CHAPTER EIGHT  
REBIRTHING AND CONVENTIONAL PSYCHOTHERAPIES

      The major difference between traditional methods of talk therapy and Rebirthing is well illustrated in the following scenario:

A man has been stabbed; the knife is still in his body, hurting him with his every breath.  He holds the protruding knife to keep it from wounding him even more as his body shakes in agony.

One of his friends, seeking to provide aid, asks solicitously, "How did it happen?"

The friend listens compassionately as the victim describes in exact detail the circumstances leading up to the stabbing.  They talk back and forth until the victim has fully communicated what happened, has given his ideas about why it happened, and has fully explained how the knife still prevents him from breathing or moving freely.

Still, after all the talk and explanation, the knife remains in place and the victim continues to suffer.

That's conventional psychotherapy-it concentrates on the negatives.

Another friend comes to help.  His questions are different.  Not concerned about how the stabbing came about, he instead asks, "How do you feel about being stabbed?  How do you feel about the person who stabbed you?  Have you ever felt like that before?"

They, too, talk back and forth until the victim has thoroughly ventilated his feelings about having been stabbed.  But, the knife is still in him and he still suffers.

That's expressive, emotion-release therapy.

Finally, a third friend comes by and asks, "What are you doing with that knife still stuck in you?  Why don't you get rid of it?"

He, too, listens patiently while the suffering man explains that the knife hurts so much he doesn't dare move it and he has to keep it in place.  The friend points out that the knife will drop out once the victim stops holding onto it and encourages him to let it go, whereupon the knife clatters to the floor.  The wound bleeds a little, but that's part of the natural healing which immediately starts to take place.  In a relatively short time, even the memory of the incident is forgotten as the man rushes to get back to having fun.

That's Rebirthing.

Like the first two friends in this scenario, traditional psychotherapies are concerned with epiphenomena, like deciding how you were hurt, why you were hurt, how your hurt still affects your here-and-now life, etc.  Such considerations don't stop the pain.  They merely give you a comfortable intellectual understanding of your pain and your adjustment to it.  You isolate yourself from your pain as you intellectualize, even as you engage in dream interpretations and free associations.  But you don't eliminate the pain or its source.

Most so-called successful psychotherapy merely results in the patient's being able to divorce himself from his problems sufficiently to perform and act like other people who, presumably, don't have such problems.

I know that my former colleagues who still practice traditional talk therapy are well-trained, compassionate, sensitive, and devoted to the form of psychotherapy being practiced.  I've never known a therapist who was indifferent to the costs in money and time and painful discomfort spent by the patients consulting him for help.

Yet most continue to practice the technique they settled upon in their late twenties and scorn most innovations including even diet and nutritional supplement approaches to mood, energy, and other personality variables.

I imagine something about the old mode resonates with the early imprints these therapists established, so changing their minds about therapy is as difficult as giving up any other convictions based on early imprints.

It's almost as if therapists are afraid they may jeopardize their safety if they change their basic beliefs.

That's why I urge people, especially therapists, to engage in a Rebirth session before deciding they don't approve of it.

In a sense, traditional talk psychotherapies are like the use of tranquilizer drugs that blot out human consciousness along with alleviating anxiety, or the use of psychosurgery and convulsive shock that interrupt normal brain function.  These all either cover up or prevent old negatives from determining the patient's behavior on the superficial level of today's acceptable social behavior, yet the problem may still operate, determining private feelings and thoughts, interfering with healthy basic bodily reactions.

By contrast, Rebirthing appears to eliminate tension and disease (dis-ease).  The client becomes healthy and positive automatically as a consequence of letting go the negative feelings and thoughts and bodily reactions which characterize his disease.  No longer is there a split between private and public, between the symbol and the reality.  What is revealed in the Rebirther's social acts is a direct enactment of the consciously perceived Self.

All people recapitulate the circumstances of their birth in everything that they do.  They develop their ego mechanisms on the foundation of the outstanding factors of their birth.  Their consciousness is closely related to the pre-natal, peri-natal, and post-natal states that had the greatest charge for them.

Dr. Stanislav Grof delineates a limited number of such states of consciousness:

First, there is endless oceanic bliss, the sort of feeling that a wanted, happy infant experiences from the time of conception through his first few months of womb existence.  Everything is being provided to the enlarging, growing fetus, who's exploding into life.  All the waste products are being taken away as promptly as they're created.  The baby is just in Bliss.

Other people later in life may still be lost in their efforts to return to this stage, the only state of bliss they have ever experienced.  In their search for such autistic satisfaction, they may become opiate addicts, alcoholics, over-eaters, or withdrawn psychotics.  Mood disturbances accompany their failure to achieve the bliss they cling to from the first stage.

