What would it be like for one therapy client, during deep breathing sessions across about ten weeks, to experience Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, Otto Rank’s Will Therapy, Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis, Abraham Maslow’s Third Force approach, and Stanislav Grof’s Holotropic Therapy.
In the culmination of my latest novel, I have my main character, Dylan Steffan, guide his client Felicia through all five. This is, of course, a fictional account, but one that provides us with unique insights into human therapeutic, spiritual, and transpersonal breakthroughs.
Denver
Fall 1976
My client Felicia, a Hispanic woman in her mid-thirties, has arrived at my office suffering from a lot of body tension, including tightness in her muscles. On the outside, she’s putting up a great front. She smiles constantly and has an ingratiating manner. Inside she’s a bit of a volcano.
She seems to be responding well to me as her therapist. Perhaps she is the one I can successfully guide through all five forms of therapy. While I fear falling short yet again, I let myself get my hopes up.
I start at the primal level delineated by Dr. Arthur Janov, which is basically the same as the psychodynamic level delineated by Dr. Stanislav Grof.
Like Janov, I don’t allow the front by anyone – bright, humble, polite, obsequious, hostile, dramatic – to remain intact. The front has to go – so that the real work can begin.
If you giggle, yawn, intellectualize (abstract your thinking from your feelings), or change the subject, I bring you back – so you can move beyond your defenses, keep breathing deeply, and stay with your fear or other feeling until it overtakes you. Breathe and feel – this is the only thing that heals.
I explain all this to Felicia but don’t let her live in her head about it. We’re not here to talk about stuff that’s far from her feelings. I urge her to “sink into an early situation that evoked a great deal of feeling for you”.
It’s not too long before she brings up her father. “He was always criticizing me, poking fun at me, ridiculing me.”
“Breathe deep and feel that, stay with that, stay with that feeling! Pull that feeling from out of your muscles.”
She pounds a pillow nonstop for several minutes. “I feel more relaxed now. I had no idea I had so much anger in me.”
A couple days later Felicia goes further.
“My father was always pushing me to smile. To coo, to wave bye-bye, to appear happy, to have perfect etiquette and manners, to get A’s and say bright things, to do my chores without hesitation, to be quiet and undemanding – to be advanced at everything. I was shushed, ridiculed, and pushed beyond my limits every day! And all the way along, the unrelenting criticism!”
“You couldn’t be yourself and be loved. The real you was crushed. You shifted to an unreal person.”
“It was so unjust.”
“Say it to your dad.”
“How could you, Daddy?” she asks. “How could you be so constantly mean?! How could you?! I never even raised my voice to you! Have never once in my life raised my voice! You took my power away! Daddy, be nice! Mommy, help me! Why don’t you ever stand up for me, Mommy?! Why don’t you ever help me, Mommy?! Why’d you allow this to happen?! I hate you both!”
I think she’s moving toward her primal scream but not yet. “It’s healthy, Felicia, to rage against someone who’s trying to crush the life out of you.”
“No wonder I always want the best table in the most expensive restaurant,” she says. “No wonder I chattered in class and bragged all the time. Because I was being continually denigrated by my father. And God forbid we called him anything but ‘father’. We’d never dream of calling him ‘daddy’ or even ‘dad’.”
“Keep feeling. Tensing up against the feeling is more painful than the feeling.”
Day after day, Felicia goes through more primals – total feeling-thought experiences from the past. Deep, wide-ranging, intense feeling-thought experiences.
She becomes defenseless and lets the primal pain experiences completely engulf her. And each time she feels one bit of pain, it paves the way for her to tolerate more. As she strips back the layers, she breaks open new hidden memories and undergoes more primals, and more of her defenses peel away.
“You weren’t listened to, Felicia, weren’t allowed your own space. Your needs were neglected, you were robbed of your real self. It’s a subtle but very significant tragedy. The pain became woven into your personality. Now you are finally feeling what you’ve been acting out all your life.”
Step by step she makes this ordered journey away from her unreal self and into her real self. She’s being cured because she’s bringing down the tension to a level where she’s more feeling than defended. It’s her real self that is saying, “Don’t push me away, Daddy!” and “I feel bad, Mommy” and “somebody take away my pain!”
At last she’s engaged in baby talk, lets out infantile cries, and wails like a newborn. With her eyes closed, she cries out.
“Weaned too soon, pushed to sit up too soon, pushed to walk too soon, pushed into potty-training too soon! Never allowed to explore, yell, suck my thumb, grab my mother! Never allowed to express myself! Rarely being held! Rarely playing with other kids and just having fun!”
