What Is The Purpose Of This Work?

In two words, it is character change. Ok, so what is character? Simply, it is the basic way any given person approaches life.

Here we must look at three words: behavior, personality and character. As will become apparent, behavior is an expression of personality and personality is an expression of character.

Behavior is what is observable about a person.

If you were to see me right now some things would be obvious (and unimportant). Obviously I am sitting at my computer and typing. Occasionally I stop to consult the manual on this particular word processing program. Those are all behaviors, but not relevant behaviors. They are all required by the fact that I am writing this book.

But there are also important observable behaviors. I am bent over rather than sitting up straight. My head is near the computer screen rather than being back the usual distance. It is a Sunday but instead of playing, watching television or puttering about the house, I am writing this book. Classical music is playing in the background.

None of these observable behaviors is required. They all are expressions of who I am as a person, they are all behaviors that are psychologically relevant. Psychologically relevant behavior is an expression of and grows out of the personality.

Personality is the same or similar behavior seen in different situations.

There is a simple example of this. If you are about to give a speech or make a presentation before a group and are nervous, that is a behavior. You have, to a greater or lesser degree, "stage fright."

If, however, in many situations you display nervousness, that is a part of your personality. You are a nervous person. To use a term from math, we get to personality by summing up like or similar behaviors over many situations.

Character is never seen. Character is inferred

Character is the basic statement a person makes (unrecognized) about himself, the world, and the relationship between the two. Here are two examples, first a short one — just the bare bones — then an extended example.

Footnote 2. Character is an ambiguous word in English. In one instance we speak of character rather like integrity as in "he is a man of good character." In another context we speak of character rather like different or inconsistent as in "what a character he is." As the word is used here it has no ethical implication. Everyone alive has a character. To live is to have a character. Character in this context is neither good nor bad, it simply is. It can be analogized to height. Everyone is some height. In general tall is better than short, but better only because being tall is more rewarded in the culture than is being short.

A short example:

As a result of various childhood experiences, Jim regards the world of people as unpredictable. His implicit statement about the world is that you can never really predict what anyone will do. His implicit statement about himself is that he is not capable of understanding people's motivations. His character trait is that he is rational while other people are irrational; his personality is that he is a guarded person; his behavior is that he does not readily make friends and even with people he calls his friends, he does not tend to call on them to come to his aid in a time of need.

Now for an extended example.

It is difficult to fully grasp these concepts without the aid of an illustration. For that reason, I have created a patient biography to illustrate and explain these concepts. To help pick out the behaviors, personality and character I have bolded (B) the behaviors, bolded and italicized (P) the personality, and bolded and underlined (C) the character.

Betty's mother regards proper behavior as the hallmark of a properly raised child. From an early age, well before Betty has any real memory of it — though she knows of it from her mother's proud stories — Betty was trained to say "bye bye", "thank you" and "may I." Betty was required to eat all the food put before her and was not allowed to leave the table before requesting and receiving permission. Between meal snacks were permitted only if they "would not spoil her appetite." Dessert was permitted only if she ate all her food with the proper speed and used the right eating utensils. Posture was important and Betty was constantly told to "not slouch." Clothes had to be clean, had to be picked up at night, and had to be placed in the hamper for washing. In the morning, Betty's mother would pick out what she was to wear for the day. No disagreement was permitted. One of Betty's earliest memories was when she was taken to the park. She sees herself (in her memory) as being on the "jungle jim" when her dress rips. She remembers thinking that she must hide it from her mother and feeling fear, excitement, and that if she could just always turn her back to her mother then her mother would not see the rip. Betty soon recognized that what was important was how you acted (P). Her father provided a solution.

Betty's father was a policeman and often had to put in overtime. When he did come home, something that could never be planned, he was usually tired and non-communicative. Father usually stopped at the local policeman's bar after work — to take the edge off as he would say later — and the smell of alcohol on his breath was something that Betty took as natural. Given his occupation, he was particularly concerned, perhaps even more than Betty's mother, that Betty be well behaved so that she would not reflect badly on him. His major and offstated view was that good parents had good children and he "would see that she was dealt with severely" if she ever got into trouble.

From Betty's child's world view, her preferences, likes and dislikes, choices, and desires all were either of no consequence or were wrong (P). She hated the clothes her mother laid out for her, but in time concluded that she must be wrong and had poor taste in clothes (P). Since her food preferences were ignored and since dinner was a distasteful command performance of proper behavior and proper eating, she came to dread dinner and to regard food as a form of punishment (P). Sleep, too, was a contest. She had to be in bed at a certain time with the lights out. Believing that her night-time fears would not be acceptable, she never told her parents about her fear that some bad man that daddy was after would come and hurt her at night to get back at daddy. She was fascinated by and at the same time terrified of the gun (P) her daddy wore and once she learned from the television that policemen killed people, she formed the fear that if she were bad that daddy would kill her as he killed other people (C). Since both her parents were only concerned with her behavior and considered Betty's own ideas to be of no importance, she never told them about any of her fears (B). As Betty sought to separate her inner life from her actions, her father became her guide and protector. She decided that if she had a policeman inside herself then she could not do anything wrong because policemen punished people who did things wrong (C). Thereafter Betty created an imaginary policeman inside herself and had constant inner dialogues with the policeman, checking with the policeman at all times before she allowed herself to act (C).

Betty soon stopped trying to form her own judgements (P) since they were either wrong or would make her desire things that she could not have. In time she grew to ignore any desires of her own (P) and simply incorporated all her parent's injunctions of the right way to behave (P).

She was the model child of decorum (B) and for this she was praised effusively by her mother and by her father, when she saw him. She resented that she could not spend time with her father but also was glad that he was never around because he was just as controlling as mother. The first time that she told a schoolmate that her father was a policeman, the schoolmate immediately told everyone else. Her girl playmates started mildly to shun her because they did not want to get in trouble with the policeman and her boy playmates started shooting her with their fingers. She decided never to tell anyone again what her father did and thereafter learned to lie about it (B). She made up for the loss by expanding the policeman inside herself to a whole police station (C). Initially it only had men policeman like her father. Later she saw on the television that there could also be women policemen, so she added women officers to her mental police station. Mainly the policemen and women only punished bad people. Sometimes Betty would imagine that the policemen were helping good little children who were lost. But she could never expand on those fantasies — they always just ended when the policeman told the good child how to get home — and thus her good-child fantasies ended soon and she only focused on the bad people that the policeman captured (C). A few times she imagined that the policeman would kill the bad person; but she found that these fantasies were too emotionally arousing and were thus unpleasant, so she stopped them. To stop her "bad" (that is, unpleasant or unsatisfying) fantasies she created a police sergeant who controlled what fantasies she was allowed to have with the police officers (C). Effectively, she had created a (mental) policeman to control her other (mental) policemen.

Betty's religious instruction started when she was three. She was required each night to say her prayers before bed, a ritual her mother supervised. When her unexpressed terror at night developed, Betty responded by extending her praying (B), a method of putting off the time when the lights were turned off and a method of seeking a protector against the man who would come in and kill her. Her mother viewed this behavior initially as indicating that Betty was growing up and becoming more committed to her Savior but later came to be annoyed by the extended time for this ritual and limited Betty to saying her prayer three times and no more. Betty complied by deciding that three was a magic number and any more or less would be dangerous (P).

Psychosexually, Betty was breast fed on a demand schedule as current proper motherly behavior demanded. But Betty was moved to scheduled feeding and then to the bottle as rapidly as Betty would permit. Toilet training was started at 18 months, as was socially proper. The method employed was to put Betty on the training toilet for as long as necessary to achieve elimination. Betty was not allowed to leave the training toilet until she eliminated. When she "did the right thing" she was praised effusively. Subsequent soiling was met with disapproval and disdain. Nudity was not allowed in the house. Later, when Betty had developed her mental police station, she assigned a special policeman — he was called Mr. Dodo Right (a play on words from a television show she saw that had a Dudley Doright character) — and this policeman's duty was to see that little girls did not make "dodo" in their pants (C).

Betty had plenty of playmates with whom she always played "the right way (B)." For all her toys there was a right way to use it and a wrong way (B). Betty's mother, and on rare occasions her father, always made sure that she was shown the right way to play with her toys and playing in the wrong way was stopped with "no, Betty, here is how we play with this toy." Betty soon found that her fantasy life was only acceptable when it resulted in appropriate behavior (P). She also discovered that she could " day dream (B)" as her mother derisively called it as long as she hid the activity (P) from prying adult eyes, which is to say that the day dream did not result in any action. To her mother's and father's delight and praise, Betty then took to spending a lot of time reading (B). That she did not seem to know what she read (because the book was merely something to occupy her hands while she lived out her rich fantasy life) was soon accepted by her parents as "just the way she is." Her fantasy life became much more satisfying then her play with friends since in her fantasy life the policemen and policewomen were her friends and they did not withdraw or shoot her with their fingers and she did not have to lie to them (B).

She was deeply conflicted about lying since telling the truth was right but telling the truth to her young friends was emotionally painful and thus truth led to pain and lying lead to internal punishment which was painful (P).

As she grew up, she found by watching television and hearing her parents speak that sometimes policeman beat up the bad people. After that her fantasies about the mental police force grew more elaborate and took on a decidedly violent character (C). She also started to include herself as one of the bad people who were beaten by the policemen. For reasons she never could understand, these fantasies were somehow very satisfying even though they involved her being beaten.

