Arthur Janov's Blog, page 22

So What is the Meaning of Life? (Revised)

Stop asking the question and you will be better for it. I have written before, there is no meaning to life, only to the meaning we give it; to experience.   Someone in a coma is alive but there is no meaning to it.    We don’t have to ask what’s it all about; it’s about nothing.  Imagine two chimps asking each other what’s it all about?  That represents our feeling selves and down inside we react but don’t ask intellectual questions.  Down deep we are chimps.   Now that we are humans we ask the question when the answer lies on the feeling level where there are not intellectual questions.   If we deny our chimp selves we will be loaded with questions.   And when we are disconnected from our chimp selves we manufacture questions that never need to be asked, in the first place.   What am I saying?  That we make our own meaning and no one else can. Oh wait, Janov can.   Whaat?   What does Janov do? He puts us in touch with the chimp inside, that once and for all eliminates those questions about meaning.  Because now we are in touch with our chimps running around inside and they have no questions like that.  Once they are into deep feelings I have never seen a patient in a Primal ask about meaning; they are too busy feeling, not thinking.

And what could  a meaning be?  What do you want to get out of life?  To be famous, successful, appreciated?  Or any left over need from childhood.  It can be, I am good, smart, capable, helpful, powerful and on and on.  What it is not iand can never be is the meaning of your life.  There is meaning to experience; it gives me joy, it gives me pain, it makes me happy, successful, etc.   We abdicate our personal meaning the minute we think that someone can supply us with it.    The trouble is many of the questions and search for answers become an endless affair since there are no answers.  The minute we think we found one it seems to pale until we go onto the next one;  a certain vitamin or therapy or guru become interchangeable as what we search for does not exist—the meaning of our lives.  But if we are needy, a strong guru will have us genuflect before him,  lose all critical faculties and believe in him devoutly.  The guru needs devotees and we supply the unquestioned devotion.  Once anyone else locks into our unfulfilled need we are hooked, literally.  Our need is the hook; once a psychopath figures that out he has got us.   He can make us believe in the most outrageous ideas because we are hooked, addicted to his message of promised fulfillment.  We are hooked by need and that is prepotent over everything else.   It is unfulfilled need that is addicting.   The addiction (propensity for) is already there inside of us.

And that is what differentiates us in Primal from all other modes of treatment!  It is not the pills or the needles;  it is us!  We are the addicts, not the oxycodone or heroin.  We need to go deep inside of us, not dancing around the surface finding safer, less addicting pain killers.   And blaming how easy it is to get drugs at pharmacies. Blame the Janovian Gap; the gap between our deep imprints and our conscious/awareness.
Of course, many of us never ask the question about meaning.   There are two sorts; those who feel fully and do not need to ask the question about meaning; and then those who never fully feel and have unlimited questions to pose about meaning.   And then, alas, there is the third route; those who  do not feel and never ask any questions of life.  These are the ones who exist but are not living, the problem of so many of us.

So here we have a dilemma; those who fully feel are propelled to search for meaning;  and whose do not ask themselves about meaning,, and those who do not feel and also never ask them selves what is it all about; they feel something is missing but what?.   They just live and never reflect about their lives.  They find a groove and stay in it and never put their lives in question.   Is that good?  It seems good for them to live the unreflective and unexamined life.  They do not wonder where their lives could be or what else they can do with it.   They are low in imagination and vision and do not seem to care; just as so many individuals in their seventies and eighties seem to give up on life and ascribe  no further meaning to it.  They have lost their ambition, their drive, their desires and the notion of what could be—what could they do-- with their lives.  They gave up on meaning because doing and thinking and feeling comprise the life of meaning.  Especially feeling; for that seems to be the essence.   I do not plan to join those who give up on life; my writing saves me and I hope, many others.  By the way,  I have a book, Beyond Belief, coming out at the end of the year.

