Wednesday, December 12, 2012
More on My Primal World
Now that we have emptied out the hospitals what can we do about the cops? I have an idea: reduce them because there will be so little need for them. Yes there will be violent crime committed by those who had bad gestational life and birth trauma; far less by those who had a decent, warm and tender childhood. There will be far less losing control because most of us will have a full set of marbles; that is, a more integrated, competent neocortex that can inhibit dangerous impulses and steer us into healthy lives. With a proper connection from feelings to top level control most of us will be able to control our feelings, our angry and terror. Actually, there will be far, far less terror and rage as the very early traumas that engender them are gone. And by the way, there will rarely be a migraine or high blood pressure because those early generating sources are no longer there.
Why do we need police? Traffic? With far less drinking and drug taking we won’t have them investigate all those accidents, taking reports and draining insurance company coffers and our wallets. What can police do? Investigate fraud by psychopaths; some will exist, and look into faulty manufacturing of cars and other things because there might still be residual psychopaths running companies. After all, companies are not known for their great conscience. They will rarely need to look into rape and sexual offenses because we will all have better control of our feelings. With all of the savings from police salaries we can spend far more on education and schooling. We will soon have a highly educated populace. And the lawyers? So little need for them…..yes for business documents but even there someone’s word will be her bond. To make sure about ownership of property, yes, we might need a lawyer. But all that litigation will be a thing of the past; less of us trying to screw someone in a business deal; truth will be the final arbiter.
And oh yes, we will know who can be trusted, not acting out our need to trust in following others blindly. Not trying to win at any cost; no stake in beating or getting ahead of someone. No need to cheat in order to win over someone else. No neurotic needs, in short, that detour us and drive us relentlessly. No need to keep going and be unable to relax. With full feeling comes full sexuality and makes marriages and relationships better. And when personal needs becomes acknowledged we care for those who are needy and try to help. We vote for those who understand need and want to do something about it. Society will be geared around need; primary need and not manufactured ones such fame and riches. We will really be our brother’s keeper.
We won’t impoverish our country with constant buildup of arms. We will not feel so unsafe that we need more and more guns in order to feel safe and protected. Being stable and secure we will not have to manufacture enemies to combat. We will not have to project our inner demons into outside evil forces who want to hurt us. We can tell the difference between our inner feelings and outside reality. And we won’t have to project our feelings onto new relationships so that this woman or man won’t just be wonderful but will be seen realistically. Remember we project our unfulfilled needs onto others at first because need dominates. And then with more experience we begin to see reality. That is the start of divorce and the start of lifelong suffering in the children. All that can be avoided. Obviously, not everyone’s perceptions will be perfect but they will be much better. We won’t look for salvation because we no longer look for a savior. We can save ourselves. I will leave it to you to see about religion; but John Lennon said it: the dream is over…..I don’t believe in…...
All this is not in the realm of improbable or impossible. We have the means to do it all NOW. But first, a small detail. We need to produce feeling human beings who have enough of themselves not to be taken in. After that, the rest is easy. When we know our insides as well as the outside we will have a good idea what is wrong with us and why. A stomach ache will be understood without doctoring. And what a relief—our vital signs will be normal so that we won’t have to rush to doctors. Serious afflictions will be rare as will inexplicable behavior such as impulsivity. We will no longer be a mystery to ourselves because biology and psychology will be taught in schools and help make us more aware. Bad behavior in school will be examined for causes, rather than simply punished, so that all children will learn about themselves and about feelings. Feeling people can teach better because they understand the world and themselves better. They teach about the feeling capacity of animals and how we must take care with them. They teach kindness so that we make schools and our families pleasant places. Home will be soothing and calm; not shouting and bickering, nor a place for punishment. There will be no need to punish; almost none of us learn from it. And parents who are not harassed welcome their children home from school with a smile and joy. The child feels wanted and cared for. So a child, deprived of emotion, will not grow up and become a victim of the first person who says he wants her or that he is interested in her. She will have enough of herself to see it all objectively.
Part of feeling is to be considerate of the environment--we live in and from. No using beach or street as an ashtray. No throwing trash anywhere.
We keep our environment clean; not so difficult. And we eat well because we understand and cherish our insides; we treat it well, not abusing it with cigarettes and alcohol. So little addiction that it will not be a great problem; no need to kill imprinted pain because there will be so little.
