There is an experiment where a subject in pain was given suggestions that he was no longer in pain, and he wasn't. But when given naloxone, which chemically undoes repression, the pain returned. There is no mind over matter. It is more likely matter over mind. It all makes sense since there is the factor of resonance I have been discussing in all my work. That thoughts resonate down to lower physiologic levels and set off commensurate biologic processes that quell the pain that the person is suffering from. To think otherwise is to imagine that thoughts exist in space with no physiologic counterparts, not the facts. Isn't it incredible that we have pain and pain sets up the very thoughts that then trigger off pain killers in our brain? Then we can think different thoughts: oh boy! This therapy works. Don’t forget, resonance is a two way street; if only the cognitive/insight therapists understood that and stopped treating thoughts as viable, discrete independent entities that can be changed willy-nilly.
Thoughts and beliefs are the final station of a process that can begin deep in the brain, very remote in history (personal and ancient), wending its way upward and forward until feelings meet with their counterpart. In a way, then, we do every day what we do in sleep: we revisit our ancient phylogenetic past and also our ontogenetic past and then move forward in time to the present. We are clearly evolutionary creatures; creatures of needs, especially those that were not fulfilled. In our therapy when we have a very disturbed patient we may use tranquilizers for a time to block the deepest aspect of an imprint, thereby allowing the person to focus on the present and perhaps childhood. The medicine is not in lieu of therapy; it is to treat memory, a memory that cannot remain in its proper setting in storage.
When a person’s defenses are weak due to compounded lack of love throughout childhood, the past inserts itself prematurely into the present; there we find serious mental illness. That past can warp how we think and perceive, not because we have adopted “unwholesome ideas,” but because those thoughts are the result of a lifetime of experience. So it isn’t that two people just politely disagree; it is that two people see the world in very different terms. And they are very different individuals.
So how do we block the pain? In many ways; we block the thoughts about it, we block the feelings and also the force of it. We drug different aspects of brain function. When I took an MRI I taught the technician to bang on my feet at irregular intervals so that I could not organize a coherent thought about my fear/anxiety. It worked. I was so focused on anticipating the bang that I could not concentrate on fear. The fear was still there; only it never became a coherent force.
Let me put this together again: There is a resonance factor where all aspects of a memory are involved. I assume that it may be due to the same frequency oscillations, and perhaps not. Aside from that assumption the resonance is absolute; having seen it several thousand times in many hundreds of patient over many decades. We see it in veteran patients who have deep access; when a patient comes in complaining that he is not getting anywhere in therapy and she wants to quit. We only discuss this cursorily, helping her into feelings where she feels so stuck in her early home life, and then perhaps months later, she begins a birth sequence where we can see that she is indeed stuck and not getting anywhere. We see her writhing and squirming and grunting (never expressing verbally) that she cannot make it out into life. It has a powerful valence. As we dip into her history the tail of the feeling grapples with an earlier counterpart to the feeling. And then she relives being stuck, over and over again. It was a life-and-death feeling that she gets born and breathes. It is again life-and-death when she has a problem in her life because the force of that memory rises radically to disturb her functioning. Something in the present resonates with her history, and then she becomes a prisoner of that history; a prisoner of pain.
You say that neurosis makes people see the world in different ways. I think that's a very powerful thing for people to come to realise in general - especially social workers. It explains so much about why people so often seem so irrationally self-distructive. People really do see different worlds through the prism of their idiosyncratic neurosis, and you can't expect people to change their behaviour out of context to the world that they cannot help but see. I know that only primal therapy can possibly change us on that level.
ReplyDelete"That thoughts resonate down to lower physiologic levels and set off commensurate biologic processes that quell the pain that the person is suffering from. "
ReplyDeleteSo, then there must be thoughts that resonate in such a way, that touch a person deeply inside, allowing them an honest expression of what they are feeling...?
So you're right. The only problems is that gating keeps access to a minimum. We in Primal Therapy enlarge that access in a slow methodical way until real cerebral access is achieved. dr. janov
ReplyDeleteFear must be the only response that is possible in only the first mind of your text... what can we do Art?