Those who don’t feel spend their lives seeking what life means. They travel to see the priest, the swami or guru; someone to help them find the meaning of life.  And if someone has to give it to you, it means you have already lost it.  Why would you look for something that you never had?   Why spend thousands dreaming about someone who has all the answers when no one but you has it; and you don’t have to go to India to find it; just drop a few millimeters down in the brain and there lies meaning; the pool of feeling/meaning ready to add to your experience.  There lies joy, enthusiasm, dreams, exuberance.   Oh oh. There lies that chimp playing down below.   What more could we ask for?  And no one can give us that; only our own personal feelings can do it.  And it is free and not far away. The trouble is that when we look for it we feel we have to find that special someone who has the right pulpit for us to believe in.  And he promises so much; if we can only divest ourselves of critical thinking and go along.   And when he preaches and touches us we fill in the blanks and believe we have found it.  What?  Salvation, help, guidance, warmth, leadership and all of the things we missed as children.   We join with other believers and voila, we are saved and have a direction.   Oh yes,  that direction, as with his white robe, does not come free;  we need to pay a lot for it but we think it is a small price to pay to resurrect our hope in and for life.   That is what we are buying,  hope, born of early desperate hopelessness, someone to show us the way and to take an interest in us and our health and direction.……a parent.   We buy that in our all knowing, omniscient therapists; while all we have to offer is hopelessness; that dreaded feeling that will finally pull us out of the search for a greater life.  Yet that painful feeling is what liberates us; hope born from hopelessness.  It stops the act-out in its tracks, avoids the unrelenting search for an all-knowing “God”  who will not let anything bad happen to us.

And what does the depressive feel most of the time; “I have no meaning to my life.” And why?  Because he has no energy or “life force’ to get out of bed and produce a meaning to his life.   His repression has sucked the life out of him so he cannot feel any of the elements of meaning.   His feelings seem to be buried deep down under the ceiling of repression.  And why?  Because his pain has evoked the chemicals of repression into action; a pain he does not feel, only its after-affects.  He feels down and cannot get up to do anything.  His gates seem to be closed against him.  They have shut-away his meaning.   He is now susceptible to a guru, therapist, a life coach, and advisor, etc.  He needs to be drawn out, he needs someone to literally ‘breathe life into him.”  So many of them, by the way, do have serious oxygen deficit during the birth process which is imprinted and channels us.   He needs to be told what to do and how to act because he has lost his bearings, his feelings.

I have not mentioned religion that provides so many answers for those are lost, and they tell us what the meaning of life is, ad nauseam.  The more we believe the less we follow our own feelings.  We obey and find salvation in that.

Here is one of my bloggers and friends just wrote to me:   To select Evolution in Reverse as a treatment method is deeply linked to a conviction “that we are the evolutionary result of all history, personal and ancient.” I would never trust a religious believer, who lives by the Bible’s creation story / Genesis and the commandments, at the same time, to be a reliable Primal Therapist. Possibly, he / she can be an interesting PT patient seeking a cure for his / her pain propelled religiosity. My heart rate flew up into the 70’s when Art expressed his surprise that the Catholic Church has priests / specialists who recognize / root out the devil. It takes One (a pain propelled Catholic priest) to know One (the devil). Their roles /specialties are both pain propelled products of the same evolution. (The head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, was appointed Person of the Year 2013 by the US news magazine Time. Without making other comparisons, the same magazine appointed Adolf Hitler, Person of the Year, in 1938.)

More than 100 years ago one of Sweden’s most talented personalities, the skilled biologist, scientist and Darwinist Bengt Lidforss got his career seriously disturbed by the bishop, acting university chancellor and devil worshiper Gottfrid Billing. In his book, “Why Evolution is True”, Jerry A Coyne tells us that anti-evolutionism, still today is very strong in the US and on the rise in England and Germany!

In 2006 only 40% of Americans (down 5% from 1985!!) believed that humans developed from earlier species of animals. We descend from a primate lineage that split off from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago. (In France and Scandinavia 80% of people see evolution as true). According to Jerry A Coyne, evolution gets bumped down even further in the US when it comes to deciding whether it should be taught in the public schools. Two-thirds of Americans feel that if evolution is taught in the science classroom, creationism should be as well. In the US only 12 percent - one in eight people - think that evolution should be taught without mentioning a creationist alternative…

Seen from the bright side, 12% of the US population means 38 million people…
 I think that says a lot.

The Looking Glass is Inside Out (Revised)

I have often wondered why there is so much nonsense out there in mental illness.  One psychiatrist says most of it is a brain disease and the answer will be found in analyzing the molecules of the brain. This is also the view of the former head of National  Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Volkow.  She spends her days in the depths of brain neurons trying to find answers to so many problems. Still others come up with nutty ideas about depression and anxiety that I have cited in numerous articles.  Some want to drill in the brain, others shock it, and most others want to medicate it.  Few if any know what it is they are shocking or medicating. The reason: they all need to guess what “it” is.   And “it” is not a neuron or a molecule or a hormone. “It” is a memory, an imprinted one that sways genes in one direction or another and alters our trajectory of life.