Other people are trapped in the second stage of womb existence where there is increasing discomfort due to the increasing concentration of waste products not carried away fast enough, and the increasing sense of deprivation as food, energy, and oxygen aren't provided at the same previously high rate.  The discomfort becomes increasingly greater until finally the child seeks to escape from that uncomfortable state through initiating the process of birth, which leads to a third state of existence.

People arrested in this second pre-natal stage generally experience life as threatening and overwhelming.  They may become aggressive as they project their impotence or simply reveal their doubt and weakness in paranoid and obsessive behavior. 

In the third stage, the first post-natal state, freedom from the old constraint of the womb is achieved, but at the price of experiencing chaos.  A lot of different sensations assault the newborn child, not only light and sound and temperature changes, but also touch and weight.  Most importantly, if he is to succeed in staying alive, the newborn child must breathe for himself and must receive nourishment, support, nurturance, and succorance from those around him.  Because all this may be fraught with struggle, this third stage may very well be regarded as a continuation of the birth struggle, perhaps made psychologically worse because the infant's rejection of the womb has brought this third stage about.  His independent decision to leave the womb hasn't brought him the relief he seeks.  Compulsions, impulsivity, and hysteria are developed as the individual seeks to handle the anxiety of dealing with the many sensory assaults and needs accompanying this third stage.

And then, finally, there is the fourth state of existence.  This is where the person no longer seeks that blissful oceanic union that characterized the first stage, and where the person no longer feels the increasing discomfort, alienation, isolation, and separation that are part of the second stage or the incessant need and struggle of the third stage.  In the fourth stage, everything is integrated.  Otto Rank called this stage "the state of being a true artist"in the experience of life.  True artists in living can create bliss and satisfaction for themselves.

A person who is still holding on to his grievances from the first three states is not and cannot be psychologically mature and healthy.  One way or another, he's stuck in his birth.  He's emotionally ill.  Whatever the symptoms of his illness may be, his illness is always the same: he hasn't left his birth behind.

For me, just as the illness is always the same, the cure is always the same: Let go old birth-related negatives that you've been carrying around and holding onto in your body and your thought and your feelings and your spirit and your being, and think positive thoughts that allow you to create an ongoing positive, supportive reality for yourself.

What your old negatives are doesn't matter.  Getting rid of them is all that counts.  As Leonard Orr put it, "You don't need to sort through the garbage to find out what stinks.  You just need to throw it out." The breathing will get rid of them.

And of the several ways already described for letting old negatives go, I recommend Rebirthing.

Rebirthing is not an analysis of whatever is involved in perpetuating the painful condition.  Rebirthing is a healing of birth.

Rebirthing easily and promptly moves people through their birth and through the uncomfortable post-natal stages.  They are thus in a position to create post-natal bliss for themselves, to have the constantly new, satisfying life of the artist that Rank and Grof both spoke of.

When I first got involved with Rebirthing and started to study it, I realized that there are an immense number of connections between Rebirthing and the theories of perception that were formulated in experimental psychology by the early scientistsC the Gestaltists, people like Kafka and Kohler.  These extremely objective experimentalists discovered the very basis of Rebirthing: "Keine Gestalt ohne Gestalter,"that is, "There is no pattern without the pattern-maker."

When we translate that from the world of experimental psychology into the realm of ordinary interaction in life, it is still valid and true.  I, by my Thought, am constantly creating the life that I am interacting with.  To heal myself, I must change my Thought.  I won't progress by concentrating on my grievances.  I must stop thinking my negative thoughts.

We all know that the very same activity or event can be regarded in different settings with at least two totally different kinds of appreciation.  For example, I don't take offense if I'm walking down the street and suddenly a friend I haven't seen for years runs over to me, turns me around, punches me in the arm and says, excitedly, "Goddammit, you son of a bitch!"

My reaction is to grab him in exchange, thump him on the back as I hug him, and to say, "Goddamn you son of a bitch!  Where have you been?  I haven't seen you in ages!"

My reaction is not one of pain.  Being thumped and grabbed doesn't hurt me at all.  Instead I feel exaltation and joyful surprise.

Imagine another example: I just brought in the winning run, I've just come across home plate, my team has just won the World Series, and now we are acknowledged as the world's best baseball team because of me!

What's going to happen to me?  Why, the minute I come across home plate, everybody on my team is going to run over and pile on top of me, hitting me, thumping me, grabbing me, twisting me, tossing me around, cursing and yelling.  And with all that, it's going to be a moment of great triumph and joy for me, not pain.

By contrast, if I'm walking down the street and some stranger moves against me and I have the impression that he didn't notice me or care about brushing up against me, I may well take offense.  When I look at my body later, I may even find that I actually got scratched or bruised by getting bumped against, however innocently the person bumping me might have been contacting me.

