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October 6, 2003

Primals Are Now, Primals are New

In primal work, we often think of delving into traumas as "regressing" into the past. The word itself means "going backwards." Primals have also been described as reliving past events. The "past" is a real issue. Some people think it is better to forget the past and just "get over it."

There is no past.

If we think of images that were laid down in the past, we are experiencing those images now. Everything we do, we do now. Everything we think, we think now. Everything we feel, we feel now.

It's all happening now.

A trauma is the sensate portion of the event that is not fully experienced by our entire mind-body system--the part that is repressed. That part exists, stored in our system, now. When we primal, the experience of that repressed experience is new.

In many cases, the resolution of a trauma requires more than feeling the repressed pain. We need to express that which could not be expressed at the time. For instance, to say words that we never said, like "Hold me!" or "No!" - is a new experience, a completion of what we needed to express.

This is not living in the past. This is not reliving the past. This is creating a new, fully feeling present.



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