Arthur Janov's Blog, page 14

Still More on the Act Out (1/2)

What I offer here is surmise, not proven fact but I have seen enough cancers to give me some idea about it.   My belief is that the very same trauma that caused the cancer may be the cure for it, as well. That is, there is an embedded memory deep in the brain; it is strong enough to devastate the brain because it is of first line origin, and it is there in the brainstem that powerhouse feelings are lodged.  And some cancer causes, as well.   If we can extirpate that trauma, and new research on methylation seems to indicate that we can, then we can do something about cancer. The rarity of cancer in our long-term patients is added confirmation of my point. Those incredible feelings which cannot be believed until seen, can alter the biologic and genetic trajectory of the system to change minute cells. I have long ago postulated that possibility of breast cancer in those women who are flat chested, not because of that but because possibly, their genetic destiny for larger breasts was blocked and diverted.  There is then constant pressure toward one’s proper destiny which cannot fulfill its biologic purpose.  It is the surge toward normalcy, an intact system.  The biologic impulse toward being normal is always there.

Biology is destiny, as the saying goes.  I prefer epigenetics is destiny; much more accurate.   It largely sweeps away that genetic destiny and replaces it with a new biologic system, and perhaps an heritable one.  That system, by definition, is faulty because it evolved out of damage.

Here is what patients say about their act out:

“I think there may be something to this...
 I am certainly a shallow breather - always have been - and I feel a need to conserve emotion, I would say.
 All I know is my mother had "gas and air" (NOX with air) when she was giving birth to me. I doubt that would have led to any extreme trauma for me as a foetus trying to get out but would be interested to learn anything to the contrary.
 That said, I think breathing is central to how we experience life and will undoubtedly reflect our earliest experiences.”


 “I have had Primal Therapy back then to get rid of all that tension.
I recall a dance class I went to straight after a Primal Session , where the teacher didn't recognise me because my movement was suddenly and unexplainably, free of tension and full of presence! Also I wasn't dancing to get her love anymore, but for the joy of feeling.
 Primal is the most truthful and healing form of dance and movement therapy .
 A lot of dance and movement classes are teachers acting out their need on their students. How can they not? Especially sad when it happens to children.”


“The way we breathe depends on physical and mental memories.
 My breathing, I have often touched on in my blogs over the years. It was dramatically disturbed / affected in the neurotic / conscious, protracted birth trauma caused by my mother. I was locked in the birth canal for 48 hours. Therefore, many of my act outs and subsequent therapeutic treatment experiences have come to focus on my breathing.
 For several years, existed a repeated pattern, during my birth primals, that I fell into a deep anesthesia. This was aggravated gradually that I hyperventilated fiercely and suddenly not breathing at all. This condition lasted a good while and I struggled desperately to get air but without success. Suddenly, I gave up and felt myself drowning / dying. Consciousness returned weakly and slowly. I had been through a primal instead of an epileptic seizure. The feeling of anesthetic pressure released slowly. I experienced a total relief and liberation, first physically and shortly afterwards emotionally. My breathing was relaxed and parasympathetic.
 During more than 20 years, I made early each morning push-ups (2 x 125) at my fingertips with my feet on a table (my way of freediving). During each of the two pushup series I held my breath. Besides Carbamazepine (Tegrotol), these act outs were my way of keeping up my ego and reduce my anxiety of my problems and then especially the epileptic threat. I used my abdominal muscles in combination with my pushups to displace anxiety and tension associated with a stressful and demanding work career. This defense tied to my breathing, which I have developed over many years with great willpower and discipline, was certainly the heaviest reason that my two years at the Primal Center in LA did not lead to faster visible results.”


OK. I get it.  It helps.  And that is why so many of us are addicted to horror movies.  We go to a theater prepared to be terrified (as close to the terror of a first line primal) and then we watch in horror;  and then we escape safely.  But still we get to scream and yell, releasing some of the emotional part of the original imprint.  Again, we have reawakened the Primal demons with impunity.  For some, it becomes an obsession. Aah.  What a relief.  Terror is the attraction.  It pulls us in because we can go back to the (original) terror so to speak, without the terror.  We know we will be safe afterwards.  So we go through the birth trauma without the trauma, only the feeling part.  Because it lacks the original content there is not the terrible terror involved.   But symbolically it is close.  Listen! Feelings pull us in.    That means that so many obsessions and compulsions are sucked into us by the imprint.  It makes us compulsive gamblers and eaters, and drives so many neurotic behaviors.   If we are always in terror and don’t know it then we won’t try, won’t get out and do something new. Won’t approach a stranger and talk to him. Takes forever to make a decision;  so afraid to make a mistake.  Fear runs his life.  He becomes a “loser”  because he will not grab opportunities, hangs back, and in the presence of strangers he acts like he did as an infant,  holding mother’s skirts.   He needs emotional support at all times, and now we know why.

It does put a new perspective on dangerous sports, i.e. car racing. The crowd looks for crashes to add to the excitement of something gone wrong (near death re-experience?)  But often there is no death or serious injury, and we all relax.  It is the analogy over and over again.


