Friday, June 18, 2010

WE WE DO.......by DR. ART JANOV

I am going to talk about myself, not as a measure of self indulgence, but in order to impart some of what I have learned about myself over the years.

I was an anxiety case most of my life. I could not concentrate, sit still or be tenacious, and I suffered nightmares. I think a lot of it was due to my life in the womb and at birth. Add to that my pain filled childhood and it can be understood. But why did I not know about this pain that was driving my life? If much of this took place before I was even on this planet how could I be objective about it? It was just me. And how could I feel unloved in my childhood? I was just me. It was not until I got a little love in my life that I began to understand what I did not get. Many of us do not reach that understanding because our personalities are so deviated from the start that it all seems normal not to get love. For example, my parents never talked to me or said my name. I never realized this until one day age thirteen I was at my friend's house and their mother came down into the kitchen and leaned against the sink and stayed talking to them. I ran home with this epiphany and told my dad that Mrs. Winters was talking to her kids, and not just for giving orders. I simply never knew that parents should talk to their kids. Nor did I know that parents should say their kid's name when addressing them. It was usually "hey you.' When I went down to join the Navy the gray haired lady asked my name. I told her and she said it back to me in an unhurried warm way. I felt something changed inside. I felt all warm and fuzzy inside and did not understand why but it marked me.

It marked me because it revealed a need I knew nothing about. It is why when my patients cry out their needs they are in great pain.

The reason we don't know it is because before we have words, painful feelings are engraved into our system. and they create physiologic reactions that simply feel normal to us. And if we never find love we never know about our unfulfilled needs. Sometimes we have so much pain early in life it crashes our defense system completely and we recognize that we are in pain. That is not the case with most of us. I always thought that nightmares were in all of us. Whenever I told someone I had a dream i always meant a bad dream. I grew up thinking everyone had only bad dreams. And since there was no one to talk to I just went on thinking like that.

It is the rare person who feels unloved during their childhood. We are just programmed by our imprint before birth and birth/infancy lives and we carry out the silent program. We either "dance" fast or slow by our imprint and we never even know that it is an imprint. This is why when we someone hugs us later in life it can hurt. It brings up the need and its lack of fulfillment. Some of us, therefore, avoid hugs. We become a cold personality because it protects us permanently against pain. The pain is lack of fulfillment of need; each time there is a slight fulfillment there is pain. You feel what you didn't get.

And the minute someone says or shows that they want us we become suckers because we never felt wanted. So we learn about that need when it is filled. I treated promiscuous girls who thought they were bad because they gave sex the minute someone showed an interest in them. Suddenly someone feels wanted. We are so unconscious that we are not even aware that we have an unconscious or that it continually drives us.

When you grow up not being able to concentrate it seems normal and you think that it is just the way things are. You never believe it could be any different. And you don't think about"different" because that is the way things are. I did not think that I could not concentrate because I never knew what it was not what it looked like. We keep making the same mistake in life because what we come to believe is normal warps us. We keep marrying the wrong person because the same need and its deviation continually drives us. We want a dominant man like our father so we can struggle to make him soft and tender; and it never happens. We marry "the struggle." We marry someone hyper critical so that symbolically we can have someone who approves of us. We are redoing and reliving our imprint all of the time.

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