Arthur Janov's Blog, page 25

Happy Birthday Letter

This is a “Happy Birthday” letter from a series of letters sent to Art by patients, former patients, friends and readers from all over the world that show how Primal Therapy have impacted their lives.

Hi Art,
I am sure that you don't remember meeting me, but I will never forget meeting
you!  It was the mid-1980's and, I believe, you had fairly recently returned from
France.  I was in my mid-20's at the time and a patient at the Primal Institute.
You gave a talk up at, I believe, a church in Westwood.  It was a total thrill to hear
you speak.  And after I had the honor to shake your hand.  It was a great night!

After a couple of years at the institute, I moved back to Minnesota and began a
"new" life.  I worked a job.  Got married and had two beautiful daughters.  There
is no doubt in my mind that my experiences in primal therapy helped make me
a better father.

Through the years I knew that I hadn't completed the job that I needed to do.  I
began looking into getting back into primal therapy but my life was here.  I
investigated your website and learned that I could carry on therapy with Skype.
So, after a couple of weeks in LA I returned home and have, very successfully
carried on my therapy.

I do want to share one anecdote of the one group that I attended in Santa Monica
as part of my two weeks.  A patient was saying something like, "I haven't been to
a group in a long time.  It's been 9 months.".  When it was my turn, I said, "My last group was... 25 years ago."  I am not sure that they believed me.

I'd like to say something about the differences in therapy between my experiences at the Primal Institute in the mid-80's  and the past two years at the Primal Center.  It's much better now.  It's rare for me not to feel deeply.  I don't think the suffering builds up as much.  And I think that my therapist knows what he's doing.  Looking back I can only think that my therapists at the institute missed a lot of opportunities to send people into feelings.  Thank you for these major improvements!!!

I don't have enough words to express my gratitude for the extremely positive differences you have made to my life.  The only way that I know how to express the depth of my gratitude is by sharing this thought.  To know that I've done something right with my life, all I have to do is to look at how happy and healthy my daughters are.  I know that I couldn't have done as good of a job as a father without primal therapy!  To fully convey how important this is to me I would need about a million exclamation marks but that would make this letter too long.

I would be remiss if I did not say Happy 90th birthday!!!!  And I wish you a hundred thousand more birthdays!  I suspect that you have some awareness of this, but you are a man who will live forever.  Your life's work is unparalleled.  All the people that you have already helped and all the people that your work will help, will increase exponentially.  My personal examples are my daughters.  They don't know about primal therapy.   They don't have a need for primal therapy!
Art, I don't know a greater success story than that!

Sincerely -- with my deepest gratitude.

M. T., USA

Happy Birthday Letter

This is a “Happy Birthday” letter from a series of letters sent to Art by patients, former patients, friends and readers from all over the world that show how Primal Therapy have impacted their lives.


Dear Art

The email inbox entry merely read and the accompanying thought said ‘oh my God, Janov’s dead – but he can’t be dead, he still has so much to give….;

Thus, the relief to read that your 90th birthday is just around the corner was quite palpable, and I am glad you are still alive and able to receive emails.

As you know, my father died on 5 July. He was 93 years old and was diagnosed with dementia last summer. He lived out the rest of his days in a dementia resident nursing home where the care given is magnificent. But I think my dad knew that he had lost control of his mind and he didn’t much like it.

One of my reasons for undertaking primal therapy last February was a response to your remarks about dementia in your book Life Before Birth and subsequent comments in a recent email. At 68 years old, I like to think I now know myself well enough to have no surprises waiting for me. It seems I had quite a good birth.

I have attached a snapshot from a video I took in the summer of 2012 when my son JJ was just 6 months old and my father was 91. I included the following in my eulogy to him at his funeral.

That summer, we visited dad at his house the Sunday before the Olympic Games. Even at the tender age of 6 months, little JJ was quite particular about who he would let hold him. Aside of his mother and me, there was no one really. But when he lay in his grandfather’s arms, something magical happened. They both gazed into each other’s eyes, JJ every now and then sitting up and looking around and then back to his granddad; totally relaxed was JJ, as if he was being let into a secret denied everyone else, and had found the ideal resting place from which to ponder the Universe and bathe in the warmth and security of his granddad’s arms.That was me 68 years ago, and I know just how JJ felt.

So, happy birthday dear Dr Janov, you have been one of the guiding influences in my life, alongside people like PD Ouspensky, Mahler and Dr David Yurth.

For some reason I’ve set myself a goal to cast this mortal coil at 102 years old. Assisted dying will probably be law by then. If I was going to plan when I die, I would first ask the doctor, how long it will take for the pills to set in before I lose consciousness? Assuming it was minutes, I would then play the final 12 minutes of Mahler’s 2nd symphony – the Resurrection. If you don’t know it already, I heartily recommend you listen to it and his 8th symphony. I would want to lose consciousness at the moment of the final crashing chord, and thereby go out in a blaze of glory with my family around me.

