Arthur Janov's Blog, page 10

On the Difference between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 6/15)

One clear example of dangerous feeling therapy is rebirthing – driving patients way too deep way too soon. Reliving birth in the first weeks of therapy is defying evolution and leads to disaster. It is arriving at deep levels of consciousness prematurely, skipping evolutionary steps and going through the motions of feelings without feeling. It overwhelms the integrating capacity of the brain and there is flooding with far-out ideas and bizarre notions. We have seen pre- psychotics who come to us and slide immediately down to some kind of birth trauma, way off a proper evolutionary voyage. They are often deeply disturbed and start therapy with a severely damaged gating system. They usually need help in gating so we may recommend medication for a time to control the upsurge of brainstem imprints. The medication temporarily enhances gating so that a proper descent is now possible. Without that there is no integration and therefore no getting well. Even worse, when the doctor buys into the ideas and beliefs the patient is in danger. Suddenly, he “merged with the Almighty.” And in booga-booga land, the doctor may nod agreement. It is now a folie a deux. If the therapist is mystical he may not find all this so strange, because those into mysticism never think that their beliefs are odd.

 The problem with rebirthing is that it defies the fundamental evolutionary law. Never challenge evolution; respect and follow it. It will unerringly take you where you need to go, and only when you need to go. I have seen the psychosis that this mistake engenders; and we see the inherent danger in rebirthing because feelings are directed by someone else, the therapist, on his timetable and they are reached prematurely violating history’s careful steps. Don’t fool with history. No one is smarter than that and no one has any idea what lies in the unconscious; only the patient knows. And it takes time for him to know. His body knows but he needs a higher brain to inform him. His body is screaming the message through its asthma and migraine and high blood pressure but it is a silent scream that only his system can feel. It says, “I hurt” and he says “I hurt” but he does not know from what. The decorticate message has gotten through but it lacks key information that cannot be imparted when we are too young and fragile to understand and accept it.

 When the whole brain is forced into a state for which it is not ready, it galvanizes itself and moves up the evolutionary scale abruptly searching for a handle, some way to deal with the pressure. When the ineffable feeling reaches the top-level neocortex, it concocts ideas and beliefs that are basically psychotic – “at one with the cosmos.” And this is the precise mechanism in a true psychosis (rather than induced) where the gating system has been trashed by the continuous onslaught of compounded pain over the years until it collapses. Notice that the pressure of the feeling moves up the evolutionary scale searching for some way to turn off the pain. It is a biologic rule for all therapists to understand. Crazy ideas are not single entities; they are the result of a long evolutionary voyage that ultimately results in a belief. When a therapist meddles with an idea, she is interfering with this evolutionary process. And I include behavior in all this and the anti-evolutionary behavior therapy. How simplistic to strip behavior of its roots and then to keep on manipulating the effluvia.

Just Three Little Words

Should I tell you what those three little words that most parents cannot say are?
  I love you.  You are good.  Keep it up.
Most of us learn it the hard way, waiting a lifetime for our parent to say those words. It seems as though their mouths are sealed with tape, and none of the words can escape their mouths.  Not only is their mouths sealed, but also their hearts, which cannot offer the phrase they never knew they were looking for.  Wonderful.  Congratulations.
So a major anchor in French TV can state blithely:  "I  was smacked as a kid and it build my character". What a load… Can you imagine someone in this year still think that way? Why?  Because papa always insists, I am doing for your good.  And what good is that?  Hurt is good. Pain is beneficial?  The way to show love is to beat a child?  Ayayay.  These are the people who grow up loving to be beaten in sex.  I have treated them; beating means love.  What a perversion, literally.  One woman I treated needed to be beaten hard.  Whenever she misbehaved as a child, her father put her on his knee, pulled down her panties,  and spanked her.

It was the only warmth she ever knew; that little touch.  So being beaten and feeling loved became joined at the hip and had the same meaning.  Not just a matter of words but the confluence of pain with love.  So one way is to say at the same time, this is for your good.  The other way is to inadvertently offer love, that ephemeral touch, joined with punishment.  That tells us how desperate is our need for touch and love.  What we remember, even when punishment, is the love.

