"Humankind has remained hidden from itself from the dawn of time.
This hiding rests on one simple brain mechanism.
When we feel, we act.
This outwardness displaces us away from ourselves. It is the easiest way to reduce tension.
If we reverse this mechanism, if we lie down and continue to feel the feeling, instead of acting on it, and if we externalize this feeling with sounds and words, we are drawn downward into our own depths.
At this point, the dishonesty, which is intrinsic to our species, ends."
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"When a person has a powerful feeling about a present event, almost always the identical feeling has existed in the past having accompanied an earlier traumatic event. " -- Chapter 4
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"These insights well up instantly, seemingly from the whole body. They move like a wave front or wall of comprehension, seeming to originate from the abdomen, chest, bones and muscles, moving upward into consciousness. They do not feel like thoughts; they feel like sudden illuminations. They have the quality of sun suddenly breaking through cloud, illuminating the darkened landscape around us in a single awe-inspiring burst of comprehension." -- Chapter 5
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"Skin hunger is well known in the world of infants. Lack of skin contact gives rise to depression and death. This process in infants has been well known since the studies of Spitz and Bowlby conducted before World War II. In foundling homes, babies fed and kept clean experienced depression, and finally death, unless they were touched." -- Chapter 6
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- "I've been feeling awful lately. Is it common for people to feel worse and worse in this kind of therapy?
- Yes it is." -- Chapter 8
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"The therapist must believe in the central paradox of feeling-oriented therapy that if we go to the centre of the most painful and difficult feelings, no matter where they lead, and re-experience their shame and horror, we will gradually unburden and heal. Therapy is rarely straightforward and usually takes months or years to bring these experiences to the surface. Even after we do so, individual growth sequences must often be repeated many, many times." -- Chapter 8
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"I have floundered in a parenting and we have floundered in a civilization that has no discernible relationship to its truth. In my pain, I have been impassioned to find civilization's truth. The deeper I have gone, the more alone I have been and the sounds of my fellow human beings in their intellectual journeys have been like rain falling on a distant roof. I have learned that nothing is what it seems and any patient who comes to me learns the same awesome lesson." -- Chapter 9
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"Wanting to do deep work is a crucially important factor in doing it. Wanting, however, does not mean that a person can or would work in this way. Many people who want to do regressive therapy find that their defences will not allow it. They just cannot get down there. Others who can reach these levels should not attempt to do so. their pain may be too great, their ego structures too weakened by childhood experiences. " -- Chapter 9
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"When pain connects to its original source the agony can be immense but, at the very same moment or shortly thereafter, we sense an enormous rightness in the event. We know that at last we are on the road to health and, dimly though it may be perceived sunlight begins to break over the darkened landscape of our life. Pain becomes our friend. It is like the noise of a rusty hinge as we open a long-unused door to find a treasure which will illuminate our existence." -- Chapter 15
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"We concentrate on pain because it is our signal that something within us has not yet been worked through. Joy will come later, as a by-product of the work we do." -- Chapter 17
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"The ever-watchful unconscious will only let you in when it finally perceives that you have taken up the sword of inwardness and that you will not be turned aside. Then, and only then, will it begin to yield its ground to you. It tests you with serious discomfort. If, in spite of this, you remain implacably oriented toward it, it will fill your mind with its awesome and bittersweet treasures." -- Chapter 19
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"You must enter the paradox of embracing deeper and deeper pain in order to get rid of it (the central paradox of therapy). When you do this your reward will be to make deep connections, and to experience profound release from lifelong tension and dysfunction. You will also gain profound insight into yourself and all aspects of your world including the manipulative behavior of those around you." -- Chapter 19
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"Everything that we have ever thought or done makes perfect sense." -- Chapter 20
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"Chronic anxiety is one of the best tools we have; it is the entrance to the deeper self and, in the end, it will always yield to our techniques, bringing relief and insight." -- Chapter 20
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"There will be instances where people, beleaguered in mind, in body and in spirit, with nowhere to turn and no one to turn to, will use this manual without guidance. To you, I say, go slowly and with great care, remembering that whenever you turn to anyone for advice and help, unless they are accomplished depth therapists, you will sooner or later, be the object of their 'defensive wisdom.' As you trigger within them their own unworked-through feelings, they will advise you from mechanisms within their own false self. This advice will have as its common denominator an attempt to keep you from feeling your pain." -- Chapter 26
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"Trauma does not have to be sudden and dramatic. It can happen in small ways over a long period of time." -- Chapter 2
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"The human mind if allowed to feel will heal itself." -- Chapter 8
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"How much easier it is to hate, than to turn inward and face our fear." -- Chapter 20
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"Denial stands at the intersection of true and false in the mind. It keeps the seemingly negative or dark side of us so deeply frozen within our unconscious that most people go to their graves without knowing even a small portion of their deeper self." -- Chapter 20
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"Feelings are the x-rays of the mind, and although they may begin in confusion, in the end, if we go deeply enough, they do not lie." -- Chapter 20
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". . . I believe that most adult suicides are really childhood suicides that have been delayed and acted out much, much later." -- Chapter 20
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"Feel it and you will be freed from it. . . . It is astounding how the vast majority of psychotherapists and the vast majority of patients will do anything to avoid this truth." -- Chapter 2
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"Our job, as therapists, is to bring the past into view. Our job as . . . regressive therapists, is to arrange a feeling of the congruence between the present and the past event, powerful enough so that past events are reactivated and relived in the therapy room. " -- Chapter 4
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"It is doubtful to me and to almost every patient with whom I have ever spoken, that depth therapy can be pursued without the presence of a depth therapist." -- Chapter 26
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"People in deep therapy can become seriously disabled for months or years, mired in an ever-deepening cycle of pain and dysfunction." -- Chapter 1
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"About half of my patients can learn to focus deeply within their feelings. About one person in eight does continuous Level Four therapy." -- Chapter 9
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". . . The deeper you go, the more necessary it will be for you to have continuous therapy supervision." -- Chapter 17
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"It is easier to murder symbolically, or actually, then it is to feel the overwhelming sadness and rage of early parental betrayal." -- Chapter 9
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"(It) would seem that personality is a construct founded upon a base of terror." -- Chapter 8
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"It will usually be some time, weeks or months, before the confidence to actually lie down alone and do the therapy work emerges." -- Chapter 9
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"Everyone I have ever met wants relief from pain. Only one in three people who have come unscreened into my practice are prepared to fight for this release through aiming themselves into their own depths with courage, energy and determination. . . One in three are prepared to give up their sense that their pain exists because other people are hurting them." -- Chapter Nineteen
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"Even if we do know what is wrong in the present, more often than not it is resonating with something we do not know in the past." Chapter -- 14
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"There may be times of extraordinary terror on your journey." -- Chapter 26
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"More than two-thirds of my patients have reported an enhanced sense of spirituality." -- Chapter 28
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"Cars make great emergency primal rooms." -- Chapter 27
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