This is exactly what happens with mock primal therapy. The correct roots have been evaded while driving the patient into false byways. The result? Abreaction. A false root can mean leading the patient into first line, brainstem level where highly charged imprints await. So what does the doctor see as the first line intrudes? Gagging, shortness of breath, squirming, coughing. And what does he do? He encourages the patient to go into it when he is not nearly ready for such a deep experience. What does he get? Abreaction – temporary release plus a residue of feelings that could not be experienced, which push against defenses to make the patient feel bad. More often such great reactions produce fear in the therapist and he avoids dealing with it at all. It is left hanging and unresolved.
But beware: there is also danger when the therapist is too passive. Those who do not recognize first line on the rise will keep the feeling down and only let it come up for experience when it is far too late. It is too late due to the lack of experience of the therapist who has no idea how to handle pretty strenuous feelings on the rise. So what happens? Abreaction again: feeling different memories from the ones at hand. Again a groove is formed and instead of deep resolving feelings, there are little by-ways that are not resolving. For this timid and reluctant therapist, Freud’s dictum about the unconscious still holds true: don’t go too deep. Freud decided almost one hundred years ago that digging deep into the unconscious was dangerous for the patient and would disturb his equilibrium irrevocably. We have seen the unconscious at work and it is simply not true.
We therapists need to abjure being omniscient. We don’t know enough, and I cannot even guess how it happened that we became experts in the human condition. Whenever a therapist tells the patient what to feel we know he is already on the wrong path. We must sense feelings and follow the patient, not lead him. We take him by the hand and follow where he leads, not vice versa. We doctors must avoid the temptation to act smart. We spent years in college learning to be smart, and now we must elude it. How ironic! Yet the history of psychotherapy was intellectual and provided a therapy of the intellect, exactly what we don’t need. We don’t let the patient act “smart;” we allow her to act intelligent, to recognize her feelings and how they drive her and cause her to act out. When she tries to act smart we help her get to the feeling; of how to please momma or father. Finally it is a great relief just to be yourself and not have to act this way or that to get love.
It seems banal and harmless that a therapist supplies insights for the patient, but it is far from that because the patient is given a guess about his feeling from the professional which may be accurate but most often is not because it does not emanate from the patient’s feelings, but from someone else’s. It is a subtle way of channeling the patient into a groove because the therapist is insecure and wants to make sure that the patient is really feeling. And a facile groove is what most people suffer from in abreaction; they find a release to direct their feeling and it becomes comfortable to stay in it. It becomes embedded until they cannot get out of it and they don’t even know they are in it. The force of the feeling, the actual content, finds its groove, and it takes months of proper therapy to help patients out of it. Abreaction has compounded the neurosis rather than eliminating it. Worse, the person is convinced he is better, and he is not. Much worse, the doctor is convinced that all is right, yet nothing is right. The whole process has become a charade; a delusion of wellness. It feels good for the patient because he can release the pressure of the upcoming feeling and that feels like progress: ergo he is getting better.
When we try to insert ourselves into the feeling process we get a reflection of ourselves, not the patient. And that reflection relies on a host of theories concocted by doctors to explain that which needs no explanation. The mistakes in theory are as myriad as the unconscious of the doctor. He may see a need for power or of meaning or of sex and on and on. He often sees what is not there and refuses to see what is right there. His vision is limited by his openness. And that depends on how much he has felt and experienced of his own pain. You cannot be more open than your repression. That blocks so much: vision, insight, empathy compassion and understanding. If you live in your head you will never consider plunging to the depths of feeling; it is then all about explaining feelings, discussing them or writing about them. There is a form of therapy today where patients believe they can get well by keeping a journal about their feelings. Again, it is too obvious for comment but it is the top level that is embraced when we need to push far below it. The same is true for mindfulness therapy, which enhances attention and asks the patient to concentrate on details such as rate of breathing. This keeps that top level super-attentive when it should lie quietly. In these therapeutic schemes, there is no way to go deeper when every move that is made in therapy militates against feeling. They cannot go deeper because they are locked into kind of abreaction themselves. There is no larger, encompassing frame of reference that can guide them. They are as diverted from feelings as the patient who abreacts.
These cognitive theories are based on a basic distrust of feelings in favor of intellect; the opposite of one needs to produce a feeling cure. When a doctor defines his therapy as cognitive, he has already lost. It means he will deal with half the brain to the neglect of the other parts; above all the feeling parts; those parts that are healing.
We have to lean on the child in us and trust what it tells us!
ReplyDeleteWe can say that we lean on the child in us when we come so far in our process of primal therapy that we will not fail... it to cope with the physiological process to heal from what need is all about. But otherwise also... we have to lean on the child in us to strengthen our opportunities to come alive... as it is the child in us it is all about. Then we have found the security not to fail... that is what Primal therapy is all about.
When we do not have the child in us to lean on... then we have nothing left but the physiological process to repress. It can be likened to swim across the Atlantic without any whatsoever opportunities.
We must lean on something when we can not find anything worthy to lean on... then it might be good to look for the child in us to lean on... even if it hurts.
Frank
When we cognitively rolls over and gets emotional... that's when the critical window not seldom visualized it self. But too often without our knowledge... then hopeful around someone who perceives what it is that happening with us.
ReplyDeleteWhat it can cause is a never-ending stream of emotions to mind without any idea of what it is that happening with us. Now we know what happens then!
What it means to be channeled into our unconscious feelings are what we might least think of but has the greatest significance... the child in us.
I can imagine that this phenomenon is the most fundamental obstacle to what we have in the sense of having to be recalled again and again about our feelings and what primal therapy trying to accomplish.
If we once get the child in us to be what vi actually are in many sentences then we will never forget it... or can never forget it because it is what we repressed... the child in us... that's the crux about it all. We shall never make it more complicated than that!
Frank
Hi Frank. If we have had a healthy gestation and good birth and reasonably decent childhood there is no reason to close off, and we remember our childhood. I have seen such people. But when that doesn't happen, by adulthood we close off and forget what it's like to be that child, and then have to go back and open up that door slowly without everything falling on our heads like at the opening of an over-stuffed closet.
DeleteYes Sheri!
DeleteYes... slowly and carefully finding the child in us in every step we take toward madness... madness that we never could possibly escape and saying what we never said... crying tears we never cried and look at what we never could keep in our minds of fears for whom we were.
Your Frank
Hi all,
ReplyDeleteanother poem from the depths. . . 'Underground':
I exist underground;
People don’t know this and I wonder
if I’ll ever be found.
I am alone
down the bottom of my well.
Though people draw water
And their buckets appear in my realm,
Do I even want to be lifted up?
I feel like a fish out of water.
Unable to breath the harsh reality
Of surface life.
For on the surface all is dry.
No feeling,
just a lie and another denial of that water.
I do climb up ‘there’. . .
I do share, but people don’t understand.
People don’t feel that below their feet
perhaps in their basement,
there is another land where they might greet
another hand filled with love and feeling.
But no.
People skim the surface of reality.
I don’t mind, yet I do care.
I say beware sometimes
Because I can see the descent
isn’t meant for everyone.
I don’t know how I got to be here,
I fell I think. . .
Paul G.
Enjoyed your poem, Paul, particularly the part near the end. I agree that the vast majority skim the surface of life, and that the trip down isn’t something for everybody. At the end of my session last night I told my therapist that I couldn’t believe the places inside I’m having to go to wrest this disease of mine.
DeleteYour poem brought to mind a song I heard the other day on the radio, which I hadn’t heard in ages. It took me back to the early 80’s, shortly after I'd arrived here in L.A. to go to college. It was by a band called The Fixx. These lines resonated with me big time back then, long before I’d started my own descent:
Don't be scared, don't be scared
You can face the truth of it all
Don't be scared, don't be scared
If you can't bear the weight of it all
They still resonate.
Kip
Yesterday I had motorcycle accident, I've broken my hand. During my hospital stay (x ray etc) it reawakenes, pure terror and fear of death. All this personel in hospital is soo cold.
ReplyDeleteDear Piotr, glad your ok .
ReplyDeleteMotorcycles are so dangerous but great fun at the same time.
Hope your hand will be better soon!
Katherina : )