Article by Dr Arthur Janov.
When I watch TV it seems like every commercial is about some kind of pain killer: Tylenol, ibuprofen, pills for stomach distress, headaches, high blood pressure and on and on. The best kept secret is that we are nearly all in pain but nobody says it; the emperor is really naked but we all are looking the other way; we are looking outward instead of inward. The distress is caused by this or that in the environment, we think, but never what is inside. That is obvious since few of us can look inside.
We are all hurting but in different ways; the hurt goes to where we are most vulnerable. That is the health crisis that no one speaks its name. So why is that? Because no one can see it! It was installed so early and so subtly, long before we had conscious-awareness, that it doesn’t even have a name. So I give it a name: Primal Pain. And a location: the imprint: and the chemical means: methylation. But what we may not be aware of is that its one of the leading causes of death among us, more so than deaths in traffic accidents, according to a recent study. Some of us are in so much agony that we take far too much medication and threaten our lives. We use Xanax, Vicodin, Fentanyl, Demerol, Oxycontin and Soma; we are treating the wrong thing, and that is why we do not get relief. We treat the symptom and not the person; we treat appearances and not generating sources. That gap I call the Janovian Gap. It is between origins and our conscious awareness of them. So long as Primal Pain exists it will militate toward wherever it can. Worse, sometimes we have both headaches and back aches so we take pain killers for both and again risk an overdose. The medication normally will not kill us but when we take more and more it will.
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