In other words, they all have  to guess because no one has seen “it”; they all have to look at it from outside, imagining what lies inside; yet it can be seen;  it is palpable, one can hear the screams and tears from it.  One can observe the wrenching body arcs from the pain and hear the gasping for breath.  One can observe the relief from the reliving, as the body and face relax, not only from observation but in the indices of vital signs that descend radically after a primal reliving.   And descend in ordered fashion.

Why hasn’t anyone thought about it?  Because Behaviorists rule the roost.  Looking at it all from the outside is de rigueur, while feelings are an anathema; a simple negative influence to be eschewed, set aside and abandoned.  Feelings become pests in the overall scheme of science where precise measurement is the apotheosis.  Yet it is feelings that govern and drive us; feelings when repressed make us sick. We will never notice this so long as we remain outside its realm and choose to observe from afar.  How can know that anoxia at birth may play a part in migraines until we see someone relive the beginning of anoxia and develop a headache?  How can we know what is behind depression until we see deep pain at work with repression rushing to save our sanity and create depression as a consequence?  How can we know what is behind anxiety until patients travel down the chain of pain, descending through levels of consciousness to the most primordial reactions of panic?  How can we ever know what the trauma at birth does to us until we see the reliving and discover the lifelong allergies and attendant breathing problems?  Or what it does to blood pressure and heart rate as it rises radically during the reliving?  Moreover, it drops to normal levels after the primal experience.

So of course some can say it is a brain disease since we can always find accompaniments to, for example, for anorexia.   None of this exists in a vacuum.  Of course there are changes in serotonin levels accompanying the affliction but they are not necessarily causes.  We will never know that so long as we are “objective observers.”  Once we delve into deep memory and feelings we will find a whole new world, the primal world, if you will.  It will open up a plethora of directions that pain has taken us, but it is not in the chemistry of pain where answers will be found, but in the causes of that pain.  Of course when there is a lack of serotonin in certain anxiety states it helps to add serotonin/Prozac to the mix.  But that is what I call tinkering or tweaking.  It has little to do with ultimate causes.   We can tweak dopamine or serotonin in depression, and currently they do this by adding “chemical uppers,” activating chemicals to it.  Or they tinker with the glutamate level allowing more activation with less repression. And when they tinker it has to be a daily job because the causes are untouched and create the same old mess over and over again; witness drug addiction.  The addict’s pain is very deep, we have seen it, and it causes heavy-duty drugs to calm it—over and over again.  How do we know?  We have treated addicts and see the pain underlying the addiction. We know it is refractory because the level of pain, down deep in the brain is never touched in all those rehab centers.  Worse, they do not know it exists. So what do they do? They calm it chemically and are satisfied with that. Why satisfied?  Because they have never seen the Pain!  Never seen the agony, which allows them to think that it is just a bad habit.   Or to believe that a few words of praise can help it.  Or to think that a good diet will change it.  Or to think that a few lectures or group therapy will change it.  And the pain, hidden and recalcitrant, shouts back at the curers; try to find me!   “I am far below where you are looking, encrusted into the deepest chemistry of the brain,  conjoined into the act of repression so no one can see  how it works.”

I Pronounce Myself a Hero

Well,  Brian Williams the NBC anchor man is really in the news today, not as the anchor but as someone anchored to a strange story.  This story helps explain the value of Primal Therapy, not that he would ever consider it.  He would not consider it because he is too busy acting-out his need.

Here is a man, the leading news reader in America, watched by over nine million viewers every night and it just wasn’t enough.  Why not? Aah, therein lies the sad tale of a man gone wrong through a need unfelt.

He was famous and could not feel it.  He needed more, so he fabricated heroics—his life was in danger, he was shot down and so on ad nauseam.  He wanted to be something other than a news reader (which is what they are called in England, and not journalists).  Since he could not be a field journalist reporting from dangerous war zones, he did the next best thing; he invented his life.  Although he already had, approbation, worship, and admiration it was never enough.  He wanted admiration for what he was not,  and had not done; someone who lived a more dangerous and more glorious life.  He wanted to be more famous and more glorious than just reading the news.  He needed to be famous for putting his life in danger.  By the way,  he did that in his football career.  It was dangerous, and he was proud  on air to say that his injury during the game was something rarely seen.

He needed—admiration, love, importance; something he must have lacked in his early home life.   Those needs never go away.  And whatever anyone’s reality those deprived needs dominate, always.  Why?  Because at the time those needs were at their apex, it was a matter of survival to have them fulfilled.  Nice to have them filled when we are ten or twelve but will not change the brain and its biology as it does when we live in the womb.

You can be important and yet feel unimportant to those who mattered—your parents.  That is what was imprinted  deep in the brain and biologic system; it endured and rarely changes..

