Reunion With the Positive (Self), Part 1: The Other Half of "The Cure"
by Michael Derzak Adzema
ABSTRACT: We compulsively and unconsciously re-create the Pain from our earliest years in the construction of negative, debilitating, and self-defeating life scenarios-which facilitate our being triggered into our Pain and therefore keep us miserable. In therapy we relive the roots of this self-destructive behavior, and we try to change our behavior patterns and life situations for the better in line with the insights and connections that emerge. Most of the time, however, the negative is all we had, so that our "new" patterns end up being reactions to the old patterns oftentimes their opposite-which are still linked to the old ways. What is lacking is an idea of a way of being that is completely outside of this vicious cycle, and this is attained only by feeling through the Pain and accessing a deeper, more fundamental, and earlier self-one that preceded the traumas, splittings, dualities-a real and authentic self our, "original face." This earlier self provides a model for living which is totally unrelated to the later scenarios and, untainted by later trauma, is more workable and socially congruent, and more conducive to positive cycles of growth. However, to discontinue the negative and foster the positive one must actively change one's life situation and environment from one that is Pain-evoking to one that, in line with the deeper self, is joy-evoking.
Thus, cure does not occur through the emptying of any Primal Pool of Pain (an endless endeavor); rather, through the discovery and reunion with one's "joy grids" and the restructuring of one's life in a way that they will be continually evoked and fostered. "The purpose of suffering is to learn how to stop suffering" (Seth).
Negative Scenarios
Sigmund Freud and Arthur Janov both stressed that a distinguishing characteristic of neurosis is the tendency to get involved in (to create) situations that are a re-creation of the original trauma. The neurotic tries, unconsciously and unsuccessfully, to resolve past traumas in the present-though this is not possible. Thus, for example, a woman with an abusive father marries an abusive man with the (unreal) hope of making him kind. Very few psychologists would deny the occurrence of this pattern. And many therapists would agree that it is important to relive and resolve the original trauma in order to break the negative pattern that persists in the present.
What I want to add, however, is that merely reliving the trauma and being able to discontinue re-creating the resulting negative scenario in the present is only half the cure. The really healthy person is able to create positive scenarios for herself.
I do not deny that we all to some extent create (or at least try to create) situations for ourselves that give us positive reward. We all realize, consciously anyway, that certain life situations give us more pleasure/satisfaction th an others; and we try to have for ourselves the kinds of jobs, friends, spouses, living situations, physical environments, and so on that will be most rewarding. To some extent we are successful. Most of us are able to create life situations that have at least some ability to make us feel satisfied at times.
But very few of us are free from certain patterns of bringing into our lives particular negative elements over and over. The best-selling book - Smart Women, Foolish Choices-expresses this frustrating tendency, and its popularity indicates how widely this is being experienced. And while we have a myth, handed down from Janov, that primal people are free from the compulsion to re-create negative scenarios (they are supposedly "cured"), the truth is that people in primal therapy also find certain negative patterns hard to avoid, even when they have taken them back to birth, and before that, and seem to have resolved and to have understood them thoroughly.
The pattern often seems to be that for a long time in therapy the client will understand the roots of his act-outs . . . but that he will nevertheless continue to recreate the same negative scenarios; or their exact opposite will be created. It should be kept in mind that each of these-the re-creation or the counter-creation-will (ultimately) continue to trigger the negative feelings. Whether doing the same thing or doing the opposite, one finds oneself inevitably shunted back into the same old negative grooves, dramatizing the same old negative scenarios.
I should give an example or two. In therapy a client may realize his career as a physicist has been founded on a neurotic intellectualism that he discovers has been an overcompensation for being made to feel by his father that he is stupid and cannot do anything right. With his career apparently down the tubes and with no viable alternative in sight, this person may realize that sitting behind his physicist mode, like a shadow, has always been a yearning to do something physical, to work with his hands, to feel the textures of wood, to make furniture perhaps. Should this person give up his career as a physicist and go into woodworking-and this sort of thing has happened-invariably we find that he is still triggered into the same feelings of self-flagellation, albeit from the apposite direction. Now he still "can't do anything right" because this time he feels dissatisfied not doing something with his "head"; he feels dissatisfied throwing away and not using the skills, perceptions, and talents he developed or unearthed in his training as a physicist. The earlier path may have had its neurotic impetus, yet it is, at the adult level, now a part of his total self and cannot simply be ignored any more than he can ignore the promptings of his deeper and innate self (at this point in the process).
