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.
“Causes of the Contemporary Crisis in U.S. Politics”
Peter G. Prontzos
The frustration, polarization, and anger that now engulfs the U.S. political system – exemplified by the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021 in a brazen attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election – is the most serious domestic crisis since the Civil War. The roots of this turmoil are complex, but the most important factors are the economic changes in the last 50 years that underlie this development.
This paper will first describe some of the major economic, political, and cultural developments that occurred as a result of the neoliberal wave that began in the 1980s, and the resulting increase in the power of large corporations. It will then consider how such changes have contributed to the growth of this extremism, as well as the psychological factors that underlie it. The final section will offer suggestions on how to create a more equitable, fair, and democratic society, which is essential if the U.S. is to significantly reduce the threats to the American people and democracy itself.
Perhaps the most important changes began in the 1950s, as the power of corporations began to increase relative to the people as a whole and to workers in particular. The first major mention of this shift was President Eisenhower’s “Farewell Speech” in 1961, when he warned that Americans: “…must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” 1
Another milestone was the creation of the Trilateral Commission by David Rockefeller in 1973, which claimed that there was a “crisis of democracy”. As Noam Chomsky observed, the Commission claimed that this “crisis”:
…resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more “moderation in democracy” to mitigate the excess of democracy[!] and overcome the crisis.
Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive. 2
This effort was manifested primarily by increasing corporate power in a number of areas: in the workplace (e.g. destroying unions), in the economy, (e.g. “free trade” and globalization), and in the political sphere (such as putting more corporate allies into governments at all levels in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; and gerrymandering electoral districts to favour Republican candidates).
One telling (and predictable) result which directly benefitted the economic elites: “Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015 it was 40 percent.” 3
Not surprisingly, inequality has continued to increase from the 1970s on. As Senator Bernie Sanders has written regarding the effects of these changes:
“…60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck – and real inflation-adjusted wages have not gone up for fifty years. Some 85 million of us are uninsured or underinsured, and sixty thousand die each year because they don’t get the medical care they need. We have the highest child poverty rate of almost any major country on earth…and our childcare system is a disaster. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable…Millions of seniors lack the resources to heat their homes in the winter or buy the prescription drugs they need.”
“Meanwhile, the richest three billionaires own, “more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 165 million people. Today, the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent and the CEOs of major corporations earn four hundred times what their employees make.”
…
“An estimated 112 million (44 percent) American adults are struggling to pay for health care…Over the past year, the percentage of Americans who report skipping needed care due to cost has increased to 30 percent.” One result is that, “The average American now lives six years less than the average Norwegian and South Korean…”
…
“Between 1979 and 2020, worker productivity increased by 61.8 percent, while worker pay increased by just 17 percent.
…
“…over the past forty-seven years $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent…” 4
Ironically, a major factor which led to the increase in power of the corporate class was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution – which was passed in 1868 and which was designed to provide civil rights to former slaves. It said that states were forbidden from depriving, “…any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
However, some Supreme Court rulings have given corporations “rights” that were intended for people, such as in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which upheld the “right” of corporations to make unlimited political expenditures under the First Amendment’s clause to protect a person’s freedom of speech.
At a more personal level, Bruce Alexander (SFU) has pointed out how such an increasingly corporate-driven economy:
“…breaks down every traditional form of social cohesion…creating a kind of dislocation or poverty of the spirit that draws people into addiction and other psychological problems.”
Alexander also explains that:
To the degree that civilizations approximate, “a free-market society, dislocation is not the pathological state of a few but the general condition. Because the expanding reach of free-market economics engulfs ever more aspects of life, dislocation is increasing.” Addiction, he adds, “is neither a disease nor a moral failure, but a narrowly focused lifestyle that functions as a meagre substitute for people who desperately lack psychosocial integration.” 5
Such a system both creates pain and deflects the blame. There are many examples of how this dysfunctional and unfair this increasingly unequal society is:
Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorces, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. 6
Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is what have been termed, “deaths of despair”, a term devised by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The American Council on Science and Health defines deaths of despair as those due to suicide, overdoses, and alcoholic liver diseases, with contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity. Bruce Bower writes:
Since the 1990s, mortality had risen sharply among middle-aged, non-Hispanic white people, especially those without a college degree…
White, working-class people ages 45 to 54 were drinking themselves to death with alcohol, accidentally overdosing on opioids and other drugs, and killing themselves, often by shooting or hanging. Vanishing jobs, disintegrating families and other social stressors had unleashed a rising tide of fatal despair…
“The most meaningful dividing line [for being at risk of deaths of despair] is whether or not you have a four-year college degree,” Deaton says.7
Specifically, “Drug overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past 2 decades. In 2021, 106,699 deaths occurred.” 8
(That toll is twice as many as the number of Americans who died during the U.S. war in Vietnam).
And according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by 2021, “More than one million people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.”9
The CDC reported that, in 2021 alone, “there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States…” 10, more than 36 times the number of people killed on September 11.
Rates of deaths of despair among middle-aged U.S. adults
T. Tibbitts
An analysis of national data from 1992 to 2017 for adults ages 45 to 54 reveals an increasing risk of alcohol, drug and suicide mortality among those without college degrees, whether Black (orange line) or white (red line). For reasons that are not yet clear, Black college graduates (dark blue line) had the lowest rates of deaths of despair in this statistical comparison. 11
These deaths disproportionately impact Caucasian males without a college degree. Anger, despair, and toxic “masculinity” are other major problems. As the Washington Post reported:
“Males are overwhelmingly responsible for violence in the United States, according to the most recent crime data published by the FBI. They committed about 80 percent of all reported violent crimes in the country in 2020, including 87 percent of homicides.”
Caucasian men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. 12
The sources of such problems are examined in Gabor Maté’s, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté is a physician who, among other endeavors, spent years in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, working with people addicted to various drugs. His new book shows how so much of what is generally considered “normal” and even healthy in modern society is both unconscious and actually harmful. 13 As I wrote in the CCPA Monitor:
Maté defines our “culture” as: “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.”
His book examines what exactly is “toxic” about our societies, and he stresses that the global health problems that we face, such as, “burgeoning stress, inequality, and climate catastrophe” have been created by a culture of “globalized capitalism” that condemns countless numbers of human beings, “to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
“Of course, it’s not just about ourselves. Maté stresses that we must work to create a society which, among other needs, prioritizes the health of infants and children, e.g. one that outlaws spanking and makes sure that no child goes hungry or lacks medical care, that their feelings are treated with respect, and so on. As important as these practices are in themselves, Maté emphasizes that they have profound social and political consequences as well: “…the harsher the parenting people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they become to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws, and the death penalty.” 14
Political socialization, for instance, usually begins in the home. George Lakoff (Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley) has shown that children whose parents are more nurturing tend to be more liberal, empathetic, and open-minded – and more likely to use empathy as their moral foundation. Children raised with a traditional “strict father” style of parenting tend to be more conservative, individualistic, authoritarian, and patriarchal – and see morality as being based on obedience.
The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing the United States can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).
What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families.
In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. Many conservative spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father’s authority, and are strict in those realms of family life that they are in charge of. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. Through physical discipline they are supposed to become disciplined, internally strong, and able to prosper in the external world. What if they don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. This reasoning shows up in conservative politics in which the poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth. Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility not social responsibility. What you become is only up to you; society has nothing to do with it. You are responsible for yourself, not for others — who are responsible for themselves. 15
Moreover, in his Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Study, Dr. Vincent Felitti found that the more trauma that a child has experienced, the more troubled that child (and that adult) would be. 16
This finding is compatible with the work of Dr. Arthur Janov (e.g. Primal Healing), whose work shows how a child can be damaged, (even in the womb!) in a toxic environment, e.g. poverty, abuse, stress, pollution, etc.)
It appears, however, that both liberals and conservatives are equally adept at ignoring “inconvenient truths” when making political decisions. We all have limitations, biases, and distortions that shape our world-views. These tendencies are, for the most part, automatic and unconscious, such as “motivated reasoning” – when our thinking is biased to produce whatever conclusion we want to believe.
For his part, Albert Einstein was more than just the most famous physicist in the 20th century. He was also an astute observer of human nature, and he had a deep understanding of the importance of social and economic factors in shaping human consciousness. In 1949, he wrote that:
…the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept “society” means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual…depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought…” 17
Social problems, such as hopelessness, anger, and poor health, are much worse because of the high levels of poverty and inequality in American society. This phenomenon is explored in, The Inner Level, where Wilkinson and Pickett explain that, “…inequality – the large income gaps between rich and poor, damage us all. Almost daily we see new reports of rising levels of mental illness, school shootings, depression and self-harm.” 18
They also point out that greater inequality increases the mental health of the rich as well as the working class.
Gender is also a vital factor in understanding these phenomena. For instance, “The suicide rate among males in 2020 was 4 times higher than the rate among females. 19
More than half of people who commit suicide do not have mental health conditions. For many, negative environmental and societal conditions, e.g. lack of medical care, low wages, poverty, and the need for housing contribute to stress that may increase suicide attempts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 20
The CDC reported that, “there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2021…” 21, more than 36 times the number of people killed on September 11.
Increasing inequality and economic distress for the majority of Americans is directly related to government policies which have made the rich even richer at the expense of the majority. A clear example is the extremely low federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour – unchanged since 2009! On the other hand, corporate taxes in 2017 were reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent – a bonus of $1.5 trillion in the first year alone. As Newsweek observed: “Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit U.S. Workers, Made Rich Companies Richer”. 22
In 2019, tax cuts for top U.S. banks alone totalled $32 billion.
In 2020, while 22 million U.S. workers lost their jobs in March and April due to the pandemic, U.S. billionaires increased their cumulative wealth by $282 billion!
Not surprisingly, an NPR poll found that 46% of households report facing “serious financial pain”.23 Today, millennials are the first generation since the Great Depression who are worse off than their parents.
Authoritarian leaders use such emotions as anger and despair to their advantage. That explains why Tr$mp has said things like: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 24
“Divide and conquer” is one of the oldest methods to seize and maintain political power. The former President and most Republicans in Congress have been trying to distract Americans from the real causes of their anger by the use of scapegoats: Mexican immigrants are, “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Our nation is victim of an “invasion” by “caravans” of “vermin” from “s**t-hole” countries and we must “build the wall” to keep them out. Some of the white supremacists and neo-nazis at Charlottesville were “fine people”. Democrats are Marxists who engage in “witch hunts”. And so on, ad nauseum.
