I have become much more aware of my reactions to different people and situations that I never noticed before. I also am beginning to understand much better about other peoples feelings and how I can affect them. I have a lot of work there.
Primal Therapy is subtle but it is very deep. I know that now. I can cope with a lot more things than I ever could before. Recently I went on a United Way bike ride that was organized for work and my former girlfriend Julie participated. I actually talked with her and saw her in a totally different way. Without the therapy I would just have been quite aloof to her as I have done in the past. Hiding. It wasn't easy but I took a few steps that day.

Small steps ...that’s how I have to go

Primal Therapy gets you started but how you use it and incorporate it into your life is where the real benefit comes. I am just scratching the surface of that but have already had moments and experiences I would no way have had without the therapy. I have actually experienced some real joy from people and situations. Just being able to feel a part of something. I always felt apart somehow.

N.P., Canada, November 2009

....... I was a very neurotic young man at that time. I had recently been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps after serving two eventful tours of duty as a low ranking rifleman. I had been severely injured in the summer of 1968 but was back in action by early Jan. 1969 and had another eventful tour: large battles at close range with the NVA. Killed many and saw many comrades die and be severely injured. The usual things that wars are all about.
After all this I was a very painfilled person. I know you know about these things and that at one time you did some work for the VA prior to creating PRIMAL THERAPY.
I just want to thank you for creating this PRIMAL THERAPY. I consider it the most important discovery and development of all time. It is THE SCIENCE of the origins and treatment mental illness. It is everything you have said it is and it SAVED MY LIFE.
I regret not being able to receive treatment at THE PRIMAL INSTITUTE. But I was open to and ready to feel all the misery I had amassed in my at that time, young life.
The purpose of this response is to thank you for creating this marvelous therapy. For reasons of my own I wish to maintain what little privacy is left in this era we live in and will sign off with my web name which is Dr.Syntax. I am no doctor and do not pretend to be one. Dr.Syntax is a fictional character from early 19th century English transferware pottery. The Tours of Dr.Syntax.
So,with that said, Thank You Sir for saving my life, Dr.Syntax

I just want to thank you for creating this PRIMAL THERAPY. I consider it the most important discovery and development of all time. It is THE SCIENCE of the origins and treatment mental illness. It is everything you have said it is and it SAVED MY LIFE.
The purpose of this response is to thank you for creating this marvelous therapy. For reasons of my own I wish to maintain what little privacy is left in this era we live in and will sign off with my web name which is Dr. Syntax. I am no doctor and do not pretend to be one. Dr. Syntax is a fictional character from early 19th century English transferware pottery. So, with that said, Thank You Sir for saving my life.

Dr. Syntax, November 2009

Hi, for your FAQ page, I would like to suggest a question pertaining to why Primal Therapy is not more in use by more therapists, and why more people are not trying it out.

I myself have had fantastic primal experiences, which were so real and helpful. Yet, the very same process, at other times, proved to be disintegrating.

Complete re-building, integration, and recovery of the lost self appears to me to be a complex process, requiring different modalities for different people at different times.

Also, isn’t it imperative to become, eventually one’s own therapist? Otherwise, how can there be true healing if one does not know ones own feelings.

Doesn’t Dr. Janov do his own therapy; have primals on his own, trust his own judgment on this? It always feels as if Dr. Janov wants to control the use of primal which for me begs the question: if this is truly an organic process, a universally true one, then isn’t there a healer deep within each person. Doesn’t Dr. Janov want to put the power in the hands of people everywhere to take advantage of this, including people who can’t afford to pay a great deal of money that most people just do not have?

I appreciate his great genius, but I am frustrated with his adherence to his one and only true way as the only way, and wish he would discuss more the complexities of the process, and how for some people they need strengthening of their ego structure, along with feeling therapy, or feeling deeper feelings could become disintegrating, and therefore destructive. Some years ago I was thinking of coming to the primal center. I spoke with a man who’s name I don’t remember. But I believe he said he worked in close partnership with Dr. Janov. I found him to be aloof and very intellectual, and shockingly unlike anything I would expect a primal person to be. So, again I am saying that I love the writings and ideas of Dr. Janov, but I do wish he were more inclusive, less exclusive.

Thanks, E. Sept. 09

"Dear E.

Ay, ay, ay. Our training has been open to any professional for years. It is a very complex theory and therapy and all I want to do is protect the public, since we spend half our time fixing up those who went to people who didn't have the proper extensive training Primal Therapy requires. How many ways are there to make electricity? It is not a matter of democracy; it is a matter of science. I included a little something that may help explain this below. I guarantee you that whoever says they worked with me it is almost never true. We hear those stories over and over again. Would you want to be in the hands of someone with no training or perhaps six months of training, or someone with 15 y ears of training? You may find my blog (www.arthurjanov.com) helpful in answering some of your questions, as there are many articles there.

My Best,
Dr. Art Janov"

I am so pleased with your work, the material you provide on your website, it is what caused my breakthough this week. Thank you for what you do, the educational material you provide, and thank you for caring enough about we humans to help us find our way. I am amazed by the Primal way, and I am a true believer in it. I cannot tell you how happy I am that I had the breakthrough I had this week. Best wishes.

S. C, USA, 12/2009

Dear Art,

Please let me tell you that your blog this week - about Harvard "scientists" performing brain surgery on depressed people, people with compulsional behaviour - nearly made me cry! What do these so called scientists think? Are academics able to feel at all? Or, is it common among them - as it seems - that they are highly autistic!

Art, please let everyone who reads your website and your blog know that Primal therapy is not only the only cure for neurosis, but also for Borderline! Please let the readers know that - if the patient really hangs in there and does everything that is scary in therapy, like telling therapists and oneself the truth, go for feelings, when you are triggered in group, and so on! I know it takes ALL your courage and hard work but this is the only way you can cure yourself! I know it out of OWN experience!

How blind will conventional scientists stay? Art, I really feel sad with you! I feel sad that conventional therapists, doctors, psycho-people consider Primal Therapy "unsafe" and "dangerous" as you write! What they do with these surgery techniques is to bring psychiatry back to the level where it was about 100 years ago! At that time they cut off a psychiatric patients' corpus callosum! Art, I really feel with you that these techniques in summa summarum are what you call "monstruous" when you talk about electric shocks (which "new minded" scientists nowadays begin to use again!)

And, yes, I really AM afraid that you will pass away one day and that no one will tell the world the truth about where all kinds of psychological conditions come from! What I also fear is that I will not get to see you again - simply because you and your staff have saved my life - and you simply deserve a hug and a sincere "thank you!"

Please say "hi!" to all of your staff and your wife!

Thank you! (No, I need to correct myself, "THANK YOU!")

Sincerely yours,

J. L. 2009 (who hangs there in!)

Success is experiencing meaning in your life, real meaning in the Primal sense. Success is a brain that actually works as it was meant to. Those who have achieved this through Primal are so privileged. We only have one life and to live it without meaning must surely be one of the greatest sorrows. Steve, Scotland 11/2009

Just watched Saving Private Ryan......and the tears and the pain I am privilidged to feel in the here and now are real. As a feeling man with a lifetime of inquirey I still ask is there no way to end the slaughter that Primal holds the key to ending. If people were content with the joys that life holds in its simplicity, in its wonderment, without seemingly striving to abate the tension and historical pain through projective identification, spliting, etc etc....Art what can be done? Without Primal is cannot stop. Our destiny as humans is sound child rearing practices and adequate therapy. Forgive me. I know I am a fool...of sorts. You have my honor of you. I wish I could express myself in writing this to you, in all its ramifications and idealism.

B.J.F. 11/2009

Dear Dr. Janov,

I began Primal Therapy with Jean Jackson in 1979, and met you a few times in the course of my treatment.

I contributed an article to the Newsletter about buried pain and writer's block. Along with that, I basically cured my low self-esteem, depression and anxiety over the course of the first year.

I have been active since the mid-1980s with Lloyd deMause's International Psychohistorical Association, scholars who seek to apply psychological theories to the study of the social sciences. I have been presenting papers for many years now at their conventions, and recently put them together in a book, for which I quickly found a publisher. The title is The Politics of Pain: The Psychological Roots of Tyranny and Genocide, and it will be coming out soon (hopefully this spring). The publisher is McFarland and Co. I'll send a copy when it comes out.

Thanks again for changing my life so much. I grieved terribly over Jean Jackson's untimely death.

Sincerely,
R. M. NY 2009

Hello Folks.
Glad to see you are still at it after all these years. My experiences in Primal therapy in the 70s and 80s were truly the beginning of "real" living for me. I went from very depressed and unfocussed to becoming a medical doctor and most certainly would not have made that transition without "digging deep" in my therapy after Janovs books shed light.

I am wondering if the scientific results and findings regarding neurotransmitters, hormones et al are in print and where I could find them

Thanks
J. F. MD 9.2009

Answer :
Dear J..

A LOT OF IT IS REPORTED IN PRIMAL HEALING AND ALSO MY BIOLOGY OF LOVE. ALSO I HAVE ANOTHER BOOK HOPING TO COME OUT ON SEX AND HORMONES.

ART JANOV

Dear Dr. Janov,

For two reasons, I am requesting that you publish (preferably on your website) more detailed information about the bodily measurements you have done with your clients.

First, as you have noted many times over the years, there are thousands of "primal" therapy people who are not actually doing the work. But they do not know it. Most of their "therapists" don't know it. Yet, measurements of blood pressure, heart rate and extremities' temperature are easy to do and could reveal to many of these folks that they might be fooling themselves (if they were able to compare their measurements with your numbers). They might then make better choices for themselves. (These thousands include a number of clients who were yours originally.)

Second, I believe there is a synergy about ideas that finally get accepted (the 100th monkey). Your ideas of body measurements showing tension have never really caught on - I have a book coming out in the next few months that will talk about self-measuring of inner peacefulness of spiritually-minded folks by measuring blood pressure, heart rate and fingertip temperature (all easy to measure inexpensively). In fact, I did measure a few folks who were doing "primal" (perhaps not what you would call it) - these measures showed that some were definitely less stressed than average folks; others were likely caught up in what I call longstanding detours. I have included these general "primal" results in my book (as well as my own waking-up measures of 110/60 blood pressure, 50 beats-per-minute heart rate and 97F fingertip temperature). In your published works that I have read, there are few specifics. I think specific averages or means, both long-term and short-term with your clients, would be helpful for those who follow "primal" paths. If these measures are publicly available somewhere, please let me know where. Such figures could be useful as well for those spiritually-oriented of my book whom I could refer to your website for further information. Many of them are also fooling themselves. (I am not suggesting you publish the results of brain-testing, because most people have no easy access to the equipment required.)

A bit of my background - I did my first primal intensive 35 years ago with a therapist originally trained by you. My interests have since branched into the spiritual, yet the primal base remains valuable today. I think of you as a courageous pioneer. For what you have both attempted and accomplished, I thank you.

T. W. USA,2008

Through the wonders of YouTube, I encountered an interview of Dr. Janov's concerning his newest book. It brought back a rush of memories of my own wonderful, life-saving experience in Primal Therapy. About thirty-four years ago I entered Primal Therapy as an attempted suicide survivor headed for the second try. Therapists Patti and GP lead me through the labyrinth of pain and as a result I've had a third century of great years. For thirty-three years, I have lived and worked abroad teaching American children. When the need calls to unload some recessive pain, I still speak to Patti and GP after all these years, unbeknownst to them, of course.

I wanted to thank Dr. Janov for his miraculous break-through in feeling pain out, not thinking it out. Your theory and trained therapists saved my life and left me with these many years of positive, clear-thinking, realistic attitude.

Life is great ! Thanks, M.R., September 2009

Art,

You are and have been such an important person to me for more than three decades since I first read the Primal Scream. In many ways, I credit you with saving my life. At times I mean that literally. Other times I mean it in the sense of bringing me back in touch with me. Always, always I feel deep gratitude for your having come into my life, first through your book, and in later years in person and through my therapy. Thank you for all you have given me. I live a richer, fuller life because of the help of primal therapy, because of you.

J.W., North Carolina, July 2009

Dear Dr Janov,

Once again, thank you for Primal Therapy. As you may remember, I was a client between 2000 and 2004.

I had a difficult birth, and then suffered many years of vicious physical and psychological abuse. As a result, I had severe depression and some other debilitating psychological problems. I spent my life on medications, going from one psychiatrist or psychologist to another. None of these efforts helped substantially and some of them backfired.

Primal Therapy cured the severe depression and some horrible compulsions. I was able to stop taking medications. The problems that were resolved have not returned. Also my social life, originally extremely dysfunctional, started to become relatively normal.

All of this was accomplished by your fine therapists. Thank you to all.

Your books are easily the best on psychology I have read. It’s because they are real. There is so much nonsense elsewhere. It is a great shame that so called psychology has gravitated towards pill popping and a quick fix.

An evolutionary process must have been required to develop the techniques that I and others have benefited from. I can only admire your ingenuity and perseverance.

Yours sincerely,
R.S., Australia, August 2009

Your Therapy Gave Me Life

Dear Art,

I think of you often...I am always grateful I found your book, The Primal Scream, and came for therapy in New York, 1979...and came for training in California, 1994...both experiences were invaluable...your therapy surely gave me life...thank you...

J.H., New York, August 2009

The bulk of thanks go to your Therapy. Three years ago I couldn't have imagined that at age 69 I would be in graduate school working on my masters and MFT license. There are times when I wonder if this therapy is working (especially if I'm feeling less than great) but all I have to do is take inventory of my life now as opposed to three years ago, and I marvel at the difference. Thanks so much for everything.

F.R. California 2009

Dear France,
It's so good to hear from you. When I write to you and Art it's partly an attempt to stay or feel connected from across the distance. Hearing back from you--your kind words--certainly stenghtens my sense of connection to you both and to the center. I realize this month marks my fourth anniversary--four whole years--at the center. I feel in that time like I've lived a whole life almost. And in spite of this period of crisis I'm still in it seems because of the therapy that I grow a bit stronger each day. Which gives me hope (the real kind) and confidence for the future.

And once again I want to say I can never fully express my gratitutde to you and Art and to the center.

Best Wishes,
R.B., Pennsylvania 2009

Dear Art,
I went through the PT in 1976-77 (North Almont Drive) with my wife Milly. I am now 69 and alive. I know I would not be without PT. It would be impossible to count all the benefits that come to you through feeling old feelings day in day out for years. I still feel, though much more sporadically. Milly died two months ago as a result of breast cancer spreading through her body. The agony of her loss is shaking my world. Yet I am happy at the thought of our life and love in the post-PT years together. Thank you for that

With much sadness,
J., 2009

The therapy at your Center really worked for me and I learned a lot in these three weeks. What was a very pleasant surprise is that after so many years of not having a therapist, I could feel strong feelings from the very first session.

I see that you have put some videos on your Website and it's a great idea. I attended 3 theoretical training sessions and one Practicum at your Center and I bought 14 DVD-s with different lectures. Now I'm watching your internet videos and study them in case I catch up with the training one day at your Center. I bought The Primal Healing at your Center and I have read it. After my short but efficient therapy I now read and understand Art's books in a different way. Also, I have my own ideas about what is going on during the therapy.

All the best,
M.T., 2009

From the depths of a terrible deep neurosis, totally shut down, a lonely aging man, I made a commitment to learn how to feel. I NEVER GAVE UP! I GOT BACK WHAT I NEEDED MOST! LOOK AT ME NOW!!!! Engaged to a 25 yr. old, expecting a baby in December, my life is permanantly changed! I used your Primal Therapy all the way to feel deepest intense feelings, terrible fear, and got back MYSELF! I will not lose him again, despite some remaining extremely unpleasant feeling sensations, I always ask myself, "what is this feeling over? What's it like? Incredible insights with CLEAR feelings are great. Thank you so much.

John, US

"I was fortunate enough to experience Primal Therapy in your Paris Institute during 1984.

Without the care and professionalism… I doubt if I'd have gotten through the last quarter of a century.

My debt to Primal Therapy is immeasurable. I was ill. Seeing my young daughter playfully squealing in delight as she ran around the sofa, hiding and seeking, brought on the most despicable thoughts any person can have. I wanted to cut her in two, shake her viscera around the living room, then attempt to piece her together again. Just like I’d experienced at her age: taken from my home, my mother, my family, to be adopted. Split from first memories to be given over to strangers. Coping with this emotional bifurcation didn’t stop there. As I grew older I rationalized it: added political ideology to it, sought means to change my world by wanting to change the big world no matter the consequences.

"How I hated, how I worshipped the simple black and white truths ideology provides. Everything was explicable in my world view: the good guys and the bad guys. The liberators and the oppressors. Enemies and allies.

"Returning from Paris none of my stupid, crass, idiotic fundamentalist assertions meant anything to me. They were all lies, rationalizations for my unconscious feelings of wanting revenge, of wanting to be back with my family once more. Ideas and beliefs that had sustained me through my youth, university, professional life, evaporated, seen for what they were: I was unexpectedly liberated. Nothing was the same again. I saw reality for the first time.

Primal Therapy made me well and continued my life. I cannot thank you and your method enough."

-R.L., France 2009

It may be relevant for you to know that the primal work I did was critical, essential and it was only a start. In my view It is by no means "the" endpoint in process. It opened me to a diversity of riches that have taken me far beyond merely "open to my feelings..." In my opinion people do not often "get" meditation because there are so few well qualified teachers but also most of us westerners are beset with such coarse or gross emotional turbulance... "feeling ones feelings" is hands down the most efficient way to correct that, crank down to incessant mental emotional noise and so become capable of focussing attention with laser like stability and clarity...

J.F., MD

I am currently in a RENEWED state of awe at what your therapy achieves. After all these visits to India (and the wonderful momentary feeling of their expanded consciousness), after neurofeedback brain training (which is in itself very interesting and which quantifies aspects of both the meditation techniques and the problems accessed in Primal years ago) - I had a session with L. and after an hour or two of weeping, all my symptoms of stress are gone. All these techniques fit together to substantiate each other and the one with the power to relieve the pain is - PRIMAL.

Thank you!. J.G, Los Angeles. 2009

Hi France,

Primal therapy may not have always been what it is today but, in response to talk about lack of 'empirical evidence', I can only say that I have doubts as to the extent to which quantitative studies can ever accurately measure qualitative phenomena. The Primal Center, in any case, would be too focused on the well-being of those who go to them for help to ask those people to submit themselves as guinea pigs for empirical studies, even if such studies could be meaningful (which, considering all the variables involved in human experience, I would say it was very doubtful that they could.)

Primal therapy is genuinely transformative. Discovering it has completely transformed my life.

M.G, USA, 2008

Primal therapy has given me back my sense of self, by enabling me to reconnect with my own emotional core.
Before coming here from England at the age of 26, I had tried more therapists and therapies than I can count; none of which brought about any qualitative changes in my life or in the way I felt about myself. I was isolated, depressed and desperate and yet I felt emotionally numb at the same time. I had never had a relationship and I felt lacking in personality and as if I didn't "have a life."

Through primal all those things have changed. I now have a husband, great friends and a deeply fulfilling career as a teacher. In addition to this, I feel more real, more whole and more human than I ever have before and than I ever thought it was possible for me to feel.

I have read critiques of primal by the so-called orthodox psychological or scientific community and they make me shake my head.in disbelief. The only explanation I can think of is that they must be based on either narrow minds, outdated information or on narrowly reductionistic mental models. (Because my experience tells a very different story).

Primal therapy may not have always been what it is today but, in response to talk about lack of 'empirical evidence', I can only say that I have doubts as to the extent to which quantitative studies can ever accurately measure qualitative phenomena. The Primal Center, in any case, would be too focused on the well-being of those who go to them for help to ask those people to submit themselves as guinea pigs for empirical studies, even if such studies could be meaningful (which, considering all the variables involved in human experience, I would say it was very doubtful that they could.)

Primal therapy is genuinely transformative. Discovering it has completely transformed my life.

M.G, USA, 2008

You can never know what the primal center and the therapy I have received means (to me). Some things can not be expressed in words.
Love
G.W.

Dear Art!

Once in a while I consult your homepage, which I like even more after you have given it a new elegant look and it's more accessible than the previous.

I recently bought and read The Primal Healing and I enjoyed every second of the reading, not the least the pages about epilepsy. The structure of the content is in it's comprehensive format (which goes for the whole book) the best documentation I've read about epilepsy and I've been looking around for almost 50 years.

I'm feeling better than ever and am in excellent shape both mentally and physically due to my insights about my epilepsy and the related distortions of all kinds which made my life a scary and painful prison.

When you used to ask me to describe what a seizure felt like I was never able to fully verbalize/explain all the dimensions of my feelings and pain. When I a short while ago reread Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot, I was astonished to discover how close his experiences were to the once I had. I wish I had some of his verbal brilliance when you asked.

You look great on your homepage an once more I like to thank you for what you have done for me.
It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the impact it has had.

Un fuerte abrazo
from Spain to you and France
JJ

Thanks Art!

For the first time in my life I am spending the holidays with a girlfriend! Until I found the Primal Center I had never managed to maintain a love relationship with a woman for longer than 3 - 4 months.

And those months never included the holidays so this year is especially sweet for me.

Thank you so much for your work and for establishing the Primal Center. My life would not be this fun had you not done this! No question about it!

Best of Holiday Wishes to you and France and everyone at the Primal Center!

I hope you are feeling better soon.

Love,

John, LA, USA, 12/09

Hello Dr Janov,

Being honest I would love to ask you 100 questions after reading your books. First of all: THANK YOU! I found so many answers to my questions I have been asking myself for ages!

Peter. ...(Germany 2008)

Dear Art, dear France, dear therapists,

I have just gone for a feeling. At the end of the feeling I got aware of something I would like to share with everybody who reads your website.

Would you please publish my comment on your website so that EVERYONE who reads it can read, what I would like to share?

It is about feeling one's feelings and about some people who consider Primal Therapy dangerous.

Primal therapy is - as you can read on Dr. Janov's website - dangerous if you go to an untrained or mock therapist!

But Primal therapy - if you do it at Dr. Janov's Primal Center is not dangerous at all - quite to the contrary! Acting out your feelings is dangerous and putting others at danger when you had the choice to feel your feelings! Only working your way through your triggers and finally feeling the need of what you would have needed from your parents, gives you the relief you want to feel!

When you choose to act out you should be aware that you will not feel better afterwards, but much worse, and that you had had let go a chance to feel better and feel the relief!

I hope that I could - with this e-mail - contribute to the progress of your therapy (if you already are in therapy) or help you to make the decision to come to Primal therapy at a serious, trained Primal Therapist!

Yours sincerely,

J. L. Germany, 2008

Dear Art,

I will never ever be able to express the gratitude I feel for you and your staff at the Primal Center!

I often feel that you and your staff, Art, have enabled me to live the life I would have deserved all my life! I finally can be the person who I am and should have been all my life long! Thanks to your work and mainly Brenda's and David's patience! (but also all your other staff-members!)

J.L Germany, 2008

Dear Art!

Once in a while I consult your homepage, which I like even more after you have given it a new elegant look and it´s more accessible than the previous.

I recently bought and read The Primal Healing and I enjoyed every second of the reading, not the least the pages about epilepsy. The structure of the content is in it´s comprehensive format (which goes for the whole book) the best documentation I´ve read about epilepsy and I`ve been looking around for almost 50 years.

I'm feeling better than ever and am in excellent shape both mentally and physically due to my insights about my epilepsy and the related distortions of all kinds which made my life a scary and painful prison.

When you used to ask me to describe what a seizure felt like I was never able to fully verbalize/explain all the dimensions of my feelings and pain. When I a short while ago reread Fyodor Dostoyesky´s "The Idiot" (see enclosures) I was astonished now to discover how close his experiences were to the onces I had. I whish I had had som of his verbal brilliance when you asked.

You look great on your homepage and once more I like to thank you for what you have done for me. It´s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the impact it has had.

Un fuerte abrazo
from Spain to you and France
Jan J. Spain, September 2008

Dear Art, dear France, dear therapists,

All what I wanted to say to ALL of you is "thank you"! from the bottom of my heart and to express my deepest appreciation of what you have discovered and improved over time, Art! I will NEVER be able to express my deep gratitude I feel towards all of you in words!

And, Art and France, thank you for the videos with patient interviews you put onto your website (and your blog, Art!). I hope that many people will read and listen to them and finally take steps to come into Primal therapy! I know - out of own experience - that we ALL tend to run away from our feelings - but feeling them and feeling the relief and the clarity after having felt a feeling - there is nothing, what compares to that (yes, my love I have gained through therapy towards people, the earth and my dear Alan!)

M.S. England. 2008

Dear Art,

From the depths of a terrible deep neurosis, totally shut down, a lonely aging man, I made a commitment to learn how to feel. I NEVER GAVE UP! I GOT BACK WHAT I NEEDED MOST! LOOK AT ME NOW!!!! My life is permanently changed! I used your Primal Therapy all the way to feel deepest intense feelings, terrible fear, and got back MYSELF! I will not lose him again, despite some remaining extremely unpleasant feeling sensations, I always ask myself, "what is this feeling over? What's it like? Incredible insights with CLEAR feelings are great. Thank you so much.

Sincerely,

Harold, USA, 2008

Dear France

You have my authorization to post my story on the website.

I would like to tell you that I am getting very good responds from people I know in Israel about the video tapes posted on the site...your work was not in vain.

Again I would like to thank you and Art for simply being what you are, and for giving me this opportunity to have my real self.

I don't know any words to express how I feel physically and emotionally as a result of going through primal therapy.

I feel the need to thank you again ....so I do!

Kindly

A. G. Israel, June 2008

Dear Art and France,

This experience that I have been having since two weeks ago, I must share with you.

I don't know about other primal patients, but after years of therapy and selfprimaling I think I have reached a different state of mind, which resembles your phrase of becoming "predominantly real". I took me a few weeks to make sure that it is not a temporary experience. Needless to say, the last phase of my internal journey has started after the therapy I had there with you (with David) about six months ago and some selfprimaling after that.

Namely, I feel fine almost all the time, I feel, optimistic, energetic, I don't have that lifelong feeling of being lonely, of being less important than some other people, that "something is wrong with me", that I'm not what I really am, that something is missing in my life, that I'm not a complete man.

A very good indicator of what I'm talking about is the feeling I have walking down the streets full with people. Before, I always felt - more or less - lost, lonely, like "nobody is looking at me", "I'm not important to anyone here", "they seem to know where they are going, I don't", "they all seem to be somehow connected among themselves, I am not part of them", etc. Now all these feelings are gone. I just feel fine walking among other people. They have their lives, I have mine, they are just different, no one is better than the other. Each one of us belongs to the crowd to the same extent; there are not secret human ties among people that I'm excluded from. In some ways I was crazy.

My face skin have cleared; my throat is not so sensitive to cold water any more; one cold I had the last spring was gone in one day instead in five days; my back has straitened up, it is easier to walk strait than hunchbacked. My stage fright is almost gone completely.

It seems as if I have "found myself", that I feel good inside my skin, that I have "become a person", and that I have begun to live and learn for the first time. I feel that I have become whole, and that my life – in a way – has just begun.

And it is not only my subjective experience, because other people react to me in a much more positive way. They seem to like me, to want to be around me, to socialize with me. I also became much more open, ready to approach almost anyone, I start a conversation easily, I can risk more in coming to know someone. I'm not so much afraid of being rejected, of being criticized. I don't loose tamper any more if someone says something bad about me.

Some people that I have always seen as "better" than me, "with stronger personality", "more interesting than me", etc., I now see in a realistic way, they are just different, but we are all of equal value, so to speak. I became much more empathetic with people, I show them my feelings about them much more easily, I relate to people in a spontaneous and warm way. At the same time, I see the boundaries much more clearly, I control my life and my relationships with people much better.

Many things in me changed at the same time. I cannot say it all happened out of the blue sky, the change has been preparing itself for many years, but it came about my awareness in a relatively short period of time.

Am I perfect? No. After all, I have just begun to live and learn (after 48 years after I had been born). This fact makes me sad, but it's true. I have become a person at age 48, and your therapy has to do with it a good deal.

I have one picture in my head that graphically illustrates what I'm talking about. It is as if I was trying to putt together a puzzle for years and now I'm finally seeing the meaning of it (of who I am), although not all pieces of the puzzle are in place. What is important is that "I have myself" and the rest will fall into its place as times go by.

Thank god I lived long enough to come to know this wonderful feeling.

Thank you,

M. T. Serbia, May 2008

Dear friends: I am immersing myself again in Dr Janov's great books these days, and I must say he is brilliant.

M.C Montreal, Canada, April 2008

Dear Art and France,

I suppose you might be interested to hear from me. I'm doing fine. After the three week intensive with David in Oct/Nov 2007, I managed to go on feeling feelings. Given that I still don't have a sound proofed room in the town where I live now, I suppose that my brain is serving me some less intense feelings to be felt.

The therapy at your Center really worked for me and I learned a lot in these three weeks. What was a very pleasant surprise is that after so many years of not having a therapist, I could feel strong feelings from the very first session.

M.T Serbia, April 2008

My therapy has opened me up to more inside myself that has always been stagnating and eating me away and driving horrible anxieties. I don't feel the anxiety anymore, such a relief!!
- T.C., California, 2008

"The upshot of me having such good therapists and having double sessions each week is that the therapy has now gone down very deep for me. So deep I almost can't believe it. I've broken through to some of my most powerful needs, and its left me half stunned - as if for the first time, the pieces deep down in you finally fit. As if you're literally being reborn before your very eyes. But reborn into what you already are. How's that for a thought twister!

I"m also writing this to say thank you again. You've literally helped save my life. I can't really find words to tell you how grateful I am."

-- R.A., NY (USA) 2008

It's so good to hear from you. When I write to you and Dr. Art J. it's partly an attempt to stay or feel connected from across the distance. Hearing back from you--your kind words--certainly stenghtens my sense of connection to you both and to the center.
I realize this month marks my fourth anniversary--four whole years--at the center. I feel in that time like I've lived a whole life almost. And in spite of this period of crisis I'm still in it seems because of the therapy that I grow a bit stronger each day. Which gives me hope (the real kind) and confidence for the future.
Please by all means feel free to use my comments on the website. And once again I want to say I can never fully express my gratitude to you and Art and to the center.

Best Wishes, -- F.M., NY 2008

Dear Dr. Art J. and Dr. France J.: France: I just had to drop you a note of thanks for you help in getting me hooked up with Brenda Craven for my therapy. I could not be more pleased. I had some concerns about being able to open up over the phone to someone I'd never met in person, but as soon as I talked with Brenda, her warmth and empathy came right through. I've had two sessions with her thus far, and they have been wonderful in terms of relieving the pain that I've been carrying for a long time and that has been exacerbated by Michael's passing. Art: I had to send additional thanks your way for developing such a wonderful and powerful system of therapy. Deprived of it for so many years, I had forgotten the tremendous healing and release that come from deeply feeling feelings without letting the intellect get in the way. I have always been and forever will be grateful to you. Love to both of you,

- J.W, New York.

There are lots of different types of psychotherapies being practiced but as far as I can tell Primal Therapy is the only one that deals with the actual pain of childhood trauma. Feeling the pain is the only way to lasting health.

- G.B., NY 2006

Primal Therapy is the perfect solution to emotional healing. It is natural, practical, human - and most of all - IT WORKS!

You know without our saying it that you literally have the best therapists in the world. No one does what your therapists do. My experience with Brenda and Jack's experience with Ruth are priceless. You are lucky to have such a professional and highly skilled staff. We have read every book you wrote to the public.

- J & L, NH Sept 2006

LIGHT YEARS BEYOND ANY OTHER PSYCHOTHERAPY!

PRIMAL HEALING is a book for people who want to feel better, make smarter choices, and live more satisfying lives. That's what Primal Therapy is doing for me, and I'm sure it can do the same for you and nearly anyone else.

I am currently going through Primal Therapy at Dr. Janov's Primal Center in Santa Monica, CA. I can honestly say that it is the greatest adventure of my entire life. My only regret is that I didn't start the therapy 20 years ago.

When I started at the Primal Center, I was taking Vicodin every night for pain in my legs, hips, and back. My anxiety was such that I would cringe with a jolt of fear whenever the phone or doorbell would ring. I was frightened of driving. I was scattered and disorganized. I was depressed, in agony, and filled with hopelessness. I had difficulty reading and could read at most for five or ten minutes at a time. It all seemed like one big chaotic nightmare.

After only one month of Primal Therapy, most of the physical pain I suffered was gone. I might add that this pain plagued me my whole life. I'm not certain when I stopped cringing at the sound of the phone and doorbell. I just noticed one day that I didn't do it anymore. Nowadays I'm simply curious to see who is there. I still don't like driving very much, but I'm no longer afraid to drive. These days I can look around in my office and see that it is in pretty good shape. It used to look like I'd thrown a hand grenade in here. I feel good almost every day and more often than not, I feel great. My relationship with my wife is many times better than it was before therapy. We now shower together every day. This might not seem like much to you, but we had never showered together in all the years of our marriage. It is now an event we both look forward to each day. We love to wash and pleasure each other. We have become very familiar with each other's bodies, which just makes good sense now we are older and more vulnerable to certain diseases. It also makes us closer than we have ever been. I'm much less scattered now and can read with full focus for hours at a time and enjoy it.

I'm sure you've guessed by now that I'm not an unbiased reviewer. Primal Therapy is very dear to me. I'm livin' it, and lovin' it.!

- Frank Robinette, CA, March 2007

I'm not writing this review to promote Primal Therapy. Unfortunately, at this time only a select few can have good Primal Therapy. There are too few therapists (in part because the training period is so long and rigorous) and too little time. Despite this, the implications of all the research and experience associated with Primal Therapy are not only many and profound; they are available for everyone to benefit from. This knowledge could revolutionize obstetrics, child rearing practices, and our education system. The effects of this would be to reduce mental illness, crime, drug use, and a host of other social afflictions. This would in turn revolutionize our prison system and law enforcement policies ? not to mention our nation's foreign policies.

During my life I have experienced a variety of psychotherapies including Client Centered Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Reevaluation Therapy, Tavi Group Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, Feeling Therapy, Eclectic Therapy and even acquired a degree in psychology. With that I can assure you that Primal Therapy is not only the most effective, it is the only therapy that is real science, integrated with neuroscience so that the therapist can clearly evaluate the patient's progress. Because of this I can fully trust any of the therapists at the Primal Center because they all know where I stand in the course of my therapy. I'm sure the day is not far off, whenever you hear the word psychotherapy; you will know they are referring to Primal Therapy.

I have read all of Dr. Janov's books, including GRAND DELUSIONS, the one he has made available on his website (www.primaltherapy.com). Each of his books represents a step forward in his group's research of the theories and techniques of Primal Therapy. However, his latest book, PRIMAL HEALING, is as special today as was THE PRIMAL SCREAM in 1970. It is my opinion that if you are going to read only one of Janov's books, PRIMAL HEALING is the one. It is my favorite because it is a clear and precise compendium of all his work over the past 35 years. Just as THE PRIMAL SCREAM represented a quantum leap over all existing psychotherapies in 1970, PRIMAL HEALING today represents a quantum leap over THE PRIMAL SCREAM.

Finally I will simply say that if you want to be at the cutting edge of human advancement, PRIMAL HEALING is a book you must read.

- Frank Robinette, CA, March 2007

Thank you so much to Primal for saving my life many years ago, and in the last few years improving my quality of life. I live today "mostly" pain free.

- A.E.

Primal theory is the only psychology (really psychobiology) that relates to what I personally experience both externally and internally. It's the only theory asking the why of behavior and ones physiology. Only it says "man is the creature of the mind, feelings & emotion and body". Only it relates ones behavior to what he feels inside. Only it offers cure to what ails me mentally, emotional and medically. I've studied all the books on primal therapy.
The Book the Primal Scream changed my live when I read it in 1971.

- D.A., NY June 2006

All I can say is that Primal is the only therapy that ever felt right for me. My year in therapy has not changed my belief that Primal is the only way for people to make real and lasting changes. Everything else I have ever read in the field of Psychotherapy does not even come close.

- S.M., CA August 2006

I would like to thank Brenda, my therapist, and all the people at the Center for the two weeks I passed in there. I feel that it's been a small but fundamental step toward the knowledge of who I am/was. I could not have hoped for anything better than what I've got and I hope I can come back again next year.

- G.G., Italy

There have been many times in my life where I have felt sad, betrayed, and lonely. In the past I never knew why though. It was always something that just lingered in the back of my mind. I always felt like that pain/anxiety would never get better or go away. After having two therapists before, I never got anywhere until I was introduced to a therapy based on this book. I then took the step to enter into this program and I don't regret it, even in the slightest. It's helped me so very much to be more comfortable under my skin, to free myself from anxiety and to help me feel my pain and get it out of my system so that I can live a productive life.

- D.G., CA

... In any case ...I am touched by your response in that ....Art has been a Hero to me for over half of my life. Would that the earth be fortunate enough to have Primal available to every inhabitant we as a species might survive. The discovery and methodology certainly is there thanks to Dr. Janov. I remain utterly devoted to the Paradigm.

- B F , CA September 2006

My own experience in Primal Therapy has helped me to live in the present. I know that the suffering from the present connects to deeper Pain on the second and first line and that feeling that pain helps to allieviate my suffering. The connections that are made help me to know how the valance of the Pain drives my acting out behavior. Not only do I know why I behave the way I do but I also gain direction in being able to change the way I live my life.

- K.S , NY August 2006

Best therapy in the world. Only one that brings about permanent change. INCOMPARABLE. IT ROCKS !

- S.B, Australia, September 2006

Dear France and Art,

...I am absolutely certain that I could not have made these changes if it had not been for Primal Therapy. Things can seem completely bleak and hopeless. It was truly wonderful to be able to have sessions during this time. I have been able to feel more and more, and I have found out some amazing things. I didn't even know until recently that I live with a constant feeling of dread. Weeks ago when, I realized I am not worried about anything. It was amazing. I am always moved about something, always dreading something. Most of the time I am not sure what it is. But recently I have had truly happy days with nothing to fear or worry about. It might not sound much but to me it is extraordinary.

I studied the impact of birth experience on personality. I am really pleased because recently I heard that my poster is going t be presented at the annual conference of the division of health psychology within the British psychological society. My tutor very much to believe that my research will get published but I am not so sure.

I think I would like a time some spare time to have a social life. This has also been a big change for me actually being out there in the world. I have made a couple of really good new friends.

I am extremely fortunate to have been able to do Primal Therapy and to have help from the foundation. It has made all the difference. This year would have been unbearable without Primal Therapy. I really could go on and on thanking you. It is difficult to express what an enormous difference it has made to me. So thank you. My life is completely different to how it was when I left LA. I feel like it is my life now and I am in it. I can feel so excited about life and enjoy being in the moment and being with other people. Wow!

She will always be very special to me, as will the two of you. Thank you for everything. I hope you are both well. Maybe see you in September?

- V.L., England, 2006

"The meaning of being human"

Dear France & Art -

Thank you both from the bottom of my heart for all you have done for me. For showing by example the meaning of being human; what it is to be there for someone; what it means to dare. You have selflessly lain the greatest gifts at the feet of mankind - led the way in showing the difference individuals can make in the world, in a life.

- J.R., Massachusetts, June 2006

"Know who I am"

The therapy saved my life...literally. In a short time I went from living in pure hell (three suicide attempts) to living with a joy I never could have even imagined. I now know who I am and why I was in so much pain. But beyond knowing it I have felt what was festering inside and it has liberated me from it. How could ever thank you ?
P.S. : By the way I had spent years in therapy before coming to you. Nothing compares..

- C.H., Paris, March 2006

"An opportunity to feel"

"What started as a crisis with my health became an opportunity to feel and to resolve insights. I am not through this crisis yet, but I am not lost in it anymore either. Your support (not only the Foundation, but so much also your emails) and trust/belief in me helped me to get there.

For this - your straightforwardness, clarity, your warmth and care - my heart sings out a thank you to you and for the people you are."

- F.D., Germany, Christmas 2005

"There was no one to let it out to"

I know you must receive many much deserved "Thank yous" on a regular basis. But I feel you deserve another heartfelt "Thank you" from me. I found a copy of The Primal Scream while I was at a local used bookstore and the funny thing is the book literally fell into my hands. It was like I was meant to read it. Once I got through the introduction I knew that your book was IT. The book I have been searching for the last several years. I have spent a lot of time in the self help and parenting sections of every book store within a few miles of my home. So, after the introduction of The Primal Scream, I spent the next half an hour looking for a highlighter to highlight everything I knew I would need to come back to.