Another example: A woman realizes the emotional and, consequent, sexual wasteland of her life. She realizes that because of the therapy she now can have the love and the lovers that before she only dreamed about. So, thinking she is changing her patterns, she begins having many lovers. It is exciting at first. Eventually she realizes that she still feels unloved and that the amount of sexual activity is meaningless. Here, again, doing the opposite only resulted in being stuck in the same negative feelings.
A more common example might be the woman who was made to feel that she
always had to be the "good little girl" or else suffer loss of parental love and approval.
Feeling this personal truth in therapy, a woman may feel liberated knowing that she can never get her parent's love and besides, that was all in the past anyway, and therefore she can be any way she pleases. If she then goes about being a "bad girl," she invariably finds herself triggered back into her old feelings because she begins feeling that in fact her parents were right about her (she is basically a bad girl). Thus she has to continue entering the feeling and discharging it (from the other end now) in order to restore her sense of self-esteem and feeling of liberation. What is missing for her is a model of a way of being which is outside of, separate from the whole unreal scenario of good/bad girl . . . a way of being from the vantage point of which that entire negative scenario is distinctly irrelevant.
I propose that the other half of "the cure"-where we are able to truly free ourselves from the negative patterns - involves having access to experiences on a more fundamental, and often earlier, level than that of traumatic experiences.
I should make this more clear. The neurotic, after having relived the roots of his neurosis, is left with a knowledge of the way he acts to limit and undermine his life and pleasure. This does not necessarily mean that he knows how to act in order to expand his life and enjoyment of it.
Thus, we observe a passive, "do-nothing" period among many primal people-no longer in the throes of the negative energy, which has been and continues to be dissipated, yet without any basis for positive action. This do nothing tendency in "post-primal" persons, not only is a recurring criticism of them made by commentators of Primal, but also is a characterization made of them by Janov in his writings as well as being a frequent comment by post-primalers in describing themselves.1
While some of this phase may be a necessary part of the process (and I am aware there is some evidence from holotropic breathworkTM that even this may not be true), I contend that a major reason this phase has been so obviously prevalent goes back to the model of primal pain that Janov bequeathed us. This model of a primal pool of pain, not only fosters the kind of do-nothingness described, it makes a "second half of the cure" all the more important. I will now show why this is so.
Pain As Pattern Not Pool
Janov (1970) originally postulated the concept of a "Primal Pool" of Pain which could be "emptied." Subsequently even he was forced to abandon this concept as it appeared that some Pains refused to completely go away. Evidence of his change in position exists in his later journals (viz., The Journal of Primal Therapy). Some of his followers, as well, began admitting the fallibility of the "primal pool" analogy to Pain. Primal therapist Jonty Christie (I976) remarked, ''[W]e'll be feeling forever. I don't think you ever 'empty your Primal Pool.' I think that's a misleading notion.... I don't see anyone around who's finished feeling-who's emptied their Primal Pool." (pp. 108-109). Vivian Janov agrees saying, "The Primal Scream indicates that there is a pool of Pain that is gradually emptied, and after seven years of some of us trying to empty that we have sort of shifted to the idea that you never empty it, but that you identify exactly what those Pains are and you are able to live with them so that when they come up you are able to feel what they are" (Janov and Jim, 1974, p. 85).2
Other primalers speak to this issue when they say things like, "I guess there will always be certain kinds of my Pain which will always be able to be triggered" (cf., Pam and Barton, 1974, p. 160; Vivian and Jim, 1974, p. 85). But I say that it is not that there is always some old energy stored in a pool left to be leaked out; rather, that the patterns are still there, intact though less energized, and the energy from a new situation can and does flow through them for lack of some alternative "route" for that energy to take.
At any rate, since the primal pool model embodied an outdated mechanistic paradigm in the first place, its failure was inevitable. Despite this, it persisted in varying forms throughout the primal community. Jules and Helen Roth-figureheads in the Denver primal community and founders of the Certified Primal Therapists' Center (now called the Denver Counseling Center), where I did my therapy - used to speak of a "run-off of neurological sequences." While in ways that would be too lengthy to discuss here I consider the therapy I received there to be the best possible and far ahead of what Janov was doing at the time (in fact, Graham Farrant also received his therapy and training from the Roths), still the concept was part of the way we all saw things at that time. And this "run-off" idea implies that a series of sequences are run off and out of the body and that, therefore, the sequence, pattern, and amount of run-off that is to take place is all carried, materially somehow, within the body.