I don’t want to leave out the act-in.   There are those since infancy who hold their breath when anxious or surprised.  Still others who cannot catch their breath when upset.   Others with asthma who often have breathing problems and also cannot catch their breath.  Especially those who lose their breath when anxious and have to lie down.  The permutations are endless but it is all about breathing and not breathing.    They are often the minimalists who hoard and never buy too much, and save and save. …in case.    With reliving over time we resolve the act-in and act-out against the very same imprint.
Again, one has to go back and relive the original trauma, exactly.  No way around this. It was never lived fully at the start; cut off by repression when the pain got to be enormous.  

Has anyone noticed that when shocked, people put their hands over their mouths? Not an accident; it is part of holding back breathing, a return to the prototype.  When scared originally we stopped breathing as death approached; that became the template for later reactions.

The act-in results from having so little chance to behave against the trauma of being pinned down, unable to escape the womb.  The reactions develop inside,  and become the act-ins.  They leave a prototype of physiologic responses and certain kinds of afflictions such as asthma.  A lot depends on the nature of the birth and specific weaknesses of the system.  Most certain, a  lack of oxygen at birth and even before leads to blood vessels constricting to conserve supplies.  The act-in may be migraines; and sometimes the treatment for it is..?  guess what?   Oxygen.

The leitmotif often can be, “Something is missing but I don’t know what it is.  I think I will eat more or make more money.”   I will try to fill a void I don’t even know is there. Something is surely missing, and when patients get down to the deep brain they finally know what is missing, and the obsession with food or money stops.

Here is one recent case of obsessions and shallow breathing.  A woman over sixty recently had a birth Primal, reliving birth.  The forerun was dangerously high blood pressure and fast pulse.  (190/101…..pulse 97).  She often had to take blood pressure medication to bring her vitals downward.    What she found through reliving was that her imprint of anoxia was breaking through and raising her vital signs.  It was telling her that her embedded memory was pushing.  Of course she was a shallow breather.   After her reliving her vitals were again taken:  149/125 and pulse of 64, a vast improvement but not yet normal.  It wasn’t pills that could normalize her; it was feeling and reliving.  Previously gate her pain but could never touch her imprint.   Sometimes during the end stages of her Primal she could return to heavy breathing and begin the process of normalization.  She tried again to get air.  Before, she gave up. She became a hiker early in life in order to breathe deeply and get air in.  It became an obsession; more and more hiking.  Until her knees gave out. She did have cancer earlier on. The doctor told her she had to careful for another 5 years to be considered out of the woods.  Now she knows why; the imprint is still there doing its damage.

Who could dream that a serious imprint deep down due to lack of early oxygen could help produce a cancer decades later?  Pills suppress the pain but never touch the cause.  It hides it well.  That lack of oxygen remains with us and agonizes all of the time.  It does its damage sotto voce.  And will never tell us the truth until we travel back in history to where the damage lies.  Only then do we learn that the simple truth is revolutionary.

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 17/20)

The Cause of Some Cancers: Not What You Think

Our theory is not just something “nice or interesting or amusing.” It is life- saving. It means reversing serious mental illness. We see this all of the time. Many of us think that good diet will prolong life, and it is true. But few are aware that repression makes us sick and can kill us prematurely. Repression kills because it distorts basic physiology and detours brain development. And repression forces the kind of unhealthy eating habit that makes us sick early on. Repression kills because, unconsciously, it forces us to deal with imprinted pain every minute of our lives. It forces us to find ways to act out feelings or suppress them. The wonder is how we all manage to keep deep pain stored away, never once acknowledging it. The body does, however, and gets sick. And it makes us sick on the deep cellular level, the level where the early imprints lie. All the pressure to keep pain stored puts the cellular development at risk; eventually we find serious illness, which should not be a mystery but a foregone conclusion.

Consider the research on twins done by scientists from London’s Institute of Cancer Research who found that the origins of leukemia are prenatal (Ma et al., 2013). The researchers there delved deeper into the disease process by looking at cases where both twins had developed acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells. They studied the DNA inherited from both parents, completing a full genome study on their subjects. They found that
womb-life was a culprit in the development of the disease. They believe that the mutations accounting for it must have come from the womb. Other mutations may have come after birth. The results prompted another British biologist, Dr. Julie Sharp of Cancer Research UK, to suggest that further study could lead to better cancer treatment. Quoted by the BBC News, Sharp said, “Studies like this could reveal new ways to target the very roots of cancer and help us better understand how the disease develops over time. Survival rates have increased significantly over the past decades thanks to research, but there is still more to
do to make treatments better with fewer side-effects."(20)

Now I must ask the question: how about finding out what happened in the womb that forced these mutations? That seems to be overlooked as mission impossible. But it is not; we can find fairly closely what happened during womb- life to produce mutations. They are looking to alter those mutations by examining the mutation itself. But the basis of all this is that something goes
wrong in the womb while the mother is carrying. It can be external forces such as war or more personal events such as a husband who leaves home, leaving the mother chronically anxious or depressed. The permutations are myriad, but the result is an imprint that causes a deviation and ramification of many functions, from brain circuitry to vital organs.

I will hypothesize that Primal Therapy can help prevent cancer if we have the time to go deep enough. I am not stating that in every case, but we have little cancer among our patients and we believe that Primal Therapy can be a factor. In short, I think cancer originates deep in the brain often during womb-life, and that is exactly what we treat. We do not treat this or that bit; we treat the central organizing factor of the whole system.

20: Scientists track leukaemia's origins 'back to the womb' (2013, April 9). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-3162...

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 16/20)

(After a long pause, I will be publishing the remaining articles about Epigenetics and Primal Therapy over the next few days.)

