# Primal therapy



## jimity (Jan 12, 2011)

Anyone tried it? Apparently if we relive our trauma(s) and discharge the pain that it caused, our emotional problems will begin to disappear.


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## Beamer (May 28, 2012)

It might have some value for some psychological issues. Probably not SA so much. I think with SA the causes are mostly irrelevant, and reliving and focusing on them justifies and reinforces your anxiety more than anything. With SA you have to focus more on changing yourself, not dwelling on the past. CBT is the way to go.


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## Keith (Aug 30, 2008)

From what I understand EMDR is more effective for releasing trauma, and is the standard therapy these days. However I think primal scream therapy is pretty cool, at least for me screaming when no ones around feels great (though i know its much more involved than that). It has been heavily criticized, but at one point was extremely popular. I guess it all really depends on if you agree with Freud about the role of early childhood's trauma in a persons development.


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## Gleeman (Nov 16, 2012)

There's no doubt that this kind of therapy can work but if it all hurt the first time why make yourself go through it again if you don't have to. It is your experience now and in the future that you want o change. You cannot change the past. I'd always use this approach as an absolute last resort. If you learned to play the guitar incorrectly when you were 10 years old and now you wanted to learn it correctly you don't revisit the old lessons, you learn new ones. The workings of your inner mind are not really any different to this. You have learned to do what you are doing now - the pattern known as Social Anxiety - for a reason, probably to protect yourself, but in protecting yourself in this way you are making your life uncomfortable so you need to learn new ways to protect yourself. When you've learned better ways to do this you will have no need of the old ways that made you uncomfortable. There are a few ways to do this, you just need to find the way that resonates with you.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

*primal therapy*

I am new here and responding to an old message, but I wanted
to say that I know by experience that primal therapy works.


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## ACCV93 (Sep 6, 2012)

Didn't John Lennon do this? :b


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

That's right, John Lennon did primal therapy for a short
time in the 1970's.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

Primal therapy has been very effective at relieving my social
anxiety problems. The advantage is that it has healed a lot of the root
causes.
Why revisit old issues? Because they remain repressed in memory
and continue to cause problems until released. EMDR is a
short cut method which can't achieve the same results.
It is too bad that more people don't know about primal
therapy. I


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## trendyfool (Apr 11, 2010)

Beamer said:


> It might have some value for some psychological issues. Probably not SA so much. I think with SA the causes are mostly irrelevant, and reliving and focusing on them justifies and reinforces your anxiety more than anything. With SA you have to focus more on changing yourself, not dwelling on the past. CBT is the way to go.


I agree completely with this.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

trendyfool said:


> I agree completely with this.


Actually dwelling on the past is how you change yourself as that's
where the causes are. At least that's what I think. The key is
feelings, not thoughts and behavior. If there is no rational reason
for anxiety, then where is it coming from?
But primal also has a focus on the present. For example if there
is something I really want to do, like a social event, but anxiety is a holding me back, I use primal to work with the feelings, both ahead of and after the event.
It is a very useful tool for all kinds of issues. 
I haven't tried CBT so I can't say anything about that from experience.
Have you tried primal?


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## trendyfool (Apr 11, 2010)

pbanco said:


> Actually dwelling on the past is how you change yourself as that's
> where the causes are. At least that's what I think. The key is
> feelings, not thoughts and behavior. If there is no rational reason
> for anxiety, then where is it coming from?
> ...


I disagree, because I focused on my past for quite a long time and it just made my avoidance worse. CBT has been very helpful for me, though.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

I'm glad that CBT works for you. But I'll describe a little more about
primal therapy in case anyone has an interest. It is a feeling based 
therapy, so the therapists are very good empathetic listeners.
The point is to get to feelings, starting in the present, and expand
on them by expressing them, and eventually take them back to past
events. This therapy was helpful for me from the first day and I came
to realize that my anxiety was bottled up feelings from childhood events.
In my case much of it was caused by neglect and not so much specific
incidents.

The therapeutic choices available are to better hold in (painful) feelings
to cope with them, which most therapy or drugs do, or resolve them through expression, which is the aim of primal therapy. With primal, besides 
relieving my social anxiety, a host of other symptoms have been 
addressed. For example, I now have a greater feeling capacity, am mostly free of negative thoughts, and my body has much fewer tensions


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## Emma D (Jan 19, 2013)

*primal*

_I'm glad that CBT works for you. But I'll describe a little more about_
_primal therapy in case anyone has an interest. It is a feeling based _
_therapy, so the therapists are very good empathetic listeners._
_The point is to get to feelings, starting in the present, and expand_
_on them by expressing them, and eventually take them back to past_
_events. This therapy was helpful for me from the first day and I came_
_to realize that my anxiety was bottled up feelings from childhood events._
_In my case much of it was caused by neglect and not so much specific_
_incidents._

_The therapeutic choices available are to better hold in (painful) feelings_
_to cope with them, which most therapy or drugs do, or resolve them through expression, which is the aim of primal therapy. With primal, besides _
_relieving my social anxiety, a host of other symptoms have been _
_addressed. For example, I now have a greater feeling capacity, am mostly free of negative thoughts, and my body has much fewer tensions_

I too have had great results from primal therapy, right from the start. And I had done plenty of CBT and other traditional therapies that did not help me. I would like to reinerate one point- primal therapy is NOT about dwelling in the past. It's about using present triggers/feelings that come up in life and then feeling and expressing them physically......thus dissolving the emotional charge. Doing this therapy regularly brings one to realize that these present difficult feelings and issues are continuing to happen because when the original traumas occured they were represssed. We were too young and vulnerable to deal with them. This was how we survived.