R. C., UK

Happy Birthday Letter 5

Dear Art

The email inbox entry merely read and the accompanying thought said ‘oh my God, Janov’s dead – but he can’t be dead, he still has so much to give….;

Thus, the relief to read that your 90th birthday is just around the corner was quite palpable, and I am glad you are still alive and able to receive emails.

As you know, my father died on 5 July. He was 93 years old and was diagnosed with dementia last summer. He lived out the rest of his days in a dementia resident nursing home where the care given is magnificent. But I think my dad knew that he had lost control of his mind and he didn’t much like it.

One of my reasons for undertaking primal therapy last February was a response to your remarks about dementia in your book Life Before Birth and subsequent comments in a recent email. At 68 years old, I like to think I now know myself well enough to have no surprises waiting for me. It seems I had quite a good birth.

I have attached a snapshot from a video I took in the summer of 2012 when my son JJ was just 6 months old and my father was 91. I included the following in my eulogy to him at his funeral.

That summer, we visited dad at his house the Sunday before the Olympic Games. Even at the tender age of 6 months, little JJ was quite particular about who he would let hold him. Aside of his mother and me, there was no one really. But when he lay in his grandfather’s arms, something magical happened. They both gazed into each other’s eyes, JJ every now and then sitting up and looking around and then back to his granddad; totally relaxed was JJ, as if he was being let into a secret denied everyone else, and had found the ideal resting place from which to ponder the Universe and bathe in the warmth and security of his granddad’s arms.That was me 68 years ago, and I know just how JJ felt.

So, happy birthday dear Dr Janov, you have been one of the guiding influences in my life, alongside people like PD Ouspensky, Mahler and Dr David Yurth.

For some reason I’ve set myself a goal to cast this mortal coil at 102 years old. Assisted dying will probably be law by then. If I was going to plan when I die, I would first ask the doctor, how long it will take for the pills to set in before I lose consciousness? Assuming it was minutes, I would then play the final 12 minutes of Mahler’s 2nd symphony – the Resurrection. If you don’t know it already, I heartily recommend you listen to it and his 8th symphony. I would want to lose consciousness at the moment of the final crashing chord, and thereby go out in a blaze of glory with my family around me.

R. C., UK

Happy Birthday Letter 4

Dear Art,

 I write to wish you a happy 90th birthday and as many healthy and happy years ahead as you wish yourself.

 Your 90th birthday should be a day of joy and glorification for a life that has brought true meaning to the lives of thousands of others and laid the groundwork for those of millions of others yet to benefit from it. You have made an indelible imprint in the sands of time.

 Your discovery and practice of Primal Therapy are no doubt a silent revolution in the knowledge of Man. Man has over the years conquered the science of everything but of Man himself. You have successfully re-discovered Man. Your discovery and development of Primal Therapy have laid the path for the understanding of the link between Man and himself, between the human mind and the human body, the understanding of causes and origin of major illnesses and afflictions, the causes and origin of poverty, of the wealth or poverty of persons or nations, of success and failure, of sanity and insanity, and of sadness and joy, of longevity and short lives, and many others. You have laid the path for the resolution of the ever-aching conflict between Man and himself, between his mind and his body.

 Sometimes great men like you are not discovered in their lifetime. What is, however, certain, is that you will be discovered or re-discovered in the course of time. And the world will be happier for it.

 I use this opportunity to say how lucky I am to have met you through some of your works and in person. I am lucky, too, to be associated with your discovery of Primal Therapy. Indeed, the whole world is lucky that there has been an Arthur Janov,except that most of them are not aware of it.

 Congratulations on your 90th birthday.


C.  Nigeria

Happy Birthday Letter 3

Hi Art.

We've only really met once and you couldn't understand my Nottingham accent. I got the chance to thank you though and I will tell you there was a lot more behind those two words. Primal therapy saved my life, I believe. Also in making my wife and I more real it enabled us to give the kids a much better childhood than they might have had which is priceless. I find it hard to put into words how grateful I am and how privileged I feel to have been able to do primal therapy and especially to have come to the primal center.

Thank you again, all my best wishes and have a great birthday.

C. C., UK

Hi Dr Janov:
In case I forget, happy upcoming 90th birthday.
I would like to again thank you for all your inspiring and important work in psychotherapy. These days, I am re-reading one of the major works of the counter-culture "The Greening of America" by Charles Reich (now about your age), which came out about the same time as "The Primal Scream". I am thankful and in awe that you both were able to create such important works, some clarity and insight within all pervasive neurotic culture which stifles us. It means a lot to me, especially now that I too am getting older.
M. E., Canada