So why is it that a parent can’t enjoy and celebrate with you when you do something well?  Because they learned from their parents the same lesson.  Don't get excited or show enthusiasm; and they never got compliments because the zeitgeist dictates; “It will go to their head and make them arrogant”.  So we really don’t want anyone feeling good about themselves, do we?  Better we criticize so they do not get a swollen head.  Imagine this crime:  tell someone they are pretty or accomplished. Some girls who are pretty are never told so because then the boys will be after them and they might become a “slut”: trading on their beauty and not their intellect.

My friend and I were musing about our fathers and asked each other: “How could it happen that in a whole lifetime we never ever heard a word of praise?”.  Those words were sealed tight in the Primal caves of pain;  they were waiting for the same thing and priorities demanded that they be praised first and only then could they maybe whisper one word of “well done”.  But they need that praise not at age twenty but very early on when the child is beginning to develop a sense of self esteem and self worth;  in other words, when it counts and sinks in and changes the child.  Because if we wait till they are age twenty, other negative forces have sunk in to make them feel not worthy.  After all,  we would not want to “spoil” them “would we?

So what is this terror of arrogance?  Well it is not arrogance.  We don’t want our child to think he is good and better than the others. To act superior. Horrors. Imagine the crime: to think you are pretty and capable and smart and talented. So what is wrong with that? It is a throwback to the 1800s where it was "verboten".  We do everything to discourage them from trying, to get ahead. We want them to feel inferior and believe they have to struggle to earn any right.  Imagine if a child got up and announced to his parents in the morning: “I feel so strong and good and talented today”. Imagine  how parents could rush in to stop that self delusion.  The parents do not feel that way and they do not want anyone else to rip off that right. You first have to earn it. You simply cannot feel good and smart without earning it.  Another sample from the zeitgeist:  you have to work hard and earn what you get;  IT IS NOT JUST GIVEN FREELY. Otherwise the child will be spoiled rotten.  More horrors.  Children feeling good about themselves?  Ayayay

On the Difference Between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 5/15)

The Dangers of Mock Therapy

 In our four decades of experience, we have seen many ways the therapy can go wrong. A skilled therapist can take an upcoming feeling and channel it where it must not go. In the case of deep depression, it is an early death fore-told. But an ill-prepared therapist may take a near-death metric – such as very high heart rate – and refocus it into some other feeling that is not related to the cause but is decided on by the doctor. Whether aware or not, he is meddling with biology. The result is counter-productive because the patient begins to form a groove so that each time a deep feeling comes up with all of its power, it is rechanneled into a byway of unrelated feeling. And that is also an aspect of abreaction: taking a beginning, inchoate feeling and turning it into something else. The doctor thinks he understands the process and takes control, instead of the feeling controlling the session. The patient’s feelings, far from ready, are taken up prematurely, and the patient deals with an offshoot instead of the next feeling available. Those feelings seem to be in a queue, each waiting its turn, and each bringing relief when its turn comes. Primal sessions normally start with agonies up top of the brain; unhappy events in the present that can trigger more painful early associated memories. “My wife just suffocates me,” eventually connects to the basic imprint: “I am suffocating.” This is not thought out; it happens automatically through resonance where one pain high up can set off deeper lying pain, in a chain of events when the patient is ready to feel it. It seems like each feeling is classified as to its content and nature into separate compartments; one kind of feeling here and another kind of feeling there. Resonance in brain function connects the evolutionary links to each other to encompass most of our lives. Our biology decides, not a doctor or therapist, which feeling is on the rise and can be experienced. But when the unconscious of the doctor intercedes into this still untrammeled, pristine sequence of feelings, the result is an emotional detour – abreaction.

 We do harm in therapy when we think we know where it all comes from, and we don’t. It is our guess against the reality inside the patient. So we have an internal battle: the patient’s system struggles to maintain his neurotic equilibrium, which is the body’s natural adaptation to early trauma and pain, while the misguided therapist struggles to change the neurotic’s life-saving ploy by tinkering with his thoughts and attitudes. The cognitive therapist, in particular, wants to change neurotic normal into abnormal by turning depression into a more positive, optimistic outlook. They don’t understand that depression is normal for the patient because his life experience drove him there and his biology is doing its best to maintain the equilibrium – the neurotic normal – established when trauma disrupted and rerouted his system’s natural state. The primal therapist also seeks to dismantle the neurotic normal but by resolving its origins, not by futilely trying to manipulate its present-day manifestations. Neurotic normal is what patients have to do to adapt to serious imprints, while abnormal is an attempt to enter into this equilibrium and alter its careful balance.

