Friday, May 3, 2019

After you've seen abreaction, everything else is pleasant


Several blog posts here* describe or illustrate deep-feeling purging: the real self’s buried truth explosively emerging from hiding. On the way up and out of the mouth, eyes, chest and stomach, it chemical-washes the brain and gives the person back his or her original reality. I just wanted to point out here that while this may seem, on paper, unique, an impactful but discrete moment, when you see it before you, you realize this is the essence, the gold standard of therapy. You realize the person is supposed to feel all her set-aside history, is supposed to stop running from herself (the definition of the adult), is supposed to recapture her imprisoned and forgotten identity. This is what happened when a young lesbian woman, realizing that she “stopped being myself” prior to age ten under repeated humiliations, felt and was embraced by her buried-alive gay, true life, and screamed and cried, and found then that after so many years she had shaken herself awake.

Though I facilitate these moments, they are so unpredictable** that I only sit in mild anticipation during sessions, wondering when or if. Of course, many other things go on. They can be meaningful in pleasantly moving ways. But at the deepest level they are babysitting. Or rather, adult child-sitting.

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** Setting aside orthodox Primal Therapy, where this process is the daily bread.

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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.