He felt unimportant in the face of his very important job at the News.  Deep down that is what drove him.  First to get a great job, and then to trash it because it just was not enough.  He invented fulfillment.  Why on earth did he have to do that?  Because the feeling of unimportance gnawed away inside for a lifetime and made him act out,  as it does to all of us, despite the reality of our lives.  When we are not loved for ourselves, we feel unimportant.  If only he could have felt it and stopped the act-out in its tracks. But short of Primal he could never feel it; it was buried deep inside and not accessible.    His unconscious thought, "if I am very important they will see it and I will feel loved."  Sorry, it  doesn’t work like that. They never saw it and never will and sadly, never will you.  That is why your apology fell short.  It was another compromise with the truth because you did not know what the truth is and was. He could not say, I reinvented myself to feel important; because that notion was beyond him.

So instead of feeling his deep need, he acted-out and when caught he invented again; "I was confused and conflated the plane in front of me from my plane," or some other nonsense and unbelievable tale.  He lied again. Can you imagine?  He lied about his life and when caught he lied again about his life.  Remember the comic who used to say, "the devil made me do it"?    His excuse is not too far from that.  For all intents and purposes, his feelings are really the devil inside.

Overdosing the Fetus and What that Means

Imagine you are taking your four year old child to a doctor. The doctor prescribes opiates for you for your anxiety and you give some to your child.  You are 130 pounds and your baby is thirty.   My oh my, you think how irresponsible, how terrible.  It is criminal!  But if I told you that one in four mothers might be doing that would you be shocked?  Yes.

Well, a new study finds exactly what I am writing about.  A report from the CDC (disease control) states that one-third of women of reproductive age have filled a prescription for opiate drugs in the last year, and every year for before that.  So what does that mean? It means that drugged mothers in large numbers are giving birth. They describe these numbers as "astonishing".    They believe it presents a great risk for birth defects, which I think is true.  But there is a more subtle effect; that of down regulating the who biology.  We need to know what percentage of these babies may not have obvious birth defects but are also much more vulnerable to depression.   Think now:  a 130 pound mother is stuffing herself with heavy drugs which reach a one pound fetus.  Clearly there is a massive down regulation of so much of his physical system, from heart and liver to hormones and stress and energy levels.  Then to make matters worse, there is a birth with again massive drugs given to the mother which affects the newborn;  more down regulation.  He has no chance.   He is passive and lethargic,  never has enough energy, has low blood pressure, perhaps a few allergies and cannot concentrate in school.

Ayayay; it is constant mystery to us all because no one realizes what those medications to the mother have done. The baby is heavily drugged before he is out on the world.  We understand if the mother hands her baby drugs but few understand if she directly transmits them into her baby's system while he is living in the womb.  She herself does not mean to but she doesn’t understand what she is doing.  After all, no one can see it happening. And so the baby is sluggish and is a future depressive but it is a sub rosa event.  Later, he cannot get out of bed to go to work; takes uppers and “speed” to get going, and we all run around trying to cure him of his depression.  Oh and what do we do? Well now we give him uppers and find it helps. Or we give him LSD, as the new wonder drug because  it temporarily lifts the depression; what it does is ease the depression by blasting open the cerebral gates.  Of course, anything that eases the repressive gates, lashed into action with the aid of our own opiates during womb-life, is going to help.

It is not rocket science; we are fighting heavy repression, the base of depression.  (see my article in the World Congress of Psychiatry 2013-14 on Depression http://www.activitas.org/index.php/nervosa/article/view/157).   I still believe that given a healthy birth and gestation there is little reason to suffer terrible afflictions.  Of course, heredity plays a role but not as great as we might think.  Epigenetics plays the predominant role, in my opinion.  We are dealing here with invisible forces that are not obvious to the eye so we ignore them.  Anything that a carrying mother takes will affect the biology of the baby.  It is a tiny little baby, helpless, trying desperately the escape the constant onslaught of  a mother’s constant smoking and drinking with not great success.  We need to teach that in schools so that students will not be so insouciant about it. While pregnant,the mother and child is as close as they ever will be again. Their biologies are very close so that the predominant state of the mother, anxious or depressed, will be reflected later on in the baby.  Take care, friends, and be a good friend to your baby.