 This is a state where the vitals betray the patient. It literally can be a death foretold because constant abreaction weakens the system and can lead to premature death due to the load of unresolved feelings weighing in, stealthily adding pressure on the biologic system. We don’t see the pressure that repression is exerting constantly on the heart, liver, lungs and other organs. We don’t see what chronically high heart rate does to the whole cardiovascular system. In short, what is killing us is exactly what we don’t see. And why don’t we see it? It is just too much to face and experience all at once, because it is life endangering in and of itself.

 We can watch the descent into lower depths of the brain as the patient sometimes will touch on the first line, brainstem part (the base and/or lower part of the limbic system) during a higher-level Primal. At that point, he may show vital signs down into unimaginable depths – body temp at 96.0 and heart rate down into the fifties. We know what part of the brain is activated as the brain systems unveil and indicate unmistakably what level of the brain is at work; defending against what trauma and at what period of ontogeny. When there is suddenly a breakthrough – an abrupt trespass – we see intrusion at work; the ripping away momentarily of the defense system, giving way briefly to deeper feelings.

 This tells us that deep material is now just below the surface and may be ready to be addressed and relived, or Primalled. It is not guess work as the body signals its readiness. If we do not recognize intrusion we may wait too long to allow deep imprints to mount; the body is ready but the doctor is not. Again, the feeling may be changed into something else by the doctor because personal evolution of the patient, his ontogeny, has been ignored. The therapist has led the feeling elsewhere. A neophyte therapist, anxious to show his skill and dramatic effects, will force the patient far too deep too soon. As a result, the patient develops far-out ideation as the top-level brain is doing its best to handle the doctor-induced overload. It is the same effect we see with the ingestion of LSD.

 I remember during the LSD craze of the sixties when some doctors experimented with hallucinogens for patients. Many went into transient psychosis as out-of-sequence pains were thrown up and could not be integrated. The result: overload of the neo-cortex and delusions. In our early research, we saw the residue of all this: aside from universal sleep problems, the neo-cortex was in a constant flooded state and the brainwave amplitude came way down, which meant to us, after many of the same readings among other LSD patients, that the repressive defenses were faltering and crashing. When patients are pushed too fast in therapy we often get the same kind of profile.

On the Difference Between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 4/15)

 A Syndrome of Failure

 When abreaction becomes an embedded groove, it’s like a hellish path to nowhere. It is a defense disguised as a feeling, so it creates no insights and produces no resolution. Instead, abreaction promotes recurrent act-outs that can get reinforced by repetition. When powerful first line is present it doesn't generate genuine insights. In fact it can give birth to fake or far-out "insights." That is the danger of so-called rebirthing therapy, which deliberately plunges patients into first-line pain out of sequence, when they are not ready for it. The technique overwhelms the integrating capacity of the brain and the patient is flooded with strange ideas and bizarre notions. Suddenly, he is “at one with the Universe,” or perhaps “merged with the Almighty.” And if the therapist is mystical, he may not find all this so strange. I have seen people who have gone to rebirthing centers and come to us pre-psychotic. (More on the dangers of rebirthing therapy in a moment.) In these cases, the sequence or order of feeling has been interrupted. The result is serious; we simply cannot order evolution around but rather, we must obey its dictates. Clinically, that means knowing how to identify the right feeling track for the patient and keeping the session on that track, a skill that is trickier than it sounds.

 Since abreaction is not curative, patients are trapped in a forever need “to feel.” Nothing is ever resolved so the pain is never felt or emptied out. Thus, in a very sinister way, abreaction can induce a recurrent neurotic behavior that mimics primalling. The pain is forever present, so people are more likely to be triggered. In fact, it is more present than before the abreactive process set in, because all these triggered feelings are called up into consciousness without ever being resolved. They are 'there" all the time, ready to be triggered again with very little provocation.

 Abreaction creates a closed circuit of pain, an endless loop travelled over and over whenever part of it is triggered. And every trigger – however different it might be – will bring up the same abreactive feeling: "I want to die. I am in too much pain. I want to die." It will not be attached to anything specific at any time and will remain a litany, or a series of sensations repeated forever. Like a starved monster, abreaction will swallow all these different triggers and feelings to incorporate them into the same loop of physical sensations and/or disconnected feelings. They are all processed by the same defense system. It is truly amazing to contemplate the brilliance of a defense system that can reroute painful feelings into abreaction in order for them – the feelings – to remain unconscious.

 Patients who abreact become very entrenched in their "primal” style and very resistant to admitting that what they are doing isn’t "the right way." And of course, they aren't open to change it. Why? First, because it means to them that they aren't doing their therapy right, a reaction associated with feelings of "I am wrong/bad." Secondly, it is hard for them to accept that all the time, effort and money spent for "feeling" was actually a waste. It is hard to accept that what they were doing was not good therapy and, in fact, might have harmed them.

 Another element that also makes the patients resistant to change is that abreaction can make them feel better temporarily. Indeed they have released some tension. However, they could run a few miles and have the same result, a false sense of relief. If the abreaction goes on for years, like in the case of people who self- primal for a long time, it may not be reversible: the grooves are too strong as they have become a neurological defense in and of themselves. Most of the time, this abreactive groove is powerful, persistent and deeply entrenched.

 I remember the case of a woman who had been self-primalling for about 20 years somewhere deep in a very remote part of the world. Her style was a persistent screaming. That is what she thought the therapy – "The Primal Scream" – was all about. She could go on screaming for hours in a very piercing voice, at the top of her lungs. It was, of course, devoid of all real feeling, content, context, and resolution. She didn't know why or about what she was screaming; she had no memories attached to it. She did "feel" like screaming because "she was in so much pain." It was very hard to listen to, and totally unmoving. As we might expect, she never had any insights and wasn't getting better. Reversing that groove proved to be very difficult.

 Trying to stop a patient from abreacting and switch to a whole new way of "really feeling" the pain is usually a long and difficult conversion. That is because the defenses have been reinforced by the abreaction. So trying to get to these real feelings, with all their pent-up force, immediately summons the abreactive defenses created precisely to keep them at bay. The patient is pulled into the abreactive neurological groove, where they feel comfortable. Trying to reverse the pattern can be even more painful than in the regular process of tearing down defenses in therapy. Some patients have never been able to finally annihilate the abreactive trend, so sadly they never get better.

 Ultimately, the clinical outcome of abreaction is a syndrome of failure. No insights, no resolution, no getting better. Same act outs, same symptoms, sometimes getting worse. Mostly the tragedy in abreaction is that the patient is going through all this agony forever and with no pay off.

 In contrast, real feelings don't need to be felt forever, there is an end to them. In Primal, beyond a certain amount of feelings that had to be experienced over and over for a while – depending on how much pain was attached to them – the need to feel decreases with each felt feeling until, at some point, we hardly ever have to "feel" the old pain again.

On the Difference Between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 3/15)

Taking the Wrong Track into Abreaction

 To understand more about how abreaction works, let’s see what happens when a session goes off track.

 As we now know, there is a critical window during a session when the patient brings in a certain feeling, say, helplessness. If the therapist does not act to help the person delve into the feeling it very well may be too late, later on in the session. When the therapist does not strike at the critical moment, the specific feeling/frequency the patient came in with is now gone. What the patient will be left with is abreaction, the discharge of a secondary feeling, not the key one she brought in. That means no resolution and integration of feeling because the feeling has not been felt. When we measure vital functions after the session, the signs move in sporadic fashion. They do not move in coordinated ways but as though each function moves at a different pace. They seem to have lost their cohesion, which tells us that no primal has occurred.

 What I think may happen, and this is only hypothesis, is that when the feeling and its frequency are left unaddressed the patient slips into a secondary feeling with a different brain pattern and frequency. Even though she may look like she connected and resolved the feeling there is a good chance that it is abreaction. It is simply the discharge of the energy of the feeling without connection.

 Let me make this clear because so many so-called primal therapists make this fundamental error. There is a time in the session when that feeling is very near conscious-awareness. Without professional help the feeling slides away and the patient, now floundering, manages to get into a different feeling, one that may belong to the therapist’s agenda, not the patient’s. That is because the therapist did not pick up on the entering feeling and then projects his own needs and feelings onto the patient. The patient then goes where the therapist decides, which has nothing to do with attacking the basic need and resolving it. Too often, the patient goes where the therapist tacitly is interested. The patient senses that and becomes a “good girl.’ The unconscious of the therapist implicitly directs the patient.

