Primal Pain is created when we do not get our needs met as children. Another way of saying that is when our primary carers do not love us we suffer pain. It is not just ordinary pain that can be easily felt. If we are not loved as babies and children then that lack of care is a threat to our very lives. Regard Primal Pain has having a life or death quality about it. Then we can begin to understand how Primal Pain shapes who we are and how we act in a monumental way.
When Primal Pain is relived during Janovian Primal Therapy it is released in small modules. For example I have probably released something like two hundred “modules” so far. However each ‘module’ was as much Pain as I could physically and emotionally deal with at one time. It is my experience that the mental health industry and brain scientists grossly under-estimate the amount of Primal Pain each of us carries, and the effect it has on our lives. All Primal patients are always surprised at how much Primal Pain they carried, and how much the pain had influenced who they became as adults.
After we suffer Primal Pain we unconsciously develop a defence system that keeps the pain from coming to conscious awareness. I will briefly discuss three of the worst ways (in my opinion) that Primal Pain and its associated defence system make a human life more miserable than it needs to be.
Primal Pain stops or reduces all feeling
The pain and pleasure pathways in the human brain use the same neuronal tracks. Therefore when the brain blocks Primal Pain from coming to consciousness it also puts a block on any good feelings, and especially on our feelings of love. Love is the feeling we need to bond and communicate in meaningful ways. Who would disagree that there is a huge lack of love in the world today. We have psychologists who approach brain science in an intellectual way, but I have heard it said that Primal Therapists should be known as ‘Feelologists’ because we understand feelings and sensations, and how important they are to healthy human functioning.
Primal Pain causes irrational minds
When we carry Primal Pain we have to think and talk in ways that keep us from our Primal Pain. We do this unconsciously but it has a tremendous negative outcome in just about every area of human life. In the twentieth century humans killed around 250 million other humans because one group irrationally thought that making a better world involved killing all those in ‘different’ groups. And even today that irrational thinking is still causing many deaths, and nobody seems able to stop it or understand what causes people to think and act in such obviously pathological and idiotic ways. Another common thing that irrational minds develop are belief systems. The most obvious one is a belief in a God. Now it would not worry me if people wanted to believe in God and kept it to themselves, but religion is the basis of so many conflicts within communities and also the world at large – so much so that surely we must all realise that maybe there is a better way. (This better way involves understanding the Three Levels of Human Consciousness, and how Primal Pain distorts these three different levels to create the mess we humans find ourselves in.)
Primal Pain is the underlying cause of nearly all mental disorders and many physical disorders as well.
The common mental disorders of depression, anxiety and suicide have their basis in Primal Pain. Depression is the repression of Primal Pain. Anxiety and panic attacks happen when the defence system is unable to completely block all painful feelings, and so some of them come to conscious awareness. Suicide, or not wanting to live in this world, is the result of painful things that happen to us, mostly in early childhood. We get physically sick because when the brain represses pain it tends to repress all systems, like the immune system and also our sexuality. Low libido and painful sex ruin many promising relationships.
GETTING REAL
When undergoing Primal Therapy the therapist targets the Primal Pain. It does not matter so much what the symptoms are, because once Primal Pain is released from the system, the human organism can return to good health. One of the most profound things to happen to a person undergoing Primal Therapy is that FEELING comes back into the body. When we can feel our own feelings we become a lot more aware of other peoples feelings – we will be less inclined to shoot and bomb our neighbours.
Irrationality disappears because during Primal Therapy we have confronted our Pain – which is facing the horrible truth that we were not loved much, if at all. Facing that truth makes it easier to face the reality of life, and although life can deliver us some horrible blows, it is still mostly a wonderful world to live in. If we can learn to replace Primal Pain with Love then the world can become our oyster. Our need to believe in a heavenly father will disappear when we understand the real power of love. Loving parents are all we need to establish a sound mind/body to experience this world in all its glory.
If Primal Pain causes so much sickness both mentally and physically, then it follows that not imprinting Primal Pain, especially in young children, will have a huge impact on the future health outcomes of all peoples. (This is already becoming known with research like the Adverse Childhood Experiences, which shows how trauma in childhood is strongly correlated with mental and physical ill-health later in life. Primal Theory and Therapy knew this fifty years ago and has developed a process to reverse most of the damage. The orthodoxy are still looking for a viable cure, but not towards Janovian Primal Therapy).