This idea of the therapy working this way is a very attractive one, especially for those of us who have felt the way feelings can erupt from within ourselves during our therapy in a totally unexpected and totally unpreconceived fashion and can integrate aspects of thought, feeling, and behavior (all without our trying) which had previously been thought to be completely unrelated. It is as if a preplanned regimen of growth including both pattern and energy amount, is presenting itself, which merely needs be let out, or primaled. And this concept is to some extent true; but it is not the whole truth. Furthermore, this concept fosters an attitude and a way of seeing people in therapy wherein just because a person is primaling it is assumed that she is "on track" or growing.
From my own experiences and observations in Primal, I propose that just because a person is primaling does not mean growth is happening. I am saying that you can lie in bed for years, doing nothing but eating and sleeping and primaling (which some primal people are rumored to actually have come close to doing), but that you still might not have "emptied your pool," you might still be "running off neurological sequences." This can occur because though you have been feeling, you might not have been growing. The difference centers around the concept of whether the neurological sequences are both pattern and energy or just pattern.
I propose that the concept of blocked energy in the body that can be released and permanently gotten rid of is an incomplete one. I think that a better conceptualization or model is that we have "patterns in the brain"3 by which we constantly block energy in the "body" from moving freely, which therefore causes energy to "build up" in those areas, and which, therefore, are felt as tension areas. I believe that what happens is that in Primal one reenters those "patterns in the brain" and alters them so that energy in the "body" is unblocked and able to move freely again - but this does not dissolve the patterns in the brain!
Consequently, if a present life situation is energy-producing (has Pain value) and happens to resemble a situation that one has a deeply embedded pattern for, then that energy can, theoretically, be forever triggered through that pattern, that neurological sequence. The present situation then provides the energy which, run through the old familiar grooves, is amplified in the kind of overreacting and misery we call one's Pain. Thus, the danger of opening up to a pattern and getting "stuck" in it are much more real than primal therapists have heretofore been willing to acknowledge. In fact I believe this apparent tenacity of deep-rooted patterns in primal people, as seen by themselves and others, may have something to do with the swing of popularity away from Primal during the 1980s. People certainly saw something happening in Primal but it did not look good to see some primal people going through the same struggles and problems for years.
This pattern of stuckness was acknowledged as long as twenty years ago by several of Janov's senior therapists. Primal therapists Nick Barton and Tracee Sheppard (l975) discussed this situation in a "Primal People" section of The Journal of Primal Therapy. Barton refers to these as the "sackcloth and ashes" type of primalers (p. 338). Sheppard remarks that "some people . . . if they have a choice between living and feeling, they'll always feel" (p. 338), then she characterizes that as "beating themselves every night with Pain" (p. 338).
Jumping ahead a bit, I might say that it is no coincidence that primalers who are "stuck" in this way are characterized so much by "victim" behavior. For as Grof- among a number of other deep experiential therapists-has let us know, for true resolution of an issue to occur, for it to truly go away, one needs to be able to connect with the feelings of the perpetrator, in the traumatizing event. The primalers described by Barton and Sheppard have obviously over-identified with the 'victim" and appear to be blind to, and in denial about, the "perpetrator" inside of themselves. Thus, in failing to see the scenario from the perspective of victim and perpetrator, they continue abusing themselves (and continue the act-out of the trauma) with the therapy itself. They fall short of growing into the state of forgiveness and self-forgiveness, which is a major aspect of real cure in that it allows the person to finally let go of the past and feel peace about it in the present.
Using Feeling and Acting Together
Getting back to the pool, however, I find it interesting that, along with acknowledging the inadequacy of the primal-pool-draining model twenty years ago, Janov's senior therapists were also advocating a correspondingly different model of growth. They were discovering that growth only really occurs when action in one's life is added to feeling. Sheppard and Barton (1975) explain this different perspective this way:
Barton: [I]t wasn't what some of us used to think: that the feeling alone would change your life.... It took a lot of hard work.