Happy Birthday Letter 2

How come Dr. Janov is not the most famous man on our planet?
It was a difficult decision to come to Santa Monica. So many disappointments concerning therapies before. Regressive therapy, family constellations, art therapy, coaching, One brain therapy... before trying Primal therapy I tried at least 20 different therapies.
Why is Primal therapy so powerful?
Because one man was lucky, focused and did not accept his inabilty to help those who need therapy. The result? A miracle: Primal therapy.
4 months into the therapy I do not see any dramatic improvements in my life, yet. What I see however is my gradual return to life. And what I am sure of is that it is the only effective therapy compared to other therapies which are only wasting time and money.
If Dr. Janov is not the most famous man on our planet, then we are living in a completely insane world, with psychotherapists so brainwashed they are unable to distinguish between effective therapy vs. ineffective therapy, with people celebrating their captors as their liberators and with evil being portrayed as good.  And with frustration and suffering being considered normal.
Dr. Janov cannot thus be recognized as a genius by official authorities.
Primal therapy gives life, strength and freedom and makes things what they really are: with Primal therapy good is good, suffering is suffering and life is life. Thanks to Dr. Janov. My infinite gratitude.
P. K., CZ Republic


Dear Art,

Congratulations on reaching your 90th year.I’d like to thank you for your lifetime of dedication to helping others. Your influence on my life has been immense. Had you never written The Primal Scream, I’m sure my suffering would be far greater than it is today.Today I can say that I have healed much of the pain from my childhood and complicated birth. I have a greater sense of freedom. I’m more present to my feelings and to life. My mother put it best: “it's as if you’ve had a lobotomy”! I genuinely feel like a changed man.Of course there’s more pain in the bathtub and my spoon hasn’t gotten any bigger, but today I have a means to empty the bath, unlike the vast majority of the population. For that I will always be grateful to you and the many who have been influenced by you.I hope you remain active as a writer for many years to come.  I think your writings have more influence than perhaps you imagine. Even the watered-down manifestations of the Primal vision that spring from your thinking are helping to slowly move the therapy movement in a more curative direction.
Much love
R. A., UK

Happy Birthday Letter 1

We are beginning a “Happy Birthday” series of letter sent to Art by patients, former patients, friends and readers from all over the world that show how Primal Therapy have impacted their lives.

When cancer or heart patients thank their doctors for saving their lives, we all know that they mean. The patient survived and the doctor gets the credit, as well as honors and recognition from his profession. Often, we have heard Primal patients say the same thing: “Thanks, Dr. Janov, for saving my life.” But what we mean is not as obvious to everyone. After all, we weren’t dying of cancer or heart disease, at least not imminently. So why do we all feel rescued?

I cannot bear to think what would have become of me if I had not read “The Primal Scream” back in 1973. I was 24 years old and my life had come completely off the rails. As I once told you personally, I had a sudden, inexplicable breakdown five years earlier when I was a sophomore in college. Sitting at home reading a book without a care in the world, then suddenly engulfed in panic and terror that seemed to well up from deep inside, but out of nowhere. I felt like I was in a strange science fiction movie in which a comfortable existence turns into a waking nightmare and the victim is forced to spend all his energy to figure out why his life has gone haywire.

Nobody could understand what I was going through. The craziness was so excruciatingly isolating. It felt like an electrical storm of madness in my head that only I could see. How can you explain the fear of losing your mind when everything around you seems sunny and normal?

When I read your transformative book, I felt like I had finally found a person who understood my suffering and its causes. Like so many other readers, my reaction was immediate and instinctual. You offered a way out. And I was desperate to take it.

The first step in saving a life is understanding what threatens it. The next step is knowing what must be done to remove the threat and restore health. By this measure, Art, you are a true healer.

So when we say you saved our lives, we really mean that you restored a life worth living. You unlocked the mystery of neurosis by understanding that emotional pain is at the root, that repression is required to keep the pain at bay and that, in that devil’s bargain, we wind up living in a suspended state of perpetual suffering, or numbness.

So what kind of life is that?

My nerves were so frayed from the constant tension that soon after getting my first big job at the San Francisco Chronicle I trembled and shook for the entire night, curled up in a ball until dawn. What kind of a life can there be without the ability to sustain a livelihood?

When my dad pumped me full of Prolixin and Haldol to calm my nerves, I became a zombie. I was no longer trembling but I was trapped in a cold, eerie stillness that truly turned me into the walking dead.  What kind of a life can there be when you are at war with your own body?

My relationships were such a mess because as soon as I would find somebody I really valued, I became so insanely jealous that I made her life miserable and ultimately would drive her away. What kind of a life can there be without love?

We also often say that Primal Therapy gave us our lives back. But what does that mean, exactly? Sure, with less anxiety, anger, fear and insecurity, we are liberated to pursue the things that can really make us happy in life. A good job, a solid relationship, the ability to feel joy. But for me, getting my life back also meant understanding what really happened to me. For example, knowing that my jealousy began before I was two years old, when I felt rage for having been rejected by my mother and replaced by the next baby in a line of eight. How could I have grown up without realizing I was so hurt and angry at the time, and ever since. All I saw was the devastating aftermath in my wrecked relationships. Primal Therapy helped me connect the crippling effect with the unconscious cause.

