Musings
From The Heart
An
Essay A Day For A Year
By
Roe
Day
147 May 26, 2012
A
Tribute To Arthur Janov And Primal Therapy
I remember when I was a
little boy and I felt like I knew so much. I often said to myself: “What is
wrong with all these kids and mommies and daddies anyway?” I would see or hear a person in pain, or witness
them in an embarrassing situation, and the kids and adults around them would
laugh at them, or mock them, or tease them. “No, no, no!” I thought. “You’re
supposed to hug them and listen to them and help them!” When I was a little boy I used to cry easily,
and due to the sad and scary scenes unfolding all around me constantly, I cried
a lot. Of course when I cried I knew that I should receive hugs and people
wanting to listen to me and help me, but instead I got laughed at and mocked
and teased, just like the poor animals and kids and mommies and daddies that
were suffering to the point that I cried. That made me cry even more, and so I was
ridiculed more, and that made me cry more, and that caused everyone to laugh at
me more, and that made me cry more, ad infinitum, which is an expression that
must have been invented for disappointed little boys that find themselves in
overwhelmed by sadness.
That is when I figured out
that I had been born into hell here on Earth.
I figured out that “crying is a bad idea”, and I figured out that my
parents and all the people around me were very, very sick people also living in
hell. I finally decided to run far, far
away inside myself where no one could find me, and I resolved never to come
back until the world could hug and care and listen to me and anyone in
pain. The funny thing is that I promised
to come here to Earth to hug and care and listen to sick people, so they could
love again too. Now I was becoming a victim
of hell just like the people hurting me were victims of hell, and I figured out
that they must have run far, far away too from their loving hearts, so they must
all be lost from themselves, just like I was about to be. “Did they forget their Love?” I thought. “Did they forget themselves?” I thought. “Am I about to succumb to hell and lose my
loving self just like them?” I thought. “Uh oh!” I thought, I had to find a way to
stay alive and loving inside, and not know it so no one else could find me, and
still remain a loving person, but without being aware that I was still loving. Yikes, what a challenge for a little boy or
girl like you or me.
What a very mind and heart
bending conundrum, having to run far, far away, deep into self, to hide from
the abuse that is hunting our very loving selves, to have to hide from a cruel
world administered by cruel people and survive, but without losing contact with
our original loving selves. It is in fact impossible fully, and we all find
tricky ways of sort of being available to self, while being sort of destroyed
by our parents and the world around us. If our sick and cruel parents and all the sick
and cruel kids and the sick and cruel mommies and daddies around us can find
any vestige of our real loving selves, we are hunted with taunts and ridicule
and mockery, and physical and emotional abuse, until they break us and break
our loving spirits. And so we must be completely invisible in our original
form, and that means to become lost to our own selves, lost to our original
loving hearts. Sadly, when we cut ourselves off from our our selves to defensively
survive, we become sad and sick and hurt and cruel just like the parents and
people hunting us. How very tragic and
how very, very dangerous. This process
of disconnection from our loving self is the actual springboard to all illness,
all criminality, all insanity, all suicide, all violence and war, and
potentially the end to us all. I knew this as a little boy, and I virtually
died crying, but to no avail, I had to disappear before I was annihilated by
those that were meant to love and protect me.
Despite having lost myself
and most of my life, and despite having navigated blindly from the inside out
without even knowing it, I am here writing you about being a lost little boy
that knows that we need to hug each other and care for each other and listen to
each other, and not hurt each other. How
did I do that? As ironic as is sounds, I
found my little boy by crying, when I had long lost the ability and right and
privilege to cry. I found my lost little boy and reconnected to him thanks to
Arthur Janov, the founder of Primal Therapy and author of many books on the
primal recovery process. I spent most of my live lost and wandering and
searching, but carefully avoiding all the traditional pitfalls that sick and
cruel people succumb to. When I read the
original book “The Primal Scream”, at age 30, it was the first time I choked up
with tears since I could remember, which at the time in my memory was
never.
Thanks to Tracy, my Primal
Therapist that I chose, after a harrowing decade of simply trusting to cry
again and learning to cry again, I am now able to cry about anything I need to
cry about, which as usual for little Roe, is very often. Tears are medicine for the heart, and my
heart is still severely wounded, and I cry deeply and often, and I cry
backwards in my mind and heart to the times in my life when I could not risk
crying. I have learned in the last 20
years of primal recovery to reclaim my self by reclaiming my right to feel all
my natural and beautiful emotions, and to feel them at appropriate times and
places, and in an appropriate way. I have made friends with my sadness and my
rage, I have learned to hug my little Roe and let him feel bad and down and
mad, and I have virtually died crying many hundreds and hundreds of times about
all the tragic things that were done to me, and all the things that happened to
me, or should have happened and didn’t.
I deeply cry and profoundly grieve so many traumas and deprivations that
it breaks ones heart to imagine what we do to our own children day by day, and
I mourn for the poor me that still has so many unfulfilled needs of a loving
little boy.
I also think of poor Hiroo
Onoda each and every day. Hiroo was a second lieutenant in the Japanese army in
1944, and he was sent to a remote island in the Philippines to fight. Tragically Hiroo was forgotten, and never
told that the war had ended. Hiroo spent
29 terribly lonely years defending himself from the enemy, and surviving on
virtually nothing. Finally in 1972, after
29 years of fighting a war that was over, he was discovered and safely brought
to safety. When he was told that the war had ended 29 years before and that he
had been forgotten, he wept like a child, or more appropriately his own lonely
little child within wept.
Arthur Janov reminds all our
little boys and girls inside us that the war is over, we have survived our
childhood, we have survived the war, and sadly, we have forgotten our own
little Hiroo’s on our own remote little islands within us. Arthur reminds us
that we have not yet felt any of the traumas and deprivations and unfulfilled needs
that are hidden with deep within us, we are effectively still 1 and 2 and 5
years old inside, still fighting a war, yet never feeling the pain. I have
learned to lie little Roe down in a safe place and with a loving family member any
time I feel sad and mad, or lost and angry, and cry my heart out. My parents and the mean and cruel people that
tortured me and hunted my soul can’t hurt me now, and I will no longer fear the
fear of simply feeling fear, I will no longer run from the pain of not wanting
to feel my pain. My pain is me, and I am
hurt, and I need medicine, and my beautiful tears bring me closer to my little
Roe each and every tragic and magic cry.
Janov
reminds us that our tears and grief, and feeling our pains and integrating them
into our whole selves will never hurt us or kill us. He reminds us, since we
all know this already but we have simply forgotten it, that the only way to
heal ourselves is to grieve and cry back into the original traumas that we are
hiding from. Every time I reclaim one
more precious piece of little Roe I say thank you to Arthur who triggered my
recovery, and thank you to Tracy (Hi Tracy),
for her brilliant, adaptive patience with me and my little Roe, and
thank you to my Hiroo (what a beautiful pun), for braving to come out of the
jungle and face his fears and find his connection to a peaceful life again, and
set the example for all of us who are so lonely and fighting so hard to
survive. Love to all inner children in all
people. Yes that means me and you.
See you tomorrow.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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