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scottjmurray
266 Posts |
 Posted - 12/11/2008 : 17:58:25
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i thought this was some good stuff. i kind of inadvertently figured out, and still perform, primal therapy on myself. this is really good if you're having trouble recovering from neurotic personality traits:
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The Primal Scream (1970) is a book by Dr. Arthur Janov, the inventor of Primal Therapy, sometimes wrongly called "primal scream therapy".
The book summarizes Janov's clinical work to that point, which centres on his 'discovery' of the Primal Scream. Janov's theory holds that accumulations of emotionally painful events (Primal Scenes) permanently affect psychological health, and that resolution (and hence cure) can come about only by reliving those experiences in therapy, and resolving them by admitting the pain.
Through this book in particular, Janov is often identified as a key figure in the 1960s Counter Culture, most notably influencing John Lennon's first solo album Plastic Ono Band.
The Discovery of Primal Pain, From The Primal Scream by Dr. Arthur Janov
"Some years ago, I heard something that was to change the course of my professional life and the lives of my patients. What I heard may change the nature of psychotherapy as it is now known --an eerie scream welling up from the depths of a young man lying on the floor during a therapy session. I can liken it only to what one might hear from a person about to be murdered. This book is about that scream and what it means in terms of unlocking the secrets of neurosis. The young man who emitted it will be called Danny Wilson, a twenty-two-year-old college student. He was not psychotic, nor was he what is termed hysteric; he was a poor student, withdrawn, sensitive, and quiet.
"I don't have to live my life in agony anymore. I can finally be myself - the real me - the one I should have been all along - and be happy with who I am." C.B., France
"During a lull in our group therapy session, he told us a story about a man named Ortiz who was currently doing an act on the London stage in which he paraded around in diapers drinking bottles of milk. Throughout his number, Ortiz is shouting, ‘Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy!’ at the top of his lungs. At the end of his act he vomits. Plastic bags are passed out, and the audience is requested to follow suit.
"Danny's fascination with the act impelled me to try something elementary, but which previously had escaped my notice. I asked him to call out, "Mommy! Daddy!" Danny refused, saying that he couldn't see the sense in such a childish act, and frankly, neither could I. But I persisted, and finally, he gave in. As he began, he became noticeably upset. Suddenly he was writhing on the floor in agony. His breathing was rapid, spasmodic; "Mommy! Daddy!" came out of his mouth almost involuntarily in loud screeches. He appeared to be in a coma or hypnotic state. The writhing gave way to small convulsions, and finally, he released a piercing, deathlike scream that rattled the walls of my office. The entire episode lasted only a few minutes, and neither Danny nor I had any idea what had happened. All he could say afterward was: "I made it! I don't know what, but I can feel"
"What happened to Danny baffled me for months. I had done standard insight therapy for seventeen years, both as a psychiatric social worker and as a psychologist. I was trained in a Freudian psychiatric clinic, as well as in a not-so-Freudian Veterans Administration department. For several years I had been on the staff of the psychiatric department of the Los Angeles Children's Hospital. At no time during that period had I witnessed anything comparable. Since I had taped the group session that night, I listened to the recording frequently over the next several months in an effort to understand what had happened. But to no avail.
"Before long I had a chance to learn more about it.
"A thirty-year-old man, whom I shall call Gary Hillard, was relating with great feeling how his parents had always criticized him, had never loved him, and had generally messed up his life. I urged him to call out for them; he demurred. He "knew" that they didn't love him, so what was the point? I asked him to indulge my whim. Halfheartedly, he started calling for Mommy and Daddy. Soon I noticed he was breathing faster and deeper. His calling turned into an involuntary act that led to writhing, near-convulsions, and finally to a scream.
"Both of us were shocked. What I had believed was an accident, an idiosyncratic reaction of one patient, had just been repeated in almost identical fashion.
