Welcome to The Primal Mind

Welcome to our blog on affective neuroscience and how it can be applied to heal human suffering. We’re just getting warmed up here so be patient – we’ll be posting regularly very soon. In the meantime, mosey on over to the “about” page and learn more about why we are writing this blog.

Peter and I have been friends for forty years and over that entire period we’ve been involved in deep feeling therapy (primal therapy) in an attempt to heal our childhood wounds and open to a more fulfilling, integrated, and feeling life. When we met, each of us was suffering personally and searching for a more authentic, real life in a world that was, and still is, crazy in so many ways.

Going through this process has given us a touchstone by which to judge the genuine from the fake, the sane from the insane, and the real from the bullshit, and there is so much bullshit these days. That in itself is painful; as you get healthier on a personal level, you become more sensitive to the insanity that drives our market-driven society.

Peter went on to become a lecturer in political science and Bruce became a medical writer after a number of years working in a biomedical research lab. Both of us are passionately committed to exploring the scientific foundations of deep feeling therapy. Each week, we read the literature on the early life origins of mental illness and find confirmation for what we learned so long ago down on the mat: that early trauma leaves a lifelong imprint on your life.

Although deep feeling work helps many people heal those imprints, it doesn’t help others. We’d like to know why. And when it does help, what is happening in the brains and lives of the people who get better? What is the actual mechanism of healing, both in the brain and in our social interactions? Can it all be attributed to the relationship between therapist and client, as some claim, or is there a neurological reconnection process going on between regions of the brain, as Arthur Janov says?

We’ll be exploring this in future posts so I’ll hope you join us!

Bruce and Peter

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2 Replies to “Welcome to The Primal Mind”

  1. I’m glad that you’re doing this. I like the blog and I’ll try to follow it. I’ve had my therapy at the London Association of Primal Psychotherapists (1992/1994) and at the Janov’s Primal Center (2007). Best wishes, Marjan, a psychologist, Belgrade, Serbia, Europe

  2. Absolutely fantastic and so very clearly stated. You guys are my new heroes. 🙂 I wish you every success. I will be giving the url of your blog to my sister. I really want her to be aware of what you are looking into and the hope for the world it might imply. Also her political views are much like mine and I believe our views are much like your own. I would joke and leave a really crazy good bye as we got used to in a certain message string in the past but I won’t. ha

    Oh, I have not credentials, I am just a fellow sufferer here. My therapy was with Ann Farnell, once Ann Farnell-Blow, in An Arbor Mi. Many years ago. I was involved in the poor person’s priced right version called christian inner healing, having studied under the late Ruth Carter-Stapleton when she resided in Bartonville TX south of Denton TX, many years ago. Again, some people it helped and others not and it did not go as deep as Primal Therapy, but I did find it another way into feelings. From it and other attempts I have devised a self help approach that though not ideal is more affordable to the poor. I believe it could be studied and used as a more sensitive path to feelings that might yield safety and effectiveness for more people if utilized by teams of specifically trained therapists. It’s possible drawback again might then be the cost. I think ACC needs some revision in order to fix this last “problem”.

    Oh I also had a friend of many years that worked with me on this same project you guys are into. He is David Alan Claerr and he is on facebook I think but rarely.

    Thanks for this site!

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