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I think schools would be very different places in deed. I think that in many ways schools are there for indoctrination. Most schools are actually Scruels! Plus the fact that teachers who went into Primal schools would respect the kids rather than being a bunch of control freaks (obviously not all)that many are now. Nothing like taking power over 30 kids in a class and dishing out "Dark Sarcasm"
ReplyDeleteI guess Summerhill school is a Primal school (although it wouldn't undo early traumas). I wonder whether AS Neill ever heard of Primal when he was alive?
DeleteDavid: Primal never existed when he was alive, alas. art
DeleteHe died in 1973 but maybe not....I'd like to think he would have seen that Primal was the piece of the jigsaw missing...like yourself he was ahead of his time.
DeleteArt
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful world this sounds to be. It should be like this but I fear human beings have gone too far in ignorance and towards disaster to realise thw rold as you know it could be. A lovely blog, thankyou!
Oh were it only to be so. What a world this would be !
ReplyDeleteQuote: "I will leave it to you to see about religion".
ReplyDeleteIt is impossible for a rational mind to fill mystery with fairytale, and believe it like it's real. Only the deluded can believe in delusions.
...and actually less money will be spent on schools, because research has shown that after a basic amount of investment the money seems to do more harm than good, even with respect to traditional measurable outcomes.
Education will instead evolve with the child and adult naturally, as we realise that the exaggerated institutionalisation of child development was and is an industrialists programme to make "human resources" that are built to order (this is a fact of history). And notice how schools teach you how to get a job in the current regime, but never how to bring up a child? My point is in a "primal world" people will reclaim education for themselves - not monetary interests. It will teach people what they need to know for THEIR lives. Like you said, Art - truly educated.
Hi Andrew!
DeleteI thought I would just throw this in. Only those who want to be deluded, can and will believe their delusions. and where does the desire to be deluded come from? I would suggest fear, anxiety, dread, and like. Those are 1st and 2nd level feelings that can go as far as to instruct the mediator of the external senses, the cortex, to see what is not there, hear what is not sounding, and think and believe what is not so. I do not think the cortex is capable of rebellion and refusing to take orders from below.
I am dealing with a person in my life right now, who has no pre-frontal cortex control of feelings, urges, or emotions. He is a runaway freight train heading down a steep hill. He does not want to hear or see bad in himself or see need for improvement or change. He is at the mercy of the animal 1st/2nd level in him. His cortex is virtually dormant if not comatose. Do you see the problem? The core (1st/2nd) has shut down the thinking brain. Only problem is, the gates don’t work so well, so he suffers and drinks like a fish. No way to control the cortex very well, so he is someone no one likes to be around.
Delusions are not motivated by the cortex. It is the core that drives the cortex to do as the core pleases. Always had been, always will be.
Hi Apollo,
Deleteright on your case matey:
-"Only those who want to be deluded, can and will believe their delusions. and where does the desire to be deluded come from? I would suggest fear, anxiety, dread, and like. Those are 1st and 2nd level feelings that can go as far as to instruct the mediator of the external senses, the cortex, to see what is not there, hear what is not sounding, and think and believe what is not so. I do not think the cortex is capable of rebellion and refusing to take orders from below"-.
You make Primal Theory into a Georgian Navy Ship Mutiny!
Mutiny on the Primal. . .
The 1st line, our brainstem gets it's set points distorted and the 2nd and 3rd line 'grow' distorted from that. Worse compounding trauma in the 2nd may well completely shut off access to any real sensations and feelings at all and the poor patient then becomes forced to live in the ramparts of his mind. Full blown repression.
That was me.
I studied personality type for decades in 'panels' listening to people's testimonies and over many years I saw people who had realised their fixations chronically limiting their lives finally break down and sob with the relief of realising they no longer needed to carry on in the ramparts, they could finally have a feeling life.
I was one of those panellists and I need to go further, to the clinic.
Are you going to the clinic as well? Come on Apollo, stop building Primal Theory into another buttress of your intellectual fortifications. You wont get me to help you do that; is that why you freeze me out? Did your mother freeze you out, or your alcoholic brother before he died? If so join the club, my family and friends have frozen me out. . .
Paul G.
"All this is not in the realm of improbable or impossible. We have the means to do it all NOW."
ReplyDeleteYes. We can start with a primal community. We can buy a large chunk of land and subdivide it into many very affordable properties. We can develop our own primal school. We can help each other with life's little problems, and we can go sailing and have picnics in the weekends and our children can play together even when the sun is setting. Humans have been living like that for thousands of years. Think of it as a highly intelligent hippy commune without the drugs and broken bicycles. We need a few more primal therapists.
Richard: I prefer to think of it without the hippies. I find them depressing.
