Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one could cure negative emotions as easily as one cures a headache, you take one pill, one medicament, it doesn’t even have to be the same package you took the last time, and still the pain disappears in a few minutes, hopefully to never return again.

Bad emotions plague our daily lives so much so that almost all the modern deadliest diseases are helped by or induced through negative emotions, we only recently began to understand the full psychosomatic effects that stress, repressed anger and sadness has on our body. Recently I discovered something that helped me release and thus cure the stress and anger which for so long tormented me, but first, in order to understand how we can escape the deadly consequences of chronic stress, we must understand how it starts to affect us.

Bottling up the rage.

At some point in your life you faced genuine stressful situations which could not be solved in any obvious way, At that moment, when the rush of cortisol (the stress hormone) hit you, you couldn’t react the way that it is natural for you to react in, either because of the social stigma, emotional problems or other factors that prevented you from opening up and releasing the anger and the frustration- so you kept it to your self. You forced your mouth closed, your throat grew stiff, your breath shallow and your body was paralyzed for a brief moment in order to keep yourself from reacting the way nature meant for you to react in. You closed your emotion inside you, you imprisoned it in your mind, your body and your muscles, but it didn’t go away, just because you didn’t manifest it at that time doesn’t mean its gone, it stayed inside you, burning in your soul, in the darkest caverns of your unconscious. The longer it stayed there, the stronger it became, it bubbles inside you, and through time and repetition the held back emotion developed into a nervous holding pattern. It was held up in your body for too long, eating away at your confidence. You thought it was gone when you suppressed it, but it manifested through your speech, through your tone of voice, through the way you held your self, though your eye contact or lack there of, etc and etc. The terrible truth is we face problems like these every day, and every day we create new holding patterns which suppress who we are more and more and through years of this dreadful process we become but husks of what once was a man, we become imprisoned by our own insecurities and depressed by the same emotions we suppressed for so long, we develope mental illnesses and later even physical ones. So the big question is, how do we break free from these holding patterns, how do we release the pent-up emotions in a way that is safe and socially acceptable, how do we return the life once taken to the empty man?

The answer to those questions is something called the primal scream therapy.

What is primal scream therapy?

Primal therapy is a trauma-based school of psychotherapy first developed by pshycologist Arthut Janov. It is, simply put, based on the idea that repressed pain, especially childhood pain which is causes by trauma can only be resolved by reliving the trauma in a therapeutic way. In my, simple yet effective definition, I would say that primal therapy is basically screaming until you feel better. When one thinks about it, isn’t exactly this the most natural way that we react to stress? We shout and scream and curse, it is almost as if nature created this mechanism for stress relief which we fail to put to good use because of social norms. It is “bad manners” to shout and yell and cry in pain and anger. Isn’t it natural that as a man you should be able to take control of your own emotions and release them in a controlled and safe manner. No one can argue that there isn’t something primal, liberating and relaxing about letting out a loud, deep battle cry to heal your wounds of battle.

People releasing anger through the primal scream:

How does one perform the primal scream?

It is a very simple technique to do, and anyone can do it, though it does take a few preliminary tries in order to get it right for someone who never did this kind of therapy before, it takes time for a person to get totally comfortable with doing this in order to experience the full benefits. First of all, if you are doing this alone, find a pillow to bury your head in while doing the primal scream because it can get quite loud once you start and it might help you feel less self-conscious while doing it. If, on the other hand someone who you trust is helping you do it, I find it best to do it in their embrace.

The first step is to sit, or lay close to your pillow and breath deeply for a few minutes, you want to prepare your mind for what is to come, you also need to breath deep in order to be able to scream from your abdomen once the primal scream occurs, because screaming from your throat is not only much less effective, but could also damage your vocal cords. Once you feel ready, try to remember a situation which made the suppressed anger or pain or sadness arise, you want to force yourself to relive the emotion which you caused the nervous holding pattern. If you are not sure which event causes it, just think about the negative aspects of your life which being you pain or stress. Once you have the event or situation in mind, try to remember it step by step, moment by moment as detailed as possible in your mind, the setting, the ambient, the words that were said, what you felt in that moment in time, try to bring the negative emotion to the front of your consciousness.

Once you feel the emotion so strongly that you cannot hold it back any longer, bury your face in your pillow, or in the embrace of a trusted person and cry out loudly and powerfully from your lower abdomen tensing up your body with the emotion as it comes through you and out of you in those few seconds. While you let out your scream your body may be prompted to move or vibrate, and you should allow it to do so, go with any impulses that you might feel in that moment. After the first or second deep inhale and cry, your body should take over the control of the situation, crying out will start to feel more as a need than as a voluntary action, it will almost feel like vomiting out the scream from your body completely involuntarily, which is utterly natural at this point. Your body will feel like a bottle being forced open as the pain comes out uncontrollably, once that feeling subsides, the screams and tremors will stop naturally and your body will be free of the neurotic pattern which held it. Of course doing this once won’t solve any problems, although you most certainly will feel much better, I do this therapy at least once every week, and more often depending on the level of stress i experience at time time. With that you will notice that your mental and psychosomatic disbalances will start to disappear and you will feel and perform much better in the long run.

Recently, I did my primal scream session in front of my girlfriend for the first time. It was early morning, and six days passed from my last session, I explained to her what it was, i knelt beside her on the bed as she was laying down. It took me a minute to bring forth the negative emotions, as they came i let out a deep and fear inducing battle cry full of primal rage, i released the anger five times, each cry lasting for about ten seconds. After I was done, she asked me, shocked by the primal mature of my roar-like cry, where did all this rage come from. I thought about it a little, and i realized that nothing major happened in the past week to cause me such frustration and pain, it was the little things, the little day-to-day frustrations and repression of our true expression which causes us to develope these holding patterns, whose severity can only be described by the mighty roar a man releases during this therapy.

If you want to learn more about primal scream therapy I recommend looking through the following literature and resources:

And for a community to help you in your journey of becoming a better you, i recommend that you subscribe to my mailing list via a form at the bottom of this page, I promise you there won’t be any spam mail, only updates on when my next article is out. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed.