On the need for a ‘megadose’

I recently came across the story of Linus Pauling - an impressive chap.

He was awarded 48 honorary PhDs and is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes: for Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962.

Pauling researched the impact of high doses of Vitamin C for the treatment of cancer, for which Paul Offit in The Atlantic described him as ‘arguably the greatest quack in history’.

However, recent research by Kanawasa University in Japan and by Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), suggests that high dosage Vitamin C treatments may be worth re-evaluation.

Intuitively at least, it seems to me like an approach that makes a lot of sense. First, suppose that cancer is some malfunction of the immune system and that it is possible for the body to self-heal. If we are to recover from a disease as aggressive as cancer, we would need abnormally large amounts of essential elements to affect the repair.

I believe that regression therapy works in the same way. I entered regression therapy around four years’ ago exhibiting:

• High levels of sexual compulsivity
• Ingrained co-dependent behaviours
• A high degree of obsessive thinking and a tendency towards love addiction/love avoidance

At the time, I was also two years into my abstinence from alcohol, having spent seventeen years as a binge alcoholic.

Over the last four years, I have spent around $100,000 on more than 800 hours of paid-for therapy – most of it with the Primal Center in Los Angeles. I have probably devoted a further 2,500 hours of personal free time to processing feelings: journaling, crying, growling, dribbling, shaking, convulsing – whatever’s it’s taken to eject the poison.

That’s more than 15 hours per week of emotional work - the equivalent of a part-time job.

However, it has had a huge impact on my levels neurosis. My levels of sexual compulsivity have dropped dramatically, I am far less co-dependent and my relations with the opposite have normalised to an extent I could barely have believed possible.

I believe it is the megadose of regression therapy that has ‘cured’ me. I believe anything less may have opened me up emotionally, but would certainly not have had any curative impact. I don’t say this to boast, although I do take some pride in the level of progress that I’ve made, I say this because my year’s of ‘chipping away’ at issues with limited commitment got me no-where and I want to share my success as first-person case study.

A friend of mine in the UK, diagnosed with anxiety and depression by the National Health Service (NHS), was offered six ‘fifty-minute hours’ of psychoanalysis. That’s two orders of magnitude less contact time that I have so far received.

Even if the NHS had offered my friend egression-based therapy, I believe this level of intervention would not begin to scratch the surface of her neuroses whatever the approach taken.

Returning to Pauling, it would be the equivalent of a cancer sufferer hoping to emulate Pauling's curative results by eating an extra orange each week. It would be a hopeless effort.

As Arthur Janov notes, most neurotics could light a small town with the pain inside them.

As such, those with significant psychological issues need to make enormous efforts to heal their underlying emotional trauma. I’m reminded of the performance coach Tony Robbins imploring his followers to take ‘massive action’ to achieve their external goals. So it is with achieving internal transformation. In my experience, it takes a real commitment, dedicating a significant portion of one’s week, week after week, year after year, to get well.

I have seen many people who have attended Primal Therapy for years, just simply not improve. They won’t or can’t put in enough hours to break that internal ‘cosmic egg of pain'; that tipping point when all the violent feeling starts flooding out and the deep healing begins. There can be no half measures, if one is truly to get well.

Now of course most people simply don’t have the time or the money to commit on this level. We need a society takes enables individuals to engage in intensive, regressive approaches for as long as it takes for them to get well. How we get there is another topic entirely…

On pushchairs...

I visited my local supermarket last week and was touched by an incident involving a toddler.

The child was in a pushchair screaming. Her father and grandmother were accompanying her. As she continuing the cry the grandmother and father made soothing comments to little effect. Eventually came the silver bullet.

‘Listen honey, Daddy’s going to get you a treat’ says Grandma.

Then after a few seconds wait: ‘Here you are, look: a muffin!’ she exclaims.

And the child is instantly sated, content that soon she’ll be enjoyed that sweet sugar rush.

The grandmother and father of this child may be telling each other that they've ‘kept their child happy’. Perhaps, in fact, they’ve simply been enabling her deepening sugar addiction.

Another approach could have been to pick up the child from her pushchair. Perhaps the real issue was that the child was suffering from a sense of isolation, a need for physical and emotional connection, not the need for a muffin.

Judith Liedloff’s brilliant ‘The Continuum Concept’ shook my views on many aspects of child rearing that we consider normal in the West. In this book, Liedloff describes the parenting practice of the Yequana tribe in Ecuador.

She emphases the fact that young children are in continual contact with a caregiver, how they are carried everywhere, how they are made central to the activities of the caregiver, but, crucially, not made the centre of attention.

She describes how the infants and children rarely cry. She couldn’t recall a single serious argument between children in the three years (on and off) she spent with the tribe. In essence, she describes children who grow up feeling connected, who have their needs met on demand; who grow up seemingly devoid of neuroticism.

In the West, we isolate our children in cots, in pushchairs and when they cry out in despair of the deprivation, we often simply ignore their cries or we attempt to sedate them sugar or other distractions.

My own response as a child to these standard deprivations (as well as significant birth trauma) was not to develop a sugar habit, but to shutdown. I didn’t cry. I became a ‘good baby’. Later I developed other addictions to cover my pain. It has taken many years of reliving this early pain to ‘thaw out’, through Primal Therapy and other modalities, to heal the wounds driving my addictions.