Anybody who has done the firewalks or boardbreaking has learned, quite definitely, that thought controls reactions of the body.  It is truly mind over matter.

Strangely enough, apparently this has been ignored by most psychotherapists.  What talk therapists have failed to acknowledge is the effect of the talk therapy process itself.

The majority of the time spent in conventional therapy is spent analyzing and discussing grievances.  We spend our sessions complaining about things that were wrong, how we were harmed, what we did wrong, how we hurt other people, how we've screwed up, how our life has been screwed up.  The focus is always on the negatives.

No wonder most people find that talk therapy doesn't work, that their lives simply don't improve!

That's because Thought is Creative.  What we think about enlarges.

As the Bible says, "As a man thinketh, so doth the man live."

If this idea is correct, it's easy to understand why traditional therapies usually fail to benefit the patient: he is constantly concentrating on what was wrong in his life, and so he is constantly creating more grievances for himself!

Most of the people I see as Rebirth clients have been in some form of conventional psychotherapy before coming to me.  Usually, they have been involved with some form of therapy that depends on talk, like psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, Rogerian client-centered, non-directive therapy, Gestalt therapy, psycho-drama, or play-therapy.  A few patients were even in the newer forms like Zen therapy or Primal therapy which depend on expressing and dramatizing emotions, rather then on developing new insights and cognitions with regard to life, as the older, more traditional talk therapies do.

But whatever the form of conventional talk therapy or the form of expressive therapy was that they were involved with, such therapy, generally speaking, was ineffective.  It took many months and years and it cost a great deal, but the changes were not significant.

If those therapies had worked, these people wouldn't be coming for Rebirthing!  They come, still searching, because their other therapies haven't worked to enable them to create the lives they have wanted.

            I've listened to many therapists say that finding satisfaction is not the aim of therapy.  These other therapies, when they've been regarded as successful, must have based their criteria for "success"on something other than happiness.  Instead they talk about how it's important for people to adjust to their limitations, to stop having unrealistic expectations, to acknowledge that they are damaged.  But I question, "Important for what?"

Certainly not for happiness and satisfaction.  At the end of many years of hope for change and the expenditure of immense quantities of money, time, and effort, though the typical patient may understand exactly why he's as unhappy and sick as he is and why his life is as bad as it is, and though he may at least feel free to feel bad about it, his life still hasn't changed!

Some therapies even make acceptance of unsatisfying lives the very basis of the therapy.  Janov, for example, made a big point in Primal Therapy, when I was involved with it, in getting people to acknowledge and accept the fact that they had been damaged, they were ruined, there was nothing that would ever happen to them that would make life any better, they were crippled.  They had to accept that and acknowledge that and orient their life around that.  They had to abandon all hope of ever being able to be different.  They stayed unhappy and apparently incapable of being happy.  So, of course, they didn't get well.

After more than fifty years as a clinical psychologist, ardently studying many therapies, including client-centered and Gestalt, and diligently practicing, first, psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, then Primal therapy, and finally Rebirthing, I conclude that talking about your troubles doesn't help much and neither does getting into your feelings.

From my point of view, the big problem with conventional talk therapies, as with the expressive, emotion-release therapies, is that by concentrating on the negatives, they perpetuate the negatives.  Thus they don't produce prompt healing.

I was certainly pleased with I first moved into Rebirthing and found that it was possible to concentrate on the breath and concentrate on positive thoughts.  As I did that, they enlarged, and my life transformed.

People often ask me if I don't believe that conventional therapy is nevertheless necessary for people who are extremely disturbed.  They challenge by saying, AYou couldn't use Rebirthing with someone who is psychotic, could you?"

And my general reply is as follows:

A)  First of all, most talk therapies also don't work very well, if at all, with people who are what we call psychotic.  The very few dedicated psychoanalysts, like Sechehaye and Rosen for example, who dealt with psychotic people, spent immense amounts of time, years, with each individual patient.  Even then, while they may have produced some significant results, by and large their patients never became what would be regarded ordinarily as normal people.

B)  Secondly, of course I use Rebirthing with psychotic people!  I use it with everyone and anyone who asks for help.

Indeed, the distinction between what is psychotic and what is not becomes a meaningless distinction once personality development is placed into the birth framework.

To say that one person who is caught in one part of his birth process is "crazier"than another person who's stuck in another part of his birth process seems to me to be pretty silly.  I see people who are labeled "psychotic"as just manifesting some aspects of birth consciousness and pre-natal consciousness that are different from the ones that people who are regarded as "neurotic"are manifesting.  Diagnosis no longer involves labeling the disease state on the basis of which later psychosexual development stages symbolically represent the birth stage in which a patient is stuck-all that matters is that the patient is stuck and the connected breathing pattern enables him to let go his attachment to whatever birth stage most caused his failure to progress into living in reality.

