MusePapers January 13th, 1998:
Primal and Anti-Primal:
Truth and Consolation
Mickel Adzema, M.A.
PART ONE: TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY VERSUS
"CONTAINERS," CONSOLATION, CODEPENDENCY
Consolation
Someone is crying. Our hearts go out to her or him. We wish
to help, to console. Do we pat that person on the back and say, "It's
all right . . . everything will be all right . . . please don't cry"?
Well, yes, generally this is done. Despite decades of Primal, holotropic,
and humanistic/experiential psychotherapy, almost everyone will consider
this to be the humane and compassionate response to another's expression
of suffering. We know that mainstream society believes this because
it is difficult to find a scene in a movie or on TV in which situations
involving crying are not handled this way.
So then why would the aforementioned psychotherapies have us thinking
differently about this? Well, because we have discovered that there
is a difference between consoling one and healing or helping to relieve
them of their suffering. In fact, we have discovered that when we
tell people not to cry and that "it is all right" (supposedly helping them),
we are in fact trying to control them and to keep them from upsetting or
disturbing us. Not only do expressions of grief tend to be
distracting, and annoyingly disruptive of one's peace and calmness, we
have learned that these expressions quite often "trigger" (or stimulate,
or "bring up") aspects of our own grief and pain, which we are assiduously
trying to keep out of our awareness because to let them in would be painful
to us.
So, we have learned, that our actions of consolation and concern
for another are convenient and socially rewarding (we can appear to be
nice people to others watching) ways of protecting ourselves from pain
. . . bluntly put, that our seemingly compassionate, selfless act is actually
a selfish one, which does not help the grieving person at all but merely,
at their expense, is an unconscious attempt to keep ourselves from grief.
We have learned that in consoling others we are really attempting to console
ourselves
by controlling them!
Arthur Janov, in his premier book, The Primal Scream, presented
an example of how he learned about the difference between consolation and
healing. He tells of a session, occurring before he discovered the primal
process, in which a young client is crying remorsefully about how the traumas
of his childhood have caused him to miss out on what could otherwise have
been a fulfilling, fun, and happier adolescence and young adulthood.
Janov—in his pre–primal-awareness—consoles the young man by countering
that, well, he still has a whole life ahead of him to live, that he still
has plenty of life left to make up for what he's missed out on. The
young client stops crying as he takes in his counsellor’s words.
To his credit, Janov points out what a mistake it was for him to
have said what he said. Those of us in Primal would later phrase
it that, for his client, Janov had "ripped him off of his feelings."
The idea behind all of this is that crying is the outward expression of
when a person is experiencing or confronting an inner truth. Not
only is crying physiologically beneficial—as Aletha Solter has pointed
out in her article, "Tears for Trauma,"
published in the spring 1996 issue of Primal Renaissance: The Journal
of Primal Psychology [and reprinted on this website, click here]
—but this physiological healing is reflected on the psychological or inner
realm as the reintegration of a lost or split-off part of one’s personal
truth.
Authenticity
It is in this sense that we say, in Primal, that one recaptures one’s
truth, and, consequently, regains one’s real self. By
this is meant that one re-members the parts of one’s history—of
one’s past experience—that has been kept out of consciousness because it
was too painful to think about or "re-member." In doing so, one becomes
more whole, not only because one regains memories, but more importantly
because in keeping out painful memories we keep out good or pleasant memories
associated with the painful ones.
Still more importantly, because—as Janov has said—feeling is an all-or-nothing
affair—along with memories we also keep out of consciousness—out of our
personalities—feelings, skills, talents, desires, appreciations, joys,
pleasures, and other aspects of being human which, when we have and express
them, make us feel more fulfilled; alive; joyful; actualized; clear, aware,
and rational in our thinking; and much else beneficial. So we say
that in repressing (or in being split off from) aspects of one’s past,
or biographical, experience, one is less alive, less real, less rational,
less able to exercise clear judgement and discrimination and to make good
decisions, less actualized . . . in sum, one is less authentic and less
fully human. On the contrary, however, when one has reintegrated
those split-off or repressed parts of one’s self one is more real, authentic,
and human.
Truth
Therefore, as Janov has said, it is truth that heals. Or, we could
say that it is the discovery of one’s inner truth about oneself that causes
one to grow. The crying, raging, seemingly violent physical movements
that are observed in clients in experiential psychotherapy sessions are
simply the outward expressions of their confrontations with their inner
truths. And—one must keep in mind—those truths are painful to face
and we do not initially want to know them (though there is also the sense
of relief and pleasure in discovering a sought after but heretofore inaccessible
aspect of one’s personal reality; and people in their sessions often experience
great relief and pleasure alongside of the pain of re-membering, and even
when their outward appearance—as in their crying wailing, raging, and so
on—would seem to indicate that they are in great agony (from which a "compassionate"
person would naturally want to rescue them . . . and that’s the point.
More about that later.))