Now I will admit I have not finished your book. And maybe this letter to you is premature. But I can't tell you how much I have benefited from reading what I have read thus far. Things make sense now. I make sense to myself now. I have spent years trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Like I said, I have read many MANY books in the self help sections of the bookstore and nothing has ever clicked. I have taken a few things from this book and that book, but your book, oh my, was like it was written for me about me.

I have always tried to figure out why things never seemed real to me. It was like things were real but didn't feel real. Everything has always had to be BIG in a BIG way for me to even begin to have an emotional connection at whatsoever. Over the years my tension has come to an all-time high due to build up from things that have happened to me from when I was 5 years old. I literally have memories of the day that I refer to as "The day my life went to Hell." At the age of 5! Everything just kept building up inside and there was no one to let it out to. But let me tell you that your book has opened me up inside. I can feel things because I understand now. Your book has given me a boost of energy in my lifelong journey of recreating myself. I know now that what is wrong with me has a name and it is indeed neurosis. I may even be considered a classic case judging by how much is highlighted in this book that applies to me. I don't want to mislead you into thinking that I am going to try to literally heal myself. I have just become aware and with that awareness I feel the strength I have been needing to move forward and to live in the now. I wish there was some way to thank you for what you have done for me. And I feel that I finally have the strength and the beginning of knowledge to become a better Mommy for my children. I even feel that I can give more love to my husband. Because IT IS OK to feel Love! I have always been secure with the fact that he thinks he loves me more than I do because at least I know if he loves me more than I love him than he must really love me a lot. But really, I think I might be able to let my wall down that was built around my heart. It's been there for so long it is almost like it is imbedded in me. I guess it is huh!?! It has been my way of protecting myself from further damage. As long as I did not let love in (or at [least] was selective) I wouldn't get hurt and so I could function and appear somewhat normal. Really on the inside I felt like my life was a TV show or something and that everyone was watching. Little hints that suggested I was suffering from neurosis. The funny thing is (well not that funny) NO ONE noticed. No one knew. There was no one!!!! I have known for a long time that anything could cause me to completely be gone inside. But because of my defense of not allowing myself to "feel" completely, I have survived. All of this emotional damage had stayed locked inside that when that "something" did happen to lead me into an episode of what I call temporary insanity, I scared everyone. I scared myself. A flow of emotions from age 5 all came to the surface and I could not stop it! Now that I am reading your book, it all makes sense. So ~Thank you~ from the bottom of my newly awaken heart. I know now that I can swim above the water and I will, I promise you! I am going to have my husband read this highlighted copy of your book so he can understand and hopefully quit trying so hard. I think he has tried so hard to help me in all the wrong ways that I fear if it continues he too may be a candidate for primal therapy... Thanks again for helping me. Not only will I be a better mom, I will be a better wife, and a better ME all because of your book. You are special. (and so is everyone that had a hand in your book:) Just wanted you to know.

- Sincerely, A truly Thankful Person October 2005

Dear Art,

A year ago when I came to the Center, I think I felt (somewhere in me) I wasn't going to make it. It was like a piece of shattered glass inside. My own ways and habits, they seemed to cut into me. At a deep, deep level I was a wreck.

Now it's been a year- a little anniversary for me. I want to kiss the ground I walk on. I'm happy I can breathe, walk, live. I can feel a healing happening.

This is just a little thank you note Art - I sent you one a year ago. This is just to say - thanks to you - I'm still here. I want to live.

With all my heart Art, I thank you for this therapy.

The therapy has been simply amazing for me, and I'm happy to say it out loud (so to speak) for others to hear. Art left me a phone message which just kind of made my day. I can't thank you both enough for this therapy. I think of the Center as a light shining bright in some bitter darkness.

Thank you again France & Best Wishes, . . . .

P.S. the image on this card-of a tiger waiting - signifies for me the deep strong life that has stayed in me.

Dear Art, dear France,

With this email I would like to thank you both. Art, what you have done in developing this therapy and both of you, in keeping it going, is really a lot. Art, I had and, unfortunately, still have to deal with neurotic psychologists over here. It hurts me in the bottom of my heart that you still have not gotten the worldwide recognition you deserve. By writing your books in a very clear language and easy to understand you have saved a lot of people's lives (including mine!) and you could have changed so many more!

Art, France, I imagine that this whole struggle in going against conventional therapy has really tired you and I would understand it if you both wanted to retire now.

To me you are and will be forever the people who were there for me, helped me, when I needed them and saved my life. I remember some other patient saying once that you have reached quite an age, Art. I wish you could live forever and also get the reward you would deserve.

Please let me know, when "Words don't do it" is published! I hope that I will be able to share it with a friend in the future.

Thank you!

Sincerely, and, indebted to you forever,....

- Anonymous, June 2005

"People who weren't pretending that everything was wonderful"

The following was addressed to Dr. France Janov

I am sorry that I didn't get to meet you during my three week intensive in April. I'm planning on returning in the fall, and maybe it will happen then.

In any case, I wanted to write and say how much I appreciated the time, energy, and patience that David put into my therapy. Valerie and Marie were wonderful as well.

I have been a long time believer in Primal Therapy. However, what surprised me most about my trip was how deeply moved I was in Group. I didn't anticipate what a relief it would be to associate with people who weren't pretending that everything was wonderful. The degree of vulnerability that people were willing to expose in Group was astounding. I will always remember it.

I was only able to participate in the May retreat on Friday evening, but I could tell that it was a special event and something that I want to do in the future. I think that sort of thing is a great idea.

Finally, I really appreciate the effort that you and your husband have put into helping others. I know that it is a labor of love - "easy" is not a word I would associate with any aspect of an operation that tries to help those who most need help. I also appreciate your husband's efforts to explain the therapy in scientific and quantifiable terms. Such explanations are sorely wanting in other types of therapy.

I would certainly recommend your center to anyone who seriously wants to try to recover her or his real self.

Thanks again,

Cristal Weber
Seattle, WA (USA) June 2005

Poems: The Need; Screaming Relief

The Need

So many people are trying to feed
A deep and demanding unconscious need
The constant emptiness and provocation they feel
Completely controls the lives they lead.

Millions of pounds are spent on flowers
Egos are flattered, but none of that matters.

Couples and families and friends and enemies
Are in constant search of a love they can cherish,
But no quantity of love can ever satisfy
That part of their being, which they themselves deny.

The lack of satisfaction creates a cycle of frustration
Alcohol and drugs merely numb the sensation,
But the need won't diminish by superficial means
For it's embedded in a world that knows only what it feels.

A world of darkness where no light can shine through,
A world which you reject, won't admit that it's you,
A world where you dispense negativity at your ease,
A world which manifests as illness and disease.

But this unconscious world is your unconscious self,
Suppressed by a barrier which is also your self.
A barrier which protects you from feeling your pain
But using logic on the pain comes to no avail.

It's not outside forces that are responsible for your health,
Your nightmares, your deficiencies, your strengths or your wealth.

It's all of your feelings that you've buried all these years
And are ultimately the keys to release you from your fears.

It's this underground world littered with aspects of yourself,
Once you find them and embrace them, you're heart will truly melt.

Screaming Relief

There is a moment in time
That no words can describe
The moment of piercing the threshold
Of all that's been denied
That pure ice pleasure of balancing on the edge
Of unbearable pain and screaming relief
I fall at thundering speed down the familiar tunnel
To the other side of life, to the blackness and the screams of hell itself
I'm calling out for the light but there's no chance in hell
My Eagle swoops down without the slightest falter and takes me back home to the centre of my heart bringing with me all the pain and the heartache and frustration.
The light in my heart touches the deepest fragile places of these parts of myself that both cry and sigh, they sigh and scream, they laugh and cry, they fall dead and fly high.
It's a moment in time when all life comes together, the god and the goddess, the light and the dark, the devil's found release and laughter and joy in that moment when a human sees beyond all the strife.

-Genevieve Simperingham, March 2005

"Proper training"

Dear France,

Thank you for your email. You mentioned the three years of training and if I'm able to stay this long. You know that it's not easy for Europeans to stay longer than 3 months and I was thinking to come to L.A. once a year for one trimester. As you don't have enough trainees to keep the training running at the moment I guess it's not possible to 'just take part' in the training for only one trimester.

To tell you what I feel about the training I took part in two years ago: it was amazing to see how you handle the patients. I tried to find out how therapists are trained in Germany and it's just terrible that they finish their studies and do therapy just based on their books and theories. Nobody ever show them how to actually DO therapy. I guess the primal center is the only place in the world where proper training is given, especially tape review with you was incredible. You knew exactly what to say or do to show the patients the right track.

- March 2005

"It is part of human nature"

During the first two years of training, when you taught me thinking, I felt strongly that you are the Philosopher of the 21st century. Of course, you can't be recognized by the world, although you deserve it: the world will be lied to, religions and politicians are the proof of it. I'm sad that you didn't get the recognition you truly deserved. Because of you I have and still will save many people's life. I will always make sure that they know that you have been my teacher. You will be in my heart until the end of my days and thereafter in the heart of the people I helped and so on. What you discovered can't get lost because it is part of human nature.

Thank you Arthur for everything.
With all my heart and deepest feelings of love,
Esther

- November 2004

I "share how I felt when I was little or feel now in my life"

. . . . Things worked out well in many ways. My relationship with my mother is so much improved - it is the first time in my life that I actually feel that I do have a Mom! Thanks to Primal! I just do not accuse her anymore but simply share how I felt when I was little or feel now in my life. So she does not need to defend herself and she simply shows compassion. All I ever wanted and I now get from her [is] the positive dialectic to feel how much I needed her back then. The accusing I did and can do in my sessions where I yell at her to finally find the hurt need which is the essence of ME! That is so nice to have a Mom!

- C.G., November 2004

"Much thanks"

. . . . I keep reading your books and I just want to thank you and cheer for your writing and the light you've shed on psychology and birth and feelings and all. So thanks. It is great stuff and much appreciated. . . . Thanks again. I look forward to your next book. With much thanks and appreciation, L.B.

- L.B., June 2004

"It's begun to show me who I really am"

Dear Art,

I am a new patient at the center and have just finished three weeks intensive. I wanted to send you a short note to say: thank you. Your therapy is so amazing, I still can't quite believe it. It's begun to show me who I really am, and what it means to feel. This is such a great gift to us all. I feel certain Art you've made the world a better place.

Thank you again - and again.

- R.A., May 2004

"To be there for them with all my heart"

Dear Art, France, Brenda, David, Ralph, Ruth, Jim, Carole and Marie,
I gave my first Czech class today. It was really very nice and I enjoyed it a lot.
I was able to give my students my full attention and to be there for them with all my heart. What a pleasure this is!
All I wanted to tell you is a big "thank you!" for all your help, work and the love I got from you all. I couldn't have done it without you, especially the ability of working with people and give them 100% or more. Without your work I would have never gotten to the point where I am right now. I would still be suffering from not being able to give love to people and to focus on them.
I know the road ahead of me is still long but I want to walk ahead on it as much as I can.
I very happy (and also thoughtful),

Julianne - March 2004

"More clarity . . . and more strength"

My year at the Primal Center

When I rang the doorbell for the first time at the Primal Center, I was very scared. I had no idea, what would expect me from the time the door was opened. What enhanced those feelings of fear were the fact I was one hour late after wandering about in the area of Venice, Washington and finally Abbott Kinney Blvd, and the other fact that I had tried to get into therapy for many years. Like Dr. France Janov told me, one month before I left back to my home country, I had been pounding at the doors of the Primal Center very loudly, so that the staff could not overhear me.

I knew that Primal Therapy would save my life.

Brenda finally opened the door. She was so warm and friendly with me that I would have almost started to cry. I also met some other staff members, including David, whom I had reached on the phone, every time I had called the Primal Center. I had been especially afraid of him, since I had bugged him to take me in quite a few times before. His impression towards me was, "Let's see." Nothing more, nothing less.

Jim, another therapist, joined Brenda for the intake interview. Brenda was very nice from the beginning on, while I had with Jim the same impression I had had with David. Jim asked me almost every single e-mail I had sent them, and I felt quite embarassed. Brenda had to leave after an hour, so I stayed with Jim. I was really VERY afraid I would be sent back to my home country without getting any therapy. After the interview finished, I met Brenda again. She asked me, how it was and I answered her that I hope it's going to work out. She replied: "I'm sure it will." So I went back to the motel and waited there some days, until I got, as agreed, the phone call from Jim who told me that I have been accepted for therapy. He also told me Brenda will be my primary therapist, which I was very happy about.

The night before my therapy started I felt very empty. I had no idea about what I should tell Brenda the next day. I had heard shout a man "Fuck you!" from the bottom of his heart at the Primal Center a few days before. I imagined that this man had had a history of life similar to mine: Full of violence and abuse throughout his childhood and youth. I had written down in my diary: "I feel as if I would walk to the scaffold tomorrow, and not to therapy." I had imagined I would fall into my deepest feelings of abuse immediately.

The first week of my intensive went very slowly. I was talking mainly about my feelings for a man I had met in the past and my attraction to another patient who happened to be my neighbor at the motel. I also tried to get to a birth feeling I was feeling so strongly inside. The more I tried, the more it hid. I was feeling very disappointed with myself and felt as if I was Dr. Janov's worst patient he has ever had. I really thought that he must be so bored, while watching the tapes of my sessions, so that he would fall asleep.

In the first few weeks I felt as if I had made no progress at all, while Brenda, and later on David, who had become my co-therapist, told me the opposite. Everything went VERY slowly and I asked myself, why everybody else in group got to tears, except for me. My entry into therapy happened very soft and slow. France Janov answered my question, when I had been for three weeks in therapy, why I haven't been able to get to tears, with the words: "Your therapy needs to go very slowly. You've gotten a lot of pain."