Having re-lived this pain and become more present to my own feelings, I hope that, if I ever were to have children, I would be more in tune with their needs. Of course, they would be the judges of that.

Most people fortunately will never have to re-live the pain of their early loss of connection. They will find ways to manage their neuroses and carry on. They will never ‘go there’ and who can blame them. But, if they become parents, they will surely, subconsciously visit that pain on their own offspring and so the cycle continues.

On ‘abuse’...

One of the most important books that I’ve read since beginning with regression therapy was Jean Jenson’s ‘Reclaiming Your Life: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Regression Therapy to Overcome the Effectsof Childhood Abuse’.

Jean eloquently enumerates the various types of abuse that people may experience during early life. These include:

•  Psychological abuse
• Emotional abuse (including neglect)
• Physical abuse
• Sexual abuse
• Verbal abuse

As I read through the definitions and did the self-assessment exercises, I began too see how much I’d been abused as a child: neglect in the form of a mother who tended to internalise her feelings; psychological abuse in terms of being subtly pushed down a particular career route; physical abuse in terms of occasional ‘spankings’ (being hit).

Others might assess my childhood and say ‘well if you were abused, then so were most people I know’ and they would be right.

In Thomas Stone’s rip-roaring ‘Cure by Crying’, he estimates that 70% of people are neurotic, 20% of people are nearly healthy (i.e. some neuroticism) and 10% are healthy. If we accept that all neuroticism is the result of early trauma, then according to Thomas Stone’s estimation, 90% of us experience at least one abusive parent.

To me, that feels about right. I would guess around 90% of children are abused by a parent to at least some extent. Whatever the correct figure, it is certain that far more parents abuse their children than is generally accepted. Society, and especially the press, likes to create monsters. We like to remain in denial about our own abusive natures, by mythologizing the ‘abuser’ as something other. By defining abuse in very narrow terms that can only apply to an easily demonized few, we get ourselves off the hook.

As a society, we need to accept that abuse is more prevalent than we allow ourselves to believe. I don’t have children, but if I were to produce offspring, I can say without absolute certainty that I would abuse them. I can easily envisage having a bad day at work and snapping at my child, maybe even hitting them in a moment of weakness. Maybe at some point I’ll become depressed and withdrawn and neglect them emotionally. All abusive, all damaging. However, I also flatter myself that I would, at some point afterwards, be able to recognise that I had abused them and help them heal. I would ask them how they felt about my behaviour, let them get angry with me, let them cry and heal.

As a society, let’s grow up and accept that we all abuse each other at least to a minor extent. Let’s also accept that that abuse, especially when visited on infants and children, however ‘mild’ it may be, is permanently damaging, and let’s help each other to heal from that damage.

Can you *really* remember that?

I recently read a book recommended by a friend: Mindsight, Daniel Seigel

This is interesting in that it is a book by a more mainstream psychologist that at least acknowledges the significance of lower parts of the brain. However, Daniel still advocates the primacy of what he describes as 'cortical override'; or using the cortex to 'manage' your reaction to sensations and feelings emanating from the lower brain.

So whilst I certainly wouldn't recommend his approach for anyone looking for a curative treatment for their mental health issues, I do like his introduction of the concepts of 'intrinsic' and 'explicit' memory. 

Daniel explains that intrinsic memories are held in the lower parts of the brain. He explains that it may not be possible to express memories laid down in this section of the brain through words or images as these parts of the brain are not capable of such sophisticated expression.

Extrinsic memories on the other had are held in the neocortex. These do have imagery and words associated with them. Thus, extrinsic memories can be expressed through language and other artistic means. 

I believe that it is this type of 'extrinsic' memory that most people think of when they hear the word 'memory'.

In the course of my journey through regression therapy, I'm often challenged with 'how can you remember your birth?' 

If we think in terms of these two types of memory, the answer is simple: I have no explicit memories of my birth whatsoever, however, I have deep, valid intrinsic memories of my birth.

Intrinsic memories aren't always easy to access, but they are in me and they are real. 

For a more thorough explanation of brain function try this ;)

On Letting Go...

'Just let it go!'

How often have I heard that during the course of my feeling therapy journey?

'Leave the past in the past and move on'.

This is nonsense. I can't possibly 'let go' of a memory imprinted deep in my brain. 'Letting go' may give me some temporary relief. I can disconnect in the moment, but I can't kid myself that's it not going to be back. Maybe next week, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five minutes' time.

I can no more 'let go' of deeply imprinted memories and associated feelings and sensations, than I can let go of my leg. These memories, feelings and sensations are part of me and will remain so for as long I avoid processing them.

'Letting go, moving on'; it's denial.

I prefer the entreaty I actually first learnt in the twelve-step community: 'you've got to feel it to heal it'.

Roll Up, Roll Up!

Progress! I've now created a sign-up form with Launch Rock. See below for a link to the shiny new sign-up page:

http://signup.getfeeling.net/

Love
Richard

Welcome!

Welcome to 'Get Feeling'. This blog will chart the progress of the development of the new app: 'Get Feeling'. Get Feeling will be a simple, intuitive journalling tool.

I am very excited about the possibilities for this app and how it's going to help people get better access to their feelings and to heal from their past.

More coming soon!

With love
Richard