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A personal anecdote-- I suffered from cluster headaches for about 20 years, starting in high school. Because of bad emotions and not having much success with t
by lawpoop 9y ago
A personal anecdote-- I suffered from cluster headaches for about 20 years, starting in high school.
Because of bad emotions and not having much success with traditional psychotherapy and anti-depressants, I started going to primal therapy.
I'm well aware that primal therapy is not considered valid in mainstream psychology. I'm not trying to debate that.
I found my therapy helpful for dealing with my daily emotional swings and negative thoughts and feelings.
Surprisingly, I found that it greatly reduced the number of cluster headaches that I had.
Long story short, I had been suppressing my actual emotions in order to appear okay and not an over-reactive emotional wreck. This was a much deeper and subtle process than "I'm okay"-- it was a subconscious, physio-psychological process involving arresting the subtle motions of my face and neck that normally create expression. This process, which I did often throughout the day, subconsciously, when I thought of something personally painful, would eventually lead up to a cluster headache.
That whole paragraph above is something I figured out on my own, while I was doing the therapy, not something that the therapist presented me with or helped me figure out. But I would not have been able to do it if I had not had a space to enact my emotions, which is what primal therapy is (it's not screaming--or, I should say, not just screaming).
Being in a place where you can actually emote what you are feeling, not just talk about what you feel, is a game-changer when you grew up not being accepted for validated as a child. I can talk about how I feel all I want-- that's what I had to learn to do as a child, going to psychologists. That has no therapeutic or helpful effect for me-- it became just another coping or defense mechanism. I'm completely dissociated from myself when I talk about my feelings. I was never allowed to actually feel.
I still have general physical pain, and get crushing migraines from time to time ( I just started a new medication for that), but thankfully I only have cluster headaches about once every six months. I attribute this entirely to the changes that came about from going to primal therapy.
I know that primal therapy has not been rigorously studied, and is generally considered "debunked" by mainstream psychology. But anyways, it really helped me. I entirely certain that the lessening of cluster headaches to almost gone was not a coincidence, and a result of primal therapy.
- tomhoward 9y agoThanks for sharing your experience. I know several people who are highly-scientifically minded (i.e., masters or PhD qualified in mainstream science disciplines), who've had afflictions like yours, and have resorted to similarly unproven or "debunked" treatments, and have found them effective when nothing else was. It's a mysterious world.
- jwdunne 9y agoThe brain is a complex and powerful organ. I'm not saying in all of these cases that's what it is but the brain has the power of placebo effect. If physical ailments get better because you merely believe you're being treated, there's a chance that there's a treatment out there that the brain responds to for some people for some illness that isn't apparent generally. If it helps where nothing else does, is that wrong? I bet it doesn't feel wrong to you - you're just glad you're better - and I don't think so either.
- lawpoop 9y agoIf it were strictly a placebo effect, I would expect any sort of treatment-- anti depresents (I've been on a dozen), talking theraposts, anccupuncture, accupressure, hypnotism, etc. etc. To have worked. If it were just the fact that I was being treated that caused my mind to cure itself, why did all of the previous lengthy and cost-incuring treatments fail? If "placebo effect" is proffered as a debunking explanation, I'm curious as to the explanation of why this particular sham treatment had the placebo effect, while other sham and real treatments failed to have any effect, real or placebo.
- jwdunne 9y agoActually, I'm not saying it's a placebo effect at all. I'm saying that the brain is powerful enough to produce one as an example. My point is that if the brain has that kind of healing power, it makes sense that other treatments that are not generally accepted will have healing power above and beyond placebo. I don't doubt these treatments helped you.
- pdimitar 9y agoIMO it is time for people to start assuming responsibility for their own healing and the numerous psychological / brain-state-altering techniques like meditation are a perfect example. If anything, the "placebo" sugar pills don't work by themselves; the patients feel better due to feeling calmer that their ailment is being addressed. That by itself proves that the brain has the power to cure a lot of conditions. I personally have found ways to self-cure with deep relaxation. I have well-repressed and usually well-controlled anxiety to this day. I am usually hyper-active and if I feel a bunch of free joules of energy in my body, I usually quickly expend them; pretty bad habit but I am working on it still. Meditation helps, A LOT. It calms your mind, reduces your CPU frequency -- so to speak -- and by this mechanism, or any other (not sure which one triggers the result) your brain manages to separate the wheat from the chaff and focus on what's really important right now. A bit off-tangent for sure. My point was that self-healing through altering the brain's state -- be it with meditation, psilocybin, or browsing your comic book collection from when you were a kid -- absolutely works. It serves as seeing the big picture periodically, roughly speaking.