That’s a huge gift, knowing the real self. That is reality restored. And your mind won’t let you rest until you put it all together, the behavior with the reason why.

In an unexpected way, you also gave me the chance to have a genuine moment of affection and reconciliation between me and my father. You know what kind of father he was. Emotionally distant, angry, critical, verbally abusive and a mean disciplinarian. Mostly, I was afraid of him. Still, he read your book and it touched something inside that hard heart of his. So much so that he decided to take out a loan to pay for my therapy, a shocking move from an inveterate penny-pincher. As a doctor, he saw my suffering too and must have realized there was no other good option.

Then one day during a visit home in the year after starting therapy, the buried emotions of our lives bubbled over. At the kitchen table, he started telling me of the nightmare he was living at home with my mother, who was having a full-blown psychotic breakdown. I was newly open to my feelings and couldn’t take it. I got up and rushed to the back bedroom where I used to sleep as a child. I collapsed on the bed and stated crying.

My father came back shortly to see what was wrong. When I saw him silhouetted in the doorway, that familiar figure I used to fear, I quickly sat up and dried my eyes. Crying was not allowed in front of him, even after he’d beat us with a belt. So I tried to recover and asked him to wait for me in the kitchen. When I went out to rejoin him, I explained I just couldn’t stand to hear anymore about the family problems. Then, he did something that totally caught me off guard. He asked for forgiveness. “If I hurt you in some way, son, I’m sorry.”

For what seems like the first time in my life, we hugged like father and son, with feeling.

So not only did I discover that I was in pain, my father did too. For all of my childhood, he had overlooked it. He had hurt me overtly, deliberately, brutally sometimes, but somehow he didn’t see the damage he was doing until it was too late. Then he tried to make up for it by getting me into the only therapy that could have saved me. So I forgave him.

Now, I pass on the benefits of my insights to the next generation. I have raised two sons based on what I learned from Primal Therapy. Respect their feelings. Listen carefully. Respond to their needs and be there for them.

Andres and I are so attuned to each other because I have always allowed him to express his feelings openly. If he needs to cry, I lie down with him and just hold him or sit with him. Sometimes just the look on his face reveals his feeling – hurt, disappointment, sadness or whatever. When I spot it, I stop what I’m doing. Maybe I was scolding him too harshly and didn’t realize. So I stop talking and turn to him. All I have to say is “You look sad” or “I see you’re angry.” Once I verbalize his feeling, or rather acknowledge it, he looks at me with his whole face brimming with emotion, and he nods yes. As soon as he knows that I know, the flood gates open. His lip starts trembling, his eyes well with tears. And he cries.

So there it is, the secret to a happy life. Try not to hurt your kids. But if they get hurt, let them have their feelings. Let them see you understand, that you can see inside their little hearts. That you care.

In this way, Art, the life you saved is paying it forward. And that will be your legacy. One by one, we can save the world, one child at a time. That is worth a Nobel Prize many times over. You may not see that in your lifetime, but we can honor you individually, by making sure that we are living life as fully as it was meant to be, and helping our children do the same.

Thanks for saving mine.

A.G., USA

I Am Ninety Now...

I am ninety now so I have earned the right to reflect a bit. So here goes:

 What have I learned about life?  A lot and not much since it is what I have learned about people in my life that counts.  First of all, my great great staff, some of whom have been with me for fifty years, others thirty years.  It is a lifetime together that counts.  And yes, they and I have many flaws but we are all human for God’s sake and that is part of being human. They are not “my staff,” they are my friends, my good friends, all of whom I trust completely.  They care so much for their patients and for their lives. And my wife. We are together night and day for 41 years and it is not enough.  It is a double Pygmalion.  I changed her through the therapy and she changed me through her love. What more is there?

 If you did not suffer, chances are you would not be interested in Primal Therapy, nor my books nor me.  You can live a good life without me but a better life with me.  Why? Because I have found what feelings mean to all of us, and I have found what an open brain means.  Some of you already are there so congratulations.  Many of you, like me, are still learning about me about life and about what drives us.  You mean I am still learning.  Let me give you an example:  I used to work in a meat packing plant where they slaughtered pigs.  I stood next to the racks of pigs and heard them screaming, and thought nothing of it.  And I forgot it.  As my brain has opened up, I now hear those screams all of the time and I cannot shut it out.  It drives me crazy but they are part of me.  It is no different from now feeling the hurt and pain my parents inflicted on me, I now hear my silent screams.  I was never aware of it and never knew about it. After I felt my need over and over again I began to suffer from their behavior and just who they were.  I am ninety, remember, but my life at five years of age never left me.  I was driven incessantly by that hurt yet never knew about.  I could not sit still and never could even imagine that it was due to my womb-life.  I did not concoct a theory about it; I lived it.  l never knew I need to be held and touched until my body ached and screamed it out, time and again.  I did not even know it was about being held and touched until months and years after feeling raw emotional pain.  Then it got specific.  We do sometimes hold patients because it is a good tranquilizer and it brings pain levels down so that they can feel and tolerate it.  We give them a bit of what they need so they can feel more of what they need.  The totality is too much all at once.

