“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I’ve always been inspired by this quote. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and holocaust survivor. Logotherapy, his form of psychotherapy, was derived from his suffering in a nazi concentration camp. I am personally attracted to, and respect, any knowledge that is derived out of reality based personal experience, rather than out of book reading and intellectual discussion. Primal therapy affords an opportunity to gain such experiential knowledge.
I’ve applied Frankl's quote to my understanding and practice of primal therapy. The cause of our trauma-related suffering is a conditioned fear response, which was laid down in our bodies at the time of our trauma. A conditioned fear response is a sensori-motor memory whose content is "...any and all of the following: muscle tensions, proprioceptive sensations, an organized sequence of muscle movements, and the homeostatic settings of internal organs as regulated by the autonomic nervous system” ( Henderson). Once this memory is established and becomes generalized, any environmental stimulus that "feels like" the original trauma releases this stored feeling content. We react to it in the present with defensive behaviors, which are projected onto innocent people and emotion-neutral events. This is seen as neurotic behavior. This conditioned fear response is mindless. That is to say, there is no opportunity for thought to occur between the stimulus and the response. There is no “mind space” between the two.
Primal therapy facilitates awareness of the content of the fear memory. Once we become aware of these activated sensori-motor elements of fear, they get consciously processed. This is an automatically occurring neurological connection that Arthur Janov called a ‘primal’. Every time a primal occurs it widens the mind space between the stimulus and our response to it. This allows the thought process to enter. As we continue to process each of the elements that make up our fear conditioned memory, the mind space widens accordingly, allowing us progressively more freedom to decide how to react in the present, whenever we are being triggered. Detachment from the deterministic stimulus/response reaction creates a sense of relaxing into the present moment... neurotic tension decreases. And we can then act more appropriately to what's happening in the present moment. This is the essence of human freedom...the ability to choose our actions, rather than to mindlessly react. This behavioral change is permanent. Why is it permanent? Because the cause (the fear conditioned memory), rather than the effect (the behavior) has been addressed. It is in this sense that primal therapy is naturopathic.
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