On the Beliefs that Kill

 Yes, beliefs do kill. They create a zeitgeist for murder.  If there were no zeitgeist for murder in the Middle East it may well be that the murder rate would be far less.  How else to explain how 150 militants decide together to penetrate a children’s school and slaughter over 100 innocent children?  What was in their minds but pure unadulterated murder.  What were they thinking?  They weren’t.  What were they feeling?  Killing, mayhem, massacre.  Why?  Because those children were offspring of military people.  And, as the killers said, “They grow up to be adults who kill us.” This is exactly what the Nazis said when they killed children.  They kill now for possible crimes twenty years hence.

 First the zeitgeist that it is OK to kill women who do not wear veils, cartoonists who do not defer to Allah, those who do not dress according to their standards, and on and on.  The point is to kill; to release all that hate.  And where does that hate come from?  Now the facile answer; lack of love.  No loved child could possibly travel miles to slaughter young children.  Why?  Because when you are loved you feel with and for others.  When you are shut down and your feelings are revenge, it permeates all thinking as deeper brain levels overtake higher levels and replace any semblance of humanity.    What is the revenge about?  Ostensibly for blasphemy against Allah.  In reality for a total lack of love and an atmosphere of death for the infidels.  That is why civilized societies all over the world are eschewing the death penalty.  They do not want to lose their humanity.

 As we see from Al-Qaeda and ISIS we can always find reasons to kill.  But to think about what we are doing and to reject murder because it is murder is the step toward humanness.

 I am not an expert on the Middle East, nor their politics or religions but I have treated killers, not mass killers, but those filled with rage and I know where it comes from and how it gets its start.  For mass killing we need the words of social psychologists who specialize in such matters. But I have experience with individual development into murder and can write on that.

 But in my practice I have seen patients rip up pillows and smash the walls until there are deep holes in them.  I have seen pure fury.  How could that be?  I let it happen under controlled circumstances.  And for almost 50 years of our therapy I have never seen an untoward incident.  On the contrary, expressing rage releases that urge and softens our patients.  But to let it happen means going against the whole background of psychiatry and psychology:  we were warned in our studies about letting feelings get out of control.  And so we suppressed them rather than do what is logical; which is to let feelings out.

 I see the progression of feelings daily in my work with patients.  First they come in mad at this and mad at that. Then get into deep feelings after weeks or months of therapy and are furious with their parents for their indifference and lack of feelings; and then the hard part—begging them for love.  It doesn’t matter that they cannot give it; it is their need for it that counts,  their need that removes the pain and becomes liberating, and above all, removes the fury. This is not a theory I concocted.  It is the progression of feelings in so many patients.  Lacking this primal context there can be pure rage;  a sensation that lives down in the brainstem that has no words and no feelings. As it comes up, and given the right context, those deep feelings can channel his rage against those who blaspheme Allah.  He now has a target far from the real source;  his lack of love.  And worse, that target is accepted by those around him.  They now have congealed feelings and a target.  They will kill, not for Allah, but for lack of love under the sobriquet of Allah.  Meanwhile, the killers in Paris shouted as they killed, “To avenge the Prophet Muhammad.”  Unless they had some word from Muhammad, who told them to do that?

 But in the case of a mass zeitgeist there is a contagion effect, as the feeling gains acceptance and solidifies.  It becomes shameful not to kill those who are not respectful of a specific higher being.  All that rage lives on the deepest and most level of the brain. It becomes socially institutionalized psychosis.  There is a delusionnary target; certainly no sane person can imagine that children are a menace and a danger.  And then the rage arises to prompt the killing.  I write “psychosis” advisedly, as it is a phantom enemy joined with murderous impulses with no higher level control.

 Where is the sane zeitgeist?  The same place it was during the Holocaust when Marlene Dietrich’s sister could live across from a death camp.  That zeitgeist rationalizes and makes acceptable the killing of another human being.  Jews, infidels, it is all the same as long as they can release their pent-up rage.  Or if someone can offer a rationale for killing, as we do when we recommend the death penalty.  The first step in the zeitgeist is to dehumanize the ”enemy.”  It is easier to kill a subhuman than a feeling human; that is why we can hunt and kill animals, not understanding that their feeling base is as large as ours.  We don’t believe that they can feel.

 This is all on the personal, individual level; how people can go crazy together and do horrendous things.  Are they thinking? No, they are feeling from deep down in the brain where the shark brain lies in wait. It doesn’t differentiate among targets so long as they look like food.  What are the sharks and the shark brain thinking?  They are not. They act on untrammeled instinct.