 We have turned psychotherapy upside down.  I cannot imagine telling a patient who is crying deeply that her time is up.  It is inhuman. l We have no time limit on sessions.  When they are through feeling and only then do they leave.  They go on feeling, and finally they leave me as a patient and come back as friends.  Good, non-neurotic friends.  I will publish some of the letters I received on my birthday to show you what I mean.  Here is a letter that I received while writing this:

 Dear Art,

 What a privilege it has been to have know of you for so many years and also have met you in person.
 Your life’s work has given me and so many the opportunity to save themselves from themselves. To create a new life or just a life, a beginning of something great. It’s through Primal Therapy that I’ve been able to see myself, slowly become myself, evolve to who I was supposed to be, free of pain, free of painful acting out repression all day, every day.

 I cherish the freedom of my own will, free of being caught by a web of past pain that was ever present, yet invisible. Primal Therapy to me is about awakening from a dormant state of living, letting the original child, the original blueprint, so to speak, flourish and be allowed to just be as it was intended.

 thank you, Art!


 I learned about my terror of death.  Having approached death at birth, being heavily drugged and unable to get out,  I already knew what approaching death felt like; and as I began to feel those early feelings erupted too.  And I had terror attacks, never knowing what they were and where they came from.  It seemed like I was dying NOW,  Pure terror.  I don’t want to leave this earth but I have come to terms with it… still…I have no rationales for what comes later because it is nothing;  no special energy that exists that tells me that part of me is still alive.  Nothing remains of me except in the memory of others who loved me.  If you want to go on living you need to be loved, and you need to love, and realize that what endures is love and only that.  But look, to finally be liberated from pain and to live a free and feeling life is a lot; cherish it.  That is my goal, my job and my life’s work.  I cannot stand to see people suffer when they don’t have to.  I think now of Robin Williams.  Maybe we could have helped him. We have helped so many like him.  But if he knew about us then he would have at least had a shot at sanity and health.  That is why,  not I, but the therapy needs to be famous; to save lives.  Robin had a right to know about us.  He knew about famous rehab centers that did him no good.  I have fame by the loads, my friends and patients, my wife. That is plenty.  Applause is not a good substitute for physical love, kisses and hugs; aaaah  hugs and kisses.  What we all needed and need.  We don’t need a wise man to tell us about the good life; we need someone to help us lead it.  We don’t need someone else’s ideas; we just need our own.    We don’t need brilliant advice; the learning we get out of our own bodies when it feels, is a lot and enough.  What liberates us?  Feeling the pain that kept us imprisoned.  Those bars are stronger than steel.  We never see them or know they are there but they keep us locked in.  They make us behave in the same way over and over.  We act in self-destructive ways without knowing it.  And even if someone tells us we are doing that,  we nod and say, “I guess so.”  After doing 12 years of college and university all I got out of it was to know typing and spanish.  Most of the rest was useless.  Certainly, what we learn in psychology is really useless, coming from a bankrupt field that cannot ever acknowledge feeling.  There is the apotheosis of the intellect even when it is the opposite that counts.  Some of my patients had professors for parents but they could never touch and kiss their children so what good did their intellect serve when they were destroying their children?  And they never saw it.  They were blinded by their intellect and could not see around their blinders.  Feelings opens the pathways for sight and understanding; they opened mine and then I knew the mistakes I made with the children.  And then I could hear the pigs scream, and I will never eat bacon in my life.  What we need is a feeling society and it can start with parents and continue with teachers; but first we all need to know the importance of feelings. They are lifesaving.  Two twins born prematurely, were put into an incubator together.  They had their arms around each other, and did far better then those who lived in an incubator all alone.  We need each other; we need the hugs the caress and the kisses, as if life itself depended on it, and it does.

 Here is what we don’t need:  we don’t need booga booga therapy, bereft of science, where everyone goes around hugging one another and spouting love phrases.  We need to know that pain is imprinted very early right after birth and stays for a lifetime and will not change with a few well meaning patients hugging each other.  It is good for a moment but cannot last or change anything. We don’t need smart therapists.  We need feeling ones.  Beware the ides of intellect.