In general, these authoritarians:
– see the world as dangerous
– are conservative (rate high on Fascism-scale)
– had difficult childhoods
– identify with powerful figures
– are tribal
– feel like victims
– feel threatened
80% of Tr$mp voters “view the world as a dangerous place” and “feel economic despair.”
The most authoritarian Republicans are mostly Tr$mp supporters.
And: “The space for thoughtful discussion is being hollowed out by social media forums that reward the loudest voice and the most extreme attitude.” 25
Possible Solutions
Tribal authoritarians are often racist and patriarchal, but, as Nancy Fraser points out, the bourgeois solution is not, “to abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top. And that ideal was inherently class specific: geared to ensuring that ‘deserving” individuals from “underrepresented groups could attain positions and pay on a par with the straight white men…” 26
Both the corporate elite and the U.S. military would be even more effective if they used the most qualified people, regardless of their identity. For example, U.S. government lies to the United Nations about the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was probably more convincing because it was given by General Colin Powell, an African-American.
Then there is this example of shameless U.S. Air Force propaganda:
“Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team—comprised of airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion—standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense…Our team must overlook our differences to ensure perfection as we maintain and operate our weapon systems.”
“From a U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command post to commemorate Martin Luther King Day, an American holiday in honour of one of its most committed proponents of nonviolence and anti-militarism. 27
Dr. King, of course, denounced the violence of the U.S. military, opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam, and said that the United States was, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 28
The problems with the focus on “race” is extremely problematic.
First of all, “The Concept of “Race” Is a Lie”. That is the title of an essay that I wrote in, Scientific American. In brief, I noted that the American Society of Human Genetics, the largest professional organization of scientists in the field, explained that:
“The science of genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories”; and it “challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research.” In other words, “race itself is a social construct,” with no biological basis. 29
(Note: using terms like “black” and “white” is problematic for several reasons. After all, we no longer call Asians “yellow people” or describe Native Americans as “redskins”. Worse, such words tend to reinforce the false belief that there is a clear line that divides people into different “races”. That term is a colonial construct and is rejected by the overwhelming majority of geneticists and anthropologists. It is more accurate to use the word “ethnicity” instead of “race”).
The answer to social problems, then, is NOT the tribalism of “identity politics” – the tendency of people to identify primarily with “their kind” – whichever group that is – rather than humanity as a whole.
But the idea of paying “reparations” to the descendants of slaves in the United States is extremely problematic for many other reasons.
First, there would be the difficult problem of deciding exactly how much African-Americans in general should receive.
Then there is the question of deciding how much each individual should get. For instance, if one person has 100% African DNA, do they get four times as much as somebody with only 25%? And if it’s only 12.5%? How about a person whose father arrived after slavery ended and whose genome contains 50% African DNA – Barack Obama, for example?
Third, if the descendants of slaves are entitled to reparations for past horrors, what about Native Americans, who experienced genocide for hundreds of years?
A fourth question: what would be the political ramifications of this narrow and convoluted approach? Tens of millions of working-class people will be angry about having to pay for an evil that hasn’t existed for over 150 years and for which they have no personal responsibility. Indeed, there are tens of millions of Americans whose ancestors arrived in the United States after slavery was abolished.
And the first group that would try to weaponize reparations? The KKK.
You don’t have to be a prophetess like Cassandra to foresee how such resentment would translate into even more virulent racism and “white nationalism” – which would lead to more domestic terrorism. As FBI director Chris Wray explained: “racially motivated violent extremists, such as white supremacists, have been responsible for the most lethal attacks in the U.S. in recent years.” 30
Racism and violence are rising for a number of reasons, and as we’ve seen, the most important ones are the growing stress and alienation resulting from growing social and economic inequality. Anger is then often redirected to various scapegoats, encouraged by many on the Right.
Fortunately, there is an approach which would be more humane, inclusive, and a smarter way to address systemic racism than the divisive approach of reparations. I also believe that it would win the support of the majority of Americans – and in doing so, it would also reduce the amount of anger amongst the population.
When the United States was founded, one of the key elements of the new republic was the motto, “E Pluribus Unum” – “from many, One.” It was more of an ideal than a reality, and slavery was the most blatant example.
The end of slavery did not, of course, end racism against African-Americans, so a century later it took a broad-based Civil Rights movement to eliminate some of the more obvious forms of discrimination, such as “whites only” drinking fountains and school segregation.
The uprisings following the torture and murder of George Floyd sought to eliminate systemic racism once and for all – and the unprecedented speed and depth of these reactions signify that most Americans are finally supportive of real progress.
In this context, it is important to remember that racism was also inflicted on immigrants, and not only from places like Latin America and China. Even Europeans – from countries such as Germany, Ireland, and Greece (like my grandparents) – were sometimes met with racist diatribes and even violence. President Woodrow Wilson was, by the dawn of the 1920s, arresting and deporting Eastern European and Italian immigrants. U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in detention camps during the Second World War.
As evil as these actions were, there was another people who were treated even worse – Native Americans. The genocide inflicted on the First Peoples of the Americas resulted in a population decline from approximately 10 million when Columbus arrived, to only a quarter-million at the end of the “Indian Wars” – a rate of genocide over 97%. 31
This slaughter was “justified” as “manifest destiny” – the belief that “white” Americans were given a mandate from God to take over the continent.
