that I stay away.”

No one knows the origin of those feelings and why they often contain such fury and jealousy. They cannot imagine that they come from our deep, archaic brain, yes, they are part of us too.  Not foreign entities or mysterious beings.  They are our deep brain selves we have never met, nor felt and experienced.  And the courts have no clue either. So someone who is well-behaved and controls himself for 6 months is considered no longer a danger, especially no longer a danger to himself.   He is thought to be no longer a danger to others now that he is off drugs for x months.   What they do not know is that imprinted pain never leaves, and maintains the drive for a lifetime.  How can it not be this way when there is a whole world of agony agitating us.  And we wonder why some of us cannot sit still?  There is a primal engine down there grinding away and moving us. This fount of suffering is a permanent source of being out of conscious control.  We have to keep busy and keep moving because of that primal force.  We try to cap it to no avail.   We are captivated by it through the exigencies of biologic logic. To save us hurting so we can go on functioning.

So my friends, the goal of psychotherapy is to restore our humanity; nothing more and nothing less; that is already a tall order.