 What it is that we all want? Love, of course, but when it is absent and we never knew it, we settle for substitutes…praise, approval, a pat on the head, an “A” from a teacher, a letter of commendation, a medal for work well done,  etc.  And we need those things as strong as we need love because that is what is behind our need for approval.  I know, I felt, “say I’m good” dozens of times in therapy.  That is what I needed, a wee drop of approval, a bit of praise from someone who counted in my life and at the time it was needed.  If I get it now it is nice indeed, but not life changing.  At age five after being called stupid time after time cause my father felt stupid and needed me to boost his faltering ego, that is when it would have done some good.  You cannot make up for what you missed, which is what nearly every therapy does today. Those therapists care about you, are concerned for your success and advise you.  Yet what we all missed is imprinted and fights back against all the help now.  It cannot get in.  We must must must go back and relive, undo the imprint and correct history.  We need to reverse the pain and be free.  How hard is that? Not as hard nor as painful as you might imagine.  You cannot address the present and change your past.  As obvious as that seems; you can only change the past by going back and reliving it, undo the chemicals such as methyl that engraved the memory into the system.  It is reversing the imprint that is the sine qua non.  That opens the gates to feeling and then we can breathe again; literally as some of my shallow breathers began to breathe far more deeply after therapy.  See. feelings opens up the lungs and the vascular pathways so we can breathe and have more latent oxygen in the systems.  It means averting seizures and clogging of vessels.  It means lowering blood pressure all by itself and of stopping lifelong migraines.  It means lowering the chemicals of stress and clearing the top level neo-cortex so we can think clearly again.  You mean feelings can do all of that?  Yes, but, but, Primal feelings, not the unleashing of a few tears and expecting miracles.  It means releasing pent up tears that have lain there silently for decades waiting their turn.  We have given them their turn.

 I have been in practice for over sixty years, since my days on the Staff of Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, Psychiatric Dept. And what did I learn? not much.  I started practicing Primal almost fifty years ago, and what did I learn?  Everything.    Feelings taught me, and I became a patient of my clinic.  I sat in the waiting room and waited my turn like everyone else. And then I started to learn about myself and then about others.    New shrinks must have our therapy so that they can learn, so that they can suss out feelings in others and help them with those feelings.  If you want decent kids and a good marriage you need to feel.  I have seen what a primal child looks like and it is a joy.  His father is writing a book about him.  He just gets up in the morning and says, “wow, I feel so good today.”  So simple and so great.  He learns easily, has many friends and is most popular.

 If you want friends you need to be  friend, not in the booga booga sense, but in sensing when a friend feels bad and you know how to empathize with her, feel with her and be a real friend.  Not in buying expensive gifts cause that has little meaning for a feeling person; yes it is nice but not if it has to fulfill the task of deprived early love.  Then the receiver needs more and more and it never is completely fulfilling.  When you are full of early love, gifts are terrific but they are not used to make up for what you did not get. Then it is never enough; never enough money, chocolate, boats and possessions, fame, clothes and so on.  Never enough because you are trying to fill a vast hole.  Life gets so simple when you feel that terrible burden you carry around all of the time. You need less because what you need you already have…love.

The Merger of Nature and Nurture: How the Outside Becomes Inside

 Over the years the question is always raised,  is it nature or nurture? What causes so much behavior and so many symptoms: the genes or experience?  I vote for both, and if I had to give an edge it would be to experience. But I am getting ahead of myself.  Because what seems like genetics may now be experience, and vice versa.  That is due to the new field of epigenetics where experience modifies the genes, how they express themselves, if they are blocked and how they are modified and when.  We need to look at them as an organic unit, each influencing the other.   Perhaps for a lifetime.   Certainly there are pure genetics; color of hair and eyes, but when it comes to plasticity, malleability and flexibility of symptoms and behavior we need to consider both.

 Such a thing as heart attacks in our fifties.  If we don’t consider experience and only genetics we will never solve the puzzle; for it turns out that stress changes the lymphocytes, the white blood cells to increase, and when that happens the extra cells stick to artery walls slowing blood flow, forms clots and produces a block in blood vessels: and, voila; a heart attack.  The problem is that we tend to look at current or childhood stress when the real origin may be in our womb-life.  (see: “New Study May Explain Why Stress Can Cause Heart Attacks.”  Nolan Feeney, Health Research, June 22, 2014 (see for ex: http://time.com/2909884/chronic-stress-heart-attacks/)).  As I have noted, stress is life endangering when it is at its most potent and stressful.   We need to take off our blinders and look further into the past, where experience, deleterious experience, is not so obvious.   We cannot see the fetus suffering from a mother’s smoking but it is there.  Here is the first inkling of how the outside (stress) becomes inside (heart attack).  What happens with stress is that it de-normalizes the system; either too much or too little.  One lady I saw felt “toxic,”  no one knew what she meant but she decided to move to the desert to feel “non-toxic.”  Until she had the feeling;  her mother was a chain smoker and she was toxic to the daughter she was carrying.  She produced heavy toxicity in her; it became an imprint and remained in her system. Once relived, many times over, she was over it and finally knew why so felt toxic.

But there is much much more.