DeleteRichard,
DeleteIn The Country of The Blind
When I read your suggestion of a Primal Community, H.G. Wells’ story “In The Country of The Blind” pops up in my mind. I read it a few times after having tried to explain to my, in many respects qualified, surrounding what Primal Therapy was. The trick I used in order to “survive”, when my explanations failed, was to imagine that I was a king in a country of “blind” people. So H.G. Wells story is both helpful and beautiful and it has several bottoms...
One of the ambitions with the Primal Therapy is to establish an integrated unified circuit between the different levels in the brain and I am not sure that your community will create such a circuit with the rest of the US or any other part of the world for that matter.
Jan Johnsson
Hi Richard and Jan,
DeleteI have been involved with 'alternative counter culture' for decades only to conclude that those adherents are as much 'on the outside' as any one else (including me) and in the authorities they so fervently bang up against. I was part of all that and the communities you sketch already exist; in one form or another.
But "It's all out there" isn't it. . . ?
Not everything I have been experiencing is ab-reaction, since getting into my true feelings I have completely lost interest in anything 'out there'. . . I mean, sure, I'm still interested in everything I was before (including engines, machines, carpentry and beautiful women). But now I am not in the grip of that interest, I'm not fixated by it.
I have come to see that if there were a qualification for membership of a group that could live in a more Primal way and establish Primal Communities, then touching true feelings is the qualification.
We want if we really wish hard enough for it. As adults that takes the form of a long term commitment to one's true feelings. As Art has said so many times: without that access, one's consciousness is biased, is incomplete and pushes distortions into a coloured awareness. Somewhere Art has mentioned it even tends to push us into the old situations we were 'twisted' into in the first place, we repeat, we recur and we suffer. Access makes the difference, access starts the process. Proper supervision by a genuinely trained Primal Therapist keeps us on track till we can look after our own re-living experiences.
Then we might start a Primal School or Community.
Paul G.
I honestly like your idea, Richard. But I suspect that getting rid of all our pain will not make us perfect people or easy to get along with, or even non-neurotic or free from self-delusion, and bad reasoning. That is blind unrealistic hope. For even in fully pain relived people, there are ideas we are going to find as undesirable or even scary.
DeleteFearing those things will make us deny them or run from them, even after having gotten rid of all our pain. Art seems to indicate that stored severe traumatic pain is the cause of all human error. I just don’t believe it. I can not even discuss the research I would like to. But Pain can often be a nice escape goat and excuse for poor choices of direction, etc.
Our desires, free of pain, will still lead us in wrong directions. Pain free will not stop me from desiring the opposite sex. When that desire competes with other choices, will I make the right one? Will my desire overcome good sense? Freedom from excess pain will not guarantee that I can or will always make the right decisions. In the end, I still must examine myself at all times and question myself to try to make the right decisions. No Excuses.
Jan and Antti, in Baja, Mexico, there is a large gated community of immigrants from many different countries. They have guards patrolling the perimeter. I know that doesn't sound very nice, but it's better than it sounds. Young women walk along the beach at night, without any fear of being mugged. The native Mexicans who live and work there earn more money than in other parts of Mexico. The overall living standard is very good. No doubt the money that flows into Baja comes from neurotic hard work, but the 'togetherness' is a real triumph. Would you want your children to play in the streets near the Mexican border?
DeleteA Primal community would be more than 'togetherness'.....it would be 'feeling togetherness'. If we want to change the entire world, we can start by setting an example. We can proudly advertise our primal lifestyle. We can say, "Look at our safe, loving community. Look at all the children and adults enjoying a huge picnic in Primal Park. Look...no perverts....and no neglected babies crying in the hot sun....and no dangerous dogs....and no slippery concrete edges around our lake. Look at the total absence of guns. Look at the houses with doors that open at night. Look at our Primal School and Primal Center....and Primal Shopping Center selling non-toxic food, and Primal Dance Fever Night Club where all the girls can shake their booties without having to ask for their daddy's permission. Look at our HUMAN community. Let us help you to heal. Come and join us."
Richard: Wow, all you need now is to make it happen art
DeletePaul: Well said. art
DeleteThank you for creating great awareness Art.
ReplyDeleteHow can I make my 4 yr old daughter's pain go away from her traumatic birth and rough handling by the doctors? Also, is it possible for a mother to birth without trauma to baby if the mother's birth experience was traumatic?
If one could understand the careful and loving intent that guides all this, a loving hand would be recognized in every word and ever line. There is a hidden power in forgiveness to solve it all, in which I still believe. The hope in a future unlike the past is in the healing of the heart.
