Your_Stories_1
Your Stories and Comments 1
Send in your story, personal observations or comments about primal therapy to:
debunkingprimaltherapy@yahoo.com
The identities of the people involved will be kept anonymous. The decade and city and whether the therapist was Janov certified will be given, so long as it does not identify them. Accuracy of information is essential. I am particularly interested in how descriptively the therapy or primal books affected your life, rather that a primal theory analysis as to why the therapist hadn’t felt all there pain, etc. I am also interested in the stories of family or friends of primal participants. Your story does not have to agree with everything on this website. These stories are only reproduced after permission is given from the testimonial writer.
I hope this section gives people a better idea of what can go on in primal therapy, in contrast to the miraculous testimonials in primal books and websites.
The initials of any of the participants will be changed to protect anonymity in this section, but initials will be kept consistent, if the initials are different it is a different person.
There seems to be some confusion over the secrecy surrounding primal therapy, particularly regarding the constituationally dubious vow-of-silence-legal-waivers primal therapy instituations got people to sign, or in other cases verbal agreements to silence - so I need to state the obvious to those worried about it: You are allowed to tell your story! especially if you keep those involved confidential. In some circumstances you can reveal identities of therapists under certain rules, although I will not be doing that here.
As mentioned elsewhere, the stories here are only testimonial type evidence, and I encourage people to read section 5 so as to understand how to weight such evidence. In short, testimonial evidence is useful in the early stages of investigation, but cannot be used to form theories or draw solid conclusions.
YOUR STORIES AND COMMENTS
Explanations for primal therapy “not working:”
1. Therapist not trained by Arthur Janov.
2. Patient not working hard enough, not going deep enough.
3. Patient resistant to change or wants to defeat the therapist.
4. “Acting-out” - this term can mean nearly anything.
5. Patient not primalling “the right way” only releasing tension / abreacting.
6. Hasn’t done intensive or hasn’t done it “correctly.”
7. Patient too damaged to change.
Note that one explanation never is given: that either the primal theory or treatment approach or both simply do not work; or at least do not work for everyone.
Janov presents his approach as the cure for neurosis. He proclaims that it is the only way. To anyone who has a minimal acquaintance with history, philosophy, religion, politics or psychology this claim has a familiar sound. It is dogma, ideology and the essence of “the true believer.”
The “intensive” is a perfect example of Janov’s one size fits all approach. I can say from my own personal experience how dogmatic and just plain wrong is the thinking behind the so-called intensive. The thinking behind it goes along these lines: the cure for neurosis (this word often used in an accusative and pejorative manner) is to feel one’s Pain (the use of the capital P already gives a clue to the importance of this Pain). This pain is caused by a variety of traumatic experiences which can be physical/biological (as in birth) or emotional as in abuse or neglect. There’s not much really new here but of course Janov acts as though he “discovered” these phenomena. That should already be a big clue, someone who is unable to recognize influences and insights derived from the work of others. This is not to deny an original (or semi-original) twist that he puts on these established ideas.
Now for Janov and many primal disciples “defenses” are viewed in a completely negative and one-sided fashion. They would seem to him like conscious choices or behaviors designed to avoid Pain, and since the a priori goal of the therapy is to feel one’s pain so as to be rid of it (while I think there can be a case made for this idea in the abstract it also contains shades of magical thinking) then the first goal of the treatment should be to challenge the defenses. This is where the idea and practice of “the intensive come in.” In my own experience the intensive (3 weeks) seemed more like a punishment (one which I believe I deserved) than the beginning of a psychotherapy.
Now I confess that since I have not continually followed the evolution of primal therapy since the 1990s what I say may not be the case today, but I believe that the mind-set behind the intensive is wrong, in some cases dangerous and its moralistic overtones played into the hands of my guilt and shame. The list of “rules” was something like: isolation for 3 weeks in a room with no telephone, no visitors, no smoking or drinking, no “excessive food consumption”, no masturbation (tension-release) and no “distractions.” The result desired is the breaking down of psychological defenses accompanied by daily therapy sessions to deal with the ascendant pain. If this technique would actually break down one’s defenses then inmates in prisons all over the world would be lying on the floor “primalling.”