Mexicans were also victims of this “divine” colonialism. Their territory was seized, from Texas to California, and many were slaughtered in the process. For instance, three hundred Mexicans were murdered in Texas in 1915 and 1916 alone, and tens of thousands of these “aliens” were sterilized in a mass eugenics program. 32
George Lakoff argues that the best way to approach this problem is to:
“Give up identity politics. No more women’s issues, black issues, Latino issues. Their issues are all real, and need public discussion. But they all fall under freedom issues, human issues. And address poor whites! Appalachian and rust belt whites deserve your attention as much as anyone else. Don’t surrender their fate to Trump, who will just increase their suffering.” 33
In other words, the most effective way for people of good will to combat this atmosphere of lies and hate is to focus on the real problems facing the majority of Americans – which are primarily about economic class – and on inclusive solutions. This approach has a deep history, especially among African-American intellectuals, who, for at least a hundred years, have argued for the intersection of ethnicity and class. Leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to Jesse Jackson, “added an incisive critique of how race and class intersected in American society and insisted that the only way to defeat racism was through cross-racial working-class solidarity.” 34
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were democratic Socialists who moved away from a focus primarily on the scourge of racism to a broader critique that included an economic system which exploited the majority of Americans – the working class – regardless of ethnicity. King felt that it was necessary to address poverty and inequality in addition to racism in order to make progress on all these fronts, and that a broad program would appeal to a wider constituency than only focusing on civil rights.
“A reckoning with racism, he insisted, was impossible without radically redistributing wealth and, by extension, power in American society…For him, race, class, and economic empowerment were therefore all intertwined”. 35 This intersectional egalitarianism was at the core of King’s, “Poor People’s Campaign”.
King was assassinated while helping striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
His perspective is even more relevant today, especially in the debate about reparations. As we have seen, there are some very serious problems with any program that tries to remedy this evil in a narrow manner.
Professor Adolph Reed, an African-American scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the emphasis on race-based politics as a dead-end. In his view, the problems now bedeviling America — such as wealth inequality, police brutality, and mass incarceration — hurt people of color most, but they also hurt large numbers of working-class and poor Americans of all ethnicities. 36
What is the best way to begin to address all of these problems?
First, Congress would issue an apology for slavery and for the genocide of First Nations.
Second, Congress would enact policies based not on ancestry, but on real economic need in the present. This approach would benefit the great majority of Americans – and especially African Americans, Latino, and Native American people, who on average have less family wealth. Any program which is based on people’s needs rather than “identity” will especially benefit those who are disadvantaged as a result of past and present discrimination.
At the same time, all Americans who are affected by economic inequality, no matter what their ethnicity, will be better off. Fewer veterans will be homeless or commit suicide. Tens of millions of working people will benefit when the federal minimum wage is raised to a living wage, at least $20 an hour.
This approach will also be seen as fair by most people.
There is a precedent for such a bold vision: the New Deal. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in United States history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted work programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, social security, and other measures to improve the lives of average Americans.
Likewise, a “Green New Deal” would create millions of well- paying jobs in order to finally address the existential danger of the climate crisis.
Free college education is another progressive option.
Making health care available to everyone is not only the humane thing to do, it will actually lower overall costs, which are about 50% higher per capita than in countries like Canada and France. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman notes that every dollar invested in children’s well-being results in huge savings of future costs (due to ill health, addiction, crime, and so on). He adds that: “The highest rate of return in early childhood development comes from investing as early as possible, from birth through age five, in disadvantaged families.” 37
One political advantage of all of these ideas is that they are race-neutral: They disproportionately help African-Americans and other ethnic minorities because the policies are economically targeted. And economic-based policies are much more politically feasible than race-based policies. Polls show, for example, that slavery reparations are deeply unpopular. 38 So, “while racial disparities in economic insecurity are apparent…income is an even greater predictor of financial pain, with households earning under $30,000 per year roughly three to four times as likely as those earning over $100,000 annually to have experienced material hardship during the pandemic.” 39
Such programs will be cost-effective in the long run, who will pay for these them in the short term? The answer: those who can best afford to – primarily wealthy corporations and individuals. Congress could start by eliminating the corporate tax cuts which, for example, resulted in at least $1.6 billion windfall for Walmart in just the first three quarters of 2018. 40
Programs such as these will not only improve the lives of the majority of Americans, but they will do so in a way that deals effectively with such challenges as racism, poverty, the climate crisis – while reducing the division, anger, and violence that are a growing threat to democracy. Such measures are critical, since, “…one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats…More specifically, Republicans who have favorable views of Donald Trump were found to be “nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump” to support political violence.” 41
For all these reasons and more, it is not an exaggeration to say that American democracy is facing its greatest challenge since the Civil War.
In 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein urged us, above all, to “Remember your humanity”. To the extent that the people of the United States do so, they will create a better America for everyone. 42
2. Noam Chomsky. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. South End Press. (Boston) 1989.
3. Arlie Russell Hochschild. Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press. (New York) 2016.
4. Bernie Sanders. It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. Crown. (New York) 2023.
5. Bruce K. Alexander. The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit. Oxford. (New York) 2008.
6. Hochschild, op. cit.
7. Bruce Bower. “‘Deaths of despair’ are rising. It’s time to define despair”. Science News. 2 Nov. 2020. [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/deaths-of-despair-depression-mental-health-covid-19-pandemic]
8. Center for Disease Control. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db457.htm#section_1]
9. Center for Disease Control. “Drug Overdose Deaths Remained High in 2021”. [https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html]
10. CDC. 11 May 2022. “U.S. Overdose Deaths In 2021 Increased Half as Much as in 2020 – But Are Still Up 15%” [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/202205.htm]
11. Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton UP (Princeton) 2020.
12. Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein, Dan Keating, Andrew Ba Tran and Artur Galocha. “The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings.” Washington Post. 8 July 2022. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/gun-deaths-per-year-usa]
13. Gabor Maté (with Daniel Maté). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Knopf Canada. (Toronto) 2022.
14. Peter G. Prontzos. “Review: What is Normal?” CCPA Monitor. Spring 2024. [https://policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National%20Office/2024/04/CCPA%20Monitor%20Spring%202024%20WEB.pdf]
15. George Lakoff. “Understanding Trump. 23 July 2016. [https://george-lakoff.com/2016/07/23/understanding-trump-2]
16. Prontzos, op. cit.
17. Albert Einstein. “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review. May 2009. [https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism]
18. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Inner Level. Penguin. (London) 2018.
19. CDC. “Suicide Data and Statistics”. [https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html].
20. Sabrina Tavernise. “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High”. NY Times. [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html]
21. CDC. “U.S. Overdose Deaths In 2021 Increased Half as Much as in 2020 – But Are Still Up 15%.” [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/202205.htm]
22. “Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit U.S. Workers, Made Rich Companies Richer”. Newsweek. [https://www.newsweek.com/republican-tax-cuts-trump-wage-increases-879800]
23. ‘I Try So Hard Not To Cry’: Nearly Half Of U.S. Households Face A Financial Crisis. NPR. 10 Sept. 2020. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/10/910724801/overview-of-poll-data-on-pandemics-damage]
24. Charles Homans. “Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This.” N.Y. Times. 27 April 2024. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/magazine/trump-rallies-rhetoric.html]
25. “Who’s drawn to fascism? Postwar study of authoritarianism makes a comeback.” CBC Ideas. 24 October 2022. [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/who-s-drawn-to-fascism-postwar-study-of-authoritarianism-makes-a-comeback-1.6403074]
26. Nancy Fraser. “Trumpism: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond.” American Affairs. (Winter 2017) [https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/]
27. “2013 Year in Review: USA”. Georgia Straight [https://www.straight.com/life/551821/2013-year-review-usa]
28. Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. 17 Jan. 2019. [https://time.com/55054
29. Peter G. Prontzos. “The Concept of Race is a Lie: Even the Ancient Greeks knew it”. 14 May 2019. Scientific American. [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-concept-of-race-is-a-lie]
30. Eric Tucker and Ben Fox. “FBI director says antifa is an ideology, not an organization.” Associated Press. 17 September 2020 [https://apnews.com/bdd3b6078e9efadcfcd0be4b65f2362e]
31. Michael Smith, David. “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492–Present” (PDF). Southeast Oklahoma State University.
32. David Dorado Romo. “Massacre, Look to the Long Legacy of Anti-Mexican Violence at the Border”. Texas Observer. 9 Aug. 2019. [https://www.texasobserver.org/to-understand-the-el-paso-massacre-look-to-the-long-legacy-of-anti-mexican-violence-at-the-border]
33. George Lakoff. “Understanding Trump”. University of Chicago Press. August 2016. [https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2016/lakoff_trump.html]
34. Sylvie Laurent. “Martin Luther King and the Other America.” The Nation. [https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-king-and-the-other-america-sylvie-laurent-book-review]
35. Ibid.
36. Michael Powell. “A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.” N.Y. Times. 14 Aug. 2020. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html]
37. Heckman: Invest in Early Childhood Development: Reduce Deficits, Strengthen the Economy. [https://heckmanequation.org/resource/invest-in-early-childhood-development-reduce-deficits-strengthen-the-economy]
38. “How to Close the Racial Wealth Gap: A new online calculator has a winner: Baby bonds.” NY Times. 7 Aug. 2019. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/baby-bonds-booker-race.html]
39. Kenny Stancil. “Survey Shows Nearly Half in US Suffering Serious Economic Hardship–and Situation ‘Going to Get Worse”. Common Dreams.11 Sept. 2020. [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/11/survey-shows-nearly-half-us-suffering-serious-economic-hardship-and-situation-going]
40. Jim Tankersley. “Trump’s Tax Cut One Year Later: What Happened?” N.Y. Times. 27 Dec. 2018. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/us/politics/trump-tax-cuts-jobs-act.html]
41. Ashley Lopez. “More Americans say they support political violence ahead of the 2024 election”. NPR. 25 Oct. 2023. [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208373493/political-violence-democracy-2024-presidential-election-extremism]
42. “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto”. [https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/]
Elissa Epel, PhD. (University of California, San Francisco)
Penguin Books.
It wasn’t easy to find the time to read this book – in fact, it was getting a bit, well, stressful.
However, as soon as I started, Dr. Epel’s [https://www.elissaepel.com] words had a calming effect, for a number of reasons. For instance, she makes the point that stress, “will always be a part of life – anything worth doing will have aspects of stress…But what we can change is our response to stress.”
And when that happens, in addition to feeling more relaxed, we are likely to be more successful in our work, whether it is looking after our children, organizing for peace, or just enjoying a walk.
To help the reader cope with life’s demands, Epel takes a comprehensive approach which focuses primarily on two themes: first, psychological insights that put the issues into a proper perspective; and second, specific practices that can help reduce stress on a day-to-day basis.
