Andy Bernay-Roman practices his version of primal therapy in Jupiter, Florida.

Being a registered nurse, as well as a psychologist and massage therapist, Andy has worn many caps in his career. From tending older patients in hospital intensive care units to teaching pre-schoolers, Andy has had enriching experiences with persons at both ends of the age spectrum. He is particularly interested in body psychotherapy.

Andy's unique style introduces us to different ways of looking at regressive psychotherapy. He drew from many sources to come up with his Centropic Integration therapy. He is the only deep regression therapist, as far as I know, who combines acupuncture points holding with his core regression therapy. At the end of this interview you will find links to his website, a book review of Deep Feeling, Deep Healing and a selection of quotations from his book which I found particularly moving.

He is also the only "deep feeling" therapist I have read who has included in his book fascinating case stories of his own child in the therapy. And as you might expect, that section was one of the most interesting parts of his book.

-- John A. Speyrer, Webmeister, The Primal Psychotherapy Page

PRIMAL PSYCHOTHERAPY PAGE: How does stored pain (trauma) relate to disease?

ANDY BERNAY-ROMAN: At the Hippocrates Health Institute, I often work with people who have been given difficult medical diagnoses. I inevitably find some correlation with their disease process and the process of repressed feeling. Even to the point where the disease seems like the body’s pantomime of the inner repressed turmoil. I won’t go so far as to say this disease means this, or that condition means that, but I will say I’ve seen patterns of repression that seem to go along with certain body systems and certain ailments.

The science of it is just being discovered, but it basically has to do with the inner stress induced by repression of feelings contributing to an unhealthy flooding of the system with emergency hormones and the fight-or-flight response of the nervous system without letting up. Over time this unnatural flow inhibits oxygen delivery to certain parts of the body, increases muscular tension, and creates chemical havoc. It makes sense that that state would drive cells nuts, or seriously hamper healthy functioning.

If that weren’t bad enough, the body-response to trauma when it is repressed gets shunted upwards to the cognitive brain and influences our thoughts, beliefs, and sense of self, filling it with neurosis, phobias, dysfunctional patterns of relating, and all sorts of mental disorders. These things normalize when a person taps into and drains the pool of pain. It might be a bold thing to say that connecting with and feeling repressed pain sets the stage for physical healing, but I see it over and over again.

PPP: We know that certain diseases are psychosomatic, such as functional headaches, allergies, etc., But what about the non-psychophysiological disease? Does stored pain influence their course?

ANDY: The understanding that some illnesses are psychosomatic has been around since the ‘40’s. The Psychosomatic Seven include asthma, migraines, allergies, and some others. It was revolutionary to think that back then. Now I believe the same psychosomatic influence plays into all physical ailments. I’m not saying that repressed feelings always are causative of illness, but I am saying repressed feelings inevitably help set the stage for illness, and always influence the course of an illness. I remember one woman in particular right now: she had severe liver cancer and was in marked pain in our sessions together. One time when she went especially deep into her anger and hurt, she emerged, to her surprise, physically pain-free. She got a first-hand experience of the mind/body connection.

PPP: As a therapist, do you find that everyone has repressed pain?

ANDY: I think it’s almost inevitable that some part of the psyche gets repressed just because we grow up in family and social systems comprised of people who aren’t fully feeling, or who filter their own experiences through their particular beliefs and values that may or may not fit with those of the kid they are raising. Repression is a great survival tool. It helps us keep going in the face of pain. Anything with such strong survival value is going to show up a lot in the species. So my answer is: Pretty much, but not always. And we don’t always deal with repressed pain in therapy either. That’s only for the people

• who want to and are willing to go there;
• who understand that their present responses to things are being modulated by inner defenses to old pains; and that
• the way to be free from that inner twisting is through connecting and feeling.

  
  

PPP: Please explain physical point-holding. Does physical point-holding actually quicken the primal process?

ANDY: I’ve found that sustained pressure on certain endocrine acupressure points stimulates feeling memories to emerge. This sort of tool needs to be used wisely because it does quicken the process. I like to use this method to help a person stay at the body level of their experience when that’s a problem for them. The point-holding often provides the oomph necessary to get in touch in a somatic way, and out of the intellect.

The science of this has to do, I believe, with the common connection the endocrine system and the feeling/memory parts of the limbic system have with the hypothalamus. That’s why one stimulates the other: they share common circuitry. Very cool!

PPP: In Deep Feeling, Deep Healing, you explain how hospitalized patients were able to regress to their early feelings and thereby begin their healing process. I would believe that a serious illness would definitely lower one's defenses, but I would not think that a hospital would be an environment which could be conducive to deep feeling therapy due to lack of privacy and the openness of the hospital environment. How could a patient in such a restrictive environment feel safe enough to begin the deep feeling process?

ANDY: It may not have been a matter of feeling safe enough to do it, but rather they were, like it or not, flooded by it. I saw these regressive incidents happen spontaneously, and took note of them because they seemed to influence the course of the ailment or healing.

Lucky me to have been in the right place at the right time, seeing as how I was in the belly of the medical beast -- the model that says how you feel has nothing to do with your physical condition. After a while I made my own attempts to help facilitate such experiences for people in the hospital, and they responded. This worked especially well in the Intensive Care Unit and in Hospice, where there is enough privacy to get to stuff uninterrupted.

