What They Don't Tell You When You Go Through Primal Therapy!

WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU WHEN YOU GO THROUGH PRIMAL THERAPY!

Could you please tell us how you did? That it is a recurring request I got. However, I have been too focused on my own way, to follow the Primal Principle (Evolution in Reverse), to learn or pay attention to how others have behaved and succeeded. Now, finally, I feel good and have started thinking creatively, extrovert about my transformation and I can analyze how the “official” PT applied to my practical reality. After activating my memories from those I met during my 35 year epileptic journey, and after having been in contact with some who have been patients in recent years, I realize that far too few have been successfully cured in the Primal Therapy, in which they have invested time and huge money and to which they have devoted their lives. Why?

Through my own experience (indirectly supported by a résumé of Art Janov from 47 years of therapeutic experience*), I have realized that it takes so much more to apply a principle on a complex human living situation than what PT, up till now, has offered and realized. I know that my stigma, my main symptom, epilepsy did not belong to the most common in the Primal Therapy, but, my birth trauma, its repression / imprint and subsequent development to anxiety, neuroses, depressions and physical problems of various kinds can be included as classic examples among those whom Art Janov describes in his brilliant descriptions from clinical experiences of how repressed pain distorts our lives.

My way over the course of 40 years to get through PT meant to change my life in many crucial respects. That way I achieved the social and psychological independence needed to get back the real me and to optimize the result of re-lived repressed pain from my birth trauma. This is mentioned rarely or never in the “marketing” of the Primal Therapy. If I try to describe my holistic way, I get either censored by Art Janov or discredited, especially by potential patients, who intellectually “know” all the information about the pain they have not yet experienced more than the symptoms of.

My intention is, in a series of articles, to summarize my experiences and to point out what, I think, should be the obligation of those responsible for the Primal Therapy to inform their patients about, before, during and possibly after the treatment has ended. I have nothing sensational to reveal. My experiences may, however, change the image of to whom PT may be a solution in an unsustainable situation. In stead of originally being an unrealistic quick fix for everyone, it may be a very realistic therapy for many patients, which, as part of the customer recruitment / therapy, have to be identified in order to establish their treatment horizon and potential to be successfully cured.

Jan Johnsson

*

“I used to think it was an amazing discovery to cure people. But there is something that is hard to explain: the amount of unconscious pain we all carry within ourselves. The pain we consciously feel may not feel like it requires 40 years of therapy, but that is because we don't feel the unconscious part that is much greater. And the more you feel in therapy, the deeper you go, the more you uncover the unconscious pain, the more you realize the intensity and amount of what you were carrying.

Therapy can only follow each individual natural rhythm and what their body can take out, one piece at a time. So, in fact, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but people with massive early trauma may not have enough of a life time to resolve it entirely, even with Primal Therapy. However it is still better to take it out, one piece at a time, and live a better life day after day. And I agree with you, healthy diet, exercise, all these other tools we can find can definitely help greatly too. 

As Primal therapists, we are charged with taking the pain out. We never put it in, someone else did.”  Art Janov.