ReplyDeleteHi Anonymous,
DeleteI don't believe in forgiveness anymore. Sometimes I can summon up 'compassion' and that I feel is the feeling behind what you call forgiveness. The trouble with 'forgiveness' is that it is a word, an adjective? To describe something else? An observation of a feeling. It is a 'subject / object' transaction.
I think Compassion is an aspect of Love. It is the feeling one gets when one 'sees' beyond the symptom and 'reads' the history enclosed; then for a moment one becomes 'impartial'. Moreover the feeling of compassion has to go through all one's own resonances (revulsion, awe, confusion etc) until one is able to touch the true feelings of another sufferer without causing harm (abreaction) in the other. That presumably is the non technical description of a Primal Therapist?
I dunno, I just guessing.
Paul G.
Hi Paul,
DeleteThank you for your thoughts. I will reflect carefully. Some of these thoughts go very deep. Ultimately it depends on belief I think, which one cannot attack.
Without taking on guilt or shame for what resulted in the pain, it for me provides an opening for a healing hand to touch and provide a reversal.
I would agree on your non-technical definition of a Primal Therapist, the intent of not causing harm.
I think healing without forgiveness is impossible, like two sides of the same coin working hand in hand, through the opening of the heart that is willing. To me, every Primal Patient is saying just that.
I can understand what you say though on it feeling like it's becoming only a word.
To me it is not.
I recognize a sensitive being in you.
With love,
MM anonymous
Call me Mr Semantic if you like but the point I'm driving at is 'who is making who feel better with forgiveness'?
DeleteI'm not trying to challenge your truth or your feelings but I am trying to get to the meaning of forgiveness and so far I have to say it seems like Art said before: "A Religious Concept". With the emphasis on 'concept', ie: "a thought form".
I have found myself many times wrapped up in what Andrew referred to in me: 'a symbolic feeling', one which still takes on a 'conceptual' meaning. Like the way we might look at a photograph of a loved one and go through a 'ritual' of sensation & emotion in the place of the genuine feeling we 'need' to express (which as likely is nothing to do with that loved one but to do with us as little ones).
I am convinced of the solidity of Art's theory that our feelings 'push' our thoughts. The horse refers to us. Thus the forgiveness we enmesh ourselves in may actually be a ball of thought driven by deeper feeling. I say all this because I have begun to see there could be no end to 'abreaction' and it so feels like the real thing.
My concern for anyone invested in 'forgiveness' (as a concept) is that they may forever need that concept to trap their trauma in and so remain un healed. Un healed but beatifically resigned to it as well; a sort of 'fatalism'. I'm not saying this is what you are doing but I sure have seen my New Age colleagues beatifically pronouncing me as 'other' and smiling like the pope with smug as you like conceit. They are so "forgiving". . . Yeurgh!
Paul G.
Art: I have a completely different take on what a post Primal world would be like ... that's if we could get there. The first thing I feel would evaporate is the very need for a means of exchange (money or any other device). As a consequence so many other things that the exchange system supports would also just evaporate ... for example government and it's purpose 'Law' and thus the very need for a 'police force' would become redundant. Defense and armies would also become redundant and we humans would realize that instead of the competitive behavior we've pursued (because of the need to have money to survive) we would change rapidly and become a co-operative being ... were giving sometimes and taking at others would become normal and natural. We enter the world taking (taking that is, our needs). we leave this world giving ... we can't take any of it with us.
ReplyDeleteTalking about becoming "natural" I feel we would automatically resort to our true "Nature" as opposed to what we currently do "Behave" (in order that.....).
I have long promoted this 'transition' and many have called me crazy, unrealistic, stupid and impractical. What it requires is a 'conceptual' leap. A totally feeling-full person that had had loving and caring parents (I feel) would see this clearly). It is us neurotics not having had that love that causes all this CONVOLUTED thinking that makes matters worse... instead of being able to see the very simplicity of life.
Jack.
off topic:
ReplyDeleteDr. Janov,
PBS brought a very interesting Study on “alcohol gene”.
“Scientists Say Bottoms Up to Find the Connection Between Genes and Addiction”
SUMMARY: Scientists have not found one master alcoholism gene in DNA but rather several that may affect a person's susceptibility. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien goes under the influence to examine the genetic science behind alcoholism and other addictions, and how the answers point to great challenges in curing substance abuse.
Especial interesting is the statement from David Carr.