 So,  as to make my point real, I wrote this at the same time as a group of terrorists in France attacked the offices of a magazine that makes fun of all the great religions and ideologies and killed 12 writers/cartoonists.  Their shouts were “Praise Allah.”  Their pal who also was radicalized in prison with them, went on another killing spree nearby and killed another four people.
 How come he traveled to a Jewish delicatessen to kill?  Because in certain zeitgeists the Jews were already considered sub-human.  We need to be very careful about joining in on the maladaptive zeitgeist which overall makes it easier to discriminate and ultimately to kill.  That is the danger of even the most minuscule insult to any race or belief.  It adds to the background noise of hate.  And the hate accumulates till violence shows its ugly head.  The person; Jew, homosexual, Arab,  are the targets to discharge the hate.  And where should that hate go if anywhere?  Toward their early life, parents who never loved and a family life filled with chaos and violence.  That is what built the hate and need to release; rather, to find a target where they can release.  They killed those who answered back against idolatry; who refused to praise and serve a higher authority.  They killed those who would not share their beliefs.  Was it just beliefs?  No.  Beliefs without the urging of feelings never take on that violent aspect.

 After the terrorists were killed by the police, 3 million Frenchmen took to the streets to protest.  The terrorists seemed to know they were on a death march and did not care. They did their job; releasing rage and rationalizing under the authority of Allah.  And above all,  they felt they belonged.  They shared the hate with others.  Let us not minimize this since those followers of a leader in Waco, Texas  when faced with fleeing and escaping, went back into the building which was on fire.  They chose death instead of feeling there was nowhere for them.  If there is no close family, the need to belong is primordial.

 I have seen it in treating Mexican gang members. They come here not knowing the language, the fathers are struggling to make a living, neglecting the kids and they join a gang to be able to talk to others, to feel that they belong and are wanted.  The price of entry is sometimes killing someone else; often someone from the block down the street.  These kids are family to each other; they need a family and someone who cares about them.  And they fabricate enemies; across the tracks, a different neighborhood.  It doesn’t matter as they need a target, someone they can blame and pin their woes on.  And they do find them.  It is a common enemy that provides cohesion for the group.    That enemy makes the gang or group closer and more bonded.  When there is no enemy they provide them;  manufacture an enemy who is the danger, even those who live 2 blocks away.  What do they have in common?  The enemy.  Take away the enemy and there is less cohesion.  In these situations you are not safe if you are different.

 I have seen several articles on the French massacre and some claim they are not psychotic.  I am not sure what is psychotic if you go to kill a hundred children who have done nothing at all to harm anyone.  These are psychologists writing.  The claim of the terrorists is that they perceive they are victims of injustice.  Maybe true, but one does not slaughter someone who has nothing to do with that injustice.  OK, so they think that there has to be delusions for psychosis to exist.  Isn’t what those killers believed? Pure delusions?  That their God was insulted and that he is the last word for truth? That one has to kill if others disagree with their delusions?  That it is all done in the name of a God or deity.  And that the deity approves of this slaughter and actually insists on it:  the Fatwa.  So “God” does not ask them to love and honor others;  it wants them to be murdered.  Ayayay!  They do not celebrate life; they celebrate death and often ask to be killed.  They give up their life happily to be known as a “martyr.”  For that word they are willing to die.  Imagine, the most precious gift anyone of us have is life.  To throw that away for a word is indeed psychotic.

 So who gets killed? Those who deviate from the zeitgeist.  And who makes the zeitgeist?  All of us. But first those who profit from it.  Capitalists who can make money if we acquiesce. Or those in power who are willing to kill us to remain in power.
 In Cambodia they killed those who wore glasses because they thought it was that only the Vietnamese who wear glasses so they can read and have thoughts.  They were the danger.  In fascist societies, the college people are the danger because they might think.  Intellectuals often become the target, even those who read French; hence freedom fries, rather than French fries.

 The powers who reign do not want us to think; they want us to believe, to be engaged in endless studies of the official scripts so as to be further inculcated and more easily led.  It looks like thinking but it actually replaces thought. The spread of ideation has cast a large intellectual net over us so that the powers simply twist and turn the ideation and we follow.  We continue to follow until it envelopes us and we do its bidding without any further reflection.  Their control is now internal; we just follow its dictates.  That is the ticket; impregnate ideas until they become part of us, and then we follow them without question.  It is a true principle in advertising: “ Buy this truck and you will be strong.”  It is not said, it is implied.  We fill in the blanks with our deprived needs.

