Juliana Brown & Richard Mowbray

Everyone has an inherent potential to experience processes of inner development resulting in a continuous process of ‘becoming’.

These processes are spontaneous and unfold in a unique way for every individual. They have their own dynamic pressure and their own pace. The question of change is one of allowing these inherent processes to function more fully. Primal Integration endeavours to offer an environment that is conducive to this.

Biological gestation and birth provide rather a good metaphor for this process of ‘becoming’. You become aware of being ‘pregnant’ – a sense of something going on inside. Gradually you become more and more aware of its nature. It gets bigger and moves towards some sort of coming out into the world. This can be an uncomfortable process, a painful process. It may be dramatic. It may be ecstatic. Either way this is a forward and outward process.

The practitioner’s role is akin to that of a midwife – to encourage the client to follow the instinctive processes that will produce the natural emergence. In giving birth to aspects of oneself, even the memory of traumatic experiences – such as having been stuck during one’s biological birth – will emerge naturally. One does not need to extract these experiences with forceps! Recovery of traumatic memories does not require the psychological equivalent of the obstetrical intervention that was perhaps necessary for one’s survival ‘back then’. As practitioners we remain midwives – midwives of consciousness – rather than obstetricians!

The ‘delivery’, including that of traumatic memories and ‘difficult’ feelings is enabled by the configuration of a contained, ‘free space’.

In Primal Integration, we have a high degree of structure ‘around the periphery’ which allows the space within to be very free. This encourages the ‘structures’ within people to become apparent, to be experienced as in their formation, and for unexpressed feelings bound up in them to be released and completed.

It seems that the intensity of the experience necessary to melt inauthentic ‘structures’ within people will be comparable to the intensity of the original experience from which they split-off. Seldom is intellectual understanding of the relevance of these experiences enough to effect change. It seems that the ‘understanding’ has to run as deep as the event is significant in that person’s development. The events are in a sense ‘re-lived’ at depth and in context. Important to note here and crucial to the ‘wholing’ process, are the differences between the original context and the present one. This time around there are resources available that were not there the first time, not least one’s own ‘adult’. A memory is what is being engaged rather than a present reality and it is being engaged voluntarily.

This discussion will be found wanting without also talking in terms of love. It is ‘tough love’ that makes up the container, attentive love that is held within it and love energy – energy for life – which emerges from it. Love contains the process. Love drives the process. Love is the process. Warmth, kindness and humour are present alongside the pain and suffering. Deep human compassion is both evoked and needed in the presence of people confronting their innermost issues.

The period after the ‘birth’ is one that requires attention worthy of this ‘new beginning’. This is integration – welcoming and creating space for the newly recovered ‘self’ in one’s life by giving it appropriate recognition.

Integration takes place in two stages – the integration into awareness of the formerly excluded aspects of oneself and then the practical application of these new discoveries in everyday life. Whilst the former can happen spontaneously, the latter often requires some form of active work.

The welcoming involves changes in outside life, where choices made in the absence of these now recovered aspects of oneself may have established social roles and patterns of living which have gathered considerable inertia. Changing these when possible usually involves ‘donkey work’. However, it is not always feasible, or wise to completely change them, so there is much challenging work to be done in finding a way for the ‘new self’ to manifest which is meaningful and fulfilling.

This process of recovery and integration is not a ‘one off’ project, but rather forms a continuous cycle of change. When it is Self-regulating, this process seems to provide for its own furtherance. The fruits of one sequence of recovery and integration provide resources for the next, continually bringing a deeper way of living into being, and a deeper way of being into living!

© Juliana Brown & Richard Mowbray

Excerpted from our chapter on Primal Integration published in David Jones (ed.), Innovative Therapy – A Handbook (Open University Press, 1994).