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…