How Early Is Too Early?

In the scientific community, the question has always been, “How early is too early?” And this is where epigenetics is relevant to our discussion. A group at Washington State University led by Matthew Amway found that gestational experience in animals that sways the genetic unfolding can show effects for three generations. They found that exposing pregnant adult rats with defective sperm could engender many diseases, including cancer, in adult animals. Females avoided mating with other rats that were also exposed during gestation. And this went on, not only for the life of the adult, but for the life of their offspring, as well. It seems that the system knows how to behave given certain biologic deficiencies, and it does so according to what is best for heredity, what gives us the best shot of succeeding in life. So when we cannot explain some trait in adults by heredity we may have to reach back several generations to find the answer we’re looking for. This gives us a new perspective on so-called psychological problems in adults. When we do an intake interview of prospective patients, it has to be thorough enough to include the prenatal life of the patient, as well as their parents and sometimes the grandparents, as well.

Without clinical evaluation we can only guess as to what traumas may have occurred in the life of a pregnant mother, and what adaptations continue to show their effects in her children and grandchildren. Of course, it isn’t just that a mother underwent trauma, but that the trauma has altered her basic physiology and produced lifelong changes in her and her offspring. Did the pregnancy occur in wartime? Were the parents fighting all the time? Was the child’s grandmother depressed? Was she a heavy smoker or drinker during her pregnancy? These are all questions we should be asking.
And in truth the distinction between heredity and epigenetic “heredity” must be made, if we are ever to reverse disease. When a mark is made on certain anxiety-regulating cells, for instance, we may be stressed until that mark is revisited and relived. As I have noted, the process of methylation also can be chemically reversed by demethylation agents, for example. That leads us to believe that certain regions of the brain altered by drugs are the same areas that may be affected by reliving gestational events.

What is most important is that stress in the mother compromises the repressive system in the fetus, so that later it will be difficult to mitigate surging feelings. Low-level imprints from womb-life burst through the repressive barrier, overloading the system, and — in the absence of a cohesive cortex — result in difficulty focusing and concentrating, and problems learning. The prefrontal cortex becomes overwhelmed as it is pressed into service to counteract and hold down painful feelings.

Why are those early imprints so critical? Because almost every key adverse event in the womb can be life-endangering: low oxygen, inadequate nutrition, too much agitation, flooding by drugs or alcohol, etc. they all affect vital organs and change the system of the baby accordingly. I will never omit smoking, which is deadly to the maturation of the baby. Imagine being in the womb while a mother ingests all kinds of toxins hour after hour, every day of the year. Who can survive that?

There is a beginning to personality development and we must not immediately ascribe it to genetics. Epigenetics is possibly more important. Life circumstances wrap themselves around the gene, and alter who we are and what we become. It is those days in the womb that form the crucible for personality type; they all accommodate life circumstance. They pivot around the imprint; and when we take patients down deep we find the little nugget, the key imprints that forced all that accommodation. And when those early imprints are relived and all the vital signs move as an ensemble down lower, we know we have struck gold. We have found Nirvana, the core of the pain. Remember, there is no suffering in the pure state of Nirvana.

Suicide and Success

There have been a number of people  who have committed suicide who seemed at the pinnacle of  success.   So what is going on? And most of us  thought that once we choose  a profession and follow it and succeed at it, becoming an expert and well known, that would be fulfilling.   We would feel like a success.  Wrong.  When we have deep-rooted lack of love, rejection, indifference and missing touch early in our lives we cannot feel like a success.

Usually because success and  fame are ephemeral notions not part of our systems.  Success is not a feeling, loved is.  Fame is other people’s idea of success; it is in a way their feeling……admiration, humbling, important, etc.   And why does the person, even most accomplished, never feel satisfied nor fulfilled?  Because all of his fulfillment and all of his admiration is symbolic; it is not the love he needed early on.  It covers it over, sits on top of the real need and leaves an emotional vacuum in its place.  It is the imprinted pain that cannot be erased no matter what kind of success is there.  And it drives him for more and more. Finally at the top of his fame he feels still unfulfilled and a failure; there is nothing more to gain, nothing more to try for.  He looks at all his billboards and feels empty. What does it mean?  “I don’t know what else to do to feel good.  It seems that life is empty. There is no point; suicidal thoughts thrust their way in.  The pain that drove it all is still alive and gnawing inside.  It says, sotto voice, you are not loved and that is all that matters.  You have failed at what matters most; to be adored, admired, encouraged, held and caressed.   That is the malaise that speaks of something missing.   “All your drive was to try to feel loved, and you are, but not by the people who really matter.”  To be loved early on, is what sets the stage for your life; it makes you feel confident but not driven.   It offers daring and enthusiasm and a joie de vivre.   It allows you to try but never in desperation.

