Homage to Primal Therapy

 

I can’t believe I never described psychological healing this explicitly before. As far as I recall, I have generally assumed one-half of the essential process.

Healing must be a feeling-expressive experience: The splinters of emotional injury must be pushed out. There is no talking, analyzing or rationalizing away a splinter; there is no “refram­ing” the damage it caused; there is no meditating away its pain, or mindfully dis­tan­cing it. There is no behaving away the devel­opmental arrest and the misdirec­tions in life the damage will cause: We must ultimately regress, founder or fail.

But feeling expression is not enough. If the historical source of the feeling is not known, is not present in consciousness, it will remain severed, floating aimlessly, surging anar­chic­ally within us. Knowledge is essential because we are holistic: mind, body, time. A person who rages with­out targeting the specific childhood crimes committed on him will remain an eternal loop of rage. A woman who cries at Disney movies and television com­mer­cials will never find and release her grief until she remembers her loss and attaches those tears to it. A depressed person will never mitigate his depression until he remem­bers his parent’s deafness to his need for care and em­pathy, a cruel epiphany, his total invisibility in childhood. Anxiety and panic will not evaporate unless the actual fears and terrors are joined.

This linking of the event’s awareness to its feeling is the literal, internal returning to the past, what depth thera­pists call “reliving,” and reliving it the right way: this time with jus­tice. In our earliest years, the brain and body suppressed our pain, splitting it from its experience. Our holistic self was disintegrated. This is what we see all around: severed heads that think and race, eternal loops of rage and nebulous feeling, adults stuck in childhood, primitive hates clothed in sophisticated intellect. This is what we see in most of human­ity, almost all of it.

There is no real answer to this flaw in our nature but to start again, at the begin­ning, when pain and its cause were tragically known.