Video: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec12/addiction_12-13.html
Sieglinde
This actually seems really close to improbable, thought very nice. It seems like neurosis has probably been with mankind and driven us since we formed. It pretty much runs this world.
ReplyDeleterjkingman: True, but it doesn't have to. we have to start somewhere. art
DeleteWhat might have happened if Poul O’Neill had known of the importance of “Life Before Birth”?.
ReplyDeleteOver and again I have been asking myself why I have had so much success with Primal Therapy. I have more than once come to the conclusion that PT has been my symbolic Operating System. To PT / OS I have added applications which have given me winning habits to make it possible to relive pain, dissolve neuroses and to release my “competent neocortex so it could inhibit dangerous impulses and steer me into a healthy life”.
When I wanted to change my problem, I asked WHY it existed, until I felt satisfied with the answer. Then I developed a vision and eventually I developed the HABITS which eliminated the root of my problem.
I will try to give an example which I have taken from “The Power of Habits” of Charles Duhigg. It is about Poul O´Neill who before his successful career as CEO of Alcoa was working for the US government. He then created a framework for analyzing federal spending on health care, when one of the foremost issues concerning official was infant mortality. The US, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth had higher infant mortality rate than Europe and parts of South America. A staggering number of babies died before their first birthdays.
“O’Neill was tasked with figuring out why. He asked other federal agencies to start analyzing infant mortality data, and each time someone came back with an answer, he’d ask another question, trying to get deeper, to understand the problem’s root causes. Whenever someone came into O’Neill’s office with some discovery, O’Neill would start interrogating them with new inquiries. He drove people crazy with his never-ending push to learn more, to understand what was really going on.
Some research suggested that the biggest cause of infant deaths was premature births. The reason babies were born too early was that mothers suffered from malnourishment during pregnancy. So to lower infant mortality, improve mothers’ diets. Simple, right? But to stop malnourishment, women had to improve their diets before they became pregnant. Which meant the government had to start educating women about nutrition before they became sexually active. Which meant officials had to create nutrition curriculums inside high schools.
However, when O’Neill began asking about how to create those curriculums, he discovered that many high school teachers in rural areas didn’t know enough basic biology to teach nutrition. So the government had to remake how teachers were getting educated in college, and give them a stronger grounding in biology, so they could eventually teach nutrition to teenage girls, so those teenagers would eat better before they started having sex, and, eventually, be sufficiently nourished when they had children.
Poor teacher training, the officials working with O’Neill finally figured out was a root cause of high infant mortality. If you asked doctors or public health officials for a plan to fight infant deaths, none of them would have suggested changing how teachers are trained. They wouldn’t have known there was a link. However, by teaching college students about biology, you made it possible for them eventually to pass on that knowledge to teenagers, who started eating healthier, and years later give birth to stronger babies. Today, the US infant mortality rate, is 68 percent lower than O’Neill started the job.
O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish and to start a chain reaction.”
What might have happened if O’Neill had went one step further and found out of the importance of our “Life before Birth”?
Jan Johnsson
To lose my mom ... my life's tragedy ... but my "lessons" to my own life!
ReplyDeleteMy elderly mother is now staying in a nursing home due to a fall in which she broke both her femurs... a terrible tragedy for her.
I have visited her constantly and have witnessed how her cognitive defense now demolished... defense that her home has been... what it with all her chores keeps away from conscious awareness.
We talk about confusion as an older phenomenon... confusion that all our life has consisted of… but without knowledge of it... as anxiety and depression was deputy.
Now... now that she has lost the closeness to what her home meant cognitively so has her defense to her life history started penetrate... leak... and at a pace that her current circumstances at her nursing home not can protect her from... with very confusing consequences as result... but with its reality of what was then... then as she was a little girl.
Involuntarily she remembers things with devastating consequences as no process of conscious awareness occurs... she thinks she is on her way to what then was… as she is at a place without any defenses... entering her memories of the limbic system… or she is already there in her memories... there where the memory of what the limbic system has very well preserved… ever since she was a little girl.
It cannot be more clear how cognitive activities was lifesaving when she as a child could not defend herself through other than narrowing... an electrochemical process that involuntarily started because of the intensity of loveless relationships caused.
What a tragedy I am witnessing overpriced but a reality that I also have to litigate in myself. I really needed my mom as a child but I never got it. I was frozen out into hell mazes. Something that we have not learned from as the primal therapy existed for decades. It is enough now!
Frank
If you accidentally place your hand on a hot surface, you will automatically move your hand away from the heat before you feel the pain.