Codependancy
Despite the fact that Janov stressed truth as the healer in Primal,
some of us have noticed a tendency for this therapy’s name to be used to
indicate techniques that involve just the kind of "ripping off" behavior
that I have described at the outset. It is not that the technique
is employed as blatantly as in the common examples of real life; it is
subtler. The usual pattern is that the person who is confronting
his or her personal truth is surrounded, comforted, and/or held by the
facilitator or facilitators in attendance. The rationale for this
is that some pains are so painful that a "container" or some form of outside
support is needed for the client to be able to face them. The other
reason given for using such methods is that a "healing" or "rescripting"
of the original trauma can be accomplished by the client getting some love,
affection, touch, and holding, which are often the things that were lacking
in the client’s past and the fact of which is so painful to the client
as to cause the grief that is being expressed. Sometimes this method
is called "reparenting." It is the attempt to give the person what
the person did not get at the time in infancy when it was necessary to
prevent pain and to promote normal emotional growth.
What often accompanies this kind of supposed reparenting is the facilitator’s
being supportive and positively affirming, verbally, to bolster the self-esteem
of the client. Again, the idea is that part of people’s pain involves
being criticized and judged unfairly and often harshly, undermining that
person’s sense of self-worth. That, consequently, to affirm the client,
and to refrain from any seemingly "negative" feedback helps to "patch up,"
so to speak, that ever-present sense of unacceptance of oneself, or even
self-hatred. The client, in this situation, is seen as so wounded
that any "negative" feedback is seen as furthering the original injury,
so that feedback is withheld, and, if absolutely necessary, is presented
in only the gentlest and even euphemistic of terms. In this way,
the facilitator is said to be demonstrating "real love" in his or her relation
with the client; again, giving the client some of that which the client
should have, but didn’t, get from her or his parents.
However, Janov has written that love involves giving to a person
what that person needs. Consequently, that if what a person needs
in order to grow is honest and unglossed-over feedback about him- or herself
and a dispelling of illusions and defenses about oneself, which the person
can then evaluate within his or her feeling process (accepting and integrating
the feedback if discovered to be true and rejecting it if found to be untrue),
then even if this feedback is initially "painful"—meaning it triggers feelings,
primals, or distressing emotions—it is actually an act of love, on a facilitator’s
part, to provide this. On the contrary he has said that to be dishonest
in one’s feedback to a client, to be "unstraight," even though it might
temporarily stave off a painful reaction in the client, is not a loving
act at all, for it prolongs the unreality of the client, thus prolonging
the client’s suffering in the prison of personal delusion and its accompanying
reality illusion (however, pleasant or at least undisturbing that delusion/illusion
can at times be). His claim is that when a therapist sugar-coats
or distorts her or his own honest perceptions of a client in order to,
supposedly, "protect" the client, the facilitator is in fact only protecting
her- or himself from a difficult confrontation; thus, that such a therapeutic
technique involves a cowardice on the part of the facilitator. Furthermore,
and more insidiously, this, let us call it, "mothering" of the client can
be an expression of the facilitator’s desire (however unconscious the motivation)
to keep the client coming back so as to keep getting paid by the client,
for to risk expressing something that could be distressing to the client
means to take a monetary, as well as personal, risk.
Does "reparenting" work? Who is right? Is it true, as
Janov has said, that one’s inner journey is a solitary facing of painful
truths about oneself and one’s biographical history, which, when accepted,
leads to acceptance of one’s reality and hence a healing and clarity of
consciousness? Or is it true that these painful truths are so difficult
to deal with that they need a facilitator’s help to "package" and "rescript"
them? Is Janov correct in saying that therapists who rush in to comfort
and hold the client when that client is in the process of facing painful
inner truth are practicing "mock primal therapy"? Is Janov correct
in saying that the therapist and the relationship between therapist and
client is irrelevant—as is the idea of transference—and that consequently
therapists are interchangeable, because it is the realization and acceptance
of painful personal reality and truth that heals, having little or nothing
to do with a facilitator’s personal affection for or relation to a client?
Is it true that this form of cuddling of a client when the client
is in pain is a "ripping off" of that person’s potentially healing experience,
which instead causes a codependency between the client and the facilitator
wherein the client begins to need that particular facilitator and begins
to project the needs one had for one’s father and mother onto the facilitator
in a way that is unhealthy because it re-creates the impossible struggle
to get what was not gotten in the past into a present attempt to get it
from the therapist? Or, is this holding and cuddling actually giving
the client a taste of what was never had and providing a basis for a more
secure and stronger emotional self?
Is it true, as Janov has said, that the unreal self was created in
violence and it must be torn down violently—by which he meant that therapists
need also to reflect back or to be straight with their clients in the way
that they see them, in both their shortcomings as well as their strengths?
Or is it true that clients are in such a state of low self-esteem that
to reflect back to them any shortcomings that the facilitator sees—even
when the facilitator is acknowledging that the statement is only his or
her perspective, his or her "projection," and, because being a flawed human
being, with primal pain of his or her own, could be incorrect—would set
the client back in the process and undermine further growth and personal
gains? Do we grow by protecting our self-esteem or by allowing our
self-esteem to be tested on the anvil of feedback from others, whether
facilitators or friends who know us?
Well, the evidence is now in. It now can be said who is right in
this debate.
(To be continued)
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Derzak Adzema
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on: mickel@primalspirit.com
Mickel Adzema
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