To do so, she does not simply recite a few obvious bromides, like, “Always look on the bright side of life”, or “Put on a happy face”. Instead, the reader is offered a thoughtful overview of the problem alongside practical and effective exercises based on a weekly schedule.
Epel, who co-authored, The Telomere Effect with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, begins by pointing out that having a hard-wired stress response is important because it can “deliver the physical and mental resources we need to meet a challenge.” She then makes the vital distinction between the occasional stressful situations that are inevitable but brief, and chronic stress, which, “can change the structure of our very cells, right down to our telomeres” – the “caps” that are at the ends of our chromosomes. “Chronic stress, the type that goes on for years and years, has a toxic effect on your body. It wears out your cells prematurely…Having short telomeres in our blood cells predicts earlier onset of diseases and death.”
Chronic stress also makes us feel terrible and will often cause otherwise nice people to be mean to others. Indeed, constant anxiety from day-to-day plays a significant but usually unrecognized role in the growing tension and polarization in society.
What to do? Epel’s first point is to expect the unexpected, and to accept the Buddhist insight: “everything changes, and nothing lasts, including our own lives…”
She adds that we can change our minds and bodies for greater resilience, leading to, “longer, healthier lives that we can enjoy for the time that we’re here.”
Sounds good, eh?
That process begins with remembering to NOT be stressed if you do not have the time to jump right in and start practicing these exercises today, and/or if you don’t follow the plan every day. In other words, just do the best that you can without worrying about it.
The week-long program has a different theme every day, such as: do what you can and let go of the rest; training for resilience; and reconnecting with Nature as an effective way to relax. In the latter case, Epel recommends full immersion in a forest, a lake, or similarly soothing places. She suggests that you: “Walk in silence, slowly…let your senses be fully engaged…Listen for birds, breezes, movement, water.”
And remember that YOU are part of Nature too.
This approach is very effective in reducing what’s known as, “nature deficit disorder”, while also reminding us that it’s impossible to thrive, either as an individual or as a species, in an unhealthy environment.
Epel includes many insightful ideas with each daily theme, along with ways to make them part of one’s routine. The richness and variety of these suggestions allows every person to explore a wide range of options for each day, finding for themselves which are the most appropriate.
Throughout, Epel weaves in stories about difficult times in her own life, and that of other people dealing with very serious problems. She recounts some of the situations when she found herself over-reacting to stressful challenges and how she needed to practice mindfulness, exercise, or other techniques that helped her to return her nervous system to its baseline – what she terms, “deep rest”.
To be clear, she does not suggest that these techniques and perspectives are the answer to some very distressing situations that so many people face, such as poverty, oppressive jobs, or the loss of a loved one. And Epel does mention some existential problems that we need to confront, the climate crisis being the most serious.
The role of such problems in creating stress is profoundly illuminated in Dr. Gabor Maté’s latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. [https://drgabormate.com]
Maté defines culture as: “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.”
His book examines what exactly is “toxic” about our societies, and he stresses that the global health problems that we face, such as, “burgeoning stress, inequality, and climate catastrophe” have been created by a culture of “globalized capitalism” that condemns countless numbers of human beings, “to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
(It’s important to note that a number of studies have shown that, when people work together in a peaceful and respectful way to make a better world, they experience many positive feelings, including a real sense of connection and purpose).
For his part, Albert Einstein was more than just the most famous physicist in the 20th century. He was also an astute observer of human nature, and he had a deep understanding of the importance of social and economic factors in shaping – and potentially damaging – human consciousness. In 1949, he wrote that:
…the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept “society” means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual…depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought…” [https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism]
In modern societies, almost everybody is traumatized to a greater or lesser extent. In Einstein’s view: “This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.” (ibid)
As individuals, the practices that Epel suggests can help make our bodies and minds more relaxed and improve the quality of our relationships, as well as making our lives more thoughtful, and perhaps even more meaningful.
And that’s a good start.
—–
Note: I was introduced to Dr. Epel’s work in a powerful National Geographic documentary, “Stress: Portrait of a Killer”, which highlights the insights of Stanford neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky: [https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/stress-portrait-of-a-killer]
I decided to update our look to the Twenty-Seventeen theme because our old Journalist theme was getting pretty boring. I love the colourful header with the plants. How do you like it?
While wandering through Chapters bookstore in Toronto, I came across a little book by Harry G. Frankfurt, an emeritis professor of philosophy at Stanford University. It’s simply called “On Bullshit,” Here is a video interview with professor Frankfurt posted on the Princeton University Press website:
https://youtu.be/lArA7nMIqSI
Apparently, Professor Frankfurt’s book has become somewhat of a cult classic; reviews praising the book are scattered throughout the web. In my mind, the praise is well deserved – how often do you see someone in academia, which is immersed in bullshit, standing up to expose it? Although he drags on in parts and does a bit too much hairsplitting as to just what constitutes bullshit (or humbug) he makes the point that our society is swimming in bullshit.
In this era of rampant political lying, Frankfurt makes the distinction between lying and bullshit:
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
According to this definition, I would claim that most politicians bullshit artists than outright liars. But in the end, the result is the same. You’ve been deceived! Time to grow a good pair of bullshit antennae.
“…the personality…is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up…The individual…depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought.”