Tracee: A lot of people that come into Primal Therapy, have trouble with relationships, so they won't have relationships. They wait until they have had enough feelings to have a relationship. If I had done that I wouldn't be very far along in my history of relationships. It's by being in the relationship, and dealing with the feelings that come up, and dealing with the present that you change things.
Barton: I think that's the great asset of the therapy right now - the understanding that you can't get by on Primalling alone but rather you have to use activity and feeling together. If you have a feeling and an insight then you must use the insight on your life, and then if all goes haywire again, okay come back and have more of the feelings. And then use the further insights. But you find those people who have all those feelings and all those insights and they do nothing with them (p. 341, emphasis mine).
Similarly, as Speyrer (1995) points out in this issue (p. 95), primal therapist Jean Jenson (l995) - who coincidentally was a client of the same Tracee as above, after Tracee had left Janov's Institute-in perhaps the most recent book on primal therapy, has also noted the same deficiency in classical Primal. She writes that "to consciously choose to behave differently from the way you feel compelled to behave is essential for this work to be successful" (p. 93); but she claims that this forced behavioral change occurs only with great difficulty. Alice Miller (1995), in the foreword to Jenson's book, reiterates this insufficiency of primaling as an end in itself and points to something additional being required in the way of action in the world:
[A]s long as the needs continue to be neglected and unfulfilled in the present, old pains and their destructive attendant symptoms will constantly be triggered. Then, therapy could become a self-perpetuating necessity accompanied by old, unresolved feelings that will constantly have to be felt, and dealt with, if they are not to overwhelm consciousness. The process of feeling childhood helplessness is absolutely necessary and unavoidable. But it is not, as Janov hoped, of itself sufficient to resolve destructive, and self-destructive patterns of behavior. (p. xiv)
So the case has been made that feeling one's feelings, by itself, is not sufficient for real growth to occur. However, while I agree with the intent of these authors in pointing to something else besides primaling being required for "the cure" to be successful and I agree it has something to do with acting in the present, where I feel their ideas fall short is that "forcing" oneself to change one's behavioral patterns or even seeking to get one's needs filled in the present is ultimately doomed to failure for the reasons I stated earlier. So it is no wonder that they consider these changes to be extremely difficult (I would say ultimately impossible). For these prescriptions require the use of "will power," for one thing; and since intellectual understanding and "will power" were found to be so impotent in talk therapies like psychoanalysis, why would they work now? Second, this forced-growth suffers from the same problems that I described above: Lacking any idea of a true alternative, having never experienced what is really good for oneself, one stays within the vicious negative cycle, crucified between the poles of doing and not-doing the old pattern. This is just too much like the same old Judeo Christian struggle for me to stomach . . . in which case, Why Primal?
Third, it is not emphasized that it is not merely one's behavior that needs changing (in the face of continual triggered Pain and the sometimes irresistible pulls to act it out), it is the things outside oneself which, constructed by the acting-out self, were of course chosen to foster its continued existence and to continually drag and pull you back into the same destructive but familiar, ruts, which also provoke so much Pain in you. It is the external not internal, environment that requires the attention at this stage; and this may mean changing one's life situation, one's physical environment, one's activities, occasionally one's job, occupation, or profession . . . often the type of friends one has, sometimes the locale one lives in, and many other things. To change these also requires an act of will - sometimes a difficult one. However, one can wisely decide to implement crucial scenario changing decisions during the relatively peaceful, clear, and courageous intervals - which all of us experience at times - of temporary freedom from the negative pulls to act out. Upon the implementation of these changes, their integration into one's daily life, their existence in one's day-to-day experience allows for continuing reinforcement of the positive within one and less triggering of one's Pain; hence a situation that is more conducive to the emergence of one's truer self.
Finally, these prescriptions fail because they do not acknowledge the crucial importance of accessing the deeper, positive self-which is irrelevant to and not tied in to the negative scenarios-as a model for a realer life. We know that these primal theoreticians are not aware of these joy maps, because when these grids are fully accessed and one begins to commit oneself to their expression, the task of becoming real is a downhill coast, having nothing of the qualities of Sturm und Drang, sweat and discipline that seems to characterize the earlier attempts to grow. No. When one begins accessing and reuniting with the deeper self, which-rooted in the Self, the inner Divinity, if you will-is infinitely stronger than the fake self, the persona, growth occurs by simply following one's deepest desires, wants, and feelings (many of which are rooted in intensely felt feelings of caring, compassion, desire to serve and help, feelings of unity with others, desires to manifest and refine one's unique talents and thereby add one's small part to the creation of a better world, desires to share experience with loving people, and yearning for unity with the source of all). When truly identified with this deeper self (at least more identified with it than with the impostor self), growing is as natural as breathing, it is one's heart's desire; every day becomes a thing of joy in that one gets another stretch of time in which to feel the bliss and pleasure of following these promptings.