 The pain of lack of fulfillment is always an adjunct to a specific need. To address the wrong need is to forego proper connection and resolution; it is feeling the wrong pain at the wrong time. A depressed patient comes in feeling hopeless and helpless. The therapist may perceive latent anger and urges the patient to hit the wall. The release does offer some relief and they both may think there was resolution. But it was only temporary. The real feeling will return again and again only to be waylaid. Or the therapist may say, “Tell your mother!” But it may have nothing to do with mother, at least not the patient’s. What is coming up is the pain of the doctor; he needs to scream at his mother. Indeed, the patient’s core feeling may date back to a time before words. So expressing the feeling verbally is a false route. It is tricky business. A sound knowledge of the evolution of consciousness will help here.

 Doctors are used to being active during therapy sessions so it is difficult for them to see how little there is to do. I speak on average about 50 words a session. My patient feels and then the insights follow. I do not need the majesty of bestowing insights on patients. It is wonderful that they make their own discoveries. And what discoveries they are, up-surging feelings accompanied with their notes from the underground. Telling the doctor what the feelings mean. On the other hand, therapists have a lot to do when we sense abreaction entering in. At that point, the therapist must be vigilant and hyperactive to keep the patient on track. He must make sure not to reinforce the tributary feeling while steering the patient back to the main feeling. And how, you ask, does the therapist know the difference? By instinct and experience. The therapist has to sense that his patient has taken a detour and he has to know what the real feeling is. That skill you can only acquire by primal intuition. There is no law.
 

On the Difference Between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 2/15)

The basis of Primal theory and practice is the concept of the three levels of consciousness, corresponding to an individual’s stages of development from gestation to adulthood. The first line is pre- verbal consciousness from the womb through birth and early infancy. The second line is laid down in childhood as the brain is still evolving. And the third line is current-day awareness, the top-level consciousness of adulthood. Those three levels of consciousness correspond to the structure of our triune brain – the primitive brainstem (first line), the limbic system (second line), and the neocortex, our thinking brain (third line). Pain is experienced and repressed at each stage, stamped into the brain as an imprint on the level where it occurs.

 The essence of Primal Therapy is unveiling the old events so we can live in the present. Those embedded memories contain painful and frightful feelings that needed to be repressed and kept from consciousness due to their overwhelming valence. But they are never forgotten. They leave biochemical traces serving as markers that say there was damage here and a hurtful event there. Through therapy, we can retrace our lives and our embedded memories and revisit them in orderly fashion, undoing the traces and (hopefully) reversing history by obeying evolutionary dictates. So we go back into those evolutionary stages methodically, feeling a bit at a time; beginning with the lightest pain in the recent past moving down to the deepest brain levels. In proper Primal Therapy, pain must be relived and resolved in the same evolutionary way it was created on all three levels, but in reverse. If we neglect evolution and do not deal with lesser pains first, we will again make a serious biologic error and force a feeling on a patient that he is not ready for.

 There is an adage in science: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The history of the species is run again in our personal evolution. We can see our ancient history in how we evolve from the embryo on (fish fins, wings, tails, etc.). Each evolving individual re- runs the archaic life of the species. We get rid of our tail and are left with a vestige, a “tail-bone.” Similarly, we have vestiges of our old "ancient" personal life, which I call the first line. That is, we have traces of our lives from a time when only the brainstem was our predominant brain structure. And we can visit that ineffable life we lived before birth, and then eschew those traces though Primal Therapy, which can also be called undoing the imprints (or on a molecular level, de-methylation). Imprints mean precisely an event that was so powerful and so painful that it could not be experienced and integrated at the time. However, we are older now and can more safely experience them. But it takes years to be able to relive the past fully and make it part of us instead of a constant alien force.

 A well-ordered therapy begins in the present, anchoring feelings in the present-day life. Over time this will lead to deeper levels along that same feeling path through a process I call resonance. Once locked into the feeling, the neuro-biologic system will take charge enabling the patient to go deeper, traveling to more remote and archaic areas of the brain. Over months, as the patient follows that evolutionary path, different aspects of the feeling are gathered up at each level until reaching origins where very deep pain lies. This process cannot be forced or decided in advance by a therapist who dictates where the patient has to go. If feelings are forced out of sequence, no integration will take place.