It’s a completely simplistic and one-sided view of what defenses actually are and how they work. The best example I can give is my own experience. When I began my therapy intensive I was a very shy and fearful person who had great difficulties approaching women and maintaining a relationship. What would have been a far more powerful and therapeutic approach for me during my intensive than being isolated would have been to have to go out to public places and try to meet women and engage in conversation. My defense was isolation, so that for me to be isolated (as the intensive advocated) just strengthened my defenses as well as depression. But then again I felt depressed and also that I deserved to be depressed. The intensive did little to change that pattern. And because I did not achieve the “spectacular” results that the therapy was selling I felt even more like a failure. A failure that even primal therapy couldn’t help. I continue to believe that there is something punitive and masochistic about this procedure. I did not need to be isolated from the few friends I had or to be told what NOT to do but rather treated in a more sympathetic and open manner.
Of course undoubtedly to the tough true believers of primal therapy I was just wanting to be taken care of by mommy and daddy or “acting-out” (the worst thing imaginable). One has to ask “who is acting-out’? Is it a so-called therapist who operates by a limited and rigid set of rules and supposedly eternal insights? Or a suffering person who pays a very large amount of money to be helped and looks for compassion and even-handedness in treatment?
The authoritarian, dictator-like posture (“busting”) towards patients only aggravates a transference response in the patient. Even more interesting is that primal therapy denies that transference (or counter-transference) plays a part in primal therapy. In denying this transference process (which is a normal and universal phenomenon) primal therapy places itself beyond good and evil, the therapist have “worked out all their s***” so they have no unresolved issues when “busting” patients. I can just hear the primal true believers saying, yeah but that busting stuff isn’t done anymore. I’m not really sure if that’s true but if it is I believe the spirit behind busting still is a part of primal therapy.
True believers and other ideologues always have ways of deflecting criticism and explaining or justifying their wrong-headed positions. They’re always willing to admit that this or that was a mistake but that the heart of their beliefs is still valid. Their investment in personal power and maintaining their systems of meaning are extremely strong. The proselytizing aspect of primal therapy was very apparent. There is a “them and us” orientation, we are the Primal People, and we feel our Pain. They are the Neurotics who Act Out and are Crazy.
This orientation gets reinforced in group therapy where group members build solidarity and a view of the world that is consistent with Primal Theory. As in all groups, the members want and need to feel accepted and so “perform” in the appropriate manner. There is often a scripted aspect to these group experiences. I can not off hand remember anyone challenging either the group leader or the primal approach, or even expressing doubts about it. I myself was full of doubts about the therapy but never expressed them either in individual sessions or group. I could discuss in general about my doubts in life but was often reprimanded by the supposedly helpful comment that “self-doubt is a defense.” My feeling as I recall was: don’t doubt, criticize or question the therapy; the therapy is your only hope, criticize yourself. If there was something wrong in the story it must be me, after all the others seem to be feeling “more real.”
The idea of becoming “more real” was quite attractive, seductive and yet always unattainable. Sometimes after having had a very intensive primal I would have moments of insight and relief, but they did not last. My reaction was that if they weren’t lasting that there was something I must have been doing wrong. That my primals were not “authentic” but rather merely cathartic or acting-out, pretending. I had the very strong belief that there was “right way “of feeling and a “wrong way.” Primal therapy’s way being of course the right way and mine probably wrong. All of this compounded by the feeling that if I’m wrong I will be criticized or banished from the tribe, which I had believed to be my only hope for mental health.
Primal therapy had always been for me a kind of last resort treatment, kind of like the Golden Gate Bridge is often for the suicidal person. It’s perfectly logical that the therapy would be invented in Hollywood, California. Go west Youngman, and primal therapy is your last stop, so it has to work, my life depends on it. I had tried other therapies, eclectic talk therapy, Gestalt, Fisher-Hoffman Process, and there was only one way to get relief from my anxieties and fears. I learned of primal therapy and entered it in great part because of some friends I had who had done the therapy with some of the first therapists trained by Janov.
