https://medium.com/@pbt.skills.integration/the-primal-therapy-adoptee-1c1bd6edcd30Paul Brian Tovey
Sep 21
The Primal Therapy Adoptee
It’s way back in 1984 that I left the UK for Paris and the Primal Institute and started Primal Therapy under the directorship of Dr Art Janov for my version of the “Primal (Adoptee) Wound” I was crippled by emotional pain then, physically too In those days I could rise on my feet for maybe 4 hours then I had to lie down with pains in my back and body. In 6 months of therapy in Paris so many deep body twisting painful cries came out of me from so much life lived without being “emotionally seen and heard” I was socially blanked. Voided and steeled. I’d been twisted out of my “Self”. The word “twisted” where I grew up too, actually meant “to have had something stolen” I felt oddly many times in my life I was “missing a self” . The same feeling as many other Adoptees. I left Paris and continued therapy with Primal Therapists who had set up in London in 1985 sometime. Being “emotional iron” was the way of my Working Class upbringing in the main. The deep imprints of losses, separations I finally felt, after age 30 of my first family, mom, dad and sister will never fully heal. How could they?
They were my life until aged 3 and half when I was dumped by my very disordered natural mom into what became a life of dislocated senses, identity voids, sexual abuses, and no validations of losses. Isolated. Accessing feelings for me in Primal therapy was a major breakthrough and I needed to be: “all of me”. To understand what had happened to. I could feel that I was born to be “me” but whatever that might have fully been collided with Adoption, and the child abusive ways of my Adoptive mother who saw in me as if in a mirror of her own needs. But she never saw me. Nor my need to leave her or grieve fully. She sexually abused me and tied me up and at times beat me. She was a strange “mother” of self-comforting on me, sometimes being nice and other times so angry at her infertile husband who she complained was not a sexual performer. But what Primal Wound in therapy did I heal or resolve?
The therapy enabled resolution of the immense pressures in my body of all the losses I had stored for years. That took years to “drain down” in many tears to manageable levels of easier grief. The therapy lifted the defense states of neurologic dissociative states and “blankness” because my brain in therapy operated to recall and feel on bother emotional and cognitive levels. Putting me back together again. The cost was pain but the gain was true Self. “True Self?”
Yes it exists, as the “fluid feeling self of experiences and sensations” that really happened. That is the leftover “Primal Self” from the primal wounds that really happened. It is one’s “emotional-being”. It is a great sadness to realise one’s life was lost the way it should have lived. Strangely grief, loss felt and cried out, will make that more bearable. It is still hard core truth though. Losses that were accessed by me and felt over years were monumental but then right in the first two years of therapy my natural mother died as I was trying to navigate the Adoption-why’s with her. Just after she died on Christmas 1986 I went to be on the childhood railway where I had often stood as a kid blankly looking “towards my magic south” towards Bristol my first home. My soul place. My birth-star .. I put my head on the railway to die after she had died in late 1986 ..Waited for a train. I then heard a laugh. It was strange, and it was my Adoptive mother’s laugh. So I got up and LIVED because I just could bear her at all. I stood again, to feel the grief like bayonets in my heart. It was that sharp. That bad. I suffered for two years from immense pain and my therapy carried me through with high grief waves that were blue and black inside my head and like I was being hit by stars and pain all the time. It’s many years ago now and the internet came after 2000 and here we are in 2022. I am amongst fellow Adoptees validating their strange “internal state-hoods” of half belonging selves, and hurt kids inside them as adults with dislocated identity, or just non-senses of “Self”. It’s a kind of “home” I know. I am at home with sadness. I wanted to say because I am 69 and a cancer survivor, and so much more like we all are, that more fully enabled GRIEF is the slow oceanic answer to the Primal Wound for Adoptees that suffer which in fact may be multiple wounds bound up across many years sweeping up within it many invalidation and non-hearings by others who were “family”. Oh they SAW US. YES THEY DID. But they never RECOGNISED who we really were nor our deeper wounded hearts. They could not feel us or did not want to. That is all worthy of grieving and for finding a long pathway towards acceptable levels of digested sadness. We are the Flag of Tragedy. Life gave it. It’s okay to cry under it. You will still walk on with integrity. We are children of gone galaxy eyes. Times lost.