ReplyDeleteHow long is the time gap between the unconscious process (the simple automatic reaction) and the conscious interpretation (the pain and proper understanding)?
According to Dr. G. D. Schott, the time gap can be anywhere from a couple of seconds for a mild burn, to several decades for patients who have experienced a severe injury (such as a damaged limb requiring amputation). This phenomenon has been well documented with countless case studies.
If the time gap between the unconscious process and the conscious process was several decades, would that mean the unconscious process continued for several decades?
Dr. Schott highlights a report of a patient who experienced the specific sensation of an ice skate cutting through the skin and deep muscles in his leg while he was receiving saline injections in his stump thirty years after the accident occurred. The patient said he had never experienced the awful cutting sensation at the time of the accident.
My hypothesis:
In these cases of severe mutilation, the eventual sensation of pain is not a complete one; it is the beginning of an incomplete primal.
A hot stove under the palm of your hand will cause a simple automatic reaction, then two seconds later you will feel the pain, and then you will acquire an explicit understanding of the accident.
Forceps on each side of your head will cause a simple automatic reaction, then twenty years later, in therapy, you will feel the pain, and then you will acquire an explicit understanding of the accident.
Maybe my reasoning is annoying you, Art, but just think about it for a moment: an imprint is an ongoing, unresolved, unconscious, defensive response. I am suggesting that an insignificant burn does generate an imprint -- an imprint that lasts for only two seconds. I am suggesting that all bad events are imprinted, but some imprints last longer than others, and weak imprints are affected by earlier stronger ones, and the strongest ones are epigenetic.
Even if this hypothesis is bullshit, it might get the attention of Dr. Schott and others like him.
Hallo Richard!
DeleteAbout the forceps delivery bit on your blog, I always have had two rosy looking marks in the same area each side of the head, hidden under very thick hair. I never knew what it was till recently... why they were there. I was born 2 months premature with my non identical twin who came 20 minutes after me but we were so very tiny and we nearly died in the incubators where we were left for weeks.I should think forceps to a little baby must seem terribly cruel?
Richard Atkin: "We need a few more primal therapists."
ReplyDeleteWell, there's an understatement! As far as I know the Primal Center alone needs more therapists... let alone the amount of therapists needed for this "Primal World" to exist. Or, if we forget about Primal therapists, just changing our birth practices, for example... I don't see it happening. I'm afraid that, although in principle everything Art wrote is possible, in practice it is not. But I am a pessimist, so who knows.
Planespotter: "I think schools would be very different places in deed." As I'm writing this, two news stories have emerged from the US: 1) The massacre at the school in Connecticut. 2) From the state of Michigan: "Changes to the concealed weapons law passed the state House and Senate late Thursday, allowing trained gun owners to carry their weapons in formerly forbidden places, such as schools, day care centers, stadiums and churches." http://www.freep.com/article/20121214/NEWS15/312140129/
In a Primal World would we hear crazy news like this? I think not. How about addiction? Would we have to resort to something like this (a surgery that has emerged in China, where part's of the brain's pleasure centers are simply destroyed): http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/13/controversial-surgery-for-addiction-burns-away-brains-pleasure-center/
That's not very far from lobotomy if you ask me. So... although I think the Primal World is a pipe dream (I have nothing against pipe dreams per se, some of my best friends are pipe dreams), it is something to strive forward to... even if it does seem pointless to parasympath like me.
Hi AnttiJ
DeleteThe school killings in Connecticut are such a horror. It has raised the horror of Dumblain in the UK. Last year in the UK 38 people were killed by guns where as it was around 9000 in the USA where half of the worlds privately held guns are. It seems that abuse, hurt and pain are enshrined in the US constitution. A right to bear arms would suggest a certain paranoia about the world and where does that paranoia start. Our early life when we are hurt by our Parents in an often religious influenced attempt to make us good often by frightening us beyond measure. Spare the rod and spoil the child crap. It is often said that human beings got together into big groups when agriculture was developed and larger numbers were needed to grow wheat to make bread. Some suggest that this bread was not used to eat but as the basis of very early beer. Thus large groups got together to drink a poison so they could feel loved. Therefore society has always been damaged. Wht carry a gun if society is full of people who were always respected for who they were from the day they were born and before. A school which allows kids to only go to the lessons they want to go to would be a start like A S Neill's in the UK.
An addition to my last post. What a heroine the women teacher was who when she heard the gunfire bundled all her class into a cupboard and told the gunman her class were in the gym. He shot and killed her but she saved many young lives. Such a tragedy.
