Articles on Primal Therapy, psychogenesis, causes of psychological traumas, brain development, psychotherapies, neuropsychology, neuropsychotherapy. Discussions about causes of anxiety, depression, psychosis, consequences of the birth trauma and life before birth.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
On What Helps Us Love
There is the obvious: being loved from the start.
There is the less obvious, abstracting the chemical elements that are part of the ability to give and receive love; i.e, oxytocin. Being loved is the natural way; paradoxically, another way is to feel the lack of love, which seems to normalize so many biochemicals. I have seen so many patients who are unloved by parents who cannot sustain a loving relationship.
This inability to love is now being recognized in the field and doctors are prescribing a spray that enhances oxytocin. I have another idea; let them scream out their agony over not being loved, in Primal Therapy. What we find is an increase in loving in patients who have relived their pain over the lack of love. It is an odd dialectic that crying out not being loved can help you love, as one turns into the other. Determined to love one’s wife or kids will help but it does not add the feeling element to the process. And it is the feeling element that is missing, at the start. And can happen despite our best intentions. The will power needs to be driven by passion and feelings. Otherwise it remains a cerebral desire, bereft of feeling.
Those who take pain killers also suppress passion. But, suppose we are on pain-killers permanently; when there is great early pain, there is an equal and opposite reaction to hold down feeling…repression which is constant and obdurate to hold down great agony. Then we cannot love completely. And that can begin before we begin in this world. Clearly, when we remove deeply embedded pain we enhance the ability to love. We reopen the feeling channels.
Remember, feeling unloved means feeling; repressing it means no feeling.
Let us not look only at oxytocin because what we have found is that normalizing the patient elevates so many biochemicals to normal levels, as we have measured over the years.
We do not dissect the patient into his parts, a kidney, a heart or a liver. We try to approach the human being as a totality and expect changes as a totality, as well. That is the trouble with Rolfing and Bioenergetics where muscle groups are targeted and worked on to the exclusion of the brain and mind. Which means all that does not come from the central nervous system but the organs themselves. Which is how we go awry studying the organ apart from the human being. And we get changes in the muscle groups and not an organic change. Relaxing tense muscles is not the same as relaxing the whole person. The tension usually arrives from experiences in life and those sculpt the human being. I treated one person who had chronic arm muscle tension. He felt in therapy he was chronically holding back, hitting back his father who beat him incessantly. Beware of the facile, easy answers. We are not an arm, a liver or blood pressure. We are humans, and therapy must be of experience.
Love a word to not exist!
ReplyDeleteYesterday I was back at my mother's parents' house... I was eleven years old and recently had an operation for appendicitis. I was in a house completely without love. I was in a atmosphere like a vacuum... my head felt like it could implode... a vacuum I have no memories of but now at my return I felt the madness of... to be so alone as I was and absolutely nobody to talk to. WHERE AM I... WHERE HAVE YOU LEFT ME!? If I would have to stay there alone out on the countryside I would have been buried in this vacuum with no way in trying to run away from myself... a lurking condition I have been carried with me throughout my life.
It is not so that we become schizophrenics we have it with us and we just live in another crazy world away from it. We live for what we are forced to teach us ... we are punished to be "normal" and normal is to become an intellectual... keep our thinking in order for the requirements of it... which is the only possibility way to be accepted... the only way possible in attempt to be and to fit into for what our system can possibly perform and we've become talented idiots with an lurking outbreak of schizophrenia.
Frank
I don't know Frank. You seem to know how to act, but yet you don't think you had never been in a loving atmosphere growing up. To know how to be, is a good thing. One must have, possibly, at one time, shown you the loving ways of the world early on?
DeleteHello beachcoast7
DeleteMy life is just about pain in addition to glimpses of other things!
My moments from the experiences of love are memories when our neighbor... a beautiful young student smiled at me when we met... and she asked me if I wanted to help her raking leaves in her garden. Her smile rushed through my body like a fire without burning as my memories in primal therapy confirmed... a crash against my suffering... but still than the experience of love for the beauty I experienced. I was ten years old and now I will never forget it. I got a glimt of love. A moment of memories like that can be enough to reconnect it... even if it only lasted for a moment... it when we do our journy in primal therapy as we slowly but surely moving towards what we went through... even for what a glimt of love meant... moments that can color our whole lives when we get the chance to meet up with them.
Your Frank
Knowing that love and loving ways are the answer, but yet for some reason the one born in trauma, always needs and seeks much more love. And when they don't get....what sometimes happens , is that they "give up" all together (on loving fellow human beings) almost to the point where they don't even "act" like themselves possibly because outside family and friend life....it is a cold world. But yes, of course, one must be themselves....and be a loving, caring natural person. What happens when they aren't...., just totally not right; they can't act like some of the "cold" people in this world. Primal Therapy is the answer; so it's not so much a "ball of confusion" for that person.
ReplyDeleteSorry but I vehemently disagree with Janov when he writes that "the trouble with ...Bioenergetics (is that) muscle groups are targeted and worked on to the exclusion of the brain and mind" ,and most inaccurately when Janov writes that "relaxing tense muscles is not the same as relaxing the whole person" . First of all ,the mind is not excluded in Bioenergetics; it's considered to be part of the energetic whole of an organism, and thus affected by any pressures on the organism and affected indirectly by therapeutic procedures. And the brain is not excluded either because it it too is implicitly considered as part of the energetic whole. True, neither Reich nor Lowen talk about the brain (and hormones etc...) as much as Janov, but in terms of results , is it that important? That some part of the brain processes emotion is an interesting fact but, pragmatically, neither Janov or Lowen work directly on the brain. We don't know Janov's procedures but I doubt if any direct work on the physical brain is performed , like a probe.So his techniques are not directed to the brain directly. And Lowen's procedures affect the brain insofar as the muscular armoring is dissolved.But most importantly, in contradiction to Janov's false assertion in this blog , the work on the muscles does not just affect the muscles, they affect the whole being just as in Janov's work.Why? because of the emotional releases and reequilibrium after the systematic muscle work AND after deep verbal analytical work.That should be perfectly obvious if one reads Reich and Lowen carefully.
ReplyDeleteWhat I see , as a difference with Lowen and Reich, is that Janov has brought to our attention other important traumas besides emotional ones which affect the organism profoundly and holistically, such as reduced oxygen at birth, the effects of drugs on the fetus etc... These are never mentioned in Lowen's and Reich's work; they deal exclusively with emotional trauma.And it's not clear to me if Janov has discovered other defenses apart from the muscular armoring , which he never mentions anyways.
One final point: I was just re-reading Janov's critique of Reich in his book "The Anatomy of mental Illness". I consider one key element of his critique unfair:he says that work on the body is a haphazard process. To the contrary , all the Reichian case studies I have read point to clear logical non-arbitrary procedures to effect change in distorted energetic patterns.One only has to read Reich's work on a female schizophrenic ( " The Schizophrenic Split" )in his book "Character Analysis" to realise that he seems to know EXACTLY what he is doing to help her.And in fact he cured this woman using body techniques and character analysis techniques, which are systematic interpretations (in the 1940s !). Janov would dispute the use of such interpretations; he always says insights should come from the patient and obviously they do in his therapy, but only after techniques he himself has devised; aren't those latter a form of insight also? In Reich's and Lowen's therapy insights come from BOTH the therapist and patient in so far as I can tell (insights from the therapist are called "interpretations" following the Freudian teminology) .What's wrong with that if they are timely and liberating? Reich also helped a lot of cancer patients survive longer since he discovered the emotional sources of some cancers. And, by the way ,these discoveries (in his "The Cancer Biopathy") seem to coincide with Janov's comments on cancer in "The New Primal Scream".
So all this Reichian and Lowenian help with schizophrenia, cancer, depression, obsessions, colitis, back problems, heart problems, arthritis etc. came about because this muscular armoring and interpretative work was much more than mere fiddling around with a few muscles here and there!
Marco
Marco,
DeleteI won’t go into all your points but I did read all of their work and had a Lowen bioenergetic person on my staff. To me it never touches old and deep embedded memory in the brain. One primal would dissuade you from this idea. I personally don't think that muscle therapy will ever cure anyone of long term serious illness. We do work in brain processes. I have observed bioenergetics and Rolfing at work and I see what it does. Not at all what we do. art janov
Hi Marco,
DeleteI have undergone extensive therapy at Janov's centre and I agree with everything he says. My depression and anxiety have almost disappeared, and this improvement in my mental state is being reflected in my physical state. For example my 'widows hump' is almost gone,I stand taller and straighter and my shoulders are more square. I used to frequent the chiropractors but haven't needed to go since undergoing therapy. My running action is much more free-flowing as I am no longer muscle bound. Oh how I wish I could have my sporting career again! I also see everything as an emotional trauma. Lack of oxygen is not a trauma in itself but it produces an emotional trauma that has a life and death quality to it. Reliving a lack of oxygen is a very emotionally traumatic experience. I totally agree with Art when he says if you experienced a primal your views would change. I believe one of the main reasons primal therapy has not become mainstream is the fact that it cannot be 'figured out' from an intellectual viewpoint. One must experience the thinking, feeling and sensation parts of the mind as three distinctly different ways of experiencing one's life. Even the current psychological paradigm does not factor in the power and influence of the sensations to effect human functioning at both the physical and emotional levels. Having a 'primal feeling' is not part of their training.
If you want to fix a problem, you have to fix the source. The muscles are not the source of the problem.
DeleteMarco, so what is your 'cure story' from Bioenergetics? All you write is just intellectual, devoid of your experience.
DeleteI had a couple of true Primal experiences, that changed my life. I went outside after one of them and saw the raindrops clinging to the bough of a tree for the 'first time in my life' (bless you John Lennon ;-)).
And I'm sorry I have failed both of us: you to whom I can't convey this; me because I failed to keep the process going (no access to proper therapy)...
Erron
Richard, So succinct and so well put. art
DeleteArt
ReplyDeleteAs I do observe people I see that for some man it is too late to understand anything. They are so strongly blocked. For most of time for me it is hard to break to my feeling, because all people around me are fooling me and tell "forget". ..... I can't forget, and I won't.
Art are you vegan?
ReplyDeletePiotr, I wish I were. My dad drove a meat truck so we had meat every day. Now I try to eat very little meat as possible. I am close and I understand it. art
DeleteHi, I haven't posted here before. It would seem to me that the work of Reich ,Lowen and Janov could compliment each other. As Janov mentioned in this blog, we are human beings and we can't be summed up easily. I have my own experience of years of personal growth work, including primal and ,the way I see it, it is possible to use primal in conjunction with the many other authentic approaches to personal growth.
ReplyDeleteDave
Dave, Primal Therapy is very different from the therapies you mentioned. art
DeletePrimal Therapy is in fact a neuro-psycho-therapy, as different from any other therapy as are chemo-therapy, physio-therapy, radio-therapy or any other treatment you have ever heard of. You can pour oil into water, mix it, and the oil will come out on top anyway, in the end. That is the difference between Primal Therapy and all other treatments, make no mistake about that.
Delete