P rimal therapists do not have to be perfect. What is required is a deep and genuine sense of how damaged they really are. When we work and the client enters realms where we have not ourselves been, we do not have to give up. What we do have to acquire is an ability to keep our mouths shut and handle within ourselves very high levels of ambiguity. In other words, we must be able to tolerate not knowing what is going on in moments of extreme tension without leaping into the process and interfering with the client's journey.
Therapists handle their own fears in a variety of ways, especially by giving advice.
Advice shuts down the openness in the client's mind which is so crucial to the forward movement of primal processes. This need on the part of therapists to explain things, is attached to their own terror of what is unknown within them. We comfort ourselves when we explain things to people. It lends false stability to the therapist's own fears. It asks the client to become the therapist, to employ the therapist's own defenses, as it were.