          Let me explain. When we hurt early on — and that means in utero, in infancy and most importantly in early childhood— we have a defense system that hurries to contain the pain. For every major trauma there seems to be an equal and opposite defensive force to contain the pain. I call this defense system the gating system. Those familiar with my writing understand that defenses are abetted by biochemical means through which neurotransmitters are secreted by the brain into the gap between cells so that the message of pain cannot travel to high centers, enabling us to remain unconscious. We humans usually manage to hold down our most painful feelings by a neurologic system that was built for it, to keep our mental system functioning. It is in the first weeks of life in the womb that life-threatening events occur. The mother is depressed or anxious, takes drugs or drinks alcohol and is not careful with her diet. As her life goes on, there may be a compounding of pain for the developing infant due to her own parental neglect and indifference. Her gates do not function well and she goes on taking drugs to quell her pain. The chemicals that accompany these states spill into the placenta and affect the fetus.
      Sometimes life deals such harsh blows that the gates crack or weaken; the result is that there aren’t enough repressive chemicals such as serotonin in the synapse to keep repression going, and we have a carrying mother in turmoil. Deep in that turmoil lies rage which is sucked up into various targets, rarely parents.  But it can be Socialists, Unitarians, Vegetarians and so on.  Or the unions which we rally against.  Or Wall Street, as another target; choose your poison but the real poison is the deep-lying pain that drives so much of us.  That does not negate the reality of the target but it helps to explain the violent reaction; as those who wear glasses.

 Of course, not every unloved child grows up to be a killer. Some lose love, go into despair and then find God. They have been saved, saved by the idea of God, unless we really think He comes down from out of wherever He is and literally lends a hand. But the reaching out for God represents the hope of being loved, albeit this time only in fantasy. Others may start to feel the pain and reach for the bottle. Still others may reach for the neck of the departing lover and strangle her. But what they all have in common, what makes the act-out obligatory, is the reawakening of early deprivation by a current situation. Amorous rejection is the trigger; parental rejection gives it power.

 Think about this.  The terrorist feels he is loved once he does his terrible deed; life in reverse.  He does it all in the name of God and since many of us have different Gods the permutations are enormous.

 When we follow evolution as I see in my patients there are deep feelings, sometimes overwhelming that force their way up in the idea/belief area of the brain (neo-cortex),  and the belief becomes as obdurate as the feeling itself.  We need to address not only the beliefs but the underlying force behind them.  And indeed, when we get patients to relive very deep feelings the beliefs seem to evaporate, especially the belief in the devil.  With ISIS or Al-Qaeda the force pushing ideas is inordinate; we must not underestimate it.  Those ideas do not make one kill; it is the rage that drive them.

 One thing I fail to understand is that after the killing, the remaining journalist put out another massive issue, stating in effect, on the cover, all is forgiven.  I don’t get it.  Are the religious precepts so strong as to override rational feeling?  What bothers me is the majesty of it all; “when I forgive I am above all that.  I have the power to forgive those lesser beings.”  “I am the great forgiver.”

 Have you noticed?  Terrorists always do their deeds for love.  Mohammad loves me…….and wants me to blow myself up for the cause. Still the need for love dominates.  The recipe is if I kill I will be loved. Still the same need, only taking a lethal turn.

 When hundreds all believe the same thing there is danger.  It becomes unassailable.  The contagion factor gives it more power.  What is the answer?  Love.

So What is the Meaning of Life?

 Stop asking the question and you will be better for it. I have written before, there is no meaning to life, only to the meaning we give it; to experience.  Someone in a coma is alive but there is no meaning to it.    We don’t have to ask what’s it all about; it’s about nothing. Imagine two chimps asking each other what’s it all about?  That represents our feeling selves and down inside we react but don’t ask intellectual questions.  Down deep we are chimps.  Now that we are humans we ask the question when the answer lies on the feeling level where there are no intellectual questions.  If we deny our chimp selves we will be loaded with questions about meaning.  And when we are disconnected from our chimp selves we manufacture questions that never need to be asked, in the first place.  What am I saying?  That we make our own meaning and no one else can. Oh wait, Janov can.  What?  What does Janov do? He puts us in touch with the chimp inside, that once and for all eliminates those questions about meaning.  Because now we are in touch with our chimps running around inside and they have no questions like that.  Once they are into deep feelings I have never seen a patient in a Primal ask about meaning; they are too busy feeling, not thinking.

 And what could a meaning be?  What do I want to get out of life?  To be famous, successful, appreciated?  Or it can be any left over need from childhood?  What it is not and can never be is the answer to meaning of your life.  There is only meaning to experience; it gives me joy, it gives me pain, it makes me happy, successful, etc.

