Who are neurotics? How does their behavior differ from how healthy people live and feel? Psychologist and psychotherapist Artur Yanov talks about the mechanism of the origin of neuroses and how to deal with them.
Neurosis is a disease of feeling. In essence, this is the suppression of feeling and its transformation into a wide range of neurotic behavior.
Neurosis develops in those cases when there is a person next to the child who should love him, but does not really love him. It begins as a means of appeasing neurotic parents by denying or hiding certain feelings in the hope that «they» will finally love the unhappy child.
If the child continues to be denied support and love and has no outlet for the pain of primary wounds, then this additional pressure on the already weakened «I» will lead to the formation of a strong unreal «I» that covers the defenseless child. Subsequently, this unreal «I» begins to dominate, protecting the child, but at the same time directing him to the development of psychosis.
If there is a person to whom a small child can turn with his primary feelings, someone who will help him understand what he feels and can support him, then there is a great chance that the child’s consciousness will not split, and he will not become someone else. .
To be whole again, one must feel, recognize the split, and let out the cry of reunion.
Primary pain is needs and feelings suppressed or rejected by consciousness. They hurt because they are denied expression and satisfaction. All this pain boils down to the following statement: «I cannot be loved and have no hope of love if I really become who I really am.»
When a child is still small and his body is still strong enough, he can provide powerful protection against great stress. But when years of chronic, constant stress pass, vulnerable organs and systems cannot withstand the load and begin to fail.
In order to find wholeness again, one must feel, recognize the split and emit a cry of reunion, which will restore the unity of the personality. The more intensely the patient feels the splitting, the more intense and deeper is the experience of the reunification of the split parts of consciousness.
When links are established between mind and pain, psychosomatic symptoms quickly disappear.
Really, truly feeling rejected means writhing in pain during the arrival of the primary feeling — it means feeling like an abandoned, abandoned, unwanted child. When the patient feels this, he will no longer have a feeling of rejection, it will be exhausted — there will be only a feeling of what is really happening at every given moment.
Freed from shame, guilt, rejection, and all other false feelings, he realizes that these pseudo-feelings are nothing but synonyms for the disguised great primary feeling of lack of love.
In order for the neurotic to regain the ability to feel, he must go back and become what he never was — a suffering child. When links are established between mind and pain, psychosomatic symptoms quickly disappear.
A healthy person does not have a false facade. He simply lives and lets others live, knows how to find a source of joy in himself. He is satisfied with what he has, does not envy others, does not want what they want, and does not demand for himself what these others have. This means that he allows others — his wife, his children, his friends — to be and remain themselves. He does not live by their achievements and their successes, he does not try to trample in them the slightest signs of happiness and joy of life.
At the same time, the neurotic, helpless before his primary pain, often needs to exploit others in order to feel his importance, which he otherwise does not feel. Since the neurotic is constantly not where he really is, he cannot be satisfied for any more or less long time. He spends the present in order to get rid of the past.
A healthy person does not seek the meaning of life, because this meaning arises from his feelings: it is determined by how deeply a person feels his life (life as his inner experiences). The absence of feeling is what destroys the personality and its idea of itself, and it also allows you to destroy the personalities of other people.
From someone else we cannot get the true feeling. First we learn to feel ourselves, and then we feel ourselves by feeling others. The closer a person becomes to himself, the closer he becomes to others.
Love is what takes away the pain. We can say that love and pain are polar opposites.
Love is that which enhances and strengthens the sense of self; the pain suppresses own «I».
To love is to give another the freedom to grow and express itself. The decisive condition is to be yourself and allow the other to behave completely naturally. The definition of love within the framework of the primary theory can be formulated as follows: to allow a person to be himself.
The neurotic seeks in love a sense of self that he was never allowed to be. He wants to find such a person — a special person — who will teach and make him feel. The neurotic tends to consider love everything that he lacks, and everything that prevents him from becoming a whole person.
True love occurs when two people love and accept each other for who they really are—including each other’s bodies. Neurotics, on the other hand, exploit the bodies of other people to satisfy old childhood needs, and can turn any other person into something that he really is not.
Neurotic anxiety is the fear of being defenseless against primary pain and resentment.
If a person feels himself, and does not engage in symbolic acting out of feelings, then he is unlikely to act impulsively or aggressively. The dialectic of anger, like pain, is that it disappears only after it is felt.
Neurotic anxiety is the fear of being defenseless against primary pain and resentment. Neurotic behavior serves as a cover for pain. In fact, what was rejected, mutilated and humiliated was his own personality and its perception; therefore, it is not surprising that a person experiences fear when this feeling becomes close to awareness.
Neurotic fear is the fear of losing the lie in which the neurotic constantly lives, which contains a grain of hope. And it is felt most strongly by the patient undergoing primary therapy when his whole neurotic game comes to an end. Our goal is to awaken his fear in order to push the patient to real feelings. And the only way to overcome this fear is to feel pain and resentment. Fear remains until the pain is felt.
The closer the patient is to his feeling, the closer he becomes to the reality of the external world.
Neurosis — and this is worth remembering well — saves and kills at the same time. He protects the real «I», the real person from complete disintegration, but in doing so, he buries the real person he has saved. The child grows up attached to the unreal personality created by the neurosis, which, paradoxically, squeezes the life out of him.
The closer the patient is to his feeling, the closer he becomes to the reality of the external world, the sharper he will peer into other people, the more deeply he will be aware of social phenomena. The more the inner reality is blocked, the more the perception of reality is distorted. Any progress towards the expression of feelings is an invaluable gift to the patient.
To be real means to be calm and relaxed — depression, phobias and anxiety disappear in the patient. Chronic tension goes away, and with them drugs, alcohol, overeating, smoking, excessive overload at work disappear into oblivion. To be real means to stop playing the symbolic drama out of your life.