From the beginning of my therapy on, I had told myself that I MUST be absolutely honest with myself and the therapists, otherwise therapy isn't going to work and I would have to go on with my life as miserably as it had been before. This, especially in the beginning of my therapy, scared me to death. I had been wondering, what Brenda, or David, or Drs. Janov, would think of me after telling them very private matters.

When one of my family members had gotten to hear very private stuff of mine, this knowledge had always been abused. I had always been punished for being myself; either when I showed the beautiful little girl in me, or, when I showed everyone my pain. I was condemned to stay the little girl I had been from my earliest childhood on. No one of my family enabled me to grow. Even my relatives wanted me to stay the needy, helpless little girl they can manipulate and abuse.

I learned at the Primal Center that this trust of mine towards the therapists even got rewarded by them. I've always had the feeling that the therapists like me very much for being so honest with them. For the first time in my life, I got the feeling of being cared about and not being abused for being myself.

I also got rewarded by myself; Every time I went for a feeling and it got completely resolved, I felt a BIG relief afterwards. I have gained more clarity in my life, and more strength.

Something else: Not everyone falls into deep feelings immediately, after starting therapy. I had to wait three months after which I first had a few tears. Primal therapy is a process, which needs to grow first, and, later, needs to be continued. This is the only way, how you can resolve your pain.

My stay in L.A. was not easy at all. I always had the feeling the other patients do not want to socialize with me. And most of them did not. My roommate told me once that the more I'm being "real" in therapy, the more the other patients get scared. On the other hand, I also disappointed a few other patients, which I now very much regret.

I had VERY lonely times over there. I had gotten turned down by a young man a year ago. I scared him so much that he turned away from our friendship completely. Once, in group I exploded towards him and the rest of the group. It took all my courage to do that, but I knew that it was necessary to get more of my real self back. The consequence was that he turned his back on me even more. This REALLY hurt.

I'm VERY glad we are being friends now. He's gotten his pain, I've gotten my pain, and the beautiful thing about this friendship is that we won't walk out on each other very easily. This may be a friendship for life.

Leaving the Center and coming home was a very difficult and painful decision for me. I knew that I would need a lot more therapy, and I felt like having to leave in the middle, after just having started. Brenda told me back then that I would need to go on with my life.

I had not understood her until a week before last. YES, my life is about going on, and I need to go on with it. After the year at the Primal Center I'm able now to take care of myself, my apartment and a job. All things I had not been able to take care of before I left for America.

It's also up to me to choose my friends, my relations, even the extent I want to be in touch with my brothers. I have the ability to feel and to feel my feelings instead of acting them out. If I stick to my feelings, they will always "light" me the right path I should take.

I know that, when I need help I can have a phone session. I'm stable enough to say that I can continue my therapy here in Europe. This doesn't mean that I regret the year at the Primal Center in Venice - no, just the opposite! I would do it again! But, like I've said my life is about going on.

Before I left for Los Angeles I felt like being trapped in my life and in the town I live in. This feeling has almost disappeared.

After I had gotten back, I also felt like standing on a plateau, doing no progress, only acting out. After this realization that I need to continue with my life and cannot stay in the past forever, I feel like something has changed. I'm feeling more mature inside.

I hope that in some years I can fully relax and be myself and feel loved, and give this love to other people. The tool that I need in order to get there is in my hands: Primal Therapy.

Julianne

P.S.: Since Brenda and David were my main therapists during my stay at the Center, I mostly spoke about them in this article. I would also like to mention the other therapists, Ruth, Ralph, Jim and Carol, and say "Thank you for your care and support, too!"

-March 2004

"I don't deserve to be mistreated"

In my last session I was able, after resolving something in the present, to really cry for my dad to be nice to me, my mom, and my brothers and sisters and to not hurt us.

Since then there are big differences in my life, I am not constantly feeling helpless anymore about what's going to happen next and my future, I am actually not worried at all.

I used to daydream all day long about being hit and yelled at and be very scared of everyone whereas now I can be present and react to others accordingly to how they act with me.

I also think for the first time that I am capable to do things I thought only others, who were smarter than me, could do. Also now I can see others for who they really are.
Most importantly I don't deserve to be mistreated and I will not get into abusive relationships anymore.

-V.P., March 2004

"Courage to go against what psychology teaches"

I want to thank you from my very heart for all the support and encouragement you have given to me. I couldn't have done it without your constant work running the Center. And for the courage to go against what psychology teaches therapists to do.

-C.G., February 2004

"Waking up with the royalty of the plain"

Please note: This poem was originally written in French. English translation appears below.

This poem is in honor of Art who enabled me, through his therapy, to find my feelings.
Quite often, after intercourse, I feel affection for my father, which explains the lines 2, 3 and 4.

SECRET LOVE

This is a translation of a poem originally written in French.
(2003)

Do you know that some nights are more sumptuous than some days
When the innumerable love joins into one
The love for the father and the love for the lover
I drink its sweetness, its purity, the forgiveness
It washes away my ancient pains that used to be garnered
Lost in this ecstasy, in the beautiful affection
Of the world's first days, in the warmth of tears,
As desire takes me higher, a strange voice
Coming from my veins lets out a fundamental cry
First with the rumble of a remote storm
Then
When the storm calms down, it is as if
I were a lioness, waking up with the royalty of the plain.

-Nhc, Paris

"Seeing and feeling beauty"

There is Beauty

There have been so many times in my life when beauty was in front of me and I just couldn't see it. My husband would tell me to put my book down and look out the window of a plane or a train or a car to see the beautiful scenery. I would lower the book to my lap, look out the window, say uh-huh, pick up the book and begin reading again.

Once in a while I could see beauty but it had to be almost picture perfect. Once I saw beauty while standing on the porch of a chalet in Switzerland, looking at the green mountains and then I heard a train whistle. I suddenly felt my senses fill with the beauty of the moment. Another time I was in New England to see the fall foliage, something I'd never seen before. We were in a car and when we came around a corner, there were trees of every fall color and I was struck by the beauty. Then there was the time I was in Paris, on a dinner boat in the canal. As it got dark, the Eiffel Tower lit up. I began crying at the beauty of being in Paris with my husband and his family, having a lovely dinner and then suddenly the Eiffel Tower just lit up. These were moments I remember seeing and feeling beauty.

I've been in Primal Therapy for 10 months now and now when I look out a plane at night, I see and feel the beauty of the city lights and I keep looking at them. A few days ago, I was driving along the freeway and there was a red rock colored wall with greenery and flowers along one section of the freeway and I was drawn to look at its beauty.

These last two experiences were "simply" beautiful, yet I felt them. I feel like I'm coming alive and I can't wait to see what's next.

In the second week of my intensive Primal Therapy I woke up in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m., with a poem literally flying out of my head. I would write a line of the poem and then start to put my head down on the pillow but I'd have to sit up and write the next line that was flying out of my head. And so it went. What was really strange was that the poem was about my father and how he'd affected my life and as I wrote, I never felt pain, I never cried. I just remember marveling at how fast the words were coming from my mind, how they rhymed and the sense the poem was making to me. I had spoken about my father in my therapy but without emotion.

It is now ten months into my therapy and last week I screamed Daddy from a very deep place of need and pain inside of me. I know I am coming alive and I am encouraged to face whatever pain is necessary to feel and live. Even the pain feels good because I feel it. Feeling feels so good.

Here is my poem:

I can't much remember your being my Dad.
Your smile or even the eyes that you had.
I do remember you weren't ever there.
And what that meant to me was that you didn't care.

Did I want you to love me? I'm sure that I did.
But from that painful thought, I constantly hid
I need to find that place in me
Where I ask for your love eternally.

I search and search throughout my mind.
But emptiness is what I find.
Did you ever love me? I couldn't tell.
So I lived in my own little private hell.

A block between my husband and me.
Caused me to seek you lovingly
I know the words, but I can't find the pain
And without the feeling, myself I can't gain.

So I'm trying to go to that place inside me.
Where that feeling lies dormant - never free.
I remember you vaguely when I stare into space
But I just don't see love in that beautiful face.

I see a man driven to be all he can be
So driven there was never any time for me
All I needed was moments from you
That made me feel special and beautiful too

I numbed my feelings I just can't reach now.
I cannot find them - I just don't know how
I looked for love in those eyes for me
But only criticism is what I see

Why weren't you ever home? was a question I had.
Was I so terrible, was I so bad?
The money was nice, I shouldn't complain.
But now looking back, it was all so in vain.

If I could choose memories of me and you
They'd be of the time spent - the fun we had too
But all of my memories are few indeed
Not nearly enough for that little girls need

Cause time meant money - that's what you'd say
By the way that you lived day after day
But to that little girl, time meant much more than that.
It could have meant love - being where I was at

But the time has passed and so has my dad
And the chance to feel loved that I never had.
Daddy, please love me, is what I must say
In order to go on day after day.

But I can't just say it, just the words won't impart
What feeling I need so deep in my heart
The words are so simple - just say them now!
But the words with the feeling? I just don't know how.

I feel so empty of feeling to say
What a little girl needs from her father each day
I need to dig deep and not just for me
I need to go there for my whole family

God, how I needed your love I could feel
I think if I'd had it, I'd always be real
I needed direction and a guided way
The road was so treacherous day after day.

So Jehovah's the father I finally found
Who had what I needed when I looked around
But I still needed you - that's a blessing from him
So I understand more why my light is so dim

It's gone forever - the chance that I had
For a kind and endearing and loving Dad.
So I seek out the answers so much of my days
Cause if I don't get them, I'll be this always

Will this be the day I set myself free
By asking for love, for you to love me?
"Trust the Process" - They've asked me to
And they haven't lied - what they've said has been true
So trust the process - it's what I do best!
So this huge life issue can be put to rest
I wanted a father who would love me so
But this was a Daddy I did not know

What a child needs is to feel she's grand
When she reaches up for his big strong hand
There's something wrong with me, I thought
So for his love I never fought

I just gave up to my feelings of hate
For myself as a person I did not rate
I hug all my friends and they know that I care
But feeling "that feeling" is just not quite there

In life, "not good enough" was my decree
But I kept on trying in spite of me
I never quite felt like I could arrive
But my motions, my actions, were always in drive

Though I kept on trying, it was never enough
And the more I went at it, the more life seemed tough
I sought perfection to prove my worth
I began my search right after my birth

I expected my family to be perfect too
A reflection of me - but I never knew
So I asked for perfection - they were never quite right
What they never knew was the fight was my fight

I never told them that they could just be
That I would just love them not perfect for me
I thought I was asking what just ought to be
To strive to be perfect - a reflection of me.

A reflection you were of the feelings I had
From a "never enough" father - a "not good enough" Dad
If he'd just once loved me like some fathers know how
Then our lives would be different - I know that somehow

So I've labored and labored for what I can't be
A good enough daughter, a good enough me
My father is in me - I know he's in there
I just have to seek him - Cause I really do care
So let it all up - it never was dead
So I can be real - not live in my head
Cause in every minute of my life each day
I speak from his head - he says what to say

But "in the moment" is where I want to be
Not packing this baggage so I can't be free
When you feel unloved, then unloved you will see
Wherever you look, unloved will just be.

-Lisa M. Powers, March 1, 2003

"Somebody cares"

This story is not from a Primal Center patient. However, he writes to us on a regular basis. We thought his last message to us was interesting:

One day, as he was driving in his car, he felt a very bad pain in his chest. He stopped his car and hunched over. Three men who were on the parking lot came by and asked him if he was OK. He said he wasn't and mentioned the pain in his chest. They called an ambulance. One of them put his arm around him and he started crying: somebody cares. He was back on his feet the next day.

He figured out the reason for the pain in his chest was that he was "homeless".

-January 2004

"It began to set me free"

One day, I relived in its entirety my tonsillectomy when I was four and a half years old. It was quite an experience. It took me almost three weeks to get into feeling it.

I lay on the floor at least two hours a day feeling my body go numb. This was from the ether they gave me for the operation (I guess I had to feel that total numbness and what lay beneath it to get to the experience). I could feel the body of a little boy inside me which became more prominent each day until it took over. Once that happened, my mind went for the ride while my body began to move around. I could feel hands holding my wrists and then they were twirling my arms around (the hands belonged to the nurse who was trying to get me to wake up from the ether).

Finally, after feeling a burp come up my throat, I began to cry just like a little boy. When that happened, my mind and my body came together all at once. I was that little boy as I rolled around on the floor. That is when what I call "the greased with silk" feeling began to come over me. I screamed at my parents how much I hated them doing this to me, leaving me in a hospital alone all night. Also, my Dad for calling me a "baby" when I was crying because I was so scared. He actually left the room, walking out angry because I wouldn't stop crying. I tried hard to stop crying for him and finally did by splitting off from the experience.

After I relived it, I was filled with insights for the next hour or so. From that moment on, my life was changed forever. It began to set me free. The tension was gone.

Primal Therapy, and only Primal Therapy, could accomplish that.

-V.M., September 2003

"I feel quite OK"

My sister told me that she and my mother are surprised how I react to my personal problems: how the therapy changed me. I would have been completely destroyed as I was in the past when I broke up with a girlfriend.

Today, I feel quite OK, even if I'm a bit sad that the relationship did not work: I thought she was the woman of my life.

-V.M., France, September 2003

"Precious"

I wanna say to you that those days of Primal therapy were really precious to me. I am very thankful for your help.

-A.F., Argentina, August 2003

"I was always waiting for someone"

As a child I had tremendous pain because I couldn't talk except when asked something and I couldn't reach out to others, but I knew there was a reason why I couldn't and everyone else could and I was always waiting for someone to pull me out of that state.

At 11 I told everyone I was a foster child and that my real parents would come and get me, I would constantly daydream that they were holding me. I always knew for some reason that there were answers.

In my twenties, I saw a psychologist for three sessions, at the end of the third I asked him what he thought, he told me he was only there to listen to me. He didn't have the answer.

Then I read "The Primal Scream", I had found the answer.

Primal therapy is a tool for me to resolve my pain and get the answers I had always been looking for that are only inside of me.

It has been months since I am able to talk and communicate with others and I am just beginning now to feel genuine empathy towards others.

This has always been an unreachable dream that has come true

Thank you so much Art for discovering primal therapy, I don't know what I would do without it and there will never be words enough to thank my therapists.

-P.J., August 2003

"Important"

You cannot imagine how important Primal Therapy is for me and I cannot express my gratitude towards you.

-B.L., August 2003

"Permanent"

It is always difficult to find adequate words and analogies to express improvement when it occurs. But I must say that all progress I have made through Primal Therapy has been permanent.

-P.R., August 2003

"Connecting the hurt to the need"

Of all what is so exceptional for Primal Therapy compared to other therapies one thing seems to me utterly important to stress: The feeling of the primal NEED in the primal situation. I do not know of any other therapy that does emphasize the importance of feeling the NEED connected to the primal situation.

In talking therapies I was encouraged to talk about how for instance I did not receive attention. I could cry about it and occasionally even cried in a memory. But nobody ever suggested for me to feel and ask for what I need. The longer time went on I remembered more situations of neglect, but I kept suffering in the memory and even later, coming out of the memory, I continued feeling sorry for myself and suffered. It lead to me being eventually overloaded with hurting memories and shutting it all down again. I never could go even near to a memory of being sexually abused. It all remained hidden.

Feeling need has now become such an important point for me because I begin feeling about my father sexually abusing me. Strange enough, I find that most of my time in the feeling I spend pleading him to be there for me and to love me and to support me (instead for abusing me - my needs). Having done that since weeks, crying my heart out pleading him, I have the insight that feeling the hurt of a primal situation is the start but it HAS to lead into connecting the hurt to the need. It's in expressing this need where the healing lies. Without that a feeling is not finished, and going on feeling hurt even in primal scenes without expressing the need in that scene would eventually lead to an overload (and a shut-down) such as it did to me in my talking therapy... meaningless suffering through a scene all over again. I find now that a prerequisite for new aspects of the sexual abuse surfacing is ALWAYS that I feel what I really needed from my father. This makes me understand that and why it was impossible for me in talking therapy to approach memories of the abuse. Only in feeling the need is the final seed for growth and healing - and for going deeper into the primal scene and resolving it. And only Primal gives that - no talking therapies.

And even though I go through horrible times theses days (before I am able to drop into the feeling) I feel often very very lucky that what has misshaped my sex life is now surfacing, giving me with time my own sex life back. I still want to write an article about it. Currently though I am so much IN the feeling of it that I do not have enough distance to write about it yet.

- C.G., July 2003

"Deep and durable"

Please note: This comment was originally written in French. English translation appears below.

La thérapie primale m'a beaucoup apporté et il me fait plaisir d'en vanter l'efficacité à mes amis lorsque nous parlons de croissance personnelle.

Récemment, une de mes amies s'est montrée très intéressée par cette approche. Nous avons fait des recherches sur Internet et y avons découvert votre site web.

Je suis heureux de voir que votre "Primal Center" est toujours bien vivant, tout comme vous, d'ailleurs. Vous avez toujours le feu sacré, toujours à l'oeuvre, en train d'écrire sur le sujet. Bravo! Ce que vous faites, même si peu de gens peuvent le reconnaître maintenant, sera très utile pour le bien de l'Humanité.

Je vous suis personnellement très reconnaissant pour les bienfaits profonds et durables que cette thérapie m'a apportés. Considérant l'ampleur de votre oeuvre, vous aurez probablement, comme bien d'autres avant vous, une reconnaissance posthume.

Merci, monsieur Janov! Je vous considère sincèrement comme un grand de ce monde.

-G.M., France, July 2003

English translation:

Primal Therapy brought a lot of things to me and I enjoy bragging about its effectiveness to my friends whenever we are discussing personal growth.

Recently, a friend of mine has been showing great interest in this approach. We did some research on the Internet and discovered your website.

I am glad to see that your Primal Center is still alive and well, just like you are. You still have the "sacred fire", still working, still writing on the subject. Bravo! What you are doing - even though only a few people realize it now - will be very useful to the well being of Humanity.

I am myself extremely grateful for the deep and durable benefits brought to me by this therapy.

Considering the extent of your work, you will probably receive, like so many others before you, a posthumous recognition.

Thank you Mr. Janov! I sincerely consider you one of the greats of this world.

- G.M., France, July 2003

Improved vision

My eye sight has improved 20% in both eyes. The doctor told me that this is a pretty big improvement.

I've noticed after feeling that I was able to sit in front of the television without my eye glasses. Sometimes after feeling I would take my glasses off for a few minutes while driving just to see if there was an improvement . . . same thing, I noticed a huge difference.

- R.P., USA, June 2003

We are publishing this letter from R.P. because several patients have reported the same improvement.
Some patients who wear contact lenses but did not wear them during Primals have noticed that they do not need them or glasses for up to 3 days after their Primals.
I have personally experienced that same phenomenon quite often. You can hypothesize that perhaps the blood pressure in the eye is reduced as a result of feeling.

- Dr. France D. Janov

"I would not have made it to this day"

I'm a former primal patient. It really changed my life. I can't express how much I developed from going through the primal process. I want to thank Dr. Janov for saving my life, because without that therapy I would not have made it to this day.

It was quite an experience for me. Having repressed all my feelings for so many years as a child, I immediately had great results. I just wanted to let you know that the therapy was a success.

Thank you all.

- J.D., USA, June 2003

"He connected to his birth"

Dear Art and France,

I had an experience with my father, who is almost 92, when I was called to Germany because he was so bad that my sister thought he would not live much longer, that I think will interest you. To me it proves the primal theory that the body remembers everything.

My father has been a man who has always lived by his intellect alone and despised feeling as weak and found the notion, that our body remembers child hood and birth pain totally ridicules.

I need to tell you the events that happened before this experience first.

My father is 92 has Dementia/Alzheimer¬?s, arteriosclerosis, cancer , a bad hip, bad heart and was recently also diagnosed with cancer in many parts of his body.

Sometime in October he broke his hip on top of it and had to go into the hospital.

There he seemed OK for a while and than he had a stroke on the right side of his body and started to deteriorate, refusing to eat and drink, and according to my sister almost died twice if they had not put him on fluids. So she decided to take him home , so he could die there.

At home he improved emotionally and let himself be fed, but he was moaning and wining for long stretches at a time, asked if he had pain and where, he would just say everywhere, My sister thought it was the cancer and had him put on painkillers.

The moaning got only worse and more frequent and he became more and more unresponsive. The night before I arrived he supposedly was very cold and had a yellow tint to his skin.

All through the weeks and actually month before this I had heard my sister say things, that he had shooting pain in the right side of his brain, (which reminded me of my own birth pain making itself known before I could actually connect it,) his neck also was constantly hurting him but the doctors could not find anything, and I was already thinking than, death being so close for him is bringing up his birth pain.

After the stroke and when he was home again, he said things like "I don¬?t know what to do" "where to go" and was very distraught. He liked people to massage the very back of head, where the stem brain is, which is where I get tension and headaches when my birth pain comes up.

When I arrived in Germany I found him really bad, moaning and wining, and no words coming out of his mouth that could be under stood, even though he was trying to speak. My sister was ready to ask for stronger pain killers.

The night after my arrival I put a chair next to his bed and held his hand, and with the other hand instinctively put my hand on the crown of his head, it just felt right, and I just gently let it sit there.

After a while he pushed against my hand and moved his head around in it for a while, than he sight and breathed deeply, relaxed and fell relaxed and calmly asleep. I tried to pull my hand away slowly thinking he was sleeping, but he woke up again almost panicky, so I did the same thing over again just longer, put my hand on top of his head, and the same happened again, and he slept deeply and quietly since than, not restless as before

What is amazing in this is, that he has not moaned since than, has not needed painkillers, his speech improved a lot, he comprehends much more again, asks questions, participates in his surroundings, and most of all his almost totally lame hand arm and leg have recovered almost 75%.

My sister made a joke, that I should become a midwife, but I truly believe now, after a time where I did not even put all of this together, that he made a recovery because he connected to his birth, that is what he needed to do. Since he was and still is so close to death, and both are a passage into an other dimension, it seems only logical, that one would bring up the other.

Hope you are both doing well.

- K.R., USA, June 2003

"I am now able to express my anger"

These are some major changes I experienced, thanks to the therapy:
I always felt no one could like me or be interested in me. I am now able to feel a bit that people do like me. I also feel I am strong enough to handle it if people don't like me.
I always felt I must do something to feel important. Now, I can feel important even when I am not doing anything.
As a child, I was told by my parents I couldn't be angry with them. I am now able to express my anger.
Talking about feelings feels more normal and natural to me now.

-J.M., Norway, May 2003

"The worst feeling of all for me"

To Art and France and the Staff

It's Sunday afternoon and I just got out of a feeling. The worst feeling of all for me - that of nothingness. The first-line part of the feeling is that of utter deprivation - a pure physical sensation in every single cell in my body - of something I have no words for but that is essentially missing. It is pure physical need that is deprived and leaves me with the global feeling of 'everything is wrong and ALWAYS will be', 'I am dying if nobody does anything RIGHT NOW' and 'I need to get out there RIGHT NOW'. Coming out of that feeling I suddenly see two things:

First how I all my life have felt how I do not exist and how I behaved accordingly - never showing if or what I needed. I suddenly understand how that 'feeling' 'I do not exist' was the defense against the real devastating
feeling that I needed to learn to let happen to me in over two years in Primal Therapy. The real feeling is that of total nothingness (originating before or during birth - no oxygen and lack of nutrition) - that I actually was there though how nobody and nothing was there for me throughout my birth and childhood. Since months of feeling that I now have stopped feeling that I do not exist. I do exist because I feel. And now I can see and feel in my present day life when I am with someone who cannot give me anything. I do not need to deny that any longer and live in a dream word the way I always did when I was a child. Now I can see it and react to it - by making a conscious decision about leaving that relationship.

The other thing I strongly feel since months is that I am cured. Not from my pain. Far from. But from one of the most devastating diseases there are: from not feeling. I now dare to make moves in my life and to initiate changes that promote my own well-being. I do not any longer wait for something to happen. And I have developed a strong feeling of safety that comes from my ability to feel. Whatever happens to me I am able to feel its impacts on me and retrieve bits of myself. I am far from happy all the time. But I am happy to be real enough to live.

Thanks to you all!

-C.G., May 2003

"What power"

It is really exciting what power felt feelings have - and what power they have when remaining unfelt...

...I never could let an orgasm happen to me because I fought the physical feeling of nothingness - and how that now changes 'cause I can feel the nothingness in every cell in my body and do not need to fight it (and an orgasm) anymore. What a change!!! ...Another primal started with 'I do not have anything' (my friends just bought themselves a house and I envy them and I feel so poor), went down to first line nothingness and the poor/physically depleted feeling in every cell in me, then after deep breaths turned into a feeling of being rich in my entire body (a pure physical feeling), and then after some minutes I was flooded by a feeling and a later insight: I suddenly felt rich because I have achieved the ability to feel, that's were I chose to put my money, and it gave me the home I never would have found anywhere with all the money in the world. I still would like to have a house but I stopped envying my friends and saw how I now am able to keep a job and build a house from scratch!

- C.G., May 2003

"The tools we needed to heal"

Your discovery, your work, your center with France and your superb group of primal Therapists, gave my husband Ted and me the tools we needed to heal. And heal we did!

After you left New York City, Ted and I were "self-primalers". We did the therapy correctly and progressed well. Years later, we reached a point where we really needed a professional to get us into very deeply buried feelings. We set out to find where you went - and found you.

Brenda Craven became my Primal Therapist; Ruth Nyman became Ted's. Their magnificent work with us individually set us on our personal journeys. Their work with us as a couple (we took a week and all four of us worked together) set us on our joint path. We went through the fire as individuals and together, working out struggles one at a time. Our relationship today is loving and "easy". We spoke with Brenda, Ruth and David about writing an article about it. It will take some time and we will complete it and send it to you. We are indeed one of your "success stories".

We wish you all the very best to you, France, your family, your Primal Therapists and everyone associated with your work. May your discovery and vision allow Primal Therapy to become the therapy of humanity.

-L.C., April 2003

"Face it as a feeling"

Fear has ruled every aspect of my life, paralyzing every action I made. It isolated me not only from other people but also played havoc on my creativity. I was too afraid to dance, act, write a short story, design a quilt or display my photography. Projects were never started or finished, abandoned once a mistake was found. It had to be perfect! I desperately wanted to share my creative side. Something deep inside of me kept nagging to be seen. My creativity was hidden, too painful to uncover, I had to control it. Primal Therapy has been a way for me to experience my fear and face it as a feeling. My fear no longer had the same paralyzing charge it once had on my creativity. I took small steps to share my artistic side, as imperfect as it was. I faced the fear, took action, and found life!

- P.B., April 2003

Here are more poems composed by a patient. They are first presented in the patient's native French, then in English.