Deleteplanespotter: I wrote a piece on another mass killing. I will try to find it. art
DeleteRichard,
ReplyDeleteMany babies that have just been born, go through what you may call a primal, their tiny bodies trying desperately to get rid of any or all of the pain they had experienced up to that point in time. Problem is babies are not allowed to cry their pain out. Neither are toddlers, young children, teenagers or adults.
At age 3 or 4, parents observe what they call "temper tantrums". By that age a small human body cannot tolerate or contain any more pain, tears or anger, resulting in a wholesale dumping of emotions.
These actions draw alarming responses from the average parent, many or most who want to stop the "tantrums" asap by any means, be it medication or whatever. My father took a belt to us, forcing all feelings deep down back into our psyches. It has taken me 30 years to work most of this pain out of my system, thanks to PT.
Patrick: well said. You all say it better than I can. art
DeleteHi yes,
Deleteand it's the anger held down in the two year old me that's driving me arthritis and depression and an early stroke / heart attack (if I don't get into therapy soon). I feel there's such an opportunity for parents to let their toddlers get rid of this tension but somehow (and particularly in England) we make our children into anger repressors who later become deranged as a consequence.
Guns and shootings in schools for eg.
Paul G.
Patrick, that was amazing. Art said you said it better than him. You said it better than anyone or thing I have ever come across. What an insight. A primal might last 2 hours. No one will let a baby rage for 2 hours. We really are completely unprepared for parenthood.
DeleteI notice among Christian types that they do not allow anger any place at all. I admit, there is a time and place for everything, and anger can be dangerous when not in the right context. But anger does need venting somewhere. Even the Psalms allowed for that.
As well, Christians types say all (sexual) thoughts and attractions are lust. Nothing proper at all about them. Imagine that. God must have made a mistake. What a dummy, huh? I do not accept that premise, though. We do not allow for many things in humans, thereby negating most of their feelings and emotions, and making them feel like nothing or worse, like dirt.
To admit and give respect to others, maybe we ought to start with babies. Maybe in addition to bathrooms and changing rooms, we ought to make a crying room for moms with babies so that the public can be spared the nightmare of a screaming child, who deserves the chance to scream and make known their needs. Those tiny little vocal cords are the only tool they have for survival. We haven't figured it out yet, primal fans excluded.
Let me express my gratitude for a piece of enlightenment from you. It is a precious piece of knowledge that only makes me better and more capable, though still powerless as most of us are.
I think a newborn that screams for two hours should be monitored and soothed as much as possible. Medication should be used only if death or serious cell damage is inevitable. Until we have more evidence, we should assume that newborns are not strong enough, nor developed enough to primal.
DeleteBabies should not be left in a separate room to "cry it out". There may be a link between cot death and trauma from being isolated.
What we least want to know is what we need the most… what we least wanted to know is what we need the most!
ReplyDeleteIf this is the case... we do not know what the limbic system carries with it and that's what we need to focus on in order to understand the psychological problems and further the primal therapeutic process... which also would solve all the world's symptomatic reactions. We must focus on what the limbic system contains... focus on what’s there… there in the name of science and further intensify the clinical trials.
At first… we can leave the brain stems content as it confuses neo cortex... we know by know that we need to focus on the limbic system as it is what comes first in the primal therapy process... concentrate on our emotional memories from our childhood. What we are at is shown in our symptomatic reactions… symptomatic reactions as we so clearly experience in our lives… as we by depression and anxiety carry with us in our life… but also "surprising" in order of how the primal therapeutic process makes its way into our history.
Generally speaking… we know that the limbic system carries the sensing part of the brain and neo cortex the thinking… a question of how we interpret electrochemical signals as some signals do not reach their goals and others reaching connections to conscious awareness.
Why do we get anxiety... must be of the utmost interest to all who suffer and are working in the field... that's what we fail to put our thumb on. There are a thousand and one ways to ask a question and we must search among the thousands! There are a thousand and one ways to explain something and we have to search through the thousands!
The child in us cries out his despair by symptoms of anxiety and depression and that's not far from being at conscious awareness only we should have room to allow the process within us... what is there to prove otherwise?
To me... it looks as if we need a ”religious” speaker who are so convinced of what he says that he is one with God... one with what it is primal therapy scientifically proves.
