The Beauty of Primal Therapy

(This is a modified (and better!) version of the previous post "Why is Primal Therapy Beautiful")

The Beauty of Primal TherapyWe don’t usually think of psychotherapy in aesthetic terms. The concept of beauty doesn’t normally come to mind in connection with a discipline that deals with people’s most disturbing problems and offers mostly messy, hit-and-miss solutions.

But for many reasons, I think of Primal Therapy as something beautiful. That may seem like an oxymoron for a psychotherapy immersed in people’s pain and its power to distort their personalities. Yet, there is a beauty to the naturally healing solution that Primal Therapy provides.

Let me start with one of Primal Therapy’s most compelling strengths: Patients come to us for help and wind up learning how to help themselves. Otherwise you learn a lifelong dependence on someone else and you lose autonomy. Thirty years later, you still need the guidance from a therapist (a surrogate mama or papa) who can help you decide, make choices, and, basically live your life for you. And it never ends; it is not designed to. It is a therapy for the wounded who won’t let go of their crutch. Nothing beautiful about that.

How beautiful, on the other hand, to get access to yourself and learn from your own system about life and how to live it. Our therapy means liberation, independence and self-determination. Not dependence. That is not therapy; it is permanent leaning on someone else for decisions. Better to go to a counselor who will perform that function ad nauseam. The counselor helps in time of need, which never seems to end in those who are victims of an endless therapeutic system. Those who had a bad childhood seem to want to start over with a new parent and encouragement and constant help to grow up. Their therapy is an act-out of their unfulfilled need, an interminable act-out, as it must be so long as people are deprived.

Right here is a central difference between Primal Therapy and other psychotherapies. We get to the deep base of painful memories deep in the brain that produce instability, depression and anxiety. We know how it starts and now know how to root it out of the system. I have been taught to this day that being in touch with deep brain processes was not possible. It is. We have learned, thanks to brain science, how pain is embedded in the neurologic and biochemical systems, how it endures and above all, how to eradicate it.

Oddly, in order to eradicate it we have to “be” it. We need to travel back in our feelings to our earliest days and be the fetus and baby again. It seems impossible, on the face of it, but it is not, and we have observed it over decades. We have to go back via feeling processes, back through the levels of consciousness to those preverbal days of infancy, where the patient, in reliving them, is bereft of language, no matter how hard he tries. And if he says words during the therapy session, the session is false and unproductive.

There is also something beautiful about the way our bodies can heal. Cracked bones are rebuilt, lost blood is reproduced, flesh cuts are closed. And broken hearts can be made whole again. That is what we do for people in Primal Therapy: We help them restore their fractured selves by showing them how to mend the wounds of their childhood.

Once a pain is experienced it is out of the system and health is on the way. The patient is going back into his history slowly to gain access to himself. That is why it is beautiful. To really get your life back and to start to grow again. When I say get your life back I mean that patients, some of them, grow longer arms, fingers, feet and breasts in women. Feeling their feelings helps re-establish their original genetic trajectory. It unblocks repression and opens the system up for proper genetic growth: beautiful. That is truly a growth experience. It is what I mean by getting your self back; in a real way for a system restarting in its growth.

So in one sense, a patient enters Primal therapy and learns how to gain access to himself and learns how to help himself, to become his own therapist. The patient goes from needing help to helping himself, from patient to therapist. Not a professional Primal Therapist but someone who has mastered enough of it to help himself get well. Beautiful.

Let me not get ahead of myself; we don’t make therapists out of patients, but I teach them what I do and why and explain sometimes the brain function so they have a good grasp of what is going on and can see the signs of upcoming pain. But this is never a learning situation in the classical sense. Everything they are going to learn is already inside them. They learn from their own feelings; we just show them the way. They need to access and connect to them. Through their own experience they learn the warning signs of upcoming feelings and how to deal with them. They usually do not have to call the doctor for guidance. Maybe it is too facile to say that they become their own doctor but their feelings, not others, direct and guide them.

So let us be clear what getting well means. I think it is getting ourselves back; reliving the severe hurts from early in life that can no longer dominate our actions. It means organs that function properly and behavior that is not self-destructive. We are in the pursuit of recovered memories, which is a deadly serious undertaking. Those memories are the gateway to freedom from a painful history. We have found that we cannot change our history unless we submerge ourselves in it. That is the linchpin for cure. It cannot be done from a distance anymore than we can love a child from a distance. It is not pleasant but it offers unlimited relief, a good bargain. Why face pain? If we do not then we spend a lifetime pushing it away with all the strum and drang that repression entails. We work overtime to do that and it drains us all of the time. What we are retrieving are feelings, lying deep inside hidden from view, so deep as to remain a mystery. Feelings explain better than any words can. They tell us why we have symptoms and why we behave in one way or another. They open the port to liberation….from our terrible history, and we can only liberate ourselves by feeling it. We become whole again.

In science and mathematics, elegant solutions are highly prized. These are often the simplest, cleanest answers to complex problems. But elegance also connotes balance, harmony and, yes, beauty. Not to sound immodest, but I see Primal Therapy as an elegant solution to the ugly, thorny problems of mental illness. The theory describes a system by which the disease contains its own cure. Pain is the source of neurosis, but feeling the pain is also the way out. There is beauty in the balance of that dialectic, and there is harmony in its resolution.

We also often say that there is beauty in nature. That’s undeniable when contemplating the myriad colors and shapes of flowers, the vastness of the universe, the innocence of a baby’s face. Science is beautiful because it explores how nature works, how everything from the planets to microscopic cells are governed by certain immutable laws. The human psyche – the brain and mind as a whole – is also subject to a system of internally coherent laws that we are beginning to discover. We are also part of nature, and understanding ourselves is a beautiful endeavor.

Primal Therapy is based entirely on a natural process already contained within every human being. We are simply unlocking the mysteries of that process, allowing the cure to unfold. Anyone who has had a primal, descending through time into feelings that span a lifetime, and emerging into the light and lightness of experience-based insights, can attest to the beauty of the process.

On the other hand, obstructing nature is rarely a pretty sight. Much of psychotherapy today involves intercepting and diverting our feelings, which mans repressing our true nature. Feelings are quelled through pills or through retraining the brain to think happy thoughts. Either way, there is no beauty in trying to subvert nature by reinforcing the ugliness of repression.

In Primal Therapy, I am describing science at work; a science we have worked on and refined for fifty years. We can now add methylation and demethylation to the mix to verify improvement. The pain does not come back, nor does the anxiety, the ADD, the phobias nor the inability to sit still, focus and concentrate. It is left back in personal history. How great to not be weighed down by unrelenting depression; to be able to lift that weight and be light and free. What a feeling. I have experienced it myself so I am not describing an isolated or esoteric incident.  Beautiful.