Positive Scenarios/Positive Self
Janov (1972) writes, "It is a lonely discovery to find that there is no meaning to life, and I suspect that the post-Primal 'blues,' which set in occasionally, have to do with this discovery" (p. 181). What occurs to me in reading this statement is that Janov is referring to a stage in the primal process before one has begun to tap in to one's positive potentials, which give meaning and pattern to one's life. Janov has no idea, apparently, of how transformative and positive this primal process really is . . . of just how much happiness, bliss, peace, fulfillment, direction, inspiration, satisfaction, spirituality, creativity, and joy the process can make possible for people, at least somewhere down the line. Janov did not know - still does not as far as I have heard- what kind of "renaissance" in the person is possible through facing one's primal pains and what kind of blossoming and flowering of the personality can (and will inevitably) occur!
In response, then, to the gloomy outlook by Janov and some primalers, I would like to point out that the experiences of some other primalers, as well as the findings of Stanislav Grof's (1976, 1980, 1985, 1988, 1993) research, show that there are positive experiences to be had, on our feeling journey, which are as fundamental, and ultimately more fundamental, than the negative experiences. What I am saying is that the second half of "the cure" occurs when one is able to tap in to these positive experiences and is able to act to create, in the present, the scenarios that would trigger these positive feelings (instead of continuing to irrationally re-create the negative scenarios which continually trigger us into our Pain).
What we have begun to discover - which has revolutionized our entire perspective on the primal process - is that it is only when one can begin to create scenarios that are outside of the light and shadow, outside of the do's and don'ts, that are in no way tied in to the old complexes, and which therefore can trigger positive feelings, that one no longer has to keep feeling those Painful feelings.
The important part, however, is that in order to be able to create positive scenarios, in order to be able to reunite with the positive self, one must feel through enough of the Pain to have access to what Grof has called the "positive COEX systems," i.e., the positively charged "primal scenes." When one re-experiences these pleasant memories and understands them, one can begin to understand the source of one's joy in life and can act to shape one's life and one's environment in a way that will be conducive to eliciting that joy. These positive feelings and memories embody a pattern that is totally unlike and totally unrelated to our underlying negative patterns. Hence these patterns can be the model for a truly effective restructuring of one's life.
Grof and Halifax (1977) help us to understand how the positive experiences to be had during a session can be employed in changing our present life situation. They note that positive changes from an LSD session can be reduced in intensity "under the influence of the demands and pressures of the social environment" (p. 212). They go on to explain that "with discipline" the "profound knowledge acquired" can be used "as a guideline for restructuring one's entire life. Some individuals are thus capable of creating a situation for themselves in which not only the cognitive insights but also the new spiritual feelings are potentially available much of the time" (p. 212, emphases mine).
At this stage of the cure, the "work" of therapy begins to revolve more around the
"hands-on" reconstructing of one's environment to create the life situation/life context producing the most in the way of positive reward.
This concept has many parallels to Marie Jahoda's definition of the healthy person as the one who "actively masters his environment," among other things (as reported in Erikson, 1968, p. 92). In other words, such a person is able to alter her environment to conform to herself, unlike the average person who is forever engaged in trying to conform herself to the environment presented. It is related, also, to the stage of the therapeutic process where one moves more and more out of the "victim" perspective and into "empowerment". It is related, also, to moving away from BPM-II-type "stuckness" and into BPM-III-, and then IV-, type struggle, empowerment, achievement, and resolution.4
However this active manipulation of one's environment is not to be confused with a construction of one's social, cultural, and physical context that is forceful. Maslow's (1968) idea that the expression of one's unreal or neurotic "needs" is in fact life-negating is relevant here. So then this active structuring is not to be confused with a continued structuring of one's environment in a sole pursuit of "lower" pleasures, because such behavior negates the possibilities for "higher" pleasures of growth, relationship, and self-actualization, which entail much acceptance of pain and discomfort in their attainment.
