Situational Irony.

Situational Irony.

During therapeutic treatments, Art Janov discovered that, behind depression and anxiety, there was a repressed pain that could be re-lived. He realized gradually that evolution / our organism had provided us with a protective filter against the pain we experienced, very early on since we had not yet developed sufficient robustness to endure it. Meanwhile, it emerged without exception that all this pain was rooted in a lack of love, security and / or neglect in the initial phase of life.

The most common causes of mental and physical pain occur during the fetal period, during and just after the birth process. Pain (the brain treats mental or physical pain similarly) occurs when a fetus / child is not getting its need met for love, security, touch and care. Neglect includes that the mother is, for example, drinking, smoking, using drugs, expose herself to abnormal stress and eats too much, too little or improper nutrition during pregnancy. A fetus / child, which gets the right treatment during gestation and has its needs for love, security and care of both parents during the first three years has excellent potential to develop according to its potential.

One of Art Janovs ingenious messages implies as stated in the introduction that he explains the natural protective filters to suppress and reduce the unbearable pain that evolution is providing us with. These repressions of physical / mental pain have a hidden, long term cost. To produce protection, our organism is over-taxing our organs and distorting our emotional ability. Everything indicates that the magnitude of the over-taxation and distortion is related to the impact of the repressed pain.

To the extent that our repressions are leaking pain, when we, for example, are exposed to overloads, we suffer a large number of mental sufferings and neuroses. We need protection from the original unbearable pain as long as we live. Therefore, the over-taxation of our organism will speed up that we suffer from common diseases like hypertension, peptic ulcers, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, cancer, alcoholism, etc.

The current, sometimes criticized, psycho therapeutic paradigm does not cure its patients. It is a treadmill that, after all, along with the pharmaceutical industry will take care of our symptoms. A natural question is, therefore, why Primal Therapy does not take over. The reason is that PT does not have the capacity to work in practice more than in exceptional cases. The dynamics and overall vision are not sufficient to establish Primal Therapy in a broader context, even if the primal principle in theory is working, and there are patients in abundance.

Relatively speaking, only a few (financially fortunate) patients have experienced a radical cure through the primal principle. In my own case, the decisive stimulus was a traumatic birth process leading to epilepsy. My epileptic stigma meant that I eventually could not abstain from following the primal principles and re-live my birth trauma. I dared to risk my life in order to demystify my pain / epilepsy. Since my epilepsy always had appeared dramatically and wordlessly, so I had a bridge into the wordless feelings during my birth trauma.

Anxiety, “to lie down and feel the stab of wordless pain”, discourages most people from re-living their, by evolution, repressed traumas. For the Primal Therapy ( = "Evolution in Reverse"), it is a situational irony that traditional psycho therapy and the pharmaceutical industry free can  plagiarize the evolutionary “patent” to suppress pain. Evolution is thus the ally of the current treatment paradigm. This impressive - and often necessary - pact can we best resolve if all children, from the moment of conception and at least three years ahead get enough love, security, stimulation and care.

Jan Johnsson