The first law of pain: the Skill of Healing Individual Suffering

What is Suffering?

Suffering in life can encompass many things, some of which are tangible whereas others are more obscure. The most direct evidence of suffering is, of course, debilitating disease and illness such as asthma, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, or serious mental illness. The more obscure and intangible examples of suffering include migraines, phobias, panic attacks, and emotional disturbances. There are also everyday kinds of suffering which the majority of people never really resolve but instead put up with throughout their lives, like headaches, habits, personality traits, fears, anxieties, sexual dysfunction, relationship problems, and job dissatisfaction. To cope with all of these problems, society is awash with pharmaceutical medicines, social drugs like coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, a hard drug subculture, and many different conventional and alternative therapies and treatments. There seems to be so many problems and so many claimed "cures" that a solution to human suffering just seems impossible to achieve.

People shouldn't really suffer from headaches or phobias or obsessions because there is usually nothing going on in their present lives that would cause such intense problems. So where does suffering come from? There is only one place that it could come from and that is from a person's past--old experiences are impinging upon present day life causing people to suffer mysterious ailments, and in other cases to appear to be behaving irrationally.

Most people actually have an idea of why they are suffering. The alcoholic talks about how they didn't get properly cared for in childhood because their mother/father was always drunk. The devoutly religious person recalls how they weren't always that religious--until a parent died when they were young and they found solace in the church. The man suffering from an ulcer says that it is probably a result of a stressful divorce years ago. Even though most people have a rough idea of where their problems in life come from, they are unable to change and make the problems go away; and what is more, the many health care practitioners also seem to be unable to heal such problems--they only help people to cope with them.

The Skill for Healing Suffering

The problem with past experiences that cause suffering is that they are locked in time: i.e., locked into the past. So the many and varied problems that people suffer from cannot be resolved simply by talking about them in the present, or by just understanding them in the present, or by altering one's present-day behaviour, or by getting things off your chest in the present. Present-day problems originate from past painful experiences--or nervopains--which are psychoemotionally unresolved. Therefore, the suffering person must go back into those painful experiences (back in time as far as the brain is concerned) to reexperience those parts containing hurt, anguish and despair that was unable to be expressed at that past time - but which can now be safely expressed out of the system. In superpsychology terms, this process is known as exfeeling: the active expression of feelings, connected to the past, which produces a healing phenomenon. It is a healing skill that can be learned over a period of one to two years.

Three Levels of Individual Consciousness

It has also been found that people just don't have one nervopainful experience in their lives, but each person has many unresolved hurtful episodes from the past that need to be reexperienced and resolved. And what is more, that there are three distinct levels of consciousness in the individual, so that nervopains trapped at different stages of development have their own distinct characteristics: a fetus-baby is viscerally conscious and so pain repressed at this time of life will cause health disorders in the visceral areas, such as colic, asthma, migraines, etc.; a child-teenager is developing physically and emotionally and so pain repressed at this time of life can slightly alter bodily proportions, or produce anger, depression, etc.; and a teenager-adult is cortically conscious and so pain repressed at this time of life will be acted-out on a more symbolic level, like the development of business buzz words, slick handshakes, or a druggy street language, etc. Overall, though, nervopains that occurred to us in our lives are all linked together like knots on a string--which acts like a false genetic code because it imparts in us irrational habits, obsessions and compulsions, as well as a phoney overriding "personality". Such an affliction in superpsychology terms is known as nervotension. Suffering people, therefore, do not need a short period of therapy to try to heal just one problem, but need a course of healing over a longer period of time--effectively, a journey through their pasts--to dissolve this false genetic code.

Such a therapeutic journey can heal a range of symptoms of ill-health. And so the successful client becomes reasonably free of chronic niggling health and emotional problems. They become calm inside and lucid in their thoughts. 

Despite the success of employing the first law of pain in therapy, there have been some problems in using one law only that are described in the following pages.


Scientific Evidence Supports the first law of pain

L Ron Hubbard used the computer (i.e., computing science) as a model for how memory works in the brain, which helped him to find a way to resolve troubling (or "reactive") memories.

Dr Arthur Janov has provided scientific evidence that the expression of feelings--connected to the past--changes a person's neurology as well as physiology. The research has measured changes in heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure, core body temperature, brain wave measurement (EEG), hormone levels, and peripheral blood flow. The results show that the vital signs of people undergoing this type of treatment become normalised.

Dr Paul MacLean identified the triune brain structure--three separate brains in one--which has become important in reexperiencing-based therapy in that it has allowed for the establishment of three distinct levels of individual consciousness.

A number of psychiatric studies have shown that reliving trauma is an effective therapeutic method. A University of NSW psychiatric study split 90 recently traumatised patients into three groups: two of which were treated with a different therapy - and one left untreated as a control - to see how effective the therapies were in preventing the onset of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Of the patients who were treated with prolonged exposure therapy (reliving trauma) 37 percent went on to develop PTSD, compared to 63 percent of those who were treated with cognitive restructuring therapy, and 77 percent of the untreated group.  It was concluded that reliving trauma was effective in preventing the onset of PTSD.  Other studies have shown similar results - a notable one being published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that this type of therapy helped female US military veterans with PTSD.
Reference:
'Reliving trauma could ward off PTSD', ABC News in Science, Australian Broadcasting Commission, (online), Wednesday 4 June 2008, (accessed 8 June 2008),
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/06/04/2264769.htm?site=science&topic=latest

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