The Purpose of Suffering
In summary, in line with our discoveries in Primal of the falsity of the Primal Pool of Pain theory and the associated "feeling alone is sufficient" model of growth; of the importance of action in the world to be added to primaling, of the failure of attempts to change one's negative patterns without a positive model to go by, and of the discovery of positive experiences, scenarios, models, and motivations (a positive self) at a deeper and earlier level of the psyche than the Pain, I propose a different model for growth. The crucial idea in it is that once one has unblocked certain pathways one need not keep oneself in situations that keep directing energy through them. This entails more in the way of acting upon one's life situation to change aspects of it that are Pain-provoking. This also means that certain aspects of one's life situation, which are not changed, can continually trigger the same sequence of "neurological firing" and the person can be "stuck" feeling the same feelings again and again without any gains (or very little) being made. This can happen when, for example, a person who has had a delayed birth and constantly carries with her the pattern of being trapped can continually have that feeling coming up when the situation in the present is that she is trapped (in an unfulfilling job, for example) and that what she needs to do to change that is to get untrapped in the present (i.e., to find a more fulfilling job!). I am saying that merely feeling that trapped feeling over and over can be just a tension release and not lead to any permanent gains.
As in all growth, as Maslow (1968) had said, boredom appears to be the signal that a person has stopped growing. Thus, if one is "bored" with the "same old thing" in one's feelings, it is a good possibility that one is stuck in them and is not gaining or growing from them anymore.
But an additional thing is necessary for one to be able to discontinue putting oneself in situations that feed the old patterns. That is, one must become aware of an alternative. In some minor cases, a certain amount of life experience might have revealed viable alternatives. But in order to change our deepest negative patterns, I believe it is necessary to have access to our deepest positive patterns, so that when it comes to restructuring our entire life orientation from one that is pain-evoking to one that is joy-evoking we have a model to go by.
This I contend we cannot do unless we have felt back and through to the time before the first "shutdown" and reunited with the positive experiences that have set the patterns through which it is possible for us to feel joy and happiness Without knowing our "joy grids," we have little guidance in attempting to change our life situation so that it stops feeding our "pain grids."
For without knowing these joy patterns, one will often do one of two things: (1) in reacting to the "pain grids," one will set up a life situation the opposite of that which triggers the pain grids or (2) not do anything at all. The first alternative usually does not work (any more than "reaction formation" works) in that opposite patterns themselves will feed the pain grids because, in failing to produce the desired results, they re-create the original situation. The second alternative, not doing anything (for everything is seen as an act-out) does not lead to anything at all; certainly it does not lead to feeding into our "joy grids" because nothing is fed in (except the stimuli of sameness, and going-nowhereness, which are unlikely to feed anyone's joy grids and more than likely would end up feeding one's pain grids).
Thus there is something to be said for bringing in new life information when one is "stuck"; that is, for trying out alternatives, which, if not actually working (feeding the joy grids), at least bring new information into the feeling arena which can keep one "moving along" in one's feelings.
But even this last cannot do much good if the situational factors that are keeping the person "stuck" are, in fact, those of the therapy situation itself. By this I mean that inadequate aspects of the therapy situation that happen to resemble aspects of one's pain grids can feed those pain grids over and over. And the client can go back to the therapy situation, and that situation will feed the old sequences, and the client will look like he is "feeling" (which he is) but, in the way mentioned earlier, he will not be growing.
Under these circumstances it is the therapy situation itself that must be experimented with. Though no real alternative may be apparent or available, the only hope the client has of continuing to grow is to bring new information into the gestalt of her feelings about the therapy situation itself. In order to do that she must experiment with it.
This we saw has happened at various primal centers. People who had felt they were not getting anywhere in their therapy attempted all kinds of things to change the format of therapy, left their center for primal therapy at other places, tried other therapies, tried other lifestyles to get what could not be gotten in therapy, and even quit therapy altogether. These actions, in my opinion, are the natural result of the therapy when it is practiced in a manner that enables clients to get stuck and to stop growing.
Though clients may stay with their feelings of being stuck and not getting anywhere for a long time-constantly being channeled by the therapy situation itself into the negative gridworks - still if they have even only a minimum of will to live (grow) in them, they are eventually going to try something else and keep experimenting with other things, though the new things may be inadequate also. But at least the new things will bring new information into the system, allowing different aspects of the negative gridwork to be revealed, and thus allowing the person to grow, however slowly, in the direction of access to the positive networks, the "joy grids"- the perception of which allows one finally to make real and workable alterations in one's life situation.
It is not that some Pains do not go away completely. Some do; that is, they are gone beyond as one traces the roots of that Pain to deeper and earlier experiences. Thus it is that Pain emanating from the earliest experiences, especially womb and birth experiences, are the most tenacious. It seems possible that during a person's lifetime these may never lose the capacity for being triggered . . . if the present situation warrants it.
Thus, Pain is pattern not pool. And it is not simply a matter of running off a finite amount of neurological sequences or emptying any pool that causes real change in our negative pulls; rather it is that cure occurs when the individual has felt and received insight into a particular Pain enough to be able to change the situation in the present that keeps triggering that Pain. As Seth put it, the purpose of suffering is to learn how to stop suffering (Roberts, 1972).
The trick to this is to discover one's positive early scenes and patterns-hidden below the negative ones - so that one might use them as a guide for restructuring one's life rather than simply acting out of, or in opposition to, the negative patterns. If we acknowledge that it is important to have access to one's positive grids in order to truly go beyond this tendency of continued triggering of Pain, the next logical question is just how do we foster the access to that positive (real) self-those positive scenes/experiences. In Part 2 of this article-under the heading of "Fostering the Emergence of the 'Joy Grids'"-I discuss means for accessing and reuniting with one's positive (self).
Notes
1. Though, as Spike (l974) - in one of Janov's later journals - asserts, "The Primal Scream suggests that the process is complete when you sit around all day listening to music, content. This is but a stage of the re-growth a connected person achieves" (p. 269, emphasis mine).
2. Also see remarks in The Journal of Primal Therapy by other primal therapists -
e.g., Leslie Pam and Nick Barton (1974, especially pp. 158 and 160); and Tracee Sheppard and Nick Barton (1975, especially pp. 340-341).
3. I am speaking metaphorically in suggesting a brain with patterns . . . even in postulating a brain as a cause! I am using our outdated materialistic paradigm as the
basis for my model in full acknowledgment of its limitations, but also being aware that most people still think in such "scientistic" ways, and therefore this sort of "brain" model will convey more than the complicated model that would be required in alignment with the new-paradigm findings of the new physics, the new biology, and the new psychology.
However, for the record, the latest consciousness research points to a mind and memory that are hardly contained within a brain. The model coming into vogue is that the brain acts more like a TV set, which does not create the images it displays but whose functioning critically affects the reproduction of them.
The perspective I prefer is even more extreme. Believing, as in a Platonic or Hindu or holographic way, that the material world merely reflects the deeper and true reality (which is equal to Ultimate Subjectivity), I would say that the patterns in the brain are like the ripples on the surface of a stream, which reflect, but do not cause, the underlying currents (See Adzema, 1995). Besides Grof's works, as listed below, for this perspective see the works of Pribram (e.g., 1971, 1984), Bohm (e.g., 1980), Sheldrake (e.g., 1981, 1984, 1988, 1991, 1995); and for a comprehensive overview of all of these see Talbot (1991).
So when I say "patterns in the brain" I mean patterns in the mind or Mind. Woolger (1988) comes close to this meaning in his use of the Hindu term samskaras-which are most assuredly not related merely to the physical brain in that these patterns can be carried from lifetime to lifetime, from one embodied self to another.
4. See Grof, 1976, 1980, 1985, 1988, or 1993 for a description of his Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM I, BPM II, BPM III, and BPM IV). However, for our purposes here, I should mention that BPM II is related to that stage of the birth process when labor has started but the cervix has not dilated, characterized by feelings of "no-exit," claustrophobia, hopelessness, and powerlessness; it is the roots of depression in life. BPM III, meanwhile, correlates with the time immediately after that when the cervix is dilated and release suddenly seems possible-there is "light at the end of the tunnel." The feelings that characterize this state are thus of intense and powerful struggle with a life-and-death quality to then, strong feelings of aggression and sexuality, and the basic feeling that there is hope in changing the painful situation if one puts all one's effort into it. BPM IV are the feelings and experiences related to the time of actual birth into the world and has components of achievement, liberation, relief, optimism, self-confidence, and joy.
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This article was originally published in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 72-85.