 We abdicate our personal meaning the minute we think that someone can supply us with it.   The trouble is many of the questions and search for answers become an endless affair since there are no answers.  The minute we think we found one it seems to pale until we go onto the next one;  a certain vitamin or therapy or guru become interchangeable as what we search for does not exist—the meaning of our lives.  But if we are needy, a strong guru will have us genuflect before him,  lose all critical faculties and believe in him devoutly.  The guru needs devotees and we supply the unquestioned devotion.  Once anyone else locks into our unfulfilled need we are hooked, literally.  Our need is the hook; once a psychopath figures that out, he has got us.  He can make us believe in the most outrageous ideas because we are hooked, addicted to his message of promised fulfillment.  We are hooked by need and that is pre-potent over everything else.  It is unfulfilled need that is addicting.  The addiction (propensity for) is already there inside of us.  We need to go deep inside of us, not dancing around the surface finding safer, less addicting pain killers; or blaming how easy it is to get drugs at pharmacies. If he have to blame we should blame the Janovian Gap; the gap between our deep imprints and our conscious/awareness.

 And that is what differentiates us in Primal from all other modes of treatment!  It is not the pills or the needles;  it is us!  We are the addicts, not the oxycodone or heroin.  Let’s not address what lies in the corner pharmacy; let’s address what is sequestered in the deep antipodes of the brain.  There is where the addict hangs out needing an endless supply of painkillers.

 Of course, many of us never ask the question about meaning.  There are two sorts; those who feel fully and do not need to ask the question about meaning; and then those who never fully feel and have unlimited questions to pose about meaning.  And then, alas, there is the third route; those who do not feel and never ask any questions of life.  These are the ones who exist but are not living, the problem of too many of us. Or whole culture militates against reflection.  “Get going.  Get it done.  Success is all,” etc.

 So here we have a dilemma; those who fully feel are propelled to search for meaning;  and whose do not ask themselves about meaning,, and those who do not feel and also never ask them selves what is it all about; they feel something is missing but what?.  They just live and never reflect about their lives.  They find a groove and stay in it and never put their lives in question.  Is that good?  It seems good for them to live the unreflective and unexamined life.  They do not wonder where their lives could be or what else they can do with it.  They are low in imagination and vision and do not seem to care; just as so many individuals in their seventies and eighties seem to give up on life and ascribe no further meaning to it.  They have lost their ambition, their drive, their desires and the notion of what could be—what could they do--with their lives.  They gave up on meaning because doing and thinking and feeling comprise the life of meaning.  Especially feeling; for that seems to be the essence.  I do not plan to join those who give up on life; my writing saves me and I hope, many others.  By the way,  I have a book, Beyond Belief, coming out at the end of the year, which discusses all this in detail.

 Those who don’t feel spend their lives seeking what life means. They travel to see the priest, the swami or guru; someone to help them find the meaning of life.  And if someone has to give it to you, it means you have already lost it.  Why would you look for something that you never had and therefore never lost?  Why spend thousands dreaming about someone who has all the answers when no one but you has it; and you don’t have to go to India to find it; just drop a few millimeters down in the brain and there lies meaning; the pool of feeling/meaning ready to add to your experience.  There lies joy, enthusiasm, dreams, exuberance.  Oh oh. There lies that chimp playing down below. He will help us enjoy life; we have been asking the wrong person.

  What more could we ask for?  And no one can give us that; only our own personal feelings can do it.  And it is free and not far away. The trouble is that when we look for it we feel we have to find that special someone who has the right pulpit for us to believe in.  And he promises so much; if we can only divest ourselves of critical thinking and go along.  And when he preaches and touches us we fill in the blanks and believe we have found it.  What?  Salvation, help, guidance, warmth, leadership and all of the things we missed as children.  We join with other believers and voila, we are saved and have a direction.  Oh yes,  that direction, with its patina of white robes, does not come free;  we need to pay a lot for it but we think it is a small price to pay to resurrect our hope in and for life.  That is what we are buying,  hope, born of early desperate hopelessness, someone to show us the way and to take an interest in us and our health and direction ... a parent.  We buy that in our all knowing, omniscient therapists; while all we in Primal have to offer is hopelessness; that dreaded feeling that will finally pull us out of the search for a greater life.  Yet that painful feeling is what liberates us; hope born from hopelessness.  It stops the act-out in its tracks, avoids the unrelenting search for an all-knowing “God” who will not let anything bad happen to us.

 Why is addiction so hard to treat? Because painful need is what addiction is about; it lasts and lasts until it is finally felt in its entirety.  So addiction is just about all the same, whether food, drugs, work, drink, etc.  It is the same pained need.  What is it they have in common?  They all ease pain; the pain of unfulfilled need, starting from the beginning of life.  There are many studies about this; one demonstrates that nutritