Michelle Taja Miller’s book, “The Invisible Self”, is powerful, moving, and very insightful – both about the traumatic experiences that she endured from birth, and how she was able to eventually heal herself with the help of Primal Therapy.
The majority of “The Invisible Self” is about Miller’s life and how the pain that was inflicted on her unconsciously shaped her thoughts, feelings, and actions throughout her life. In itself, it is a very compelling read and it sets the stage for her discussion of how her therapy gave her vital and often surprising insights about the events – and the resulting pain – that damaged her.
It was only when she began her therapy at Arthur Janov’s center in California that she began to understand how trauma had impacted her life so profoundly.
One of the unique elements of this book is its understanding – and explanation – of what Primal Therapy is.
For starters, it has nothing specifically to do with screaming. “The Primal Scream” was simply the title of Janov’s first book. (This best-seller was what led to John Lennon starting his own therapy and then to such “Primal” songs as, “Mother”, “Working Class Hero”, and “Imagine”).
Miller explains that when pain – physical and/or emotional – is unbearable, it causes a person to dissociate – that it, to bury their most painful feelings so that they rendered are unconscious. For instance, she explains that her, “panic attacks were memories re-experienced out of their original context. The fear belonged somewhere in the past, out of reach, unconscious.”
“This repression”, she explains, “creates a protective amnesia, disrupting normal brain function.”
Such pain does not go away when the incident is over – rather, it can become “neurologically embedded” in the nervous system. Primal therapy seeks to reconnect these neural pathways, allowing for the resolution of repressed traumas.”
(At a conference a few years ago at UCLA, I asked Dr. Daniel Siegel about what actually happens when a patient remembers a past trauma, and he explained that the neurons in the lower brain – where the pain is stored – physically reconnect with the frontal cortex, so that the unconscious memories can now be accessed by our conscious minds).
Ideally, Primal Therapy allows a person to slowly and carefully make those emotional and intellectual connections – and that is what constitutes the process of healing. A key result of effective therapy is the insights that one gets – the ability to understand, e.g. “So that’s why I always felt that I was never good enough!”
After several years of therapy, Miller was able to access the painful memories of her birth, which she then understood that her, “entire life was a replay of the sequences” of her birth – reshaped by the numerous other traumas in her life. For instance, her, “panic attacks were memories re-experienced out of their original context. The fear belonged somewhere in the past, out of reach, unconscious.”
(Note: Janov showed a video of a patient reliving his painful birth to the renowned neurobiologist, Jaak Panksepp, who stated afterward that such an experience “could not be faked.”)
One of the most important sections of, “My Invisible Self” is at the end, where Miller explains the elements of effective therapy. She writes that:
“When the therapy is done right, the process of opening up happens naturally in sessions, when the patient is ready.” A therapist should not dogmatically insist that a patient MUST focus on what the therapist thinks is the right way to proceed. Ultimately, only the patient can, with proper encouragement and support, discover, piece by piece, their own true path in the healing process.
As Janov explained to me, a good therapist encourages a patient to follow their feelings. “Don’t be smart, and don’t offer insights”, he said. After all, even if the therapist is correct as to how the patient is damaged, everybody has to make the connection for themselves for it to enable genuine healing.
Further, Miller stresses the very important understanding that there is a dialectical relationship between good therapy and our day-to-day lives.
“Primal is not a process that takes care of itself. To succeed, we have to feel, connect, realize, and use our insights to ‘terminate’ behaviors that are detrimental to our well-being and change our lives; it is an unending dance between feeling and doing…These last conscious steps of choosing to change our behavior are essential for the Primal process to be complete and for our lives to really change.”
Miller was trained as a therapist at The Primal Center, and “The Invisible Self” is both a compelling read and a very insightful guide to the healing process.
The “The Invisible Self: Broken Childhood, Primal Healing”, by Michelle Taja Miller (Review) by The Primal Mind, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada License.