 I also want to introduce you to an important scientific paper by M. Meloni (The social brain meets the reactive genome; neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology   Hypothesis and Theory.  21, May, 2014 (see http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00309/abstract; the full text is available for free)).  He sums up so much of the new science of epigenetics,  malleable and less fixed than we might imagine.  And they are heavily influenced by genetic factors. And like us humans, genes need always to be considered in the context of their milieu.   It is the interaction of genes and environment that bring the phenotype into play……and too often we look at the phenotype (what we can see) and ignore origins as the cause of our problems with behavior and symptoms.  When someone grows up in an alcoholic, violent environment we understand the causes of his delinquency.  Why not growing up inside the womb of a heavy smoker?   Doesn’t that help us understand his later breathing problems?  Only if we know where to look.   And that environment is often womb-life.  The good part of this is that when we can tease out some environmental factors they can sometimes be reversed.   Not so with genes. Therapists need to pay attention to the latest research in birth practices and pediatric discoveries, that I often write about.  Just that simple fact, that we respond to our environment can lead us to discover proper origins.  I hasten to add:  we respond more forcefully as that environment becomes earlier.   And as we grow up and have children of our own, that environment can be passed down the hereditary chain.  In short, what happens to us in our lives can be visited upon our offspring.   Not always the bad stuff but also the good; mother rats who often licked their offspring had healthy offspring and so was the baby’s offspring, as well.   (This is Michael Meaney’s work, as well as Moshe Szyf’s).  What they noted is the Primal position, as well, that there are critical periods in life when the environment affects us the most.  And clearly that is in the first weeks of life; not life on the planet, but life inside the mother ship.  I am writing mostly about methylation and how the environment becomes embedded into the cells where nurture becomes nature.  I mean if our life experience affects our offspring it acts like genetics; yes?    I mean the outside has become the inside.

 In animal studies they find that methylation patterns during the critical period can be engraved in parts of the limbic/feeling centers; i.e., the hippocampus.  And those patterns become stable and enduring.  And that can mean being vulnerable to later disease. (They say, “modifications of methylation patterns (the imprint) are encoded and  form long-term outcomes”). Briefly, imprints can make you sick.   Abuse is what seems to change methylation patterns, and especially during the critical period.  What is important here is that heavy methylation in the feeling centers can ultimately lead to mental illness.  It becomes the crucial for bad mental reactions.  The imprint has altered the hippocampus in such a way to make one vulnerable to further trauma.  The imprint is a fixed an enduring form of cellular memory according to Meaney/Syzf/Meloni.

The researches and I, both have come to the conclusion that the imprint can endure for a lifetime. Once fused it is most difficult to pry nature away from nurture. They, in effect, become one. And when the fetus or infant is stressed the expression of the genes change.  They can be up-regulated toward expression, or down-regulated toward repression. ( a lot depends on what chemicals are “borrowed” to embed the event/memory, the acetyl group or the methyl group).  What investigators are finding is no surprise at all.  That licked/loved infant animal babies are far better at handling later stress. And vice versa; when babies are not loved they have a harder time handling stress and adversity.  Do I mean that love is that important? Yes.  It is no wonder that the rate of lost productivity in jobs (30%) is due to some form of mental illness.  Very early stress leaves offspring less adventurous, much more cautious and wary.  And above all, they are more susceptible to drug addiction.  They are in imprinted pain.   When booga booga addiction centers miss out on all these early causes there is no way they can cure addiction.  As I have said numerous times, “You cannot love addiction or neurosis away.”   The point is that adverse early events leave a mark, a trace, an imprint that endures and affects behavior and symptoms.   It is then too late for love.   Yes it helps a bit but once brushing up against the imprint it is useless.  Because of the pain the gates won’t yield to feelings; they won’t let them through.

 We human beings are social and so are our brains.   They take in outside life and transform it into lots of internal stuff.  And then we look at the phenotype and say, aha, it is genetic; or worse, we say, “It is your job that is causing so much stress.”  It is rarely both; either we are born with it or we got it last week.  Like high blood pressure, for example.  It is Primal Pain that kills us prematurely, not so much diet.  Although I would not neglect diet, but normal people generally choose healthy diets, according to any number of studies.   If your system is balanced so will be your food choices, and choices in life, for example, like a proper partner.

 So who we are is not in the vapors.  It is in concrete experience; and that experience usually predates our life before birth (to name my most recent book). There is where we need to look and there we will find causes; we will find key memories that have driven us and caused so many symptoms that have been a mystery.   There we will find cure.

More on the Act-Out: Goodbye Robin Williams

There are some common act-outs that dominate so many of our lives.  I was thinking of having to work under pressure; that is, waiting until the last minute and there is pressure on, and then we start to work.