Never having felt them in the past, the feelings continue to resurface in the present when events that mimic the original trauma happen. This gives us the opportunity to "finish the gestalt;" complete the event that was never completed by feeling and expressing them. This is what heals.

Doing this is the opposite of avoidance. It's facing these difficult emotions head on rather than medicating them away or using the many other ways we use to avoid facing these difficult emotions.

I would also like to say that before something is criticized or denounced it needs to be experienced. One can't say it doesn't work just because they "think" it might not. This is an experiential therapy. It has to be tested out with a good therapist and given a fair trial before a judgement is made.


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## trendyfool (Apr 11, 2010)

I'm not denouncing primal therapy. However, many people with social anxiety on this forum have trouble doing things like finding a job, going to school, or simply getting out of the house. They need concrete help to do these things--someone who will hold them accountable for improving their lives, as well as someone to guide them through the process. Primal therapy may help people, but it needs to be supplemented with something else, something concrete.

That's what I think.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

A good primal therapist does hold his client accountable for improving
his life. That is how it worked for me and I didn't have any other
type of help. What is needed is there in the primal therapy process.

This might also depend on whether the individual wants to achieve real
change or not. Being excessively guided and helped can hold back personal
growth; there has to be a balance. It is important for people to get
in touch with their own capabilities.


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## Sierpinski (Jun 17, 2012)

jimity said:


> Anyone tried it? Apparently if we relive our trauma(s) and discharge the pain that it caused, our emotional problems will begin to disappear.


This is psychodynamic nonsense. There is no evidence that undischarged energy causes mental illness. In fact, there is no evidence that such a thing as undischarged energy even exists.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

Primal is different than psychodynamic based therapy, which
is mainly an analytic, not feeling, based experience.
There is plenty of evidence of repressed feelings causing
mental illness. 
A good example is PTSD, where it's hard to deny that the problems
come from traumatic experiences.
Another good example is grief. If a loved one has passed away, we
experience a lot of sadness. If the very sad feelings aren't felt
as crying etc., the energy will remain, and we won't recover
well from the experience. These are examples easy for people
to understand. But the principal certainly applies to all kinds
of childhood situations of abuse and neglect etc. 
Primal therapy has a very extensive and well structured theory
about mental illness. This was an attraction for me, as it has 
a logic missing from other approaches. 
The theory of how primal works came from observing what patients experienced with the process. My therapy experiences have verified the truth of the theory at a personal level.


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## jimity (Jan 12, 2011)

Sierpinski said:


> This is psychodynamic nonsense. There is no evidence that undischarged energy causes mental illness. In fact, there is no evidence that such a thing as undischarged energy even exists.


But does it matter if it really is nonsense??? If reliving and reprocessing trauma works for some people then it works. What about pent up sexual energy?. Having social anxiety, I know that exists :teeth


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## johnbostonn (Feb 2, 2013)

As an adult, I did regression therapy to my mother's womb in two different ways. One was through psychotherapy during my time as a patient in Primal Therapy and the other came about during Past Life-Spirit World Hypnosis when I successfully connected to the soul of my deceased wife, Marcia. Both techniques brought up some commonalities and also some unusual different surprises, like an abortion attempt in Primal Therapy and my soul playing paddy cake with me when I was a fetus inside my mother's womb during hypnosis.


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## pbanco (Jan 13, 2013)

johnbostonn said:


> As an adult, I did regression therapy to my mother's womb in two different ways. One was through psychotherapy during my time as a patient in Primal Therapy and the other came about during Past Life-Spirit World Hypnosis when I successfully connected to the soul of my deceased wife, Marcia. Both techniques brought up some commonalities and also some unusual different surprises, like an abortion attempt in Primal Therapy and my soul playing paddy cake with me when I was a fetus inside my mother's womb during hypnosis.


The kind of primal therapy I'm familiar with doesn't involve hypnosis or past
lives. That is regression therapy and is something different. My own therapy focuses on childhood experiences. After a lot of therapy, some people may primal events around birth (in a physical way) or earlier and these things come
out in a natural way with the therapy process. Trying to go directly
to birth is not primal therapy, it's "rebirthing therapy". If you connected to
the soul of your deceased wife, that's wonderful, but it isn't primal therapy
either. Standard primal therapy doesn't use any of the techniques you mention.


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