 I stress this methodical step-by-step voyage as a warning, because in no other therapy that I know of can interference into the primal sequence by untrained people cause such lasting damage. They are meddling with the deep unconscious. It took us many decades to understand what to avoid, which is as important as what to pursue. We take great care to make sure that the patient descends the feeling chain in proper sequence so as to avoid abreaction, sliding off into pseudo feelings as a defense against the real pain.

 In essence, abreaction is the discharge of a feeling disconnected from its source, making it in fact a defense, or at least reinforcing an existing defense. It can be the release of a feeling from one level of consciousness into another level. For example, first line into third line. Or it can be first line disconnected from any other level, taking on a life of its own to the exclusion of any other levels. The defense system, in its crafty and brilliant way, can promote many forms of abreaction that may lead to strange ideations, crazy delusions and paranoia. Instead of leading to the undoing of neurosis, abreaction guarantees that neurosis will persist. This happens when the therapist allows the patient to skip evolutionary steps, going through the motions of feelings without feeling them.

 We must trust the feelings totally. But first we must recognize them and be able to differentiate them from abreaction, which is the discharge of the energy of a feeling without connection. Our job is to provide access to feelings, following evolution every step of the way, from the most recent aspect traveling down to the very origin of the pain in the most distant past. In this way, we go from an awareness of the feeling to its emotional content and then onto its preverbal base. We also go from the lowest valence of pain to the most devastating. It increases as we descend down the chain of pain in our ontology.

 When we touch on our beginnings – gestation, birth and infancy – we see the deepest pain and the most danger to the system, which I call the first line. If we do not know brain evolution we can be easily fooled and will rush in to prod a patient’s nervous system to perform in ways it cannot; hence, abreaction. We will make the patient scream or pound the walls when the real feeling is elsewhere. Once a patient is channeled into abreaction it is almost impossible to pull him back. It forms a groove defense that becomes encased, allowing no other feeling in. It becomes a neurosis inside another neurosis. It is the patient who loses, though he may convince himself he is really feeling; or worse, he may be convinced by a therapist that he is feeling when he really isn’t. Sometimes, this may all seem like some kind of plot, but it is simply unconscious reactions to avoid deep pain. Remember, it takes great skill to produce a connected feeling and no skill to permit abreaction.

On the Difference Between Abreaction and Feeling (Part 1/15)

This is the first of a series of 15 articles I wrote on the difference between abreaction and feeling in therapy. It is a crucial point in Primal Therapy.

 The ability to distinguish between abreaction and a genuine feeling is an essential skill of good Primal Therapy. The difference between the two is stark, but in practice it still can be deceiving. Feeling is the key to cure, while with abreaction there is no chance of getting well. Yet, despite this crucial difference, the therapist is often unaware of what is going on, and certainly the patient is equally unaware. The insidious part is that abreaction feels like a primal, looks like a primal and smells like a primal, but is far from a genuine Primal. In clinical terms, abreaction is "the devil" because it doesn't allow patients to get better. They remain forever "prisoners of their pain" in an abominable, endless loop of hurt and hopelessness. Once abreaction sets in, it becomes a neurosis on top of another neurosis. And it is unshakeable. It takes months to even try to undo it. The danger cannot be overstated. We have now seen many patients who have gone to mock primal therapy and are stuck so badly in abreaction that it is almost impossible to extricate them from it. If left unchecked, abreaction can even lead to pre-psychosis and psychosis.

 It is the job of the therapist to distinguish between abreaction and real feeling. To some extent, that is a skill based on the instincts of a trained clinician and acquired by experience. For some patients who are mired in abreaction, that skill can mean the difference between successful therapy and staying stuck in mock primals that lead nowhere. The good news is that there are also scientific ways to know the difference. We can often tell how if a real feeling has been resolved by changes in cortisol levels, vital signs and other biochemical indicators.