Symbolic love has to be repeated over and over exactly because it cannot fulfill.  Why not?  Because it sits on the painful imprint of no love; that imprint has only one goal in life; to be relived exactly as it was laid down.  It will NEVER leave until it is lived again, fully, in its original context.  It cannot.   Its goal is a constant warning of unfinished business.  The pain from very early on has to be felt and dealt with in all its agony.  Yes, there is agony from deep, deep pain that was transformed into an imprint that becomes a primordial part of us.  It now confuses us,  distracts us, and above all, stops our concentration.  Oh yes; it depresses us because we live with an enemy in the house that we cannot shake off.   It lives with us and in us; it claws for its liberation; it wants freedom to live the pain, believe it or not.   Yet we do what we can to stop it.  No wonder most psychotherapy is aimed at repression, rationales, understanding but never deep feeling.     They get a bit of relief which the patient settles for; but no cure.   So what does the successful person feel?  Very little:  Down, unhappy and unfulfilled.   He has to with no other choice because those feelings will not leave even for mercy’s sake.  The imprint knows no mercy.  It wants conscious awareness somewhere inside even while the top cortical level does what it can to imprison it.   Conscious awareness means deep feeling plus ultimate understanding of what it is.  Enough rearranging of the chairs on the Titanic.  We must replace things to be healthy’ we must join feelings with their thoughts and make ourselves whole.    Fame won’t do that; I have treated enough Stars to know that, and my patients also know it. There is no substitute for extirpating the imprint.  None.  Leaving the imprint and  you are leaving misery there.

So let’s go over this again.  When there is a basic lack of fulfillment early life, gestation and birth and infancy, There is an imprint of lack of fulfillment.  That stays and is embedded deep in the brain, almost in accessible.   But the feeling is imperceptibly accessible: feeling unfulfilled.   And we drag it and it drags us into into the race for fulfillment.  It has be symbolic because once embedded and out of reach we will fill ourselves with substitutes; symbols.  We cannot know the real lack and what it is.  That is why the system insists on reliving later in life.  It understands real integration and liberation.  And it finally stops the terrible drive to feel like a success.  That is different from being successful.  That is the drive to do things right.   A little more relaxing.

Still More on the Act-out

If I told you that the way you breathe is an act-out, you might scoff, so let me explain.  Act-outs mean that you are acting out unconsciously and symbolically a trauma from the past.   Allow me to offer one example:  shallow breathing.   When there was not enough oxygen at birth, the mother being heavily drugged and/or anesthetized, the drug seeps into the baby to shut down her breathing, she learned to conserve oxygen to survive by shallow breathing, she becomes a shallow breather; those who do so, just think that’s the way it is for them, and not a  sign of anything else.

The fact is that it is a sign of an event that endures and directs the system in so many ways. And this extends throughout the system; so when oxygen is depleted during birth the blood vessels constrict or shut down to save one’s life. The result can be chronic migraines where the blood constricts to save oxygen supplies.  This happens when someone is upset over something, feels threatened or is anxious.

From then on, we hoard oxygen as a life-saving device.   The whole system is in locked-down mode.   And this modus operandi spreads throughout the system:  the way one speaks, bespeaks of energy conservation; softly, quietly, of being constantly in a state of holding back, which sometimes translates into conserving money, emotions, breathing. expression, etc.  In short, by not expending too much of anything.  One can become a general hoarder;  ”I cannot be without....otherwise, I will die” (Originally….without enough oxygen my life is in danger). Her life-time leitmotif is,  “It is never enough..” and “I have to make sure I have enough”.  The fear is I cannot run out (of oxygen, of what I need) or I will die.   If I conserve, I will not be danger; I will have enough.  If I have enough it means I am being taken care of and I won’t die.  This seems like a stretch yet so many patients report on this theme constantly.

In another case a patient harkens back to originally saving just enough energy to handle minimal tasks.  She avoids being overwhelmed (again, as originally).  She only buys what is basic and necessary.   She only travels lightly so as not to be overloaded.  A too heavy suitcase is a cause of anxiety because she fears she may lack the energy to handle the load.   Her whole life runs on the formula, “If I spend too much, I will die.”   And this is symbolic acting out of her original trauma.  Too much breathing can lead to death, so heavy exercise is avoided.   She prefers a simple life style, with little material worries so she is not overwhelmed.   The less she has, the less she has to take care of, the less energy she has to expend. This person wants others to take control so that she does not have to organize anything.

What we have here are different modes of behavior from roughly the same kind of imprint…. depleted oxygen during gestation and at birth.    Life circumstance adds to choices but the overall behavior has a single motif.
       
An extreme form of this is free diving; the idea is to go as deep in the ocean while holding one's breath, until one becomes a champion breath holder.  And believe it or not, there are medals for this.   Except it is dangerous and someone just drowned last week trying it.  It is done without any oxygen at all, and experts can go minutes without breathing.  The unconscious idea again is to re-enact the early trauma, coming close to death and trying to survive.  It seems that the closer one comes to the limit and near death, the more one is applauded.   It is the early trauma turned upside down.  I wonder who instigated this madness?  But one is attracted to it because it is a chance at reliving symbolically.  Coming close to death and living.   That is the paradigm, the leitmotif called "sport".  So here we have different modes from roughly the same imprint.  One embraces it and the other flees from; not even getting into an elevator for fear of reawakening the original imprint.  It includes many factors;  one is to dash ahead crashing into their imprint and conquering it, the other is avoiding it at all cost.   In any case, it pervades every aspect of one's being.   The counter-phobes find it and chase it, while the phobics  look elsewhere.  So free divers are counter-phobic?  I would bet on it,  but then again I don't bet.

The Act-out and More

The truth needs no defense…except…not feeling it causes a myriad of defenses.  Feeling is the opposite of defenses.