ReplyDeleteFrank your question is too cryptic to be answered. In brief, I don't understand what you mean. Is English your native language? dr. janov
ReplyDeleteI've been in really bad feelings for a month or two - lots of triggers over
ReplyDeletethe holidays and my birthday, and esp. when my former girlfriend told me last
week that she was "serious" about someone else. I've been trying to process the
feelings whenever possible. I've been going deeper than ever, and the Pain and
loneliness has been unbearable.
The main realization, and I believe the central Pain of my life, has been
the fact that I was not loved from the day that I was born. (At least by my
mother). That was manifested in a number of ways, most significantly
in not being held when I was screaming for her. There was no bonding, no
attachment, nothing - and that was utterly DEVASTATING.
Only now am I consciously feeling how alone I've always been; I certainly
was aware of the feeling, but I didn't realize just how overwhelming that Pain
really is. Or how feeling that intense isolation is not normal. And how crazy
it has made me.
I also had the insight that, whenever that feeling of rejection and
loneliness is triggered, or that I begin to feel overwhelmed, my automatic (and
heretofore unconscious) response was a physical one - struggling - and I turned
everything into a struggle to survive and to try to find somebody to love. The
feeling was that, if I just struggle hard enough, the Pain will end. Of course,
neurotic struggle is a never-ending schema.
But when I finished this Primal, it was like night and day and now I am
feeling so liberated and relaxed. And peaceful. Finally.
At least for the moment, I do not feel like a "prisoner of pain."
I cannot thank you enough, Art.
How sad it is that we are so easily triggered to over-react or under-react to the immediate circumstances. Understanding now why people behave the way they do is very helpful. My workplace is a daily "soup" of inappropriate responses that result in disharmony. Compassion, and patience, are some of the great fruits of Primal Therapy, because it truly is "Forgive them, for they know not what they do".
ReplyDeleteGreetings, Dr. Janov
ReplyDeleteHow rude it is that the world has this opportunity to communicate with you, yet so few people do.
In a world that measures progress in terms of creature comforts and entertainment value, the man who offers to show us the way to receive our appreciation of the purpose of life is being ignored. It's ironic, but given the degree of the world's disease, it's sadly appropriate.
Isaac Newton helped lay the foundation for our "better" way of life by giving us insight into the knowability of the physical things around us. He, and some others before him, started us down the road to greater control of our external environment.
While life has clearly become more convenient, more comfortable and certainly more entertaining, are we happier than we were when that process started? All the evidence I see says NO.
I have read most of your books, some more than once, and the most profound statement I have ever read, period, is "Feeling gives meaning to life". The internal environment of man is unexplored, while we send orbiters to Saturn. We spend billions on learning more about outer space, and have not yet been willling to consider that there is an inner space of which most people are completely unconscious.
I guess the big question now is, how do we turn this ship around? How do we now turn attention to the things that matter?
Steve, thanks for your kind letter. I write the books and then I leave it to others to spread the word. I just don't know how to do it. dr. janov
ReplyDeleteIt is matter over mind.
ReplyDeleteIntuitively, all my life I protected my head more than any other part of my body. I couldn’t wear hats or decorative hair bands. I couldn’t run more than 50 meters with out collapsing breathless. I couldn’t look up without getting numb. I couldn’t bend over because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t dance a forward right turn waltz.
It’s all in your head, my abusive parents said, - and they was partially right. In their self-righteousness and ignorance they labeled me as stupid, untalented and lazy.
Through violence, cultural, individual ignorance, children are forced to ignore their pain, being forced into over right painful, alerting sensation and being denied listening to what their body tells them.
At age 46 I related this painful issue to my forceps birth.
It is not known yet, if forceps used at birth, can cause damage to the Craniosynostosis that also causes a skull malformation.
However, at age 60 a MRI revealed the truth, Chiari I malformation. Now all symptoms I lived with are explained, but the childhood verbal abuse and labeling has done damage an MRI cannot reveal.
Sieglinde Alexander