"Afterward, when he quieted down, Gary was flooded with insights. He told me that his whole life seemed to have suddenly fallen into place. This ordinarily unsophisticated man began transforming himself in front of my eyes into what was virtually another human being. He became alert; his sensorium opened up; he seemed to understand himself.
"Because of the similarities of the two reactions, I began listening even more carefully to the tapes I had made of Danny's and Gary's sessions. I tried to analyze what common factors or techniques produced the reactions. Slowly some meaning began to emerge. Over the next months I tried various modifications and approaches in asking the patient to call for his parents. Each time there occurred the same dramatic results.
"I have come to regard that scream as the product of central and universal pains which reside in all neurotics. I call them Primal Pains because they are the original, early hurts upon which all later neurosis is built. It is my contention that these pains exist in every neurotic each minute of his later life, irrespective of the form of his neurosis. These pains often are not consciously felt because they are diffused throughout the entire system where they affect body organs, muscles, the blood and lymph system and, finally, the distorted way we behave.
"Primal Therapy is aimed at eradicating these pains. It is revolutionary because it involves overthrowing the neurotic system by a forceful upheaval. Nothing short of that will eliminate neurosis, in my opinion.
"If it weren't for Primal Therapy, I would be dead from drinking and smoking too much and driving too fast. Even if this had not killed me physically, I still would have been dead emotionally." A.N., USA
"Primal Theory is an outgrowth of my observations about why specific changes take place. Theory, I must emphasize, did not precede clinical experience. When I watched Danny and Gary writhing on the floor in the throes of Primal Pain, I had no idea what to call it. The theory has been expanded and deepened by the continuing reports of one patient after another who has been cured of neurosis. This book is an invitation to explore the revolution they began."
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The following is taken from Why You Get Sick - How You Get Well by Dr. Arthur Janov, and reviews some of the basic theory behind Primal Therapy.
“There is one neurosis, many manifestations and one cure — feeling.”
Repressed pain divides the self in two and each side wars with the other. One is the real self, loaded with needs and pain that are submerged; the other is the unreal self that attempts to deal with the outside world by trying to fulfill unmet needs with neurotic habits or behaviors such as obsessions or addictions. The split of the self is the essence of neurosis and neurosis can kill.
That pain is the result of needs and feelings that have gone unfulfilled in early life. Those early unmet needs create what I call Primal Pain. Coming close to death at birth or feeling unloved as a child are examples of such Pain. The Pain goes unfelt at the time because the body is not equipped to experience it fully and deal with it. When the Pain is too much, it is repressed and stored away. When enough unresolved Pain has occurred, you lose access to your feelings and become neurotic.
“The number one killer in the world today is not cancer or heart disease, it is repression.”
Primal Therapy is important in the field of psychology, for it means, ultimately, the end to so much suffering in human beings. Discovering a way to treat Pain means there is a way to stop the misery in which so many of us are mired every day of our lives. After two decades of research, after dealing with thousands of patients with every imaginable psychological and physical affliction, we have arrived at a precise, predictable therapy that reduces the amount of time one spends in treatment and eliminates all the wasted motion. It is a therapy that has been investigated by independent scientists and the findings are consistent. Primal Therapy is able to reduce or eliminate a host of physical and psychic ailments in a relatively short period of time with lasting results.
“Feeling Pain is the end of suffering.”
We have found ways to measure the ongoing presence and chronic effects of early trauma. We have observed time and again that even though it is not felt, the force of the memory remains in the system, reverberating on lower brain levels and moving against the body wherever it happens to be vulnerable. It shapes our interests, values, motivations and ideas. By reliving these traumas, patients can return back to early events and know with certainty how they formed adult behavior and symptoms.
“Repression is the hidden force behind illness"
We can see how buried memories constantly activate the system, putting pressure on vital organs and creating disruptions which can eventually result in serious illness. The problem for too many of us is that suddenly we find ourselves with afflictions or obsessions and have no idea how it all happened. We don’t know why we can’t sleep, why we can’t find a mate, why we are obsessed with this idea or that or why we don’t function as we want to, sexually. Primal Therapy can clarify these seeming mysteries.
