Primal Therapy: How Feeling Your Pain Can Be Liberating

"Painful things happen to nearly all of us early in life," Arthur Janov — the founder of a completely different form of therapy — says. Those things, he believes, "get imprinted in all our systems which carry the memory forward making our lives miserable".

According to Janov's theory, which he called Primal Therapy, the early traumas a person experiences cause most of the problems for which people seek therapy later in life. Those early traumas cause people to repress their emotions, which then lead to a whole host of trouble. Yet it is not uncommo for people to be completely unaware as to what is behind their current struggles, and short-term "plasters" such as CBT and medications can lead them away from the solution, rather than toward it. That's in part because these solutions focus on the present — what problems do you have now, and how can they be solved now? That's less helpful if the root cause of your struggles can be found in the past.

Janov has a way in, he says. He practiced Primal Therapy as early as the 1960s. During this revolutionary era, he shocked clients into reliving their early traumas by "force and violence". Now, his method has evolved to become more gentle — reminding the client of love, rather than coercing them into feeling than healing pain. Other psychologists, including the Swiss Alice Miller, have also offered their thoughts on this method and have helped change its face. The basis is still there, however.

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That makes sense, right? Unless the very origins of a person's pain are laid bare and actually felt, no amount of therapy, medication, or choice addictions (smoking, alcohol, drugs, eating disorders) can really get rid of it. Only when the pain is finally experienced, the client can live with it. It might not sound as revolutionary as it did it the 1960s, but it's still huge for the many people who have failed to feel better after other forms of therapy.