A la petite fille que j'étais

(1999)

Tout l'espoir et l'innocence, comme un doux rayon

Eclairaient ton visage d'un sourire à peine esquissé

Fière et secrete comme un rayon de lune,

Tu buvais la vie à plein calice,

Le Coeur gonflé de vagues promesses,

Tu foulais solitaire des sentiers connus de toi seule,

O les ivresses dans les parterres fleuris,

Dieu avait créé les fleurs pour te célébrer,

Les oiseaux pour enchanter tes jours

Et un père pour te donner l'amour.

Devinais-tu alors que le bonheur est fragile

Quand le sortilege s'est-il brisé?

Quand la magie s'est-elle dissipée?

Ah! Pourquoi Dieu se repait-il de la douleur?

La tourterelle qui meurt, l'enfant qui pleure,

Sont-ils necessaries à l'harmonie du monde?

Sunrise

(1998)

Dans la nuit inachevée, du fond de l'univers,

Rose et noir, un soleil nouveau va aborder le monde,

L'homme voudrait capturer sa flamboyante apothéose,

Que d'immortels amours, de jardins parfumés

Hantent l'esprit du reveur en cette attente magique,

Chaque aube ranime l'espoir d'un monde vierge et beau

Il croit s'emparer de l'éternité l'espace d'un instant

Mais l'or brutal de son apparition dissipe les fantasmes,

O glorieux soleil, la fleur t'attend pour s'épanouir

L'oiseau pour rechauffer son aile, le mort pour sécher ses pleurs

Tu n'as plus le temps d'etirer paresseusement

Tes rayons sur l'horizon.

The following English translations were created by Sandrine Marten.

To the Little Girl I Used to Be

(1999)

Like a sweet ray of light, all the hope and innocence
Was lightening your face with a small smile.
Proud and secretive as a ray of moon
You were avidly drinking from the cup of life.
The heart is full of vague promises.
Alone, you were walking on roads you were the only one to know.
O, the intoxication of the blooming flower beds!
God created flowers in your honor,
Birds to enchant your days,
And a father to give you love.
Did you know then that happiness is fragile?
When did the charm break?
When did the magic fade?
Ah, why does God thrive on our pain?
The dove that dies, the child who cries,
Are they necessary to the world's harmony?

Sunrise

(1998)

In the endless night, at the end of the universe,
Pink and black, a new sun will come into this world;
Man wants to capture its shiny apotheoses.
So many immortal loves, and fragrant gardens
Are haunting the dreamer's mind during this magical expectation.
Each sunrise brings back the hope for a new world, virgin and beautiful.
For a second, it seems to take away eternity,
But with the rising of the brutal gold, fantasies vanished.
O glorious sun, the flower is waiting for you to bloom,
The bird needs your warmth, the dead depends on you to dry his tears.
There is not time for you to lazily stretch your rays on the horizon.

-Christiane N.H, France

"Sea change"

Above all, I will always be grateful to you for what the therapy has brought to Jorge and I. It has created a real sea change in our lives.

-Rita, Canary Islands

"It was like a pressure cooker"

Here is what Stan wrote to me recently about his seizures. I make no claims about a cure for most seizures but what he has to say is instructive - Dr. Arthur Janov, January 2003:
I had Grand Mal seizures, about one a year before therapy.

I would have smaller seizures all of the time and also while sleeping. I would bite through my tongue. When I would wake up from the seizure my muscles would be sore to the point that I couldn't stand up and my stomach would burn. My whole body would ache and I was completely exhausted and hurt. The recovery period was typically about a week. I couldn't talk because of a swollen tongue due to the biting. I would have this feeling in my head that I can't even describe. It was like my head was underwater and I couldn't think clearly, so I usually slept for the first few days after the seizure. I would feel suicidal for about a week afterwards. Although my inclination was to kill myself because I was in so much pain, the thing that kept me going and the reason I didn't kill myself was that I would repeat over and over to myself, "I didn't feel this bad yesterday and if I wait long enough this will go away."

Details are hard to remember because everything was a blur, and it was difficult to think clearly. Immediately after a seizure it would take me about twenty minutes to remember what day of the week it was, but I would remember my name and I would know where I was. Typically, I would lose 2 to 3 days of work. After a seizure my eyes couldn't take in light. It was like I was in a really dark room and the only light I could see was any light that was directly in front of me, as if being in a dark tunnel with a train coming at you. I had other occurrences, like standing in line at the supermarket, where I would not know where I was and the doctor told me that it was probably a type of a seizure but on a small scale.

I have no idea how many feelings I have had. I didn't cry for about the first year and a half of primal therapy. I could tell that feelings were coming up because I was feeling bad whereas before therapy I was feeling nothing. The single most important event in my therapy was going on Klonipin. My very early pain, some from birth, was pushing up, while my mind was pushing down. My feeling level seems to have been getting smashed. Klonipin allowed me enough access to start feeling; otherwise I was overloaded.
In a session, I would start to cry briefly and then I would start coughing and shaking and I couldn't go back to the feeling. The Klonipin relaxed my body enough so that I could cry for a longer period of time and I could descend from things that bothered me in the present to the same things that bothered me in the past. I cried for 1 to 2 hours, twice a week, for 3 years. The biggest feeling was that everything is hopeless. The hopelessness was that mother was never going to love me, my father would never love me, and that I was in a world of shit; that nothing would ever get better. I had this feeling that my life was a prison sentence that I had to endure. I thought about suicide constantly because it seemed that it was the only way out of the prison. For example, I was in a scene in therapy in the house I grew up in, at the bottom of the stairs, looking up to my mother who was standing at the top of the stairs, and I was crying because I wanted her to come down and talk with me. She never talked with me. I would cry about wanting my mother to pick me up and to hold me and to talk with me.

During this period there was very little birth feelings. I had one previously had feelings where I felt stuck and my mother was that my mother wasn't helping me to be born. Although I don't know for sure, I suspect that a seizure is an explosion designed to get me unstuck and born.

Eventually I got to feelings of, please love me, please talk to me, and stop ignoring me. These are the feelings that changed my epilepsy. The key to it all is that I have all this stuff I have had to keep inside. I was never allowed to show any emotion and I had to act like everything was fine. So, after twenty years of having to hold everything in, it was like a pressure cooker and my body couldn't hold it in anymore and I started to have seizures. Every feeling I have in Primal therapy reduces that pressure a little bit more.
As a result of years of feeling, that pressure has been reduced enough that I no longer have seizures. Today, I am off all medication, and I feel good more often than I feel bad. I used to feel bad 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but now I might feel bad only a few days out of the month.

-Stan, USA

"My life had been restricted by pain"

During my therapy, I realized how much my life had been restricted by pain. When I felt hopeless, blocked or anxious I felt the feeling and connected it with my childhood pain. As a result of my insights I have changed the way I deal with both business transactions and my personal life. This has made a tremendous difference to my self-esteem and . . . happiness

-M.C.C., England

"True change"

What I like about Primal Therapy is that it enables change at the visceral level, which is the only way true change can take place.

- S., USA

"For the better"

[The following was addressed to a therapist:]
Things have really changed for me and I have been able to change things for the better in my life. The fact that I have told my parents that I do this and have been able to talk to them about feeling is just amazing, unheard of and unbelievable.

I am very grateful to you. Thank you.
-M.N., England, November 2002

"I marvel at all the love I have in me"

I wish to thank you for the priceless/invaluable well being brought to me by Primal Therapy.

I will always feel a deep affection and admiration towards Dr. Janov.

Forty years ago, I suffered from post-partum anxiety. The way I was treated was an aberration: put in isolation for 15 days, tied by one foot for 2 days, locked up for 10 days, given psychotropic drugs (haloperidol, moziman and sleeping pills). I did not see my 3 young children for 6 weeks.

At the Primal Center, I found the complete opposite to this old-fashioned psychiatry. I am still not completely free from all my anxiety but my feelings are coming up little by little and I marvel at all the love I have in me - for my deceased father, my sister, my grand child - and to be able to make love quite often with fantastic feelings while in my youth I could stay 6 months without feeling any need for it. "You need to be able to access first line to be able to make love in a satisfying way" (The Biology Of Love). This is so true.
Please receive a big hug.

PS: I have forgotten the fact that I am able, for the first time, to have a friend and to get out of 60 years of insensitivity.

- F.L., Denmark, October 2002

"The work she has done with me is exceptional"

I am taking this opportunity to express to Dr. Janov my gratitude for the existence of Primal Therapy and its continuity. I have been extremely lucky to be treated by the therapist you assigned to me. The work she has done with me is exceptional. I wish you fructuous research and long life to Primal Therapy!

- S.G., Brazil, October 2002

"The first method to have had a positive, dramatic effect"

I have just returned to South Africa after another three months at the Primal Centre.

It really was a fantastic three months.

To be precise, I spent 36 years conscientiously co-operating with psychiatrists and psychologists with no results or negative results of a devastating nature. Primal Therapy is the first method to have had a positive, dramatic effect.
- B.J., South Africa, October 2002

"Changed my life"

The therapy has changed my life! I'm living in THIS world now, with all its beauty and joy and pain, not in a tortuous "fog"! My conscious and unconscious mind is pretty well connected. (I only dream in the here & now!). . . . I want Primal Therapy to go on!! I want it to be available to my son, if he should ever need to do it.

- L.G.., Germany, May 2002

"It's primalling and not talking that resolves and frees us from past pain"

At my return to therapy to the Center I slowly fell back into a pattern I had been in during my previous stay, especially the three week intense. Again I began accusing my therapist for being unconsidering and mean to me, for torturing me. Anything she did felt wrong to me. The feeling was "somebody is mean to me and maliciously torturing me and nobody is there to protect me". It was finally triggered off in all its load by a woman in pre-group who yelled names at me while it was my turn to drop into a feeling. None of the therapists interfered. It was very painful.

In my next session my therapist tried to help me feeling the pain of being without protection when somebody is mean to me. To me it felt as if it was her actually BEING mean to me (she didn't protect me from the feeling). My pain was too much so that the focus stayed on her. I wrote two letters to the Center, complaining about my therapist's way of working with me. I accused her for having tortured me and I demanded she would apologize. After four weeks my wrongly focussed and thus unresolvable struggle and suffering were finally ended when my therapist was taken away from me.

Immediately the feeling broke through with its right focus. My first memory was how my mother had refused me food for 24 hours when I was four years old. She wanted to punish me for that I never could eat much at a time and that I often refused food because I felt sick in my stomach (due to pain because of my mother being mean to me beyond belief). I had cried for hours and begged her for food: *Mommy, one egg, only one egg". She laughed at me and turned away. In my primal I looked at her and for the first time in my life I screamed out my pain of my mother wanting to starve me (the PAIN).

Then I remembered how my mother had told me the Brother Grimm 'fairy tale' H?§nsel und Gretel" when I was four years old. In the fairy tale a stepmother wants to get rid of her two stepchildren and leads them into the deep forest where she leaves them all alone to die of starvation. I had made my mother tell me that story every evening. And every evening I had told her the end of the story that I had invented myself: the children would find their way out of the forest and go to the police. In my primal I saw myself standing in front of a police man and I cried my heart out, pointing at my mother and begging him to give me shelter and come home with me (the NEED). Then I felt again how I all alone stood behind my mother when she denied me even this one single egg. I cried for her to turn to me, to hold me, to caress my cheeks and tell me with tears in her eyes "C., I'm so sorry" (for having denied me food) and "You gonna be alright, I'll help you" (to make my stomach pain go away) and she would lay her hand on my belly. (the NEED).

After the feeling I had to face several devastating truths on my accurate act-outs. I had not been able to see that it wasn't my therapist who had put the pain into me. She was only the person who brought me in touch and tried to help me with the pain. Which had meant to me that it was her who was so mean to me. I had even tried to turn her I into the Center's "police" (through my 'childhood glasses' it was the staff meeting and Art and France Janov) by writing letters (my need to go for shelter to the police in the 'fairy tale'). And I had demanded the apology that I so desperately had needed from my mother.

This feeling took four weeks of projection and suffering to finally be felt and integrated. It tells about its incredible load. More and more memories are popping up now on how my mother had been torturing me.

The major insight I have from it is how devastating unresolved childhood pain can be for adult relationships - in my case: to my relationship with my own therapist.

Another insight is how Primal Therapy has made a difference in my life compared to a "talking therapy' I have had before. Even back then I had projected my mother's meanness on the therapist just as I did with my Primal therapist. Though back then the therapist had no tools to help me into the feeling. We TALKED about it but the focus stayed wrong at her for several years. It lead to that I finally had to cut her off because the pain became too much- I quit the therapy but was left with the unresolved pain of my mother having been mean to me. In Primal Therapy the unresolved pain came up again. I got help with FEELING the feeling and my brain took it back to the real PAST events with my mother. It's primalling and not talking that resolves and frees us from past pain - it frees us from the devastating effects past pains can have on our present lives.

Though it's such an irony: I found the feeling. But the very person who tried to help me feeling my pain I lost - because of the very pain that someone else 30 years ago had put into me. It's such a loss to me.

[Note from the Primal Center: Once C.G. was able to feel the described feelings in their past context, she was allowed to have sessions again with her primary therapist.]

- C.G., USA, March 2002

"Proper perspective"

It is always a happy, tearful experience reading Art's work because I feel there is someone finally on the planet that really understands the inner reality that I have lived in. Before reading Art's work and having the understanding that is contained within his work, the only conclusion I was ever able to come to was that something was wrong with me and I was just "crazy" because I couldn't understand all the "feelings" that kept intruding into my present experience. It ultimately left me feeling bad about who and what I was. I hated it and had no idea it was a form of distortion in relation to my early experiences and the time frame. Art and your [France Janov's] work has changed that all around as you know. I now understand the source of all the unexplained feelings of the past and it has put the feelings in their proper perspective. THAT ALONE HAS MADE THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE WITH MY EXPERIENCE OF MYSELF. I can't help but love you guys for it! My gratitude is eternal :-) :-) !!!

