On Connection (Part 1/6)

Someone wrote to me asking about the difference between abreaction and a Primal: the key difference, of course, is connection, which takes place in a Primal but never in abreaction. Why is that? Several reasons, not the least of which is that it takes great skill to produce a connected feeling and no skill to permit abreaction.

The two most important factors are: 1. that the patient arrives at a feeling/pain/need untrammeled by other feelings, (often compounded by a history of unrelenting pain from childhood trauma) and neglect. That is, the therapist must be acutely aware of the leitmotif in the session; which feelings are critical and which are peripheral. It takes years and much experience to know how to do it. If the wrong feeling is addressed we get abreaction, which is the discharge of the energy of a feeling on a different level. Secondly, We need to know on what line or level the patient is operating on so that we confine her and us to a single level and not a mélange of levels. The idea is to remain in the feeling zone, the only zone where connection can take place. If the pulse is too high or the heart rate too fast we will be over or under the feeling zone (I call the Primal Zone); no integration can take place.


Once abreaction takes place the vital signs go up and down in sporadic fashion. In connection they rise and fall together. Generally those on the high end of vital signs stay there and then have to keep feeling and feeling because nothing gets resolved.

Now why is the wrong feeling addressed? Because when a therapist has unresolved feelings of her own she will tend to drive the patient where she needs to go. Or worse, she will avoid feelings of the patient that she is not ready for. As for example, anger. If the therapist is terrified of hostility he will shut it down in the patient. He won’t let the patient go near it, and the feeling will remain unresolved. If the therapist cannot be criticized she will dodge any blame and try to make any error the patient’s fault instead of hers. This is the most widespread of problems with therapists.
What we are after is to hook up the feeling/instinct brain with higher levels so that there is a proper lock-in. This means that the historical need/feeling/pain has been fully addressed and experienced (with all of ourselves); experience means that it is not confined to a neocortical level where intellect lives. It would seem that there may be a chemical affinity between higher and lower sites so that feelings recognize each other through their chemistry. But in any case when the vital signs do not reflect integration you can bet that connection never took place.

To put it differently, we can often tell how much of a feeling has been resolved by the amount of change in cortisol levels, all vital signs or other biochemistries. I must emphasize that abreaction is a non-feeling event. It looks like feeling, often to both the patient and therapist but there is a qualitative difference. It produces awareness without consciousness. And of course the most important is that with feeling we get well. Abreaction is destructive to any feeling therapy. To a well-trained therapist there is a hollow ring to abreaction. It doesn’t “smell” right. A therapist who is not feeling cannot pick out the difference. A patient may use abreaction as a defense against feeling, slipping into crying the minute she lies down. Or simulating a birth primal. If the patient doesn’t have her feet and arms in a specific position we know it is abreaction. Each level of consciousness is an entity onto itself. If someone is reliving something emotional and then begins birth movements it means to us that there is intrusion from another level; it may be that it is a defense against too strong emotions. If she says one word or tears up during a session of reliving birth we know it is abreaction. Defenses are tricky and we need a long training to pick them up correctly. In Primal Therapy we make it safe not to block pain, because feelings are preserved with their early scenes intact. Because each higher brain level elaborates the same sensation/feeling/need differently, we can ride the top level down and it will eventually take us to the bottom—to origins. Once down there, the system on its own will move upward toward connection automatically, following the paths of evolution for connection. We then move again up toward the right OBFC and then to the left prefrontal cortex for final connection. How do we verify this? We note that in almost every reliving there is a mounting of vital signs to inordinate levels; these levels drop with connection to normal, healthy measures. In a feeling without context, which is an abreaction, there is never this kind of organized, coordinated vital function movement. A random discharge of the energy of the feeling/pain will find its reflection in the disorganization of vital signs movements. There is no harmony to the system. And our brain research found that after one year of our therapy there were systematic changes in brain function toward a more harmonized cerebral system