It sometimes seems that everyone is suffering in their own way and few are aware of it. Television is riddled with ads for ibuprofen, aspirin, sleeping pills and other pain killers, implicitly acknowledging the Pain we are all in but without ever acknowledging it explicitly. Nothing dramatic happens but so many of us have developed this disease or that, from high blood pressure to allergies, colitis, anxiety attacks, asthma, circulation problems and heart palpitations (our history literally becomes palpable). So many ailments that seem inexplicable -- depression and phobias, ulcers and migraines -- may all stem from the same source. So might many of our personality quirks, our habits and behavior patterns, our drives and obsessions. One powerful piece of evidence for the fact of the same kinds of Pains being behind so many different afflictions and behavioral problems is that the same kinds of tranquilizers or pain killers are used to treat all of them.
In the fields of medicine and psychotherapy today doctors deal with symptoms. Just look at the DSM-IV, the psychiatric diagnostic and statistical manual, with page after page of every conceivable variation of neurosis. And in Washington, D.C., they have erected monuments to symptoms, a building for each one — drug abuse, alcoholism, heart disease, cancer and so on. Experts specialize in treating colitis, ulcers, migraines, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, anxiety, depression, marital problems, eating disorders, etc.; knowing more and more about narrower and narrower subjects. They add salt, take away salt, add thyroid, remove thyroid, speculate about the reasons for one’s allergies or unhappiness, analyze dreams and nearly always prescribe medication. They are trying to normalize the symptom instead of normalizing the person who has it; trying to normalize the manifestation instead of the system that makes it manifest.
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Delving deep into the unconscious has allowed us to clarify the basis of adult behavior. We have a good idea what lies in the unconscious and it doesn’t seem to be the mystical emporium so often described. We have learned in Primal Therapy that irrespective of whether the Pain is manifest in the body or in the mind, the person is not himself; there is a dislocation of function which is global. Both emotional and physical pain deform cells and cause alterations which show up in measurements of vital signs, brain function and chemistry, the immune system, hormones, peripheral blood flow and in a person’s behavior. Everything is askew. Primal Therapy works in reverse of the normal approach. Instead of working from symptoms to possible causes, we work from causes to symptoms. The focus is always deep. From this approach we have developed a more profound understanding of who we are and what drives us, our basic, hidden, unconscious motivations.
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author of tms-recovery . com
(not sh!t, champagne)
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windy
USA
84 Posts |
Posted - 01/07/2009 : 07:19:37
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Very interesting.
As a former TMS'er (got rid of "fibromyalgia" in early '03 based on my research of Sarno) I am now riddled with horrible dust mite allergies following a move to a new apartment.
I know the "culprit" is dust mites based on allergy testing. At first I though I was allergic to my boyfriend's 2 cats who have joined us in this move.
Here's the clinker, for my entire adult life I have lived alone and now I am in a serious relationship and this move is the first time I'm living with a mate. There was dust, carpet, bedding in my last apartment. So can something be sooooo different in the dust, carpet, bedding of this apartment, which, is actually only 1.5 miles from where I'd previously lived.
I'm thinking that the emotional ramfications/surpressed fear of this move have sudden severe allergy symptoms.
Sound likely? |
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armchairlinguist
USA
1397 Posts |
Posted - 01/10/2009 : 00:40:54
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Be careful with the primal therapy stuff. IIRC from some reading I did a while back, it is really not meant to be done unsupervised. It's pretty crazy intense stuff.
I also just plain disagree with the guy. Nothing but primal therapy will cure neurosis? Tell that to my happy life!
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What were you expecting? |
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TotalStrangerFigure
USA
24 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2009 : 13:36:25
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| This primal therapy sounds interesting. Did you read the entire book to learn about it or just excerpts like the one you posted? |
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primal therapy (from google)
