This will be a short article because the point I want to make is very
straightforward and self-explanatory.
I highly commend and respect John Speyrer for having created The Primal
Psychotherapy Page and for allowing free expression of different
opinions, unlike other primally-oriented websites.
However, let us call a duck a duck and a rabbit a rabbit. A duck is not
a rabbit and past lives are not present life. Let us make clear that primal theory and primal therapy deal with this lifetime only. Past lives theory (if there
is one) should not be associated with primal theory. To do so is comparable to an astronomer who
one day would suggest that astronomy and astrology can be integrated
because they share the same set of basic hypotheses, verifiable by the
same set of experimental designs.
Even if primal theory and past lives theory (again, if there is such a theory )
can be labeled as regressive, in the sense of "that which goes back to
past events", they have nothing else in common. They are two different
species and should not be associated any more than mystical searching
should be associated with honest scientific probing.
As a client, I would be personally very wary of a primal therapist who
would be ready to follow me into past lives without reserve, without
referring me to a psychiatrist for medication evaluation and without
giving me the help needed to integrate psychotogenic traumas that
occurred in this lifetime. Allowing me to feel the agony of the trauma
over and over coupled with the solid knowledge of a theory that gives
me hope is what I would need. Because I would rather feel the pain, as
opposed to fleeing into some comforting fantasy.
Finally, as a formally trained and experienced primal therapist I have
only observed dissociation phenomena, never past lives phenomena. I
have never verified the existence of past lives any more than I have
verified the existence of future ones.
Let belief be belief and primal theory be primal theory.
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Also read on the Primal Psychotherapy Page:
Re-living Past Lives in the Regressive Therapies by "M. H."
An Argument For Past-Life Therapy by Bob Holmes
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