 First, to avoid confusion, a definition is in order. Within Primal Therapy, the term “abreaction” means something quite different from its original meaning within Freudian psychoanalysis. In this psychoanalytic sense, abreaction is simply defined as the process of releasing repressed emotions by reliving an old traumatic experience(1). On the face of it, that classic definition is close to what we would call a Primal, although true “reliving” in our therapy is far beyond what Freud had imagined. In Primal terms, abreaction has nothing to do with any genuine reliving experience. On the contrary, for us abreaction is destructive to any feeling therapy because it becomes a defense against real feeling, as I shall explain in detail shortly.

 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, a difference I shall explore in detail in a moment. To a well-trained therapist there is a hollow ring to abreaction. It doesn’t “smell” right. A patient may unconsciously use abreaction as a defense against feeling, slipping into crying the minute she lies down, or simulating a birth primal. The key difference between abreaction and a true Primal, of course, is connection, which takes place in a Primal but never in abreaction.

 Before we delve into this, however, let me briefly review some of the basic principles of Primal Therapy. These theoretical cornerstones provide the framework needed to understand abreaction as a deviation from a successful coarse of treatment.

(1): Gordon Marshall. "abreaction." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. (July 2, 2015).http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-abreaction.html

Ideas That Evolve Out of Feelings

  I was wondering how it came to be that psychotherapy became a thought therapy and that mental illness became a belief and perception disorder? So that psychosis became a thought affliction.  I was wondering how it came to be that psychotherapy became a thought therapy and that mental illness became a belief and perception disorder? So that psychosis became a thought affliction. So only a part of us seems to be going crazy. What about the rest?

So let me start at the beginning. There are levels of brain function which my friend Paul Maclean described fifty years ago in his Triune brain; and there are levels of the brain which I describe decades ago which largely coincide with Dr. Maclean. Only I learned about them through reliving those levels and the feelings, needs and pain that reside in them. It became the basis of my theory on the levels of consciousness and the neuronal chain of pain.

  So why didn’t Freud and his pals discover that? Because there were not the scientific tools we now have at our disposal.  Brain science in his time was in its infancy; that is how brain lobotomy could gain acceptance.  There was no “point de repère”, no scientific frame of reference to not accept it.    And it killed many.  So good old Dr. Freud did the best he could and he did want to target feelings but he believed the way to do it was to have patients talk their way into it.  Eventually they would run out of words and get into feelings. It could not happen neurologically but he did not know it.  And words and insights became “de rigueur”.  And the whole idea of psychoanalysis, which I practiced for 17 years, was to offer insights to the patient.  Knowledge would make him well, we thought.  All it did was have the patient internalize what we thought was inside of him.  And we had to be wrong because we were guessing.

  But the die was cast and we all thought mental affairs were only a matter of the verbal, conceptual brain. We now know that cancer can be a psychosis of the body with the exact same origins as the later development of cancer. We now know there is a body attached to that brain that must be accounted for. It is not mental illness; it is illness, period. That illness takes different forms as we mount the evolutionary ladder.  We cannot have mental psychosis until we are fully mental but our bodies can express all kinds of symptoms.  And when we get to attention deficit syndrome, we know that internal agitation has reached the thinking mind and disturbed it so that concentration and focus become impossible.  And in 1920 we did not know about imprinted and embedded memory, nor of how the three levels of the brain worked. So how could  they know where ADD came from?  Sadly, it is very true today where most therapists have no idea that inner cerebral agitation perturbs concentration and focus. I have read volumes on the subject and it nearly all avoids inner imprints.

And what do we get instead?  Behavioral therapy which avoids feelings altogether.  And all other cerebral approaches which are feelingless.  We want a therapy of feeling not only because it is nice to have but because it means the cure of  mental illness.  I mean, the cure of so much illness.

The Difference Between Being Sad and Being Depressed

We must not confuse the two as the treatment needs to be different as does the diagnosis.  Let us return to the brain and its three levels.  There is a big difference between sad and depressed. Sad is strictly limbic, second line emanating from amygdala, hippocampus and other key limbic structures.  Depression  lies deeper in the antipodes of the brain, out of reach, part of the shark/dinosaur legacy.  It makes me think that utter hopelessness can derive from an ancient brain,  the same brain that harbors rage and fury.  It can only be described in global notions of heaviness, no energy,  no ambition, no future, etc.  There are no words on this level which makes it difficult to treat; and certainly a cognitive, word-laden approach will not touch it.  That is why in desperation some doctors insist on electroshock therapy. Blasting the brain because they simply do not know what to do.  Pretty clumsy and massive.  The opposite of delicate and targeted.  What else can they do?  Talk to the shark brain and convince it of the ineffectiveness of its ways?  It doesn’t talk and won’t respond.  Doctors want to blast the brain because it seems so unyielding.  The station of last resort are pills; they help kill pain. But not forever; therein lies the rub.  We are mollifying, not curing.  We are adding  sop to the process hoping for the best.

