Anxiety – scary!

 

Arthur Janov, author of the classic The Primal Scream and a dozen or so other books on depth psychology and therapy, sponsored decades of research on the body’s and brain’s reactions to radical expulsion of emotional pain. This is why a Psy­chology Today article calls Primal Therapy “scientific.”* While many of Janov’s claims and testimonials of improvement are credible, some seem grandiose, where even birth trauma pain can be relived and shot out of “the system” so deeply and widely that the person becomes entirely “real” and no longer neurotic, cleansed of pain but for the residue of memory.

Janov held that anxiety is based in terror resulting from life-or-death experiences during the first nine months of life, in utero. Birth and pre-birth trauma. Later, here-and-now circumstances such as apprehension about a final exam resonate with this unreached and unre­solved terror, causing anxiety and panic.

There is much you can read in Janov’s books and blog (http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/) about anxiety. And there is little you may believe, owing to its exotica and esoterica (“The brainstem imprints the deepest levels of pain because it is developed during gestation and handles life-and-death matters before we see the light of day. Almost every trauma experienced during womb-life is a life-and-death matter.”) What may be more acceptable is a giving of the benefit of the doubt, inspired by the bleak fact that no psychotherapeutic techniques developed from Freud to TED** have made solid inroads into ending or even enduringly mitigating anxiety. Everything proposed – but for the Primal Therapy approach of expelling pain at the root – has been a palliative, a soothing, a desensitizing, a drug, a self-talking, a deep breathing: a numbing methodology.

I don’t do Primal Therapy, or rather, I did it one time many years ago in Ohio, in a rela­tively soundproofed office with a client who knew of and admired the extreme theory. Nowadays I go “where the light is.” (The old children’s joke, where a boy is asked why he searches for his quarter under a street lamp after acknowledging that he lost it somewhere else. “The light’s better here,” he replies.) The light I follow is still under­ground, beneath the terrain of Cognitive Therapy. I tell clients that anxiety is present smoke from the historical fire of “fear” – the past where frightening things happened. I look to the convenient light of childhood, not pre-birth. And we would know there is plenty in childhood that can cause apprehension, shyness, insecurity, distress, worry, fear, terror, if we’d only look back, look within.

A problem, however, intrudes: There is something about anxiety that keeps what underlies it inaccessible. This is reflected in the title of Lenore Terr’s book, Too Scared to Cry – Psychic Trauma in Child­hood. An anxious person, walking on eggshells and landmines, is unable to calm enough to sink down to earlier feelings. Anxiety resembles a present crisis, and during a crisis one doesn’t reminisce. My work often becomes a hodgepodge of lessons – which both numb and enlighten – and catharsis. Clients cry about five years of Mengele-style abuse by their ex-husband, but rarely about their parents’ screaming and domestic violence when they were children. They are frozen on the surface of themselves.

Possibly, though, I’m talking sour grapes, if that’s the right term. I recently lost a teenage client whom I’d seen weekly for a year, then “as needed.” My full armamen­tarium of techniques and humanism did not lower her anxiety to something manage­able. She’ll be seeing someone else, who I assume will fail (I readily apply my human­ism to myself). She lives with a needy mother and a father who does not talk to his children. I would say she has “double anxiety” at the least: this unacceptable home environment sitting on top of earlier childhood fears. Is there a third level, “brainstem” (Janov) trauma, too? Let’s not make matters worse, by going where there’s no light.

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* “A common misnomer: it is not Primal ‘Scream’ Therapy, but Primal Therapy, and rather than saying it is ‘cool’, I would rather say that it is scientific. It is one of the most heavily researched private psychotherapies extant in the world. . . .” at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-therapy/201002/cool-intervention-3-primal-therapy.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2019/05/anxiety-help-for-some.html.