Posts
(Click to access!)
My comments:
An Abstract of an Abstract of something Abstract.
Widely in the world of psychotherapy (even among patients who have been treated many years in LA) there exists a lot of uncertainty regarding the practical application of Primal Therapy. So when reading your abstract of your article about “The Origins of Anxiety, Panic and Rage Attacks” (a brief summary / abstract of the essence of your books and reflections) there is a high risk (calculated?) that the interpretation will be: “An abstract of an abstract of something abstract / not applicable or practical”.
With my unique experience, I am not one of those who think that your creation of Evolution in Reverse is something abstract. However, after 40 years of using your primal principals I have learned that it takes more than an ingenious inventor / guide and padded rooms to work our way back into the depth of our triune brain. With the psychotherapeutic expertise that you and your team have and with the varying patient experiences you have gathered over the years, it is difficult to understand that you have not put greater demands on the patient’s ability to implementing the, often long-term, therapy treatment in question.
You have in an educational and captivating manner described the principles of how early traumatic pain can be re-lived. You have consistently during 47 years of clinical experimentation, using patients’s narratives and your own made observations, “limited” your books and articles to the processes that our organisms undergo, from the fetal stage onwards, in the short and long term, when exposed to trauma and excessive pain. When you have deviated from this model, it has been to criticize the obvious flaws in the current psychotherapeutic paradigm.
For those who are not, like the famous avant-garde artist Raphael Ortiz who once upon a time indirectly provoked the first primal, obsessed with desire and ability to experiment, and find their way into your therapy to re-live their pain, and who cannot, long term, organize their lives career-wise, financially and family / socially, it seems your treatment, to be successful, must be offered to a limited number of “lucky” victims of extremely early traumatic experiences.
It is remarkable that, during 47, years, you have not developed / refined and documented a practically applicable method to channel patients, in and out, from the therapy, considering the potential that PT has to cure people of repressed pain. Apparently, the patient needs collided with your scientific ambitions. Fortunately you are trying to convince, a, hopefully, growing part of the future parents about the requirements, for unconditional love and care, required, for a child, to be optimally healthy and uninhibited.
The world is screaming for a serious “Primal Therapy for “Dummies””...
Jan Johnsson
My comment:
What do you want us to do? Art
It is such a vast and complex issue! It brought up birth feelings this morning when I first felt helpless and thought that I wouldn’t make it; to come up with an answer. My father used to ask me “what do you want me to do”, when he did’nt get my suggestions. However, after having laid back and felt the stab of anxiety, I will now answer after my best ability.
The last couple of days I have read your article "The Origins of Anxiety, Panic and Rage Attacks" a couple of times. It made me happy but also a little sad. The dominating positive aspect, that gave me pleasure, was that you, in one pice, brought together all the psychological, biologic and therapeutic knowhow, giving examples, about the nature of mental /physical pain and how it directed by evolution is distorting our entire lives, back and forth, in our Triune brain and in our entire organism. Since I have lived / experienced my pain and been guided by you and the primal principle, the reading felt like a morning swim in my favorite lake. The content has become part of me.
Your article is in essence your contribution to the medical and psychotherapeutic world how pain caused by lack of love and touch, maltreatment, abuse and negligence is rooted and, over time, spread in our entire organisms if not relived and felt.
The negative part of your article is what is missing. Your experience over 47 years does not include a research / analysis about;
What made your therapy work for those who were successfully cured, taking into consideration everything of importance, not just what took place in the Primal Center / Institute?
Why did a large number of patients fail, compared to those being considered successful?
To make a research about the reasons for success and failure based on 47 years of experience might erase a number of question marks both among patients and psychotherapeutic therapists and provide an answer to why the principle of Evolution in Reverse is not spreading like wildfire around a world full of anxiety / pain propelled sufferers.
Given enough lead time I could go on elaborating my own vison how I think that a Primal Treatment Center should be organized, which I sometimes have indicated in my blogs. My interpretation of your shortcomings has a double ambition; to motivate you and / or inspire some young, dynamic and creative inventor / primal person who is willing to try to apply your vital principals on a wider audience.
I still believe that much of my own experience which meant a combination of Rolfing, career counseling, diet, physical activities and a selective choice of my social environment could enrich a future profile of a new even more responsible treatment center then up till now.