Indeed, the power of one’s culture is so profound – and subtle – that it can even reorganize the neural pathways in our brain. As Montreal neuroscientist Michael Meaney explains: “…the development of an individual is an active process of adaptation that occurs within a social and economic context,” e.g. poverty increases maternal distress and poor parenting, which then may lead to lower “cognitive outcomes” for children. And other studies have shown that “lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology [emphasis added].
Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, was among the first to point out that repressed, unfulfilled, and angry people are more disposed to violence and authoritarianism. Eric Fromm, who, like Reich, escaped from Nazi Germany, viewed authoritarian childhoods as likely to create adults who see obedience as the best way to win the approval of father figures in power, who, “…offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation.”
One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to agree that, overall, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Marx is not saying that ideas do not matter, only that the primary determinants of our worldviews are the concrete conditions of our existence. Our views are different than those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors because the world we live in is so dissimilar. So even though we are the most social and empathic animals, those central emotions are weakened because, neoiberal ideology promotes, free market capitalism is one of the most powerful of empathy-reducing belief systems, especially as manifested in cultures like the United States.
Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford Prison Experiment pioneered our understanding of just how powerful our social situations can be – even stronger than one’s individual disposition. The corporate media are a major factor in the construction of both the social unconscious and political ideologies. One reason for their influence, as Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman notes, is that “people tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.”
Powerful and wealthy elites tend to control what is taught in schools and, more than ever, in the mass media. The corporate media give us a very biased view of reality. As Einstein noted:
“…private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions…”
A dramatic example was provided after the attacks on September 11, when the major U.S. media blindly went along with the obvious lies of the Bush regime as it carried out a vast propaganda campaign to get public support for two illegal wars. A current example of media manipulation is the lie that Iran has not lived up to its treaty obligations regarding nuclear weapons. A related problem is the fact that the corporate media almost never mention the one country in the Middle East that does have nuclear bombs – Israel.
These examples are only a few of the many ways in which our society and culture can determine our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
In my next post, I’ll provide a conclusion to this essay.
We are the most social of all animals, and our individual consciousness is primarily shaped by our society in general, and by our culture and family in particular. Children need to be seen to feel safe and to be soothed when they are distressed so that healthy attachment can develop. Children with unhealthy attachments are vulnerable to a wide assortment of dysfunctions. “The most important aspect of early attachment relationships”, psychologist Louis Cozolino notes, “is the establishment of a sense of safety.”
Healthy relationships create secure attachments between infants and caregivers, which also helps children to learn emotional self-regulation, reducing the tendency to overreact to negative situations.
Daniel Goleman describes the neuroplasticity of our brains in his book, Social Intelligence, as: “…repeated experiences sculpt the shape, size, and number of our neurons and their synaptic connections…. Our key relationships can gradually mold certain neural circuitry. This openness to our social environment means that the kind of person that we eventually become is, to a very significant extent, the result of the quality of our relationships in the early years.”
Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology who specializes in moral development in children and how early life experiences can influence brain development. She explains:“Studies show that responding to a baby’s needs (not letting a baby “cry it out”) has been shown to influence the development of conscience; positive touch affects stress reactivity, impulse control and empathy; free play in nature influences social capacities and aggression; and a set of supportive caregivers (beyond the mother alone) predicts IQ and ego resilience as well as empathy. The United States has been on a downward trajectory on all of these care characteristics….” A nourishing environment, Narvaez adds, leads to “communal imagination,” which includes love, “sympathetic action”, and “egalitarian respect” for others.
The rise of authoritarian movements and leaders around the world, from the Philippines to India to the United States, is one of the most dangerous developments in modern times. Not only are they anti-democratic and often xenophobic, but they are one more significant obstacle to dealing with such other dangers as the climate crisis and war.
This danger is not trivial: a 2018 report by the democracy watchdog group Freedom House suggests that…”democracy is facing its ‘most serious crises in decades.’ Seventy-one countries experienced net declines in the guarantee of political and civil rights.” And this is not just an aberration. “For the 12th consecutive year, global freedom declined. Since 2006, 113 countries have reduced their commitments to individual and collective freedom.”
“France, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States have experienced the rise of extremist groups and rising intolerance toward ethnic minorities and immigrants. Germany and Italy have seen a resurgence of neo-fascism. Systematic measures to weaken the rule of law, attempts to eradicate judicial independence, curtail civil liberties, restrict voting rights and intimidate journalists have occurred in Poland, Hungary, Turkey and the United States.”
“The Great Recession of 2008 was the social and economic context for the emergence of contemporary autocracy in Europe and the United States. The reaction to the recession…reflects what Harvard economist Dani Rodrik calls the, “political trilemma of the global economy”: the incompatibility between democracy, national [self-]determination and economic globalization. Right-wing extremists were able to effectively link job loss, “uncontrolled” immigration and loss of national identity with globalization.
So you’ve started into primal therapy. Great. You are diligent with your feelings, you go to group every week and you have frequent individual sessions. When something triggers you, you are first to book a session with a therapist and “go for it” – feel the feelings, get the connections and insights. And week after week, month after month, year after year, you keep it up. Therapy, therapy and more therapy. And yet somehow the old issues don’t seem to resolve.
We are told that some feelings that take a very long time to complete, especially first-line feelings, but if you find yourself getting into the same old jams again and again, if you keep struggling with the boyfriend who erupts in anger and gives you no love, if you keep failing to do what you really want to do, or to get the job that want to get, or find a loving relationship instead of one with endless struggle, and then go back for endless therapy, you might be using the therapy as a defence.
I’ve seen this phenomenon and Arthur Janov wrote about it a long time ago. Primal therapy is about changing your life; it’s not about endless sessions after sessions for years or even decades. But many people can retreat into the “comfort” of primaling instead of changing their life because the latter is harder to do. These people can become “primal junkies,” addicted to therapy as sure as one can get addicted to alcohol, tobacco, drugs, or sex. Things just don’t feel right without your weekly session, your weekly fix. You get antsy; you “need to feel” just like clockwork.
And of course, if that is happening then you are probably not primaling but abreacting. In my abreaction article, I mentioned that one of the signs of abreaction is a life without changes:
If there is a sine qua non of abreaction, it is in the lack of life changes made by the person abreacting. Abreaction keeps you “stuck” – no ventures are made, no risks are taken, no changes in jobs or career, no “going for it” in a real, healthy, meaningful way. Instead, one remains a prisoner of their pain, always reacting to circumstances, always triggered, always needing to “go down” to feel every few days, and always acting out.
This is not a fault of the therapy; it’s a fault in the way the patient is doing the therapy and a good therapist will catch this and address it, usually by telling you to do what you don’t want to do or what you are reluctant or scared to do. They will tell you to change your behavior and go for life in the way you want. If you want to play a musical instrument, play it. You want to write? Write! Don’t just think about it, and don’t try to be Shakespeare or Dickens on your first try. You will never be ready “someday when I’ve felt enough feelings.” Someday is TODAY. If the therapy is working then you’ll be thrown into a pot of feelings that you’ve been avoiding; the very feelings that have prevented you from doing what you want to do. It’s the primal dialectic. As Janov observed so many years ago, it’s far easier to “feel” another feeling rather than the feeling that is really there. That’s abreaction and it’s very sneaky.
So a little bit of behavioral therapy can help primal therapy go a long way, not by using head trips or conditioning, but by facing up to what you need and want to do and DO IT. A therapist I respect very much once said he would get his male patients who (for example) were scared to call a girl out for a date to do it right then and right there because it would immediately put them into the feelings they needed to feel. I’ve been there, not with arranging a date, but with needing to express to someone that I loved them. Pick up the telephone, get the voice message, and then WHAM! Up come the feelings. “I love you” becomes “I need you.”
So don’t be a primal junkie. Not only does it not work, but it costs a hell of a lot of money on useless therapy.
Your “self” is composed of three fundamental elements: your brain, your body, and your relations with other people. This insight was one of the central themes in the keynote talk given by Dr. Daniel Siegel at the conclusion of University of British Columbia’s fourth Brain Development and Learning conference.
Siegel was not being poetic or metaphorical. As he explained, your mind (“your consciousness, which includes your ‘heart’)…is shaped by both the connections we have with others and by the connections we have within the synaptic structures of our embodied nervous system.”
As he put it: “The mind is within you and between you.”
Not surprisingly, the most important influences are those experiences that we have in our earliest years – including in the womb.
His talk, entitled, “Interpersonal Neurobiology of the Developing Mind”, explored how a “healthy” mind functions and can be nurtured.
The definition of a healthy mind is one in which “energy and information flow” freely in its three aspects: in your brain, through your body, and also between people.
When childhood or other trauma interferes with this flow, “chaos and/or rigidity result”, both of which “are reflections of impaired relational or neural integration.”
Throughout his talk, Siegel, who teaches at UCLA, emphasized how our increasing understanding of interpersonal neurobiology can greatly improve our treatment of children – in the home, in school, and in society in general.
Children need to be seen, to feel safe, and to be soothed when they are distressed, in order for healthy attachment to develop.
Siegel also stressed the monumental importance of how experience can affect the functioning of our genes, turning them on and off. Moreover, these “epigenetic” changes can be passed on to our children and grandchildren – and perhaps even further.
One question that came up in several of the talks this weekend was: can therapeutic intervention heal the epigenetic damage caused by trauma? Like some other presenters, Siegel believes that this approach is very promising.
Siegel explained the concepts of “implicit” (unconscious) and “explicit” (conscious) memory, and how our ideas and feelings can be shaped by past memories of which we are not only unaware, but which nevertheless feel like they are in the present.
The second part of Siegel’s talk focused how complex systems, like the mind, are both embodied and relational. It can self-organize and self-regulate. He defined a healthy mind as one in which “optimal self-organization depends on the linkage of differentiated parts to create integration and harmony.” (Siegel even got the some of the audience singing on-stage as an example of these principles!)
The take-away point was that, both within the individual and in groups: “Integration creates kindness and compassion.”
Siegel went on to explain that we need “to apply science to make the world a better place.” For instance, we know that when people feel threatened, they readily divide others into “in-group and out-group”. This is a natural legacy of our evolutionary history. Siegel stressed how “we have to rise above the tendencies of the human mind” that are dangerous and which have led to so much unnecessary suffering.
Echoing the insight of Socrates, that, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, Siegel said that becoming more mindfully aware is necessary for both mental and social health.
Finally, we need to go beyond the excessive individualism of our culture to emphasize our shared lives.
The cultivation of our natural empathy is another critical step toward a more humane world.
Siegel’s two hour talk – without notes or powerpoint – was relaxed, humorous, and extremely informative.