Frank
Frank: I have 50 pages on what anxiety is in my "Life Before Birth". art
DeleteI saw an interesting scene in a movie, today:
ReplyDelete“Change of Habit” 1969, Universal Pictures, Elvis Presley, Mary Tyler Moore
What stood out most was the young autistic girl who Elvis took into his arms and encouraged her to get as angry as she could. He continued to struggle with her for a very long time. Th movie leads one to believe it was several hours at least. She was crying quite a bit and got real loud. Great anguish among her step mom (aunt) and others listening outside the office. MT Moore was inside with Elvis and the girl. The girl gave up her strongest emotions and then was fine.
I have heard of primals done to the autistic. This seems to clearly mimic that. What have you experienced with autistic treatment? I had thought you had a patient in one book that did this with her daughter or boy. But finding things like this in movies is interesting. Some do know, but won’t say.
Apollo: Sorry I don't remember what you mention. art
DeleteAn email comment:
ReplyDeleteWhat might have happened if Poul O’Neill had known of the importance of “Life Before Birth”?.
Over and again I have been asking myself why I have had so much success with Primal Therapy. I have more than once come to the conclusion that PT has been my symbolic Operating System. To PT / OS I have added applications which have given me winning habits to make it possible to relive pain, dissolve neuroses and to release my “competent neocortex so it could inhibit dangerous impulses and steer me into a healthy life”.
When I wanted to change my problem, I asked WHY it existed, until I felt satisfied with the answer. Then I developed a vision and eventually I developed the HABITS which eliminated the root of my problem.
I will try to give an example which I have taken from “The Power of Habits” of Charles Duhigg. It is about Poul O´Neill who before his successful career as CEO of Alcoa was working for the US government. He then created a framework for analyzing federal spending on health care, when one of the foremost issues concerning official was infant mortality. The US, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth had higher infant mortality rate than Europe and parts of South America. A staggering number of babies died before their first birthdays.
“O’Neill was tasked with figuring out why. He asked other federal agencies to start analyzing infant mortality data, and each time someone came back with an answer, he’d ask another question, trying to get deeper, to understand the problem’s root causes. Whenever someone came into O’Neill’s office with some discovery, O’Neill would start interrogating them with new inquiries. He drove people crazy with his never-ending push to learn more, to understand what was really going on.
Some research suggested that the biggest cause of infant deaths was premature births. The reason babies were born too early was that mothers suffered from malnourishment during pregnancy. So to lower infant mortality, improve mothers’ diets. Simple, right? But to stop malnourishment, women had to improve their diets before they became pregnant. Which meant the government had to start educating women about nutrition before they became sexually active. Which meant officials had to create nutrition curriculums inside high schools.
However, when O’Neill began asking about how to create those curriculums, he discovered that many high school teachers in rural areas didn’t know enough basic biology to teach nutrition. So the government had to remake how teachers were getting educated in college, and give them a stronger grounding in biology, so they could eventually teach nutrition to teenage girls, so those teenagers would eat better before they started having sex, and, eventually, be sufficiently nourished when they had children.
Poor teacher training, the officials working with O’Neill finally figured out was a root cause of high infant mortality. If you asked doctors or public health officials for a plan to fight infant deaths, none of them would have suggested changing how teachers are trained. They wouldn’t have known there was a link. However, by teaching college students about biology, you made it possible for them eventually to pass on that knowledge to teenagers, who started eating healthier, and years later give birth to stronger babies. Today, the US infant mortality rate, is 68 percent lower than O’Neill started the job.
O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish and to start a chain reaction.”
What might have happened if O’Neill had went one step further and found out of the importance of our “Life before Birth”?
Jan
Hi Jan,
Delete-a different kind of food though isn't it? Not a 'commodity' we pass through our digestive system but an ongoing emotional/instinctual relationship with the next generation also starting before conception.
Paul G.
I agree with you, Paul, what you say about forgiveness. I'm the other 'Anonymous' who hates religion like the plague,agrees sometimes with Apollo, lives in the island - prison called England and went to visit A.S. Neill's school in February last year. There is NO RELIGION there! It makes me smarm and cringe when I hear that sickly word forgiveness. Yuk.All this healing of the heart, too. Like there is some big god up there sitting on a purple cloud ready to heal pain with ideas of forgiveness. What a joke. So right you said earlier on this blog there is no place for anger with christians or was it religious folk. Too right! They are the most oppressive anti feeling weirdos on this earth. I ought to know I have the ill luck to live in a block of flats. I have a severe faced anti life christian in the flat over mine, a t.v. addict who blasts noise at me till midnight every night and a jehovahs witness next door who reprimands me when she hears me close my damn door once a day. Religion- and Christmas should be banned. I wish.Happy new unforgiving year, everybody. Be angry as hell and never feel guilty!
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