There is a certain paradigm in Primal which one blogger, Frank,  alluded to.   Truth needs no defense except when that truth is more than the system can integrate; then it requires defenses. That is why in booga booga land they live inside their defenses and imagine all kinds of things like freedom, liberation,  being one with the cosmos, etc.  They no longer feel the truth of their pain.  No longer know they live inside a defense. They grab onto  a strange unreal idea and ride with it; just so long as it keeps the truth away:  I hurt.

That is why after patients have deep feelings they come up with many truths about their lives.   It is buried and defended along with the pain.  Thus no one has to give anyone insights; they are already there just waiting for the exit.  And how do they get out”?    They hijack and ride along with the pain.

Let me give you an example from my own life.  Early on,  I had to go out to coffee all of the time first thing in the morning.  I just did it without thinking twice about it. Then the Primal: stuck in the womb, could not get out and I acted it thereafter for decades.  The hidden feeling drove me and I had no idea I was driven.  And if I drank or smoked to keep the pain down, I would still have no idea why I did those thing, which I never did.    But…I had to get out, and if I had been smart or primal enough I would have traced my obsessive ritual back to its source by asking: what am I trying to do…Why silly, I am trying to get out! Pre-primal I would say I need freedom and I want to feel free, but that would not have made any sense.

I had a patient who had a different obsession: she had to fuck all of the time.  (not a dirty word, just an accurate one).  It turns out…..  What are you trying to do?  She said she needed to relieve her tension.  And why?  Because if she did not fuck, her body temperature and blood pressure went through the roof:  she was in danger of dying.    So why fucking?  It was the most basic and deeply rooted instinct.  Its buildup put the body into tremendous stress.  She had to find release through the act-out because she never knew she had an imprint embedded deep down and she never knew that it engendered all that tension.
Hi, I am your doctor.  Any stress lately?  Not that I know of but I think there was a stress event 50 years ago not sure what it was but it raised my body temp and blood pressure a lot:  to this day.  “How would you know that”?  An instinct I guess. I mean why else would I have those chronic  symptoms?  Dunno,

Oh, what is this act-out?   Our  symbolic way to deal with an unconscious concretized memory.  It is like a blind person with no knowledge of his unconscious, trying to shake off a terrible trauma.  He does the best he can, and he comes close, symbolically,  just like my having to go out for coffee every morning.   Surely that obsession meant there is something buried down below.  Even knowing exactly what it is would not change one thing because the insight lives on top of the brain,  while the feeling resides at the bottom.  They are far apart.  Isn’t it amazing that the deep-lying feeling sends messages from below to approximate the trauma without ever saying what it is?   And why is that?   Because if it sent up the whole package; the whole truth, we would be in agony all over again.  And so our merciful brain has found back-up ways to protect us.  It keeps the truth from us even when we go on searching for the truth.  The longer the search the less we discover.  Aah, that dialectic again.   Those poor philosophers; in a constant search that will never be finished because……oh no, wait,  the search is really for pain and it is only the pain that can liberate.  Us.   Does that mean they are looking for pain and  don’t know it?  Yep.

Jesus, Janov, you are so arrogant and sure of yourself.  Is that wrong?  It is better to not be sure when I have lived it?  And when I relive it and my act-outs disappear?    The truth lies in that deep pain, not in the higher level cortex where the search seems to be concentrated.   That is why it cannot be found.   We are looking for results, not causes, and like so much work in psychology, focusing on results cannot reveal arcane causes.  Oh my.  It seems so hopeless.  Nope,  because real hope lies in reliving that very hopelessness that drives so many depressions. And what do we do instead of feeling hopeless and finding causes; we run from it, keeping busy, keep working  and run and run……away from ourselves.  You cannot find your salvation nor yourself that way.

One last note on my act-out.  Why did I choose the trumpet for my instrument?  I was playing in a band, the psychopathic syncopators and I was hitting a high note and it felt like I was screaming……and it was, screaming in the only way I could.  Every week I went to the local mental hospital and played in LA.  With the best musicians around.   We went out for gigs in different venues and all the sax section who had lobotomies  had to hold hands so we wouldn’t lose them.   And all the girls from the area came and danced with the patients on Thursday nights.  One night from the dance floor I heard  “Art.  Art.  Arturo.”  A patient came up and hugged me and we talked.  “What happened to you?”(Hector Acosta)  ! pleaded.  He told me the story.  First of all he was a Mexican so that during battle he had to go down below and secure all the hatches with him inside so if we torpedoed,  the water could not flow into the rest of the battleship and sink us.   Hector was locked inside.   Why?  Cause he was a Mexican.  After months of this he cracked up and spent a long time in mental hospitals.  But it was no different while the blacks on our ship were fighting for their freedom, they were not allowed to touch a gun, and most of what they could do was cook and clean and wear white uniforms to serve the officers.  No one thought that was strange.

To this day I think the girls who came and danced with some psychotics were heroic.  They wanted to help the war effort and us sailors.   And it was wonderful.  I learned more about mental illness playing with my pals then I ever did in classes in school.

How Can Psychology Ignore Neurology?

I don’t mean that neurology should drive psychology but that brain science has so much to offer therapy.  We ignore new neurologic findings at our peril.   For what we are learning is that early trauma leaves a trace on the gene.   That trace is a marker that tells us there is a big hurt buried inside that is redirecing our behavior and is behind so many serious diseases.    The traces can be observed.  And far more important, they and much of their effects can be reversed.  Imagine that!   We can undo the imprint and reverse history and eliminate the hurt.  We don’t have to guess anymore so when psychologists ignore brain science they no longer know that history is barricaded deep in the brain, nor do they know on what level of the brain, nor are they aware   of how serious the imprint is.  How can we go on ignoring early trauma and its effects on our sicknesses  when all new science says it is there?