I've also taught many attendants, nurses, psychiatrists, and residents in mental health hospitals how to use Rebirthing, and there have been several programs that involved the routine use of Rebirthing with psychotic people.  All those programs resulted in great, good, prompt positive effects.  Although such Rebirthing programs have all been suspended after being used successfully, the reasons for stopping have always been political, rather than because Rebirthing doesn't work with severely disturbed individuals.

Several studies have been done in hospitals, using Rebirthing as the treatment of choice for randomly-selected new entering psychotic patients.  Such studies show that Rebirthing is effective with psychotics.  After two or three Rebirth sessions, many thus-diagnosed people came back in contact with reality to such an extent that they were discharged promptly from the mental health hospitals in which they had been incarcerated.  Yet, because of the usual unfortunate politics and economics of hospitalization, Rebirthing has not yet replaced conventional talk therapies in such situations.

            Most of my fellow mental health professionals readily agree that the traditional methods of treatment for emotionally disturbed people have failed to help even a bare majority of the people receiving such care.  Even so, my friends and colleagues who still practice conventional therapies are almost always angered by my stating that talk therapies don't work well even for the few who are helped who still aren't enjoying lives they want to live.

              However, my friends and colleagues who study clinical outcome generally agree with me that conventional talk therapy is usually ineffective.  Hans Eysenk, who has done many outcome studies, has found that conventional talk therapy seems to be helpful for only four out of ten people.  For the other six out of ten, talk therapy is essentially an expensive, but non-productive activity.

When I used to lecture to my college classes about this, I always pointed out that the population that conventional talk therapy works for is very select, and even so, talk therapy only works after a great expenditure of time, effort, and money.

I, myself, was involved in a two-year study that was conducted in the early 50s by Carl Rogers and many other members of the Counseling Center at the University of Chicago.  By many measures, it seemed as if all those clients who were involved in Rogerian client-centered, non-directive therapy were improving.  Still, by any measures of change in effective use of healthy ego-mechanisms, very little was accomplished. 

My own experience with most of my friends and colleagues who've been in talk therapy is that it has been an almost endless process and it has not resulted in significant changes in their life patterns.  Freud rightfully called the process Aanalysis interminable."

By contrast, Rebirthing works marvelously with any psychopathological problem, regardless of age, language, culture, or intelligence, especially when the breathing is combined with a decent, non-allergenic, non-addictive, diet that isn't confounding the issue by disturbing normal, healthy physiological functions.

Unlike other psychotherapies, Rebirthing is independent of intellectual level, ability to verbalize, motivation, or other qualities thought to determine if a given individual is a likely candidate for that therapy.

As a Rebirther, I can accept for treatment almost any individual seeking help, not just a few carefully selected individuals.  I have effectively Rebirthed many people in many different parts of the world without any communication other than directions given through a translator on how to breathe.  I still receive mail from several people in China, for example, whom I Rebirthed a dozen years ago, telling me how well their lives are working and how they're still continuing to do the Rebirth breath.

Unlike patients in other psychotherapies, my Rebirthees are not dependent on me or on my judgment of their progress.  They know how well they can carry on the connected breathing without my supervision, and they usually perceive the changes in their personalities and lives well before I can.  So they judge independently and accurately when Rebirthing is healing them and meeting their expectations of improvement.  And they decide when to stop seeing me.

As a consequence, transference and resistance are minimized, and I don't need to be artificially separated socially from my Rebirthees.  I can Rebirth friends and relatives and intimates as easily as I can Rebirth strangers.

Because it works and works quickly, overall the total cost of treatment with Rebirthing is significantly smaller than traditional talk therapy.  Rebirthing is even less expensive than short-term crisis treatment that starts with the understanding that there will be only a limited time period for treatment. 

This lower cost of Rebirthing appears to reflect not only the absence of psychological dependency between client and therapist and the many fewer sessions required to produce noticeable positive changes, but also, in part, the fact that the professional training of most Rebirthers is much less expensive and drawn-out than the training of conventional psychotherapists, so that the Rebirther has less need to recover years of costly education from each hour spent with a client.  Usually, the total cost of treatment can be accurately predicted at the beginning of treatment; and the total cost is seldom more than an average patient might willingly consider spending on an annual vacation.

I use conventional interviewing techniques only at the beginning of a Rebirth session to try to find out what it is that the person is thinking, what he is doing with his Thinker that is perpetuating his problems.  A non-professionally trained, but clear-headed, Rebirther can ask, just as well as I do, "What's wrong with your life?"or "What changes do you want in your life?"