-A.B., USA, November 1999

"In the very physiology of one's body"

Everyone reading this should know that Primal Theory and Primal Therapy has been refined, and just as important, it has matured. . . . The result is profound change not just in thinking and behavior, but in the very physiology of one's body.

- C.R., USA, November 1998

"How drugged must I have been"

I need to share the following with you: Remember a session with you when I drowned in a feeling where I felt heavily drugged and couldn't move and stayed so for several hours? I am ending up there again and again after having felt younger "no-way-out-and-I-cannot-do-anything"-memories. It is a connected feeling - though so far it didn't make sense to me considering what I knew about my birth. Yesterday night I learned from my mother something about my birth I didn't know before: In the first phase she breathed in nitrogen oxide when labour was too painful for her (that part I knew). The news is: my entire birth took only four hours. And just before I was born she was asked if she wanted to have a drug injected. She wanted - and she was so drugged that she has no idea how I actually got out of her. How drugged must I have been then...

Isn't that amazing! And that's what I wanted to share with you before the session next week!

- C.G., Canada

"Worth living"

"If I've never thanked you for saving my life and making it worth living - at times joyful and beautiful. So I'm thanking you now!"

-L.G., Germany

"Feel it"

I was very upset with a mistake my boy friend made, inordinately mad. I was furious and yet my head could tell me that what he had done was not so horrible.

So, in my session, I let myself get angry at him. It built up into a rage, I let it out. I reached a peek of furor, then it decreased. It was then replaced by a feeling of being completely overwhelmed and then despairing. The despair was deep, tainted of hopelessness: "it's too hard to live like this", "bad things will always happen from others". After crying a long time, the feeling became "I have to make things right, I have to take care of everything because nobody else does, I have to be an adult all the time".

And of course being an adult or behaving like one was the defense I had to put up so that I wouldn't be helpless at other people's hands and overwhelmed. Suddenly an image came to me: I was a little girl (4 years old) and I was welcoming adults when they came to visit, sitting with my legs crossed and talking politics with them. As I see that serious little girl, it makes me cry deeply (until now, I always felt it was cute, and I was sort of proud of it, it had become a "family story"). I am suddenly feeling that I am responsible for my parents. The memory of me calling the cops when I was about 7 rolls into my mind. I was worried that my parents were not back home while the curfew was on. I also felt so responsible for my younger brother, as if his life depended on me protecting him. The image of me sitting on the beach with him nestled inside my arms brings great sadness and tears, like we were alone in the world.

I also remember that when I was a child, I felt I never wanted to be an adult: adults lives seem to be so hard and so unhappy... I wanted to stay a child forever. The irony is, I was never a child and I was behaving like an adult." I suddenly see myself being furious at 4 years old because I cannot reach the entry doorknob: it is too high for me, I am too little. I hate it: I know why now: it means that I couldn't open the doors myself, someone had to help me.

It then appears clearly to me that when I grew up, I was always on top of everything and everybody. I was totally responsible, in control, and very "adult".

It all connects to the present again: it is suddenly clear that during the last few month of my therapy, I have started having a hard time being constantly the one reliable and responsible and having a very "irresponsible" boy friend. I kept wanting to change my life, to "play" and be "care free". Intellectually, I believed that the root of it was that I did not want to take care of anything or anybody anymore and that I wanted my boyfriend/daddy to take over and take care of me.

My boy friend's mistake pops up in my mind again, and surprise, the feeling is: "why can't I be a child, you won't let me be a child, I need it!" And that's the bottom line, that is the need, because it was never being fulfilled, I became the "child-adult" I was, and never really wanted to be.

So as a child I never wanted to grow up to be an adult but I really was. As an adult, I still wanted to be a child (unconsciously) but couldn't. I realized that wanting to change my life in the present was somewhat unreal and somewhat real. Unreal because the child who needed to be a child belongs in my childhood. Real because obviously my act-out of having the whole world depend on me is not necessary and my life can be more care free, which I fully intend to implement. Actually, it comes as a great relief that I can take it "a little more easy" in a lot of areas of my life. My boy friend's behavior is no longer an issue; and if it becomes so, I know where my irritation comes from (if any) and what to do with it: feel it. I don't have to hate him for it or need to change him. It is extraordinary how programmed we are from our past. Each time I discover a new part of myself and uncover the consequences of a repressed feeling, I marvel at the ability of the human system: to go back there and undo the damage!

- H.H., USA

"Something my mother never told me"

Since I was 13 or 14, I've been having the impulse to leave the house whenever my mother would be mad at me. I used to say "when I'll be 18, I'll leave". She would answer "here is your bag, why don't you leave now".

Now I still have the impulse to leave, my boyfriend for example, whenever I hurt inside. I realized after a session that the reason I leave is because I need him to tell me to stay so that I know he loves me and care, something my mother never told me, I wish she did.
-Y.D., Sweden

"Out of here"

I did Primal Therapy briefly but incorrectly. My therapist was MS. She was a good therapist, but I was trying to cut corners (and costs). I didn't do the three weeks, just a few private sessions and groups. Groups were particularly helpful. At the time my defenses were still very tight, and I had trouble accessing feelings. But at group the crying and howling of other patients reminded me exactly of my home life when my Mom was in the mood to beat kids all weekend, and I could get into some second-line feelings from that. I quit after just a few months because I had found some relief, and the "maintenance drinking" had fallen away but I was still using cigarettes, still resistant and unable to access more feelings.

My minimal experience with Primal Therapy did demonstrate that this is the medicine that is capable of fundamentally uprooting a person's neurosis. I read the rest of the primal books, and promises myself I would have to go back and do this stuff right. The feeling that something has been chasing me down the road all my life is something I can no longer live with. The feeling of needing to "get out of here": out of a job, a relationship, a town, has hunted me down to where there's only more "outa here" I can get, and I've never been suicidal.
- I.R., USA.

"She wanted me to be a little white girl"

My mother... She wanted me to be a white people kid instead of me. (one of the little girl my mother took care of was Janet who had a long blond pony tail). Mother told me "Don't you wish you had hair like that instead of Mexican black hair?" She wanted me to be a little white girl. I wasn't. All my life I had to be secretive and that's where some of it comes from.
- P.K., USA

"I understand my whole life"

[The following is a patient's insight right after a birth Primal:]

"... So I survived...Most incredible experience of my life. Now I understand everything. I understand my whole life. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the bad things I do to myself.

I understand why I constantly ask for help, because no one was there to help me. I was just laying there, screaming to be helped and no one helped me. At one point I felt as if I was going to die - as if I was trapped. I see how in my life I put myself in situations that made me feel trapped in. Engineering studies, my back was against the wall. No way out. I was putting myself through years of something that was immensely difficult.
And now again moving to Paris. I made myself do it. I do something difficult to get triggered, so difficult I can't cope. I'm putting myself thru impossible things and I always survive. But it's a hell of a struggle. Living in Paris triggered me the most. It was my birth. I cannot live here. There's something very physical in Paris. Noise feels like an intrusion, an attack. Narrow streets and high building lock me in".
-R.E., Italy

"Tremendous strength to continue"

...Then I also want to make use of this opportunity to thank all the staff there for the 3 weeks that I spent at the Center. You were right when you said that I had come to the right place - it surely is. My 3 weeks gave me tremendous strength to continue with my life, as well as to make all the plans and arrangements that I am currently making. I so wish that I could also thank Dr. Janov personally for the great way in which he has contributed to humanity in general, and to my own life specifically."
- E.G., New Zealand

"Because I was scare[d]"

[The following is uncorrected text from someone for whom English is not a first language:]

I remember France Janov on a talk radio saying something like "what is important is not only to feel the pain, you have to go to the need behind it".

For many months, I was pretty quiet during the groups. But because I may have to go back in France soon, I did every group in the past few weeks with a lot of exhaltation, expressing my feelings in front of everybody. I did express myself much more in my everyday life too. Since I am more active, I feel everybody hate me.

Today, I did not speak at the pre-group. I just sat, waiting for my therapist to come to see me. When he came, I just said "I was scare to speak because I feel everybody hate me when I do", then I cried. I did remember how my father was kidding on me when I was young, when I had something to say. He hated me because I was the intellectual one of the family (THE PAIN).

Next I did remember my teacher complaining about my speech desorder when I was 10, my French teacher when I was 12 too. At these times, my speech desorder was hard to undergo for me. But they both treated me as if I did in purpose (THE PAIN).

After that, I bagan to think about the furnitures in my bedroom when I was young, before I moved out at 11. I was "flying" in my old village, and then in the nearby city. I suddenly "saw" a taxi, at the station. It surprised me but I could not figure out what was the meaning. I forgot the taxi and after a while, I felt in tears. When I was young, I did a speech therapy, in the nearby city. We used to take the bus, my mother and me. Sometimes we had to take a taxi, to go back home. I cried again and again, missing these times when my mother was alone with me. She was there for me (THE NEED).

The whole thing last between 60 and 90 minutes.

What I did learn from this feeling is that when I was young I was maybe not scare to speak because of the desorder. Maybe I was just scare to speak because of the way peoples (and my father) reacted to me. I had the confirmation a few weeks later. Indeed, while I was going in my feelings, I spoke with my old speech desorder. It happen very often now. I could not pronounce "R" correctly. I figured out that it happen when my lower lip is stretch by fear (or anger, it's not clear yet). All my life I did believe I was scare to speak because of my speech desorder. Today I realize that I had the speech desorder because I was scare.

Before, I used to speak with a chocking language. I think it was only a defense. By that I mean that if people would react badly to what I said, I could believe it's only because of the way I spoke. Now I speak more in a real way and I feel much more vulnerable. But it's me.

After feeling the need I realized that when I was young I neede my mother so much. It may seem stupid but I was not really aware of it before. I always used to say "I can take care of myself", it is act out. I realised that that even though I was always around of her, she was never really there for me.

The biggest problem of my life is that I could never leave my mother. I always had the need to go back to her. Even at 15 and than at 22 years old, I gave up the schools of my choice because of that imprint.

Feeling the need of my mother created a split between the mother of my needs and my real mother. I don't put my needs on my real mother anymore. I can only accept that my "inside" mother doesn't exist anymore (did she ever exist). It give me the will to look forward and make my life as an adult. My need to go back to my inside mother still exist, and my soon departure for France triggered it. During some groups or with my Buddy, I screamed "maman, I don't want to go, don't let me alone Maman", being scared to leave my inside mother whereas I'm going back to where my real mother is. Now I know I have to feel this need when it occur.
- Olivier, France

"Living my life"

"I have to stop living my death and start living my life." -W.A., Greece

I went through the Primal Therapy in 1976-77 with my wife Jenny. I am now 69 and alive. I know I would not be without Primal Therapy. It would be impossible to count all the benefits that come to you through feeling old feelings day in day out for years. I still feel, though much more sporadically.
Jenny died two months ago as a result of breast cancer spreading through her body. The agony of her loss is shaking my world. Yet I am happy at the thought of our life and love in the post-Primal Therapy years together. Thank you for that.
Jenny and I have often discussed writing up our sometimes amazing post-Primal Therapy experiences and send them to Art. (I had to throw out all my shoes when my size changed from 37 to 42.)
A little by little the blockbuster old feelings are ground smaller by the never ending feelings and connections. Your life gets better all the time. We are the privileged ones. Jenny always cherished the moment, Art, when you met us in the corridor on our way home after the group, and said to her "You look good, kid!". Yes, she looked good, and she lived a great life. Thanks, Art!
With much sadness,

-- J. K., Melbourne (Australia) 2008

"I want to repeat again my deep gratitude for the role both of you have played in my life and for the therapy you created. I don't know that I would have any chance at happiness were it not for you. Thank you"

"Having the opportunity to work with the two of you was also a greater blessing than I had ever imagined." "What an adventure life can be with Primal Therapy! I finally feel alive after walking around
for a decade and a half feeling like a living corpse."
J.W., N.C. 2008

"Thank you all for the experience of Primal. It is a life changing event that cannot be duplicated in any other way. Thank you."
S. S, USA 2008

"Primal Therapy is the way to love and a real feeling life."

- H.K.

"Art has been a Hero to me " living for me. I went from very depressed and unfocussed to becoming a medical doctor and most certainly would not have made that transition without "digging deep" in my therapy after Janovs books shed light."

- J. F., USA 2008

Dear Dr. Janov,

Your contribution to psychology is at the very least a part of what caused society to become more open...

- J.S., New York

Dear Art and France,

I am extremely fortunate to have been able to do Primal Therapy and to have help from the foundation. It has made all the difference. This year would have been unbearable without Primal Therapy. I really could go on and on thanking you. It is difficult to express what an enormous difference it has made to me. So thank you. My life is completely different to how it was when I left LA. I feel like it is my life now and I am in it. I can feel so excited about life and enjoy being in the moment and being with other people. Wow!...

- V.L., England 2006

My own experience in Primal Therapy has helped me to live in the present. I know that the suffering from the present connects to deeper Pain on the second and first line and that feeling that pain helps to alleviate my suffering. The connections that are made help me to know how the valance of the Pain drives my acting out behavior. Not only do I know why I behave the way I do but I also gain direction in being able to change the way I live my life.

- K.S. , NY August 2006

Dr Janov I hold you and your work with the upmost regard and completely acknowledge your pioneering courage and outright determination to stand true to what you know and believe. I want to meet, shake the hand (no hug) and say thank you to the man whose work gave me the courage to trust my feelings, the primal process and finally feel that I am okay.

- L.M., Australia, September 2006