So what happens?  Therapists remain on the top cerebral level and never ever reach into the messy imprint that changes the brain through methylation and distributes the pain, impacting so much of us.  They try to figure out blood pressure and many other afflictions when the causes elude them.   Worse, they try to undo psychosis,  serious neurosis and addiction without acknowledging the causes lying literally just under their noses.

Now here is where we shrinks come in.  The new research paper by the Institute of Molecular Biology in Germany finds a way to possibly unto methylation.  That is, they have discovered the proteins neils 1 and neils 2 play a major role in demethylizing cells and revert them to normal, a great discovery.  But this is a neurologic answer and cannot be fixed through neurology alone;  they suggest that the two proteins are instrumental in reversing methylation; ergo, it could be the answer we are looking for.  But whoa, why are the genes methylated, in the first place?  What kind of pain and where does it come from?  Here is where primal enters the fray.   Now after 50 years of our daily work on hundreds of patients we have a very good idea what the pain is and how it has settled into the system.  We believe we are demethylizing through immersing ourselves into the trauma and reliving it exactly as it was laid down.  That means becoming a 6 year old again or a fetus reliving the mother’s smoking or drinking.  We see it and we see the effects of reliving: major changes throughout the system.   We believe we alter the neurotic trajectory that would have led to serious disease later in life.

The authors state that may include cancer: when there is a failure in resetting of the methyl marks on the DNA, it can result in development abnormalities and possibly cancer.  In this way the cells lose their identity and start to divide without control,  the profile of cancer.  This research is advancing by the day and will help   us measure and treat serious imprints.  And here is where we shrinks will leave neurology.  Because in psychotherapy the patient will talk about his life and ultimately descend down the chain of pain to the deepest imprint.  When that happens  the distortions that methylation engenders will normalize.  The patient is on his way to being normal.  We want our theories of the human being to be unassailable:  why?  Because correct and accurate theory leads to proper therapy , and the means ultimate health  and longevity.  That is our mission.

Why Are So Many People Dying of Cancer?

The same reasons that their gestation and birth epochs are so damaging.
Oh kind sir, please explain. And cut out all that pretentious language.

I will try to explain even while recent neuroscience is making headway on the problem. But their headway is too often an explanation of how to treat it and less about what causes it.  If people could see what I have seen over 50 years, I think that might agree with me about causes.  Why are so many dying of cancer?   Why are so many undergoing harmful birth practices? There is a relationship.   And apart from doctors’ birth practices there is also their advice:  “a couple of drinks should  not hurt any baby.”  Oh yes it does; it makes them dizzy and disoriented. They sense these effects during and after a Primal, in the same way they feel suffocated when the mother smokes. These are most harmful events.  And due to their load of pain they are not integrated.  Instead the brain uses some of its supply of methyl and leaves a trace on the gene, called methylation.  Here the pain is stored, remains active and continues to spread onto the system. It raises the cortisol level and adds methyl markers to the experience.  It also increases adrenaline levels so that the system is forced into hyperactivity to deal with the suffering.  The person is often not aware of any of this since it happened early on before language was available.

The earlier in life the imprint, the more devastating it is; it emanates from the deepest level brain, the brainstem. This is the structure of great reactions: where pain becomes agony; sad and a bit hopeless into, suicidal hopelessness, anger into rage; all of archaic responses we might expect from sharks or dinosaurs.  When a hurt is registered high up in the brain it translates it through resonance to lower and exaggerated reactions residing deeper in the brain where later emotional pains are registered. It is a neuronal train of neurons of similar valence and content join up to connect on deeper levels.  Let’s be clear:  one can be disappointed with the loss of a lover in adult life.  It can create anguish and misery; but if there lurks deeper down and very early in life a great loss of a mother, the current misery through the process of resonance descends to another emotional level where deeper pain is organized,  and the emotional consequences may be serious and even suicidal depression.  Any major hurt during gestation where deep brain levels are involved and where parasympathetic nervous system is engaged can produce heavy depression.  When the mother smokes without stop or takes drugs or when she is chronically depressed, can find its way into the developing system of the fetus.  In short, any event which blocks normal responses can produce a general suppression in the baby.  This is especially true during birth where egress is blocked and baby struggles and cannot get out by his own efforts.  His body gives up and defeat becomes imprinted. The result may well be a parasympathetic personality; passive, defeated, unable to be aggressive or fight for himself.  Why all that?  Because we are involved with deep level trauma and deep, often violent,  reactions.   When disease occurs we have the beginnings of later cancer or other catastrophic disease.   Catastrophic events lead often to catastrophic disease.  Brain stem responses often engender brainstem responses; deep-lying reactions and serious bodily disease.  That is, we reaction on the same level as the trauma.  The disease often pinpoints for us the origin of the disease. It says look here for answers; alas, too often we look elsewhere.

We often are not aware of all this as its origins are so deeply embedded but they are there. The current pain higher up, has now resonated with deep—lying traumas, roiling the whole system, detouring natural functions and preparing  us for serious afflictions later in life. The brainstem does not mess around; its reactions are major and life-endangering.  As major as a dinosaur response when danger lurks.  In the human when the mother drinks continuously, the baby cannot escape the system splashes into overdrive, as all reactions are exaggerated.  Yet full deep reactions, escape, is not possible so the suffering begins. Worse, we do not know it, but at the age of forty there lies a tumor, and no  one knows where it comes from or how it got its start.  So we embark on decades-long research to see how we can fight it, when we do not know what “IT” really is.   We fight it and wrestle with it but never get to its historic source, so we remain bereft.   “It” is so far removed, so deep in the brain we cannot imagine what went wrong, but one thing is likely: the trauma reached down and resonated very deep down where catastrophic reactions live in the brain.  It touched off dinosaur reactions and upset so much of us and changed our genetic destiny. We are often on a secret trip to cancer or Alzheimers disease, plunging forth with our load of first-line,  brainstem pain until a doctor during his exam says, “Have you had any trauma recently?   “Why do you ask, doctor?”   “Because I see something suspicious on your liver which we must look into.”   Oh my, I had no idea.

You know why you had no idea? Because ideas lie far above the origins, so of course you have no idea. You body knows and carries its memories forward to finally make you know.   And when you relive all this, then you really know because you are in touch with your body, at last.  And you feel the trauma for what it is because the pain is excruciating.  So Janov’s rule #1.  You are not suppose to know about deeply buried pain because it is so very painful.   And so you body is all conflicted.  Should I tell him or should I keep it secret so he does not suffer?  OK.  I won’t tell him and save his life; wait a minute; if you don’t tell him you may be killing him. Ayayay;  the Faustian bargain.  He goes along blithely unaware but his body is dying.

But he feels it, finally, in our feeling therapy, which opens up the neural gates and lays it all out for him;  it is the real fortune teller.  It spills out everything.  And it literally screams out its pain; there is no mistaking it.  Only a feeling therapy that engages the full brain can use it and react to it.  Finally, we can resolve it.
It can be extirpated from the system and let the body relax and normalize.  One way we know is that in our therapy there is a radical increase in Natural Killer cells after one year of therapy.  Their job, recently suppressed, was to be on the lookout for newly developing cancer cells and destroy them.   We don’t “know” about them but the immune system does and whips into action unbeknownst to us. That system is the  cancer marauder sniffing out danger and attacking.  It does what we would do if we were at all aware and conscious.  Yet we remain unconscious for self protection.  We remain unconscious to keep consciousness from being perturbed.  What a dilemma.  It is not us who made the Faustian bargain; it was our system trying to survive as best it could.  We live on, seemingly healthy, while our life is being cut short. A feeling therapy must be called upon to help out. The sine qua non, is to react to the trauma;  we cannot do that when we do not know it is there.  Full conscious permits that life-saving response. It hurts and I can scream it out. Screaming  itself in absentia, solves little but it is the way we acknowledge the pain.

We now understand that the imprint is aided and abetted by the process of methylation, in which the chemical methyl group is added to the genome to restrict its expression. In other words, the imprint is laid down, in part, by a change in the cell, as certain chemical reactions are taking place — hydrogen removal, methyl infusion, and so on. Methylation leaves an heritable imprint, one that can be passed down even from grandparents to their grandchildren, as research by Kerry Resslar has shown. So what we always thought was genetic may well be the result of very early experiences diverting the genetic legacy (Meaney, Aitken, Bodnoff, Iny, & Sapolsky, 1985; Janov, 2013). In short, the experiences of our forbearers can endure and be passed down the epigenetic chain – the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This is something science thought impossible not long ago.

Epigenetics had affected the function of the stress apparatus, what is called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), a complex part of the neuroendocrine system that controls reactions to stress and influences many body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood and emotions, energy storage and expenditure. A possible implication of these findings is that the changes are more or less permanent; they alter the gene’s activity, leading to later illness and suicidal tendencies. When the NR3C1 gene is less effective, it cannot produce the kind of alerting, galvanizing chemicals that help one fight through things. (Clearly, such trauma also diminishes an individual’s adaptive capacity). As a result, the body behaves as though it were constantly under stress. And there is ample evidence now that chronic stress can lead to serious disease.  Methylation marks enlighten us that disease is hidden below.  That trauma has occurred, and forced the system into hyper-vigilance. It is vigilant for a danger that has already occurred.  Too late.

Make yourself at home.

Even Your Blood Remembers

Lest you think that only our brain remembers, it turns out that almost every part of us, every cell also remembers. And that memory stays alive for most or our lives.  That is exactly why we need a therapy not just for current symptoms of migraines or high blood pressure, but of something that affects every part of us.  That means those key imprinted memories that have detoured our lives, changed our destiny and our evolutionary trajectory.   We need a therapy that has a reach as long as the duration of some of those memories.  They have to be reached to impact and change them; that means a therapy that has a reach over most our lives, particularly our very early lives.

In comes Primal Therapy which attacks the central nervous system, the system that radiates its traumas everywhere in the brain/body.  That means we do not have to chase down every a small impact; simply go the center from where it all emanates.   That means that if the immune system is damaged while we are young or living in the womb, there may be a cancer lurking years ahead.  If we find ways to boost the immune system, a number of cancers seem to be reversed.  And the most recent work on serious diseases involves the immune system.  For many afflictions even later on, the primal, primary imprints are channeled to do harm where the system is weakest.   And they become weak and ineffectual when early trauma lowers the effectiveness of part of the immune system called natural killer cells.  Once affected they cannot do their job of attacking newly developed cancer cells.
Our therapy, as I have reported have doubled those cells in patients after one year of therapy.   And our primary focus is to attack the central mechanisms that spread its primal tentacles throughout the neurophysiology. It is simpler and more efficient.

Speaking of how all cells remember, a study put out by John Hopkins School of
Public Health, states that “blood taken from children up to the age of five, showed molecular evidence about whether their mothers smoked or not during pregnancy”. (Nov 23, 2015 ). That means that early traumas stay around and affect us.  It is not a benign memory; there are changes in the blood of the offspring.  They also suggest that many environmental factors are ‘remembered” and change us in the same way. That means serious toxins stay alive when the mother is herself affected while carrying.   The baby is constantly impacted by it.  And there is evidence that those babies impact by things like smoking in the mother have behavior problems later on.  And so when a doctor says  “anything troubling you that would affect your behavior”?   You are forced to say “no” because there is no way you can know until you visit the zone of the underground.

I related the story of a woman who had to move to the remote desert because she felt she was being poisoned in the city.  She was poisoned:  thirty years earlier when her carrying mother was chain smoking.  That memory, totally unconscious, still drove her behavior.   Her blood system remembered.  And if she had blood and circulatory diseases we would still not know its provenance.    “Do you smoke?”  “No”.  “We will have to do  a lot of tests to figure this out.”  Oh, thank you.

“Oh by the way, could you check out the imprint on the cells in my brainstem?”    Wha?????

There are levels of conscious awareness, and the blood remembers as well as any mental memory; only it does not speak English; it speaks biology,  a most valid and accurate language.  Your body as yet has no language to distort its meaning. So listen closely; the symptoms are speaking.

What the researchers are stating now is that these traumas can go back to pregnancy days and affect us for years.  You mean we are affected why back when?   Yes. And those experiences have an enduring and explosive impact?     Yes, don’t forget the toxins the mother produces on her own.  The baby is a prisoner in a locked-in cell with no exit; and he suffers and suffers.   He seems to be born depressed or anxious.  Probably not.   He was born neurotic (a life of imprinted pain) due to life experience.  Neurotic meaning, a load of pain not integrated, that disfigures the body and alters behavior over time.

The good part of this is that we can take a blood sample and spot where you have a trauma from womb-life,  and from mother’s smoking.  There is now a way to measure it so we do not have to ask key questions: a pin-prick and we know.  In the same way that exposure to lead can affect the body prenatally, we are beginning to see how early experience exposes us to different kinds of chemical imprints.  The body gathers up all the chemicals it is exposed to, registers it and is diverted from normalcy.  Yes we can be abnormal in the womb.   And maternal smoking can do it all by itself.  It is now a predictable event and should warn against the ingestion of any drugs during pregnancy.  Remember, blood contains minute molecular memory.  We can be fooled but not our blood.

So it isn’t that the blood remembers but it also stores the memory and affects us thereafter.  When there are serious blood diseases later in life, we should not neglect womb-life events.

What a Waste

I was feeling the other night and was left with a unfinished sense that I was not done.   I felt the misery of my life but that was not it; it was the waste, and it was what could have been and what should have been.  Yet all of us in the family were equally victims:  my parents could not love because they were not given any, and they were somehow, unconsciously, also waiting to be loved.    They never knew it, and for the great part of my life I never knew it either.

What it was, was the feeling of great loss, something missing that could never again be duplicated.   It was a damage deeply embedded that remained encased for a lifetime.   It was no love where it could have been the opposite if the parent’s gates could have been open. But it could not be because that would have meant terrible pain and suffering for them; and their whole neurologic system militated against any conscious-awareness.   So my pain was not just what was never there, the love and the holding, but what could have been; and that only happens when we really experience the damage so fully that we finally understand what lack of feelings do and how greatly they damage; and how love would have changed everything. …. a touch, a word of approval, of encouragement:  not so much, just a scintilla,  a hint of it.   That could have changed our lives.  Alas, instead we were in the symbolic struggle to get it; and because what we got was only a symbol, it was never fulfilling.

So after we feel a lot of the pain, another feeling steps in: what a waste.  What we missed, and what we should have had.   Worse, that it is gone and never to return.  It is over and done with.   The damage was cemented into our systems and we are forced to carry it around for a lifetime.  And we are struck with the fact that we will never know what it meant to be a loved child; that is the ultimate tragedy.  All those years of waste; of what we could have had and could have been.  And will never be.  I was a good musician but I never became what I should have been because I never mastered transpositions.  By the time I recaptured myself it was far too late to make up for lost time. I never prepared for college because I never believed I could make it; finally after years of catch-up, I did make it.  But such a waste of all those years of being strangled by my ADD,  unable to learn and believing that something was wrong with my mind.

I come out of a feeling, often now, with the sense of waste; how many years I lost and my struggle to make up for time gone.  We can catch up a lot but not as if we had a normal, loving early life.  We can take a lot of the pain away but not the memories, and not how early neurosis sculpted us into a different human being. We will not become that loved child but we will be open in our systems to be able to be loved as adults. That is a lot.  Even if we are suddenly loved by contrite parents when we are forty it will be nice and even wonderful but it cannot change an unloved early life.  Sadly, that possibility is gone.