PPP: How do you react when a client descends into a deep past-life feeling? Do you believe that such regressions are real or symbolic?

ANDY: I react with fascination. And I don’t care if it’s real or symbolic as long as the outcome is real. I’m inclined to stay skeptical, but I facilitate as best I can anyway. One incident where a client regressed to a past life and relived a drowning, and then emerged free from asthma symptoms, was very compelling.

PPP: Under what circumstances do you find using hypnotherapy useful?

ANDY: "I use hypnotherapy as the opposite of the overload experience that often comes with primaling -- to reach the same place, or at least to help the person understand that going into primal territory can be a safe experience. Hypnotherapy eases a person into a pure parasympathetic relaxation response. That’s when I’ll remind them to visit something not so safe in their memory that might elicit an emergency body response. I use it as a way to reassure people who might otherwise freak-out at their own primal deep feeling response, that it’s OK to go there. It leads to a place of learning that “OK, this is just a memory. This is just a body response”, and teaches the fundamental healthy tenant of feeling therapy: “This is me having my feelings, not them having me.”

PPP: Do you always combine breathwork with your Centropic Integration therapy? If not, when would you use breathwork?

ANDY: When I do point-holding, yes. Based on a simple principle: people who hold their feelings, hold their breath. Sometimes outside the point holding arena, I remind people to breathe, or become aware of how they are holding their breath. The breath is central to feeling, and so is awareness of it.

PPP: Do you believe that your Centropic Integration therapy would increase or decrease the amount of spirituality in a client?

ANDY: If by spirituality you mean the awareness of the Self that was there before anything was programmed or introduced into experience from the outside, I say Centropic Integration definitely increases it. And because that self is so original and real, touching into it in therapy does spill over into the person’s everyday life. They become sensitized people, more aware of the frailty of others, and more in touch with the suffering that comes from not feeling. People free from their own painful memories, who have taken the path of integrating their stored hurts into consciousness, inevitably find an abiding sense of depth in their lives.

PPP: Are there any particular changes in the set and setting of a therapy session which would make a transpersonal and archetypal feelings more accessible?

ANDY: Yes. I use evocative music as a background sometimes, and that seems to stimulate the archetypal levels of awareness. Also a prayerful attitude. When I, as the therapist, approach the session large, it has more probability of going large, even when the client goes into smallness. I hope you get what I mean by that.

PPP: You have little to say of cellular consciousness. How early do you believe that pain can be imprinted?

ANDY: The entire perinatal time is fair game for early imprinting. I’ve seen client’s lips turn blue, and forceps marks appear on their forehead in an emergence of a birth experience. I’ve seen clients flop around like fish, in what they later reported was a fetal memory. I’ve even had some report painful memories with a return to the spark of conception. Scientists used to believe that babies not only didn’t feel things, but that they wouldn’t remember or be influenced by painful experiences, but the research now definitively shows that that is not true. I believe people can remember imprints from embryonic, fetal, and newborn times, and thereby undo the unconscious, damaging effects of repressing them.

PPP: Theoretically, if a person has no repressed trauma could he develop depression after a huge shock such as a diagnosis of an aggressive, and ultimately, fatal disease? In other words, is depression always a result of repressed trauma? Could extreme physical pain trigger depression even when there is (again theoretically) no earlier trauma?

ANDY: Repressed trauma is not the only source of deep feelings. We have the capacity to feel deeply because we are human beings, and that’s not just when we are kids.

I believe depression is actually disconnected grieving, a way not to feel. Depression is flat-lining of feeling which doesn’t necessarily connect to events from the distant past. Depression is a symptom of dealing with overwhelming grief. Some people get on with feeling, and thereby get through the depression, and others fight it, and thereby get stuck in it.

It’s certainly possible to be faced with a current trauma or shock, and become so overwhelmed by the grief response, and thereby slip into depression even as an adult with no prior childhood trauma, repressed or otherwise. Even as adults we retain the built-in capacity to get through difficult events by splitting, or fragmenting our own experience, and then integrating things bit by bit. Yes, adults without any traumatic history can still get depressed.

To be the victim of senseless violence, or to experience great loss, or both, can set anyone into a deep feeling response. The events of 9/11 are a testimony to that. A person would naturally struggle to find meaning in all that suffering, and “getting right with life” again might not happen all at once. That would make a certain period of the grieving response, even in a feeling person, seem depressive.

PPP: Have you completed your own regressive therapy?

ANDY: I believe I’ve achieved critical mass. I still regress sometimes, and sometimes to places deeper than I’ve been before. I especially like a deep hot bath for those times. Am I over all infantile behavior? Ask my wife.

PPP: Do you plan to write a future book? If so, what would it emphasize?

ANDY: Writing my book helped me get all my insights and experiences with therapy out there, and I felt compelled to do that. I’m pleased that I did, and that I’ve gotten a great response from readers. People have asked me to write a follow-up to Deep Feeling . . ., and include many more tales of therapy, so I’m thinking about it. But frankly, I don’t feel so compelled to do so. I think my next book would focus on living in relationship from a deep feeling perspective. I think it’s the best arena for personal development because it’s so intimate and it’s harder to hide out. That would be a book I’d buy!

PPP: Thanks Andy !
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