Being Enriched By The Banality Of The Basic In Life.

Janov's Reflections THURSDAY, JULY 12, 2012

On Leading a Richer Life  (Click to access!)

My comment:

How we are being enriched by the banality of the basic in life.

The read of your Reflections about how you enrich your life in a “banal” way brought up memories and feelings from all over my life. I love those rare moments when the greatest benefactor of my life is showing signs of being an ordinary man of flesh and blood and not just an antiseptic emotion theorist. Of course, you represent with what you stand for and with your mild, humble manners a feeling person, however, placed on a pedestal. 

During decades, I had two people I always trusted fully when I talked/wrote about my feelings and life situation. It was my mother, and it was/is you. My mother laid aside her religious face-mask and I took off my CEO-mask, and we exchanged loads of oxytocin. One exampel of our topics of conversation was, for exampel, when my mother surprised us by both crying and telling me about her stupid act of giving birth with pain, which led to my developing epilepsy. Other examples were my divorces, my therapy, the latest family gossips we had heard, and I could also tell the last dirty jokes that I had heard, etc.. Often when we finished our conversations, she stepped into her religious role again and told me that she was praying for me... We talked like that until I was almost 60, and she died at a high age.

You have made me understand the Primal Theory, given me a lot of knowledge and created a reliable trust and have been my guide into a new life. The interesting thing, though, is that this has happened over four decades when we have hardly talked to each other 10 hours all together! I have almost accepted the fact, mediated by yourself, that you don’t waist Dr. Janov’s time by talking about “banal” things. 

Even if understanding your limited rescources (which often is a matter of organisation) it still makes me angry and sorry at the same time. I knew lots of people who carried stories from their complex and tragic lives, which were loaded with dramas and unbearable pain of a magnitude at least of the level you are mentioning. Some of them even went to Primal Therapy where they were strictly told not to talk, but to feel. Nobody representing the Primal Therapy asked questions of non-therapeutic character or listened to them. A couple of them are working as cognitive therapists but most are dead for many years while working their asses off without ever being able to realize their real potential. One of them even worked her mind off in the Primal office in Paris.

Bruce Wilson mentioned once that you said that it is not the job of Primal Therapy to tell a person how to live her/his life, even if people need counceling during their therapy to make positive changes. My intention, as you well know, writing about this is because Primal Therapy might be so much more, by looking in other directions and adding the best of what is available in order to improve and create a more viable therapy. You have written “that changes are up to you, I am only the communicator”. However, with your exceptional charisma, you control all developments regarding the Primal Therapy. This is what Einstein might have meant by talking about the limitations of the genius. In the meantime, the stupidity in so many families is continuing without limits...

Jan Johnsson