“Love is tending to your comfort as an infant,” I add. “Love is taking away your discomfort and your pain.”
Felicia starts to squirm and twitch and sigh. Her eyelids flutter. She writhes.
“You’ve been holding onto your unreal self all these years, Felicia, so your parents wouldn’t reject your real self.”
The stream of tears begins. She thrashes about. She groans. She gasps. She shudders.
“Years of suppression, Felicia, years of denial. Shout! Let it all out!”
She shouts. “Mommy! Daddy!” And then comes the deep, rattling, involuntary scream. The primal scream.
Her defense system has completely crumbled. Connecting with the pain has cured her, and the scream has given ultimate expression to the pain.
She comes out of this final primal. She opens her eyes and blinks, as if she’s come out of a coma. Her tone of voice shifts back to her adult voice.
“See you tomorrow, Felicia.”
“Tomorrow, Doctor Steffan.”
The next day Felicia is buoyant. “I no longer feel that chronic tightness in my muscles that’s left me sore and aching most of my life.”
“Wonderful.”
Felicia declares that “never again will I enter into that bargain: ‘love me and I’ll agree to be untrue to myself’. I thought love was what my unloving parents gave me. Now I feel my needs, and I feel what real love is – for the first time.”
“Real love doesn’t make the child struggle to be loved, Felicia. Children should be loved without having to earn it. Your real self was crying out for freedom all your life. When you became your pain you were freed to become you. And feeling more and more of your infancy and childhood has produced in you a genuine maturity. Now you are being you.”
I then switch to the language of Otto Rank, Roberto Assagioli, and Abraham Maslow – synthesized. She closes her eyes and I guide Felicia through an imagination exercise:
We are engaged in therapy – the living process of developing a better self. As we climb this mountain together, you and I can discover within you a new person.
Felicia, as we climb this mountain, leave behind your trapped and downtrodden will. As we ascend this mountain, step up to affirm your positive, creative, and productive will – and strengthen your will.
As we get halfway up this mountain, you can look back and see how far you’ve come. And you can embrace the sublime experience of your discovering, creating, and re-creating your new self. You are building up something new within yourself to meet the situations of your life. You are liberating your primal life force. With your creative power, form your new self. Continually build yourself into the person you desire to be. Manifest your ideal self.
You are rising toward a life of maximum individuation and maximum connectedness. Accept your will to individuate and accept your will to merge. Take responsibility for your will and your unique self, and enter collaborative work with other people. At the center of your being, Felicia, accept that a part of your being is separate, different, and unique and that a part of your being unites with others in love.
So we’re taking this path up out of your limits – into a life that is deeper, broader, stronger, freer. As you transcend your old self and center yourself in other people with empathy, compassion, and love – and center yourself in the world, the spiritual dimension, the Field, or the Divine. We are letting our souls awaken to Light and Warmth.
Our psyches and our souls are mountaineering. We are ascending into a transcendent reality, transcendent territory, and we’re drawing inspiration from that reality, that territory.
We prepared to climb this mountain, Felicia. We gained knowledge of the mountain. We developed our mountaineering skills. And now we’re going. On up this path, up this mountain. And we’re arriving at the peak.
The peak is all about living from your strengths. It’s about a life of goodness, values, ideals, ethics, courage, beauty, literature and poetry, music, and art. It’s about ideal behavior, integrity, kindness, generosity, friendships, compassion, self-sacrifice, love, joy, maturity, health, well-being, and fulfillment.
As we reach the peak, Felicia, we are becoming wise and benevolent people who are cultivating what is good, true, and beautiful. We’re becoming people who are sociable, friendly, and loving and who have close personal relationships and a deep feeling of kinship with the whole human race.
At the peak, we are transcending our ego. We are now altruistic, dedicated to our duties to other people. We identify with humanity.
We’ve made it, Felicia. We’re standing on the summit. Let’s take in what surrounds this peak with wonder and awe and joy. Let’s take in the grandeur and splendor of the universe. Let’s take in the meaningfulness of life.
Let’s look out at the horizon. Let’s move beyond our usual limits. Let’s be strong and free.
Felicia, you and I both have an earnest desire to make a positive contribution to humanity. Let’s dedicate ourselves to our mission. We bring our best self to bear as we care about the human race and respect people with affection and altruism. This is the fulfillment of our humanity. This is the actualization of our potential.
As we stand on this mountain peak, your talents and capacities are there, ready for you to tap – to become everything you’re capable of becoming and to do everything you’re capable of doing. By having come to this mountaintop, Felicia, you can live your life in fullness.
