Frequently Asked Questions

From Dr. Gordon Van Rooy's Primal Primer


  1. How long will I have to remain in therapy?
  2. This question cannot be answered easily. There are too many variables. How much of your feelings are on the surface? How well defended are you? How intense is your Pain? Are you desperate? Do you play games with yourself and others? How deep are your Pain pockets?

    Many feel they have accomplished their therapy goals after less than fifty hours. Others feel that they want to continue releasing more of their Pain even after one hundred hours.

    The most common mistake patients make is based on the effectiveness of primal integration therapy. After six sessions or so they feel so tremendously relieved that they may believe that they are "primaled out." Because a boil has been lanced and the pain eased is no indication that the infection causing the boil is out of the system.

  3. What are the negative effects of primaling?
  4. Some complain of temporary headache after a session. Some feel "spaced out" for an hour or so. Most are tired.

  5. What are the positive effects of primaling?
  6. Improvements have been noted in many of the areas listed under the general question, "How do I Know Whether I Need Primaling or Not?" We do not guarantee that psychosomatic problems will disappear; however in many cases they have. Other than that, many say that for the first time in their life they feel whole, wholesome, integrated, free, themselves and peaceful.

    These statements are typical of our clients' comments: "For the first time I feel free." "I feel whole and integrated." "I now know who I am." "I am getting in touch with my true sexual identity." "I no longer feel guilty and condemned," "I am aware of an ability to love - something that I had never experienced before." "I am now aware of God in my life."

  7. Do I have to hate my parents in my therapy?
  8. It is not a matter of whether you have to hate your parents or not. In all likelihood, you already do in some part of your historical Child. In primaling, you cannot express anything that is not already there. Specifically, you can only primal out the feelings of "I hate my dad," if it is there. You cannot primal-express what you are not feeling in your Child.

    No sensible person wants to retain hatred for a parent, since all repressed ill-feelings are perpetually transmuted and transmitted like radioactivity until we are rid of them. If hate is there, you will always hate until your Child releases it. This is true even if you have consciously forgiven the object of your hate.

  9. Need I destroy my parents'ambitions for me?
  10. Each of us is like a jigsaw puzzle. We have to be put together one piece at a time. Many have no idea who they are. They come for primal integration to discover their true identity. Here is the problem: Before you were born, your parents had a clear picture of what they wanted you to be; simply, the best of their own ambitions! Unfortunately, much of this idealization takes the form of the parents' unfulfilled neurotic needs. Parents want their children to be extensions of themselves. They want people to say, "He's a chip off the old block."

    In the meantime, God gave you a unique temperament and genetic structure. If your created design should fit in any way into your parental ambitions, it would be purely accidental. So your parents's efforts to create you in their own image are like someone with an assortment of jigsaw puzzle pieces which they try to piece together to make a preconceived picture. But your pieces are not designed to fit their idea of what you should be. They will not interlock. But parents conclude, "Fit they must." And they begin pushing, bending, twisting, and clipping the pieces to fit - all, of course, to your own discomfort, pain and mutilation.

    Now, when I say that your parents did this to you, I include other significant persons such as your siblings and peers. All have had a part in your distortions.

    The picture in the jammed-together puzzle is not you. No wonder when you pause to take a look at the puzzle you can't make sense of it. You have difficulty accepting it because it is, indeed, not you.

    Primal integration therapists encourage you to reject your parents' distorted picture of you. They encourage you to go back in time through the primal door and tear your puzzle to pieces. The thought of this, of course, is frightening. But the consequence of not doing it is absolutely horrifying.

    If you would become you, you must go back to those very times when others torqued you out of shape. "But, Mama, I don't want to recite poetry before your class. I'm embarrassed." "Nonsense, you shouldn't feel that way. You're going to do it or I will give your dog away." Get back to that scene and feel its pain. Tell your mother now what you think of her. Tell her who you are and what you want. Tell her what you need. Such active resistance breaks up the pieces of the old puzzle.

    Here is another scene, a composite of actual cases. Dad, who almost made it on the college football team, is going to make sure his son will make the team. In the meantime, his son is trying to fit his own self-picture together. He is discovering that his musical interests are preparing him more for becoming a disc jockey than a "jock diskey." He hates sports. But Dad - by using the bending tools of guilt, shame, and conformity - with brute force, gets his son out to little league football where he permanently distorts something in him.

    Go back to that scene. Cry it out, shout it out. Get physical with whatever inanimate object might represent your father. Go after him. Such violent replay of that original scene will knock out the "reverberating circuits" so that you can live your own life.

    Once you destroy others' preconceived picture of you, you can put your true self together. Putting the pieces of your own self together is exciting and rewarding. Few experiences equal the thrill of discovering "I am me!"

  11. Should I continue to hate my parents?
  12. Hate comes from the hurt Child. The Child who has expressed its hurt has vented this hate and can now love. Primal patients find that their hatred (and neurotic attitudes) toward parents are bled off through primaling.

    Of course, you will no longer want to dance to your parents' neurotic tune. You will not want to continue playing their neurotic games. Affirming this in the kindest way possible may hurt them, but this is part of the risk of becoming you.


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