Jan Johnsson
PS
What is it in the last paragraph of my previous comments, in particular, that you don’t understand?
Hi,
I sense I understand very well what Jan is saying. Let me try to re-phrase, first of all the following is obvious to me, but to others maybe not:
Firstly, there are those who make a commitment in life 'to help others'.
I'm sure it is part of the way our history interacts with our social relationships. It may just be a tendency to help old ladies across the road or it may be a full blown international conviction.
Secondly the helper is faced with the actual technical difficulties of the undertaking. After a while the 'aim to help' and the technical problem part company. . . You could say it's a combination of a 2nd line feeling (wishing to help) trying to connect with a 3rd line perception (the scientific facts).
-"Apparently, the patient needs collided with your scientific ambitions"-.
Real 'help' can only be instrumented / measured scientifically if it is to become a universal 'help'. One would not set up a research laboratory every time just to Primal for oneself, would one? When people break down and cry deeply they don't necessarily realise the significance of the scientific facts nor the tremendous potential. . . . . .
Once the helper finds a tally between his emotional desire and the scientific facts he is in an unenviable position of being "THE CONNECTION" incarnate. The connection between his 2nd line limbic desire (to help others) and the 3rd line scientific facts.
If there were a "connection" already existing in society; if there were not a repressed split in the first place then there would not be this conundrum. So, the problem for people like Art (he is not alone) is that as long as they are alive (and kicking) they are both the 'connection' and the 'conundrum'. Quite likely the helper is also (but only by default) the main obstacle to the wider spreading of the new comprehension.
This would explain why some of (not all) Art's books are at the moment a tad mixed up (in my and other's opinion). . . I mean no offence but Art is trying to join up a circle, or do I mean cycle? In his books he is trying to write about emotional connection with scientific facts and he the author is the connection and the conundrum.
Hence a need for 'Primal Therapy for "Dummies" '...
As Art keeps on saying, he doesn't go on for ever and also on his blog he makes essays about the theories and we are the ones to round them out.
I imagine The Legacy Program will 'set up' the future of 'Primal for Dummies'. I don't doubt that this blog is part of the future too.
Paul G.
I sense I understand very well what Jan is saying. Let me try to re-phrase, first of all the following is obvious to me, but to others maybe not:
Firstly, there are those who make a commitment in life 'to help others'.
I'm sure it is part of the way our history interacts with our social relationships. It may just be a tendency to help old ladies across the road or it may be a full blown international conviction.
Secondly the helper is faced with the actual technical difficulties of the undertaking. After a while the 'aim to help' and the technical problem part company. . . You could say it's a combination of a 2nd line feeling (wishing to help) trying to connect with a 3rd line perception (the scientific facts).
-"Apparently, the patient needs collided with your scientific ambitions"-.
Real 'help' can only be instrumented / measured scientifically if it is to become a universal 'help'. One would not set up a research laboratory every time just to Primal for oneself, would one? When people break down and cry deeply they don't necessarily realise the significance of the scientific facts nor the tremendous potential. . . . . .
Once the helper finds a tally between his emotional desire and the scientific facts he is in an unenviable position of being "THE CONNECTION" incarnate. The connection between his 2nd line limbic desire (to help others) and the 3rd line scientific facts.
If there were a "connection" already existing in society; if there were not a repressed split in the first place then there would not be this conundrum. So, the problem for people like Art (he is not alone) is that as long as they are alive (and kicking) they are both the 'connection' and the 'conundrum'. Quite likely the helper is also (but only by default) the main obstacle to the wider spreading of the new comprehension.
This would explain why some of (not all) Art's books are at the moment a tad mixed up (in my and other's opinion). . . I mean no offence but Art is trying to join up a circle, or do I mean cycle? In his books he is trying to write about emotional connection with scientific facts and he the author is the connection and the conundrum.
Hence a need for 'Primal Therapy for "Dummies" '...
As Art keeps on saying, he doesn't go on for ever and also on his blog he makes essays about the theories and we are the ones to round them out.
I imagine The Legacy Program will 'set up' the future of 'Primal for Dummies'. I don't doubt that this blog is part of the future too.
Paul G.