We do an exercise with similar words during several therapy sessions in a row.
Then we move into the final phase, relying heavily on Stan Grof to move into the best perinatal and transpersonal experiences Felicia can have.
“I’m neutral about your faith and philosophy,” I’ve been telling her repeatedly. “Just want you to break through spiritually and ethically on your own terms.”
My role is to keep her breathing deeply for an hour and a half per session. And to select the music with her in advance each time. As she undergoes more deep breathing sessions, she becomes clearer about what music works for her and, more and more, she selects the music for each session.
It’s a limited role, but my commitment to her inner work requires compassion, energy and stamina, flexibility, and even a sense of humor. I have to trust the intelligence in her body and her inmost being. I might have to prevent her from rolling into the furniture or wall, and otherwise keep her safe. I urge her on when her intellect is resistant and coax her to relax when she has muscle spasms. But I intervene as little as possible. Mostly I am a presence – a compassionate presence – for her own very personal journey.
There’s a deep experiential logic to each client’s breathing sessions. Consistent with the Grof paradigm, Felicia relives her birth a dozen times and experiences at the same time her own ego death and rebirth. Her soul’s rebirth is unique to her, but – not surprisingly, since she’s a Christian – has plenty of elements in common with most spiritual rebirths in the Christian tradition.
Then her transpersonal experiences begin. Deep breathing does for her all the work that psychedelics can do.
She has a couple out-of-body experiences. She experiences things that happened to her parents when they were children, then to her grandparents long before she was born. She moves up the ancestral continuum and experiences historical events – a few times – including encountering other cultures and societies. Several times she moves up the developmental stream of the human race.
She moves on to take in animal life, plant life, all life. She moves to take in elements of the planet: sunlight and moonlight rolling across landscapes of clouds, mountains, valleys, oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams. She takes in the whole Earth. She takes in the solar system, the galaxy, and ultimately the universe. She finds herself drawing mandalas, even though she’s scarcely aware what a mandala is.
Felicia finds this spectrum of transpersonal experiences extraordinary – beyond anything she had ever anticipated experiencing in life. She then becomes aware of the unity of her body and consciousness with the Field. She has her own encounter with spirits in the afterlife and then with Deity – with the Godhead – and with Divine Love, Goodness. Truth, and Wisdom.
Just after she concludes that this is the ultimate experience she can have, she encounters Deity at the beginning of Creation. She’s filled with a profound sense of purpose that she says she’ll always strive to remember, embody, and live out in her life.
“My world’s been transfigured,” Felicia says. “Who knew I’d experience at being one with the unfolding cosmic process? I have a whole new worldview and a whole new way of being.”
I nod. “The totality of existence forms a unified field, experientially available to each of us.”
“How illuminating this has all been!” Felicia exclaims. “So profound. So liberating. So empowering. The spiritual quest is the main game. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are not accidental by-products of material processes. They’re the main event. Well, compassionate love is the main event. Now it’s all about conducting my daily life by what I’ve seen and what I continue to see.”
At this point, only one thing remains. “Re-create your personality – a coherent and unified personality – around what transcends you. Re-create your self, Felicia.”
We work on this through three sessions, until she’s secure in her ability to do it on her own.
So now there’s nothing left to do. Therapy ends. Felicia is able to conduct deep breathing sessions and even Primal sessions at home, and I’ve been coaching her on how to integrate these powerful experiences while staying engaged with regular daily life. She tells me she’s taking up kundalini yoga to help stay rooted in deeper realities.
We say goodbye. As we depart our roles as therapist and client, Felicia and I at last allow ourselves one warm and genuine embrace.
As she walks out the door for the last time, I sit on the couch near my desk and gaze at the wall. I hear her drinking water from the fountain in the hall. As I lean back and breathe deeply, I take in Watteau’s painting of Italian comedians. Like all comedies, this journey of mine is turning out fortuitously.
I turn around toward me the photographs on my desk. There is Roberto Assagioli, the mentor who inspired me. There is my natural mother, whose death during my birth no longer haunts me. There is my father Aidan and stepmother Gwen, whose failings as parents no longer drive me. There is Ren, whose doubts about this quest will never again cause me any self-doubt. And there is Carmen, whose steadfast belief in me and my goal has brought me to this peak moment.
I am more than relieved. I have the most profound, most supreme sense of fulfillment I’ve ever experienced. Eight years of strain and struggle fall away. I’ll never put that kind of pressure on myself again. Or need to. I’ve brought one of my clients through all five therapies – to arrival in life’s most promising territory.