What Lingers On (Part 1/2)

I am in my nineties now and many of you have asked for more of my feelings; since I had another Primal last night I will tell you how it happened and what it was about.

Primal feelings go beyond therapy and become a way of life.   We help patients learn how to get to feelings so for a  lifetime they can do it on their own.   We teach patients  self development so that they do not have to depend on others for getting better.   Otherwise we would enable patients to lean on therapists  for a lifetime  and not achieve self-direction and self control nor maturity.  That is not health; it continues immaturity and the need for external advice and direction.   Healthy adults don’t need that.  Look at animals, some have at least a five year period where they need parents to watch out for them; then they are on their own as adults. We want to help humans become adults not dependent babies.  If they don’t get love and nurturing early on they will try to get it later from a partner or a shrink who will foster it.

But in my opinion they need to go back to when they needed it and open themselves up to begging for it in order to evolve properly. We cannot ignore the early loss of love and protection and become human adults. We must go through the evolutionary steps; needing help, direction and love.  I did it last night; let me explain.

I watch many nature shows to see how animals develop and also because I relate to them first and foremost.  Sad to say, when I read about people hurt in an auto accident I look to see if any animals were hurt, first.  They are so vulnerable and innocent;  I am reading about me.   It is how I felt all my childhood. My mother was always mentally ill. When I was five or six she was sent to an insane asylum, as it was called back then for three years and my father went to be with her.  All my facts are faulty as they never talked to me nor touched me nor protected me.   So they left without a word to my sister and me.  They split up the family and sent us to different and very strange homes where we knew no one.   Not a word about what was happening.  Not a word when they would come back; they were Russian peasants who had no understanding of anything.  My mother was illiterate and could not read.

There was never a book, a record or even a magazine in the house.  My parents were my whole world.   And it was a pretty barren one.  I never expected love and never knew what it was.   I never heard  a laugh  my whole childhood.   That should be a big  part of any childhood; to lighten the atmosphere and make life fun and enjoyable.  It was grim; early, we lived in the ghetto and never saw the real world.  My sister worked in a bank her whole life and died recently of what?   I don’t know but I can guess;  no love.   Without Primal the same fate awaited me.  Yes, we need a good diet, but also we need an organic and harmonious system, and that is what feelings give us; to integrate feelings in us smoothly.  And when that happens our love hormones increase and stress hormones decrease and I think we live longer.   I will let you know when I am 100...

I never knew about swimming pools until my mid twenties when I saw a private pool, and was amazed.   I never heard an intellectual conversation until my late teens, and that changed me.  I began to realize that there was a different world out there other than,  “Did you take out the garbage today.?”

It is hard to believe that parents never said a word to us but we were treated like animals and could only relate to them.  I recalled the story of visiting the neighbors and the mother was standing in the kitchen with her two sons, laughing and joking.  I was shocked and ran home to say what I had seen, a mother talking to her kids. I spilled it out only to be chastised by my father for wishing someone would talk to me.  I stopped asking.  I had an underlying terror of him because when he got mad, which was every five minutes and he would scream at my crazy mother, and his eyes turned red and watered.  I knew then to watch out. But it became an imprinted Primal of fear.

Never a kind word, nor of  “How are you doing?”  Never an arm around you. Just chores by parents who thought that the job of parents was to give orders and demand respect;  never defy their need for respect.  We obeyed “religiously.”  My mother had no needs; she lived in some world I never understood.   A world of talking to herself, only.  And never to us.

Now my Primal:  I watched Nature on TV.  They raised orphans chimps and elephants until they  were ready for the Wild. Their trainers went back to the jungle after the animals were in the wild for 2-5 years to see if they were remembered.  Of course they did; the chimps came down from the trees to hug and kiss them.   They never forgot; and my Primal was that I was waiting a lifetime for them to come back from the Asylum to take care of me and love me.  I never had it and that need burrowed inside and never left.  I carried it around for ninety years and felt it last night.  I had to get to so many previous needs and hurts first.  Then later descending to age five and being left alone with strangers.  I never got it and I never had  a warm contact with my sister after the family was split.  Nothing was said but we were no longer family.

I used to feel that I was waiting for something but I never knew what it was, until last night.  My wife wanted to hug me to ease the pain and I stopped her because I had to feel alone and lonely; that was my salvation, my health and sanity.   I was getting “ME” back.  It was no more than what I had always felt deep down.   And when I was alone I was very uncomfortable.   It was the equivalent of my early life.    Alone, empty, unloved and untouched.   Not ever to be addressed directly or having a parent call my name.  And I will play you a song I wrote called SAY MY NAME.

Half the time my mother never knew who I was.  I expected it and was never shocked when she exclaimed, Who is he?    But the Primal was about needing someone to love me and be happy for me.   That never happened.  When I got my Ph.D it took place in an old English auditorium with British seats and atmosphere,  I invited them, maybe to give them one more chance to offer love, but after the ceremony they were two stones who never said a word,  and never showed any happiness for me.  One reason I became a shrink was to make women well, so I could have a sane mother.  Ayayay.

So before Primal I looked for love by starting with cold, hard people and trying desperately to have them be warm and kind.   Never happened.  I was lost and confused and alone.   I had 6 majors in college and never could talk to anyone about what I wanted to do in life, when one day I was walking across UCLA campus and Jean Fargo was waiting in a line.  I said “Jean what are you waiting for.”?  She said I am applying to graduate school where they help students learn to help others.  I said,  “I want to help others.”   She said, come on along.  I did and went to Social Work school, where I was selected for a special psychiatric internship at a famous clinic.  But when I graduated I realized that the job was like a low-paid teacher and I could not support my family, and I wanted to know more about humans. So I started all over again in psychology.   And years later I received a plaque that made me Academic Hall of Fame.    A lost kid from the ghetto; not bad.

But inside nothing changed until I saw a Primal from Dennis; at that moment my life changed; I realized that there was another world I had never seen before, well hidden and explosive.  It was me I had discovered.  It was me I liberated  but along with me was  thousands of others who shook their pain.  They began to have a life.  I realized it had little to do with what was in their head but what was deeply lodged in their feelings.  Feelings not Intellect was the answer.  That was a revolution.  Simple truth is always  revolutionary.