How Do You Prove Primal Therapy?

I have been going on about my therapy for years that it is the cure. So what does that mean?

I have always been warned not to use the word “prove,” cause nothing is proved in science; it is supported, confirmed, strengthened but never proved.  So why do I go on with the word?  Therein lies the rub because ……first, let me lay out what I mean.

I will use the example of psychosis to explain. Over decades as patients descend down into and back to their early past they begin to lose articulation and have trouble forming sentences; it means they are still on the emotional right level with twinges of left brain verbal skills which begin to diminish.  As they go back more they lose their capacity for words and if they should use complicated words to describe their feelings it is a false primal.  Why?  Because the more remote the Primal trip the less capacity for words there is.  A two year old does not have the capacity for sophisticated language.  If it is a true reliving it would be impossible and usually is.  Mind you, this is after a long time in therapy and after many lesser pains are experienced.

As the patient begins to drop into gestational life there is more pain than one can imagine, soon, it is a pain that does not hurt inside because it becomes a feeling that is being felt.  It looks like pain but it is a manageable one, unless the patient is led or forced into the emotional depths where experience is premature and out of the question.  Here, during this period where the brainstem reigns the pains are the most acute and they can be psychotic making.  How do we know? Some patients who have come to us from rebirthing therapy plunge down deep too early and begin delusions and hallucinations.  “I see the cosmos and shining angels,” etc.  The pain has mounted into the neo-cortex and drove it to manufacture defenses, including false perceptions and bizarre ideas.  It is a sure sign of overload and inundation of pain.

Down on this level, as the patient, over time, goes deeper into the past, the pain mounts, which is how we know where the deepest pain lies.  We see it and measure it; no guesswork.  And when we see it over and over in hundreds of patients over 50 years we  begin to get a good idea of our observations.  It is consistent and replicable.  It is not longer a theory but a precise observation which I call cure. Why?  Because when there are such deep experiences, always nonverbal, so much changes; the biology, the appearance, the feelings, the look and the sense of comfort, at last.  To say nothing of possibly diverting serious imprints from exacerbating into serious illness later on.  Gone are the migraines and high blood pressure and gone is a good deal of the compulsive acting-out, not the least of which is sex.

So here we see the dialectic interplay between memory, deep imprints, the pain and the symptoms it engenders.  It avoids guesswork.  They all converge into a  feeling; it is a unified event.  We are not working on this symptom or that; we are working on the whole system as it responds to the deepest and most devastating imprints.  Feeling them then radiates everywhere in the system so that the effects are systemic-- effects throughout the system.

We are not looking to conform a private theory; we are developing a theory out of our observations.  Experience first, deep brain observations first, then the theory and the hypotheses.  The patients’ experiences do not confirm the theory or the hypothesis, it is the theory that goes or changes or modifies.  I have no desire to hang onto some concocted theory that I adore. If it does not make the patient better then why hang onto it?  This is largely what happened to all those therapists who wanted to improve on our theory.  They added drugs to the mix, then hypnosis, then cognitive and so on ad nauseam.  All because they never saw the central truth of feeling.  And, I assume, because they never underwent their own feelings.