Can we offer hope? Maybe, but against what?  Hope to get out and be free.  Who knows that is the problem?

Depression seems to come out of nowhere; it comes out of the non-verbal brain.  Herein lies one key difference.  Sadness can be described as to how it feels.  Depression cannot. Sadness is often situational/existential.  There might be a reason for it;  lost a lover, failed a class, did not get the promotion, lost a job.  It seems to come from outside.  And psychological counseling can help.  Depression can only be described by its internal effects, a heaviness,  cannot get out of bed.  What is being described are first line brainstem effects.  The problem is that deep hopelessness can be life endangering and can lead to impulsive suicidal acts.  The act comes out of an impulse laden brain that can act but not reason and cannot rationalize.  It cannot delay act-outs because that brain is what is behind act-outs; a brain with no great cerebral cortex to hold back action. And those who cut themselves sense this when they cut into themselves; they understand it is inside and deep and that they must reach it even in their crude ways.  They do not know there is a deep imprint there but it is all they can do.  It is what deep depression is.  I see it often when the depressed patient comes in immersed that state and begins to relive  the birth trauma or even before when the mother was  drugged during pregnancy and the child has no way to escape. It is indeed hopeless, there is no exit, no way out, to quote Sartre.

That all encompassing lassitude is what animals do when all is hopeless, locked in cages and unable to escape. The system gives up. It is just awful but it is treatable; no easily but possible.  The whole system accommodates to this state with  drop in vital signs.  The voyage to the deep brain has to be slow because we must travel deep into the brain that is millions of years old, and it must be done methodically and carefully.  In no other way can we become close to our archaic history.  I believe that in some of us the imprint may lie in the period when the system was on the verge of giving up; passivity and lifelessness were imprinted and drove our personal evolution.
 Those deep unconscious pleas to live must see the light of day so we know exactly what it is and what we are dealing with; only then can we say, “Cure.”

Are Primals Real?

Other than the testimonies of many patients about the reality of the Primal experience, there is also our research.  We filmed those reliving early pain at the UCLA Pulmonary lab.  While in the primal, reliving a lack of oxygen at birth,  patients had what I call locomotive breathing.  It sounded like a freight train and went on for over twenty minutes.  The patients neither got dizzy nor faint.  But in an experiment later with no reliving I had them breathe deeply for as long as they could.  Within a very few minutes they started to get dizzy and were about to faint. So what was the difference?  Why did heavy breathing make them faint in one case,  deliberately trying, and not in the other where feelings were coming up to be fully experienced.    That is, not trying for  a feeling.

The difference was a deeply embedded real need for oxygen. The patients were back in their baby selves trying to keep from dying from anoxia. It was not an exercise directed by a doctor but a need from inside.  And that was the difference. It told us why there was incipient fainting among all the research subjects, and it informed us about basic need.  Those were not faked actions but something organic and historic.  It demonstrates the difference between Primal and following directions from the doctor; such as “Tell your mother”, or ”Scream at your father for his punishing you”.  Those are useless because they originate higher in the brain in non primal situations, and do not reflect the brain and time when the punishment  occurred.  Following orders and feeling one’s past are two entirely different things. They reflect two different brain systems at work;  one is healing and the other is alleviating but not resolving.  We must talk to the right brain; the one that does not talk but can feel.  The mature adult brain cannot do it; the harder it tries the worse it gets because it remains alienated from the patient’s own history.

It is no different from patients who cry and cry over long periods in our therapy. Once opened up they cry for the thousands of tears they could not express at the time.  And the tears are real as is the sound of the crying.  Fake cries have a hollow sound with no affect behind them.

That separates Primal Therapy from other approaches.  If we want to reach the patient’s early history and what happened to him we must engage the brain active at the time of the original trauma.  This is precisely why cognitive approaches cannot resolve and cure.  We are dialing in the wrong  brain and trying to get it to do what it cannot do.  Feel.