If Poul O'Neill had known "Life Before Birth"?

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

More on My Primal World

  (Click to access!)

My comment:

What might have happened if Poul O’Neill had known of the importance of “Life Before Birth”?.

Over and again I have been asking myself why I have had so much success with Primal Therapy. I have more than once come to the conclusion that PT has been my  symbolic Operating System. To PT / OS I have added applications which have given me winning habits to make it possible to relive pain, dissolve neuroses and to release my “competent neocortex so it could inhibit dangerous impulses and steer me into a healthy life”.

When I wanted to change my problem, I asked WHY it existed, until I felt satisfied with the answer. Then I developed a vision and eventually I developed the HABITS which eliminated the root of my problem. 

I will try to give an example which I have taken from “The Power of Habits” of Charles Duhigg. It is about Poul O´Neill who before his successful career as CEO of Alcoa was working for the US government. He then created a framework for analyzing federal spending on health care, when one of the foremost issues concerning official was infant mortality. The US, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth had higher infant mortality rate than Europe and parts of South America. A staggering number of babies died before their first birthdays.

“O’Neill was tasked with figuring out why. He asked other federal agencies to start analyzing infant mortality data, and each time someone came back with an answer, he’d ask another question, trying to get deeper, to understand the problem’s root causes. Whenever someone came into O’Neill’s office with some discovery, O’Neill would start interrogating them with new inquiries. He drove people crazy with his never-ending push to learn more, to understand what was really going on.

Some research suggested that the biggest cause of infant deaths was premature births. The reason babies were born too early was that mothers suffered from malnourishment during pregnancy. So to lower infant mortality, improve mothers’ diets. Simple, right? But to stop malnourishment, women had to improve their diets before they became pregnant. Which meant the government had to start educating women about nutrition before they became sexually active. Which meant officials had to create nutrition curriculums inside high schools.

However, when O’Neill began asking about how to create those curriculums, he discovered that many high school teachers in rural areas didn’t know enough basic biology to teach nutrition. So the government had to remake how teachers were getting educated in college, and give them a stronger grounding in biology, so they could eventually teach nutrition to teenage girls, so those teenagers would eat better before they started having sex, and, eventually, be sufficiently nourished when they had children.

Poor teacher training, the officials working with O’Neill finally figured out was a root cause of high infant mortality. If you asked doctors or public health officials for a plan to fight infant deaths, none of them would have suggested changing how teachers are trained. They wouldn’t have known there was a link. However, by teaching college students about biology, you made it possible for them eventually to pass on that knowledge to teenagers, who started eating healthier, and years later give birth to stronger babies. Today, the US infant mortality rate, is 68 percent lower than O’Neill started the job.

O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish and to start a chain reaction.”

What might have happened if O’Neill had went one step further and found out of the importance of our “Life before Birth”?

Jan Johnsson

My comment to Richard Atkin's suggestion to start a primal community:

Richard,

In The Country of The Blind

When I read your suggestion of a Primal Community, H.G. Wells’ story “In The Country of The Blind” pops up in my mind. I read it a few times after having tried to explain to my, in many respects qualified,  surrounding what Primal Therapy was. The trick I used in order to “survive”, when my explanations failed, was to imagine that I was a king in a country of “blind” people. So H.G. Wells story is both helpful and beautiful and it has several bottoms...

One of the ambitions with the Primal Therapy is to establish an integrated unified circuit between the different levels in the brain and I am not sure that your community will create such a circuit with the rest of the US or any other part of the world for that matter.

Jan Johnsson