These friends seemed to me so confident and connected with a very clear and simple expression in their eyes. They did seem more real to me than most other people I knew and I wanted to be like them. I was determined to do whatever I had to in order to accomplish this. I was living in San Francisco in the same house as they were. However they had done their therapy in Los Angeles and so couldn’t recommend a therapist for me in San Francisco.
I looked in an underground newspaper and found the ad of a woman primal therapist that attracted my attention for two reasons. First I thought working with a woman might be easier, less painful somehow and secondly because she said in her ad that she had a spiritual bent. This as I recall somehow softened what I had perceived and been frightened by in Janov’s completely all-knowing and tough stance. So I decided to begin my treatment with her by doing a 2 week intensive. My friends in San Francisco seemed to be supportive and like the idea that I was going to enter primal therapy. Marina had a large house in the country where she did group work and intensives. During my intensive she indicated that she thought there was something scary about my appearance. At the time I had a full head of curly hair and a large moustache. She made it clear that she didn’t care much for the way I looked.
During the first sessions I felt something about her that was strange. She seemed attracted and repelled by me at the same time. After several sessions she brought up the idea that I was trying to seduce her. I can not honestly recall having felt that I was acting seductive but of course I gave her the benefit of the doubt and took on her interpretation (primal therapy supposedly doesn’t make “interpretations”). As I said earlier I had since an early age felt “bad” and bad about myself, so it was only natural for me to believe anything negative said about me. Actually it seems to me now that she was really making more of an “accusation” than an interpretation. If I was in fact really trying to seduce her then she as a supposedly skilled therapist should have been able to work with that in a constructive way. But rather than that she seemed angry at me. After a short time she arrived at the frightening and incredible conclusion that “an entity, an evil entity had attached itself to me in the crib.” The only way that she said I could be rid of this “entity” was to go to a fortune-teller, “spiritual advisor” type who I desperately and humiliatingly went to see and paid $100 to remove this bad spirit from me.
Obviously during these first weeks of therapy, living in new surroundings and with a completely different routine I was sufficiently insecure and frightened to believe her and so here is one of my first unfortunate and looking back, embarrassing experiences with primal therapy.
But because I felt so strongly that I had to trust someone I went along with this. Thankfully I had sufficient emotional health to realize early on that there was something terribly wrong with this woman and I left therapy with her after a very short time, maybe one or two months. When I told my friends about my experience they were shocked. They too felt the woman to be dangerous and a quack.
Actually this whole experience did not debunk primal therapy but only gave more weight to Janov’s famous warning about the dangers of primal therapy when practiced by untrained people. Of course like many of Janov’s claims and ideas he is half-right. NO therapy should be practiced by untrained people. Of course that holds true for primal therapy too.
My friends then tried to help me find a place where “real primal therapy” is practiced. In the Bay Area there were two places, The San Francisco Center and The Berkeley Center. Since I was living in San Francisco I decided to go to the SF Center. It was in a very attractive Old Victorian house in the Pacific Heights section of the city. I began therapy with a therapist slightly older than myself. His name was Jack and he was a lot nicer person and much gentler than Marina, or what I had imagined Janov to be like. Actually it’s funny, without ever having met or known Janov I had a very negative transference toward him.
It’s funny because Janov didn’t see transference as an important issue in primal therapy. For him, transference was a mere defense to avoid early pain and so the pre-programming began to drive transference reactions underground, avoiding confronting the therapist and shifting all blame onto the parents or other early relationships. Ironically this script is a real defense.
The therapist is the all knowing wise parent who can save the child. One must not challenge or confront him or her. The patient is persuaded and urged through selective questioning and memories to “take the feelings back to the parents.” It is always assumed that the patient’s reactions are based exclusively on the past. After all, once again the “therapist” has either already “worked out all his s***” or is in the on-going process of doing so, giving him enormous moral and professional authority.