At age 13, Betty became more committed to her school studies, withdrawing almost entirely from social contact (B). While her parents were initially pleased with this devotion to school, they soon started to urge her to find "good schoolmates" to play with. In time the conflict in the house grew between the opposing demands that Betty do well in school and that Betty not spend so much time at home alone, that she have more friends. By the age of 16, Betty started to cut herself (self-mutilation) (B) and to eat less and less (B) in order to avoid the dinner table. Betty shortly came to the attention of the school psychologist who recommended that Betty get counseling. The intake diagnosis was "adjustment reaction of childhood with incipient anorexia and depression."

At 18, Betty graduated from high school and started attending the local junior college. When she failed all her classes the first semester (B), her parents took her to a therapist who diagnosed Betty as a borderline character with depressive features (C).

It is not critical that you follow all of the above portrait, it is only important that you recognize and keep in mind that your behavior — what you observe about yourself — grows out of your personality — the way you describe yourself and/or the way others describe you — and that both grow out of the character.

Because character is the deepest layer of the person and because no one can describe his or her own character, character changes slowly. Even though Reichian therapy works directly on the character, it does it — and must do it — slowly. You are not going to do the work for a month or even a year and see instant results. It is slow and careful work designed for the serious student of self-development.

Also, as you change you will probably not be aware of it. When I say that character is the basic way you are in the world; that is what I mean. When your basic nature changes, you will generally not be aware of the change because it is simply the 'you' that is different. People around you will be aware of the change. And you will often see the change when you do something and then afterwards realize that you didn't do it that way before. This is the secret magic of this work.

Perhaps you are the type of person who has trouble standing up for yourself. Then one day you effortlessly refuse to do something that you really did not want to do. Afterwards, it occurs to you that 'gee, that was weird, that was so natural to say no and yet I would never have been able to do that before.' This is the essence of how things work.

The power of this Reichian work is that it will change you as a person. Your very being will be different. Don't concern yourself with emotions during the body work. If they arise, that is fine. If they do not arise, that is also fine. The beauty of the Reichian work is that done properly it will do its job, not because of you but despite you. This is something to keep upper most in your mind: do the Reichian work and give yourself permission to change. This is not the world of instant reward.

That brings up our next point. The great majority of the effects of the work occur in your dreams.

There is an easy analogy. Suppose you go into a gym for a weight strength-training workout. At the end of the workout will your muscles be bigger? Of course not. What you do see is that over time, as the weight training continues, your muscle bulk and strength changes. If it does not change during the workout, when does it change? While you sleep.

So it is with this work of self-improvement. The work itself can produce all sorts of body shaking, feelings of electric currents or tingling, feelings of lightness or heaviness, feelings of a part of your body being relaxed or tense, feelings of your chest being open or closed, strange tastes or smells, feelings of parts of your body being dead or ultra sensitive; all these things can and likely will happen and all are acceptable and correct. But like muscle tiredness at the end of strength training, the real growth, the real change will happen while you sleep.

There are two other major changes that will also occur as a result of the work. One is that you will, if you allow it, become far more emotionally sensitive. I don't mean by that that you will be more emotional, I mean more emotionally sensitive. Before I explain the difference I want to mention the second major change. Because this work will make you much more aware of your body, it will also have a profound effect on your sexual experience. That simply makes sense. People who are more in touch with their body have better sex. No mystery there. The mystery is in reaching that state of heightened body sensitivity.

Now I can talk about that difference between emotional and emotionally sensitive. To put the point easily, it is the difference between a big meal and a fine meal. The emotional person is like the person who eats big meals. He becomes emotionally fat. The emotionally sensitive person is like the gourmet. He may have only a few courses or dishes, but each dish is small so that he can savor the delicate flavors. Think about becoming a gourmet of the emotions.

There is another way to understand what will happen with this work. Consider a young child. He has fallen and scraped his knee. He is crying. Now someone comes along and says "stop crying!" The question is: how does one do that, how does one go about 'stopping crying?'

Well, if we were to see that child crying, his eyes are crunched up, his chin is quivering, the sound is coming from his throat, his chest is heaving up and down, his belly is going in and out. He is using his body all the way from his eyes to his belly. Now if he clamps his jaw so it can not quiver, he tenses his throat to stop the sound, he takes a breath and holds it, he tightens his abdominal muscles; he has then, by choice, interfered with all the body motions that permit the crying.

Over time with repeated experiences of having to stop his crying these tensions become a body habit. These areas are now tense all the time, just like an upright posture (how many parents keep saying: "don't slouch, st and up straight" or "sit up straight"). Soon the child can no longer cry, he can only leak tears. That too gets stopped as the muscles around the tear ducts are tensed. Then we get the person who "has not cried in 20 years."

Well the same chest that this youngster tensed in order not to cry is also the same chest that relates to tenderness, love, empathy, sadness, pride, homesickness, and a host of similar feelings.