The Nature of Tears: Restoring Natural Human Responses Through Primal Therapy

Primal Therapy is not magic. All we do is restore a natural function, one that has been deformed and deregulated so that natural human responses are no longer possible. Take tears, for example. The average child who grows up untouched and ignored has no idea he is suffering. Nor any idea he needs to cry. Why? It is just the way life is. There is no love in the house; no one hugs, kisses or even laughs. Life becomes a grim affair. That was my life and that of many of my patients: the Silent Scream. Allergies aplenty, obesity out of control, withering migraines that are a chronic mystery, nightmares as one more unfathomable event. No cries, just pain. Cries are beaten out of children because crying reminds the parents that they may be doing something wrong. It must be hidden, out of sight and out of mind.

Yet, crying, in and of itself, is not the sole goal of Primal Therapy. The original damage, the deepest hurt that is so early and so horrific, is registered in an infantile brain that knows neither tears nor cries. Oh come on! What proof of that? We know that babies are not capable of producing tears until they are at least a few weeks old, sometimes a few months. That’s because the tear ducts of a newborn are not fully formed yet. So we don’t expect to see tears when a patient in Primal Therapy relives a trauma at that very early age, since the return to the past must correspond to the way we evolved. If the feeling is early first line, how could there be tears if no tears were possible at that stage of development?

In my patients who have descended down the neuronal chain and arrive at the lower brain and brainstem areas, there are no tears and no cries. The nervous system is not that mature as yet. There are grunts; if they use words we know it is “bidon,” which is French for phony. It is a false or faked effort to look like one is feeling but it is abreaction pure and sure. So what? So without feeling there is no healing. We cannot trick the system into a false piste (to borrow a skiing term for groomed path) that is only a byway on the road to feeling. These abreacting patients, coming to us from mock primal centers all over the world, do not get well; they do not normalize the biologic system because they are stuck in a false feeling groove. Hence, they do not restore natural functions because they we did not take a natural route to feeling. The system always knows what it needs if left to its own devices; when it is pushed this way or that it follows the dictates of someone else’s notions, which is often the misguided therapist.

The patient may have been pushed to scream and cry long before it is neurologically possible. So that tears are momentarily relieving but not curative. Abreaction means going through the motions bereft of feelings. Primals mean emotional actions derived from emotions. It means a context, not an action forced on the patient. Indeed, any suggestion by the doctor is apt to be wrong, on the face of it because it is emanating from the head of an alien source—the therapist. It has taken us fifty years to figure all of this out and it did not come easily or by whim or impulse. It seems so easy to do….if you do it wrong; and so very difficult to do it right. The therapist has to be feeling to sense when is the right time to help the patient down one path and not another. The patient will often choose the wrong one because it is less painful. Or for many other reasons. And he will choose this path over and over again until it becomes a neurotic abreactive groove which is chosen because it is a way out, not a way into the feeling. It has all the accouterments of a Primal without one key ingredient; feeling.

These Primals look like feelings but they do not smell like it. A good therapist can smell a Primal and more, can smell abreaction. The sound of it is hollow and unconvincing, like the sound of a political speech that looks sincere but takes those in who lack the emotional depth. Mistakes here can be lethal because at times there is aggravating depression, unresolved, because no one has seen, and thus corrected, the abreactive groove. This is often pushed by the patient who complains, “I am not getting anywhere.” It must be treated as part of a deep feeling, often pre-birth, where “getting somewhere” can mean life or death. Too often, the threatened therapist reassures the patient and himself, “you are doing fine; it just takes time.” He has mistaken the beginning of an old feeling for a current complaint. And worse, this confusion has settled into the patient who now believes that he will get somewhere. But where? He believes it is in therapy when it is millions of years earlier, in the need to get out; an urgent feeling that has to be faced for what it is. The doctor and patient have now missed what brain we are working with.

And here lies one key difference between Primal and other therapies: ours will lead to resolution, the others will lead to palliation. One is curative and the other is simple soothing. Why curative? Because we are restoring natural functions. And we have seen this in our research where we have elevated the natural killer cells that combat cancer significantly. If we cannot restore nature and natural reactions in our patients we cannot speak of cure. The immune system has to be able to carry on its natural functions. It too has to be normal and/or approaching normal function. We cannot take a single function and make it normal and then imagine that we have normalized the system. We must normalize the system as an integrated biologic event.

What if we do not know we should cry? As we discuss our past with a feeling therapist the body will do all the informing. Why? Because we can now react normally and that always means tears, not just analysis of why there are tears. “Why” is far too cerebral for the process of cure. It has to be out of experience; we are offering experience to those who have lacked it. That is already a lot.