So what does the act-out mean?  It means neurosis: acting in the present as if it were the past.  Symbolizing the feeling from the past in the present.  So it is waiting for pressure to start going.  Needing pressure to get moving.  And how does that start?  Often, but not always,  the pressure of trying to get out and the need to activate oneself to move.  Thus, one exerts great effort in order not to fall into a failure syndrome of utter hopelessness, and the depression that it engenders later on.  There is the need to live together with the impending death surging forth.  One cannot get going on one’s own; one needs some “help,” some outside push to move us along.  It becomes a lifelong event; needing pressure to do or to go or to start.  One is no longer a self-starter; the impetus must come from the outside.

Why do I say that the impetus must come from outside?  Because the pattern usually starts so early in life, established by imprints in our earliest days of life, long before we could be self-starters, depending on mother’s impetus for motivation.  We then need someone to say, "OK, let’s get going.  Put on your jacket."  The motivation must be originated outside, not inside.  Or someone has to get ready, keys in hand, before the person decides to get ready.  Things need to "pile up" before we can be activated.

One sure way to start this off is to pile up anesthetics into the mother during the birth process. It knocks out most of self motivation and produces a whole system that veers toward para-sympathetic dominance.  This person is passive, has a low, languorous voice and has movements that are labored.  His vital signs are on the low side, with low blood pressure and body temperature.  In short, it is all of a piece. The whole system accommodates to the imprint.    And what does he learn from his womb-life?  Patience.  He can wait, because he had to, but then desperation sets in and waiting becomes life endangering, in his mind.  Then he can wait no more and needs to move.

When we examine the vital signs we can pretty well describe the personality type: when the blood pressure, body temp and heart rate are together rather high, then we know the person is a sympath, controlled or skewed toward sympathetic nervous system dominance.  It is those days in the womb that form the crucible for personality type; they all accommodate life circumstance.  They fare around the imprint; and when we take patients down deep we find the little nugget, the key imprints that forced all that accommodation.  And when those early imprints are relived and all the vital signs move as an ensemble down lower, we know we have struck gold. We have found the core of the pain.

Why are those imprints so critical?  Because almost every key adverse event in the womb can be life-endangering: low oxygen, inadequate nutrition, too much agitation,  flooding by drugs or alcohol, etc.  They all affect vital organs and change the system of the baby accordingly. There is a beginning to personality development and we must not immediately ascribe it to genetics.  Epigenetics is possibly more important.  Life circumstances wrap themselves around the gene and alter who we are and what we become.

This is pertinent to the death of Robin Williams this week.  He had just finished yet another round of rehab.  It should inform us of the ineffectiveness of rehab but it doesn’t.  Rehab is big business and it goes on uninformed by strict science so that anything goes.  It is surrounded by great food and exercise programs with a bit of booga booga therapy to round it all out.  And when I hear Dr Drew pontificate on addiction’s causes it makes me worry.  Every TV specialist, and they are often pretty young shrinks, tell us how it is a brain disease for which we need to get help, and  what kind of therapy is there for brain disease? God knows.  They never say.  They are forced into the “brain disease” notion because with no understanding of the imprints they have no other place to go.

Clearly Mr. Williams had deep-lying imprints that could overwhelm any later imposed ideas such as “see or focus on the positive.”  Who can believe that events in the womb are the forerunner of later depression and/or addiction?  I mean where is the science in the rehab centers that speak of methylation and epigenetics?  Where do they speak of the necessity of demethylation; of undoing the imprint and measuring it so that we know what we are doing in addiction treatment?  And who is there in those centers that could help him understand deep and remote memories that have changed his brain?  So he could have some small handle on his malady?  No one, it seems; for first they would need to understand it themselves.  And I see no evidence for it.  If only a professional could speak with him of his deep hopelessness, and get off that nonsensical “brain disease” mantra.

It is as if he had no life before the age of six, no experience to explain changes in the brain.  In other words, when they avoid basic need, they then have nothing to fall back on to explain embedded early pain.  And then they have no means to explain the now ample research to shows how imprinted pain detours basic nerve roots and nerve tracks. So they fall back on empty lectures, calling in "experts" to explain addiction and/or depression with no reference to very early experience.  And so they go on searching and searching for areas of the brain to explain what can only be explained, not by those key areas, which only accompany experience, but by how early experience impacts the whole biologic and neurologic systems.  How does hopelessness change brain function?  Where does that hopeless/depression come from? Is it really deep in the brain? Yes it is down there but it does not start there; it begins with experience and what it does to our thinking apparatus years later.  Experience does change us; so we need to get out of our solipsism and see the world and how it affects us.  The answer lies not in the brain which is most often normal when early experience is normal, but in what a carrying mother’s anxiety and depression does to us.  And it turns out that we end up duplicating the mother’s internal life almost exactly after birth.  If she is depressed we may end up depressed, as well.  We adopt her nervous system and we do effortlessly and without any reflective thought intervening.  We merge with her inner life and continue where she left off after our birth.  We become a "downer" too.  And if she produced all the chemicals involved in depression then so do we.  She provides the template and we act on it.  We have become her neuro-physiologic slave.  Our fate is sealed.