Healing a Different Kind of Split

A basic concept of Primal Therapy, and one that has been much debated, is that of “the split.” This refers to the time when an individual is confronted by a painful realization that is too traumatic to be integrated, and he or she splits reality in order to survive. This split can take many forms, from the extreme of being “split in two” where a greater part of the personality becomes repressed, to the less severe splitting where a painful incident becomes blocked from consciousness.

Quite early in my therapy, I had a primal in which I discovered a different way of splitting—that of splitting someone external to myself into two separate people. The incident that I will describe here occurred during my first year in therapy at the Primal Institute. In this primal I discovered that I had I unconsciously split my mother into two people, because to acknowledge that “good mommy” and “bad mommy” were the same person would have totally devastated me as a child.

“Good mommy” was the mother who breastfed me (albeit only once every four hours) and who picked me up and walked the floor with me when I cried. When I was bigger, she played games with me, read me stories every day, let me lick the spoon when she baked cakes, showed me how to color, sang nursery rhymes with me, and played the piano. I loved her totally and believed that she was perfect in every way.

But there was another mommy who also lived in our house. She often got angry and impatient and would shout at me and hit me. Nothing I did seemed good enough for her, especially after my brother (her favorite) was born. She made me deny my own childhood needs and forced me to grow up far too early so that I could be “big for her” and be on her side against my father. In addition, she frequently vented onto me all the rage she felt towards my father, but was afraid to express towards him. She was my “bad mommy” and in order to survive, I had to deny the fact that she existed at all.

I was totally unaware of this split until I discovered it in a highly symbolic, nightmare-like primal, which I had with a buddy sitting for me. It began with me reliving the day of my mother’s funeral. In the primal, I seemed to be standing in the church next to her coffin, feeling a vague sense of uneasiness and dread. Then I noticed a dark, shadowy form hovering about the coffin. I identified it at once as being “evil” and “demonic.” To my absolute horror, the realization gradually dawned on me that this sinister being wanted to get into my mother’s coffin with her. For what seemed like eternity, I fought with it, struggling to keep it at bay, screaming, “No! No! Stay away from my mother. Leave my mother alone!”

But I was powerless. Finally, to my growing horror, the sinister, black form descended into the coffin and finally into the body of my mother lying there. Suddenly the realization hit me—and somehow I managed to half scream, half choke out the words, “No! No! . . . Oh God! . . . No! . . . Don't make me see . . . THAT IS MY MOTHER!” For the next half hour I cried very deeply as I went through the funeral again, this time with “bad mommy” in the coffin. But the crisis had been reached with the words, “That is my mother.”

Afterwards I felt strangely at peace. I “knew” that the split had occurred when I was about six years old. I had developed the fantasy that it was not my mother who said and did those bad things that hurt me, but a black “demon” that sometimes possessed her.

Immediately I had blotted the black demon out of consciousness as well, since it too was threatening. But it had served its purpose—it had allowed me to split off from my mother the part of her that didn't love me, so that I could still feel loved and believe that everything was okay. Interestingly, it was only after putting her back together into one person that the direction of my therapy changed and I was able to start expressing in my primals some of the childhood anger and rage that I had buried so deeply.

Today, I have the memory of just one mother, who was neither wholly good nor wholly bad. She is the person who hurt me as a child. She is also the person who stood by me when I had a breakdown and was hospitalized after reading “The Primal Scream.” In fact she read all the primal literature that she could get her hands on and was devastated when she understood what she had done to her children. Before her death, which occurred later that year, she encouraged me to try to get into Primal Therapy.

It was also my mother who sat for me during my early primals before I got to the Primal Institute. She hugged me, held me while I cried, said how desperately sorry she was that she had hurt me, and promised that no effort would be too great in helping me get well. So today I can remember the good and the bad times, the happy and the sad—which means I have healed the splitting of my mother. I can remember her the way she was—just another fallible human being who had pain of her own—and at the end was honest enough to say, “I’m sorry.” I love her for that. It's given me the encouragement to deal with all the pain and anger of my childhood, and thus begin to heal.

There have been many theories put forward about why people split reality in different ways. But even if we don’t know what the predisposing factors are, we certainly do know what the precipitating factor is for many kinds of “splits” in consciousness—overwhelming pain—and the need to defend against it. The advantage of Primal Therapy is that it gets behind these defenses and helps us to put the split ends back together again. To do so is not for the faint-hearted. But for those with the courage to follow it through, there is an increased awareness of healing our inner and outer splits and becoming whole again!

This article was published as “Healing The Split” in the “Primal Institute Newsletter” April/May/June 2003. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who went through therapy at the Primal Institute in Los Angeles in 1977.

Pat Törngren is a veteran primaller from the Cape Town area of South Africa, an avid primal community builder, and the list owner and moderator of the online Primal Support Group.

This article appeared in the March 2004 IPA Newsletter.