Another problem taking place here is that the patient begins to feel like a victim, his own role in his difficulties is ideologically discarded or minimized. He really begins to feel caught between monstrous parents and the pain they inflicted, and the conflict he is beginning to feel toward the therapist who wants him to delve into his pain and practically “perform it,” getting the therapists approval and feeling like a good and cooperative patient. Anything short of this “re-enactment” will be considered “acting-out,” a primal sin. Of course it’s entirely possible although not necessarily the case that this “re-enactment” is really an acting-out to get the therapist’s approval. The patient in a strange way has to force himself to believe in the therapy or it makes no sense to him why he is paying for a treatment that he himself chose. If someone is wrong in the story it must be the patient, he already agreed to follow the party line of the therapist and so is caught in a double-bind. How can he doubt the only hope he has of getting well?
Now, back to my primal therapist Jack. Although he was a nice guy he struck me as too weak to be a therapist, there was just something in his manner that did not promote confidence and trust. I believe he was really trying to be effective but just didn’t have what it took. I to this day have no ill feeling toward him and hope he found another profession that is more suited to him.
I recall working shortly with other therapists at the San Francisco Center, one man, Fred, was quite charismatic and friendly but opened up and said he had grave doubts about the therapy and quit practicing, becoming involved in another profession. There was also a psychiatrist working there who struck me as quite unhappy, a very serious guy who I can not recall ever having smiled or laughed.
As I begin describing my experiences at the SF Center to my friends, they began to feel that this place too was not doing real primal therapy. One particularly interesting insight I had at the time was that in all the groups I had attended, totaling maybe 40 or 50, I had never heard anyone bring up the subject of sex. How strange I thought and so I brought it up to the group one night asking: “Am I the only person here who has issues about sex? I haven’t ever heard anyone bring up the subject.” There was a silence and some nervous laughter after which everyone in the group admitted to having conflicts and issues pertaining to sex.
What I found particularly strange about this was that the group leaders never brought up the issue, here we were living in the middle of the “sexual revolution” (1970s) and it was as though we were in Victorian times! The completely ridiculous and counter-productive solution the Center came up with was to “create some workshops or special groups specifically focusing on sexual issues.” In other words they decided to further re-enforce the split between sex and normal life and feelings by literally separating them by the creation of a “special group” instead of integrating sexual questions into regular group therapy. All of this reminds me that there was always something wrong with the way sex was viewed in the primal world that I knew. It was viewed almost always as an epi-phenomenon. In other words, sex was always something other than it actually is, that is: seen as acting out, tension-release, avoidance of real feelings, oedipal in nature, aggressive, angry, sado-masochistic etc. Of course all of these things can go on in sex but the exaggerated focus on these created a very un-erotic and almost puritanical environment.
Actually as I think back on it most things that did not really deal with feeling early pain were discouraged from being talked about, as small talk. It was possible to be with people in groups for long periods of time, months or years without knowing much about what they do for a living, how their present day relationships are and their hopes and dreams for the future. Being a “good patient” or person meant “feeling your early pain deeply.” The deeper the better.
My own life was an emotional desert in those times. I had no girlfriend, few friends of any kind and I was not working. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was in my late twenties and my father was still supporting me. And while he was supporting me I was spending the money he gave me on expressing my anger and hate for him. More or less the same rage, disappointment and disgust for my mother. My purpose in bringing this up is not to deny that any of those feelings were real, they all were real, but rather to note that in no way did I sense that primal therapy was interested in knowing how I participated in any of that in the past but even more crucially in the present.
I was living an isolated and confused life and going to therapy believing that everything would get better for me if only I could go deep enough into my early feelings and make important connections. I often felt so hopeless, overwhelmed and confused that I had to primal several times a week just to keep going. I had to believe that all this would help me. I wanted to believe that all the answers were in the past and that they all involved great amounts of pain. Anything else, like looking into my present life was simply superficial.
I can say now in retrospect (although not at the time) my real defense was avoiding the present, even discussing it and instead wanting to somehow erase my past and it’s consequences by applying the primal recipe -“it’s all back there.” I often went to the primal center on the weekends to “self-primal” because I was feeling sadness and especially loneliness, but I couldn’t see that I was participating in my loneliness by becoming a obsessive about “the primal way.” How could I ever meet anyone when I was spending a good deal of my free time alone in a dark room lying on the floor crying? It all seems so overly dramatic and like I’m exaggerating now but my life was really based on the pursuit of more and deeper primal therapy.
I want to make clear that there is a lot of stuff back there; it’s not all a big lie. The question is how to become integrated and move forward, and not overvalue pain as a panacea. For me it didn’t work, and I’m sure for many others it hasn’t worked. For those that have been helped I’m pleased and have no problem believing them, I wish them well. Perhaps different people need different therapies, an idea completely alien to primal therapy. For primal therapy it’s the only way, the others are watered down pseudo-therapies.
Only Arthur Janov knows the true way, and it’s laughable that he thinks that “Primal Man” is the solution for all the world’s problems. He appears not to understand anything at all about politics, economic interests, history or the real world. No amount of primalling or therapy can ever lead to a utopia where there is peace and love. It’s an extremely distorted and immature view of social and political reality. It’s hard to believe that anyone could remotely believe in such an idea. There’s a real world out there where people actually have to deal with problems that have absolutely nothing to do with early pain.
It’s incredible how someone can have some interesting ideas and through exaggeration, blindness and egotism drain them of their content and possible contribution. In the “primal world” the only thing that is apparently “really real” is early Pain. The danger for some primal patients (and I believe I was one) is that the real world ceases to exist and life becomes a hunt for primal feelings and pain. In my case this was in part made possible by the fact that I didn’t have to work, I had an inheritance. This was a mixed-blessing because I could sustain my unrealistic view of life and isolation. Primal therapy helped play into the hands of that isolation, making suffering more noble than it really is. There is an overemphasis on feeling and a dismissal of all things rational or intellectual (except for primal theory and the “science” that proves it’s worth).
Before beginning primal therapy I was deeply interested in political and social issues reading and ideas. I quickly learned that “primal culture” did not respect the world of learning or intellect, for “us primal people” everything intellectual was just a big defense. We had to forget about the rational and feeeeel. The two things were viewed as mutually exclusive. For many years after beginning primal therapy I abandoned my intellectual curiosity and did little reading or learning. For me there was little left to learn, I had discovered the secret to a better life and it was based on primal therapy. In this sense I would have to say that my involvement with primal therapy had many similarities to a cult. I will discuss some of this later.
I make no claim that this is true for everyone, but I suspect nearly everyone who stays with the therapy a long time begins to assume a kind of common world-view that can be identified.
P.D. September 2008
Around October 1973 after reading The Primal Scream I saw an advertisement in the Boston Phoenix newspaper asking for people, volunteers, to ’sit’ for a Primal Therapy patient who had been ‘given up on’ by the Primal Institute. They could do no more for her as she was ’stuck’ in near constant primals from reliving (alleged) repeated rapes as a young child by her father. Joan lived with a boy friend Robert, a college math professor, who was also in Primal Therapy and had journeyed to LA from Boston to also seek the ‘cure.’ It was there that he met and fell in love with Joan.
When I arrived to meet her I found her curled up in the corner of a dark room in an empty cold apartment in Boston. She had eyes that would pierce through to the very core of your soul. She was the essence of feeling and sensitivity. Any words of kindness would move her to heart wrenching sobbing primals and screaming like a baby about to be murdered. It was terrifying and after about 4 sessions it got too intense for now she was casting a critical eye towards me and my ‘pain’ and it became very uncomfortable for me.
She hated the Primal Institute and what had happened to her. Although she believed in it religiously she felt she was the only one there who truly did ‘Primal’ Therapy…Only it wasn’t working for her. It backfired and she was now paralyzed from the waist down and totally dependent on poor Robert for round the clock care.
I have no idea [how the paralysis happened], when I found her she was crawling on the floor like a baby except she was very adult and cognizant in her speaking and interaction with me. She simply could not ‘function’ as an adult human being yet she was very, very insightful, humorous, and intelligent when conversing with me. She and I connected on music. One of the vehicles she used to connect to her early feelings with was music (she and I were both musicians) and I certainly understood and connected with her on that.
The ’sitters’ like me provided some relief for Robert.
After I stopped all communication with them I happened to pass a bookstore in Boston a few years later, in 1977, and saw the new hard cover Psychobabble by R.D. Rosen and quickly read the chapter on Primal Therapy while walking down Newbury Street near the very apartment that Joan and Robert had shared. In it under another name I read the saga of Joan. It was her for sure. At the end I cried when I read what had finally happened to her. She committed suicide by drowning herself in the bath tub. She was at that point not sure at all of her own story and what had happened to her early in life. Was it all a self imposed totally unnecessary insane nightmare? I’ll never know. May she rest in peace.
D.T. August 2008, U.S.A.
[The names of the participants in the above account have been changed. Quotations from the book Psychobabble are available in the section on this website called "CRITICAL BOOKS."]
“An acquaintance of mine went to Primal Therapy in Paris in the early eighties. He told me that he felt abandoned by the staff of the Janov center during the therapy, and betrayed once the Paris center closed down unexpectedly, leaving him and others with unfinished therapies.”
L.D. March 2008.
“I am reading your website, and I have stopped reading half way through to write to you. I have most of the books on primal theory.
My friend and I went to a Primal Therapist, one not trained directly by Dr Janov, but an associate of one that was. I asked the therapist if she could feel… in other words is she able to access feelings. She said yes, and then she asked me if I could. I said yes and she doubted me. Then she attacked me for various reasons. Now I know these methods. So if I react to her I am defending, and not feeling. So I excused myself, went for a walk, and asked myself “what is the feeling.” I had one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
I also asked the therapist is she could detect fake primals before I left. My friend went the first time, and the therapist was surprised. It worked. But the second time she faked the primal, and the therapist could not tell. Then my friend called up one night for help that the therapist agreed was acceptable, and I asked her what she was feeling after the telephone conversation. I pointed out that the therapist was full of hostility, and could not help her at all. She realized this, and quit the therapy. She said “I see what you mean.” She is bitter at me for calling.
Let’s say that you would look back at your therapy. The real question is why one could not figure out right away why you were being duped. If you had the answer to that then you could apply that genuine insight into your other affairs. My answer to why you were so easily duped by Dr. Janov is not that you had some primal pain that you did not work out. You were easily duped because you did not have the necessary information and background to detect this sham. Now you do have the necessary background. The problem is that you are finding all of this out after you have spent decades or years in the soup.
You need to clarify this [on your website]: If someone does have a genuine feeling about their childhood, does this have any benefit at all?
Here are my ideas: Some of my friends went into therapy for years. One of my friends genuinely felt her pain of her dad not loving her. It was not primal therapy, but she did feel. After 20 years of such work, she was not really making much progress. Even her boyfriend told her as much.
Genuine therapy involves not just focusing on your feelings but taking steps to stop activities and projects that do not work for you, in other words being proactive instead of passive. For example, a primal person would find it much more difficult to admit his excuses and face the reality that his primalling is basically ineffective than cry about his early pains at under age one.
Furthermore, Dr. Arthur Janov misunderstands what it means to remove the ego defenses to allow feelings to occur. He believes that at times it is necessary to bust the patient, and eventually this leads to all kinds of abuses in therapy. That is the inherent flaw in this method. I submit that if you have to bust the client, then you are doing poor therapy in the first place.
In addition, Dr. Arthur Janov fails to adequately understand this simple concept: the more you try to bust individuals and demand that they feel, the more they resist the process. There is some pressure to feel the pain because you are paying a lot of money for the three week stay, and you want to see results. Then there is the group pressure to feel as well.
Let me show you how ridiculous this idea of breaking someone down really is:
The patient says: “I have come here for the three weeks to feel, and I am having trouble getting into this entire process. What can I do?
The therapist says: “What are you feeling right now. Why don’t you stop complaining about your life, and do something about it instead? (This is a put-down and anti-feeling comment.)
Patient: “Yes, you are right. No one ever liked me at school, and my parents ignored me.”
Therapist: How does that make you feel?
Patient: It makes me feel lousy.
Now the patient cries.
Therapist: Daddy did not love you either. (The therapist is injecting this into the conversation because the patient is supposed to make a connection to Daddy or Mommy at this point.)
Patient: Yes, one day he promised to take me to the park, and he forgot because he was drinking with his buddies.
Now the patient cries more.
This is the essence of primal therapy, and this is what primal patients do for years and years, and it does not work to any significant degree.
The real question is not whether something is scientific, and therefore it is true. The real question is: does the intended method actually work on the condition, and how easily and quickly does it work?”
K.J. March 2008
[Like many of the points in this story, the last point is a good one. Whether the theory is unscientific or unfalsifiable is a separate question to whether the therapy shows effectiveness in scientific trials. It is possible that a treatment could have an unfalsifiable theory behind it, yet still show some effectiveness; or visa versa.]
“I have been reading your site and I like it because I was seeing a therapist here in San Francisco that had read all of Dr. Janov books. I mean this guy loved Janov. Well he got old (80) and retired. Before he stopped seeing me and others (it was group therapy) he told us the only way, and I mean the one way, to get cured was to go to Los Angeles and check-in to that Primal Therapy center with Dr. Janov.
Well, for months after the therapy I felt [mess]ed up and was thinking ‘I’m such a mess I should go down there to LA.’ But in my heart I did not want to do that! It sounded like a cult.
My therapist was so mean at the end of the therapy. He said that I acted out everything in my life. I had not read any of these books until just about two months ago. I was so shocked, because my therapist totally imitated Dr. Janov. I mean he totally copied everything, including birth trauma, when I read about that in the book The Primal Scream.
What is funny about this, (I can laugh now), is that reading The Primal Scream and seeing how much my therapist copied Dr. Janov.
One of the group members went down to Primal Center. He called me once just before he was about to go in for his three week intensive. He told me it cost 6 thousand dollars, and that I could take a loan out from the Center and pay back after the therapy. This scared me! Well, I have not heard from him in months. I wonder what is going on.
As I mentioned, my therapist was so mean toward the end, just before he retired. He would say that I was ‘cut off from feeling.’ He would say ‘you can’t even get angry!’ He would tell us to ‘get into to your feeling,’ (just like The Primal Scream book) without ever being trained.
I asked him if he had ever met Dr. Janov or went to primal therapy training. He answered very sarcastic ‘NO!’ He would tell us that ‘THE ONLY WAY IS PRIMAL WAY’ which can [mess] up your thinking.
Some s*** went on in my therapy group and members would stop coming and would cut off all contact with everyone. My therapist believed that confronting members was good for feeling, because it was all about the pain. Oh and being intellectual was the worst thing you could be: ‘all in your head.’ He would confront you and say ‘you’re being totally intellectual and cut off!’ He could be very nasty! Oh, he believed that being gay was avoiding feeling, like Janov [also believed]!
I mean I had problems and reasons why I went into therapy. But you trust so much and believe that a therapist has good intentions, you know what I mean?
Trust!!!What is amazing to me is that my therapist had not been through the Primal Therapy himself so how could he say it works? Unless you been through the storm, how do you know?
I once told my therapist that if Dr. Janov’s primal therapy really worked how come he is not Oprah or Dr. Phil!? He said I was being superficial.
I really hope this helps some people, it feels good to tell.
I liked the story from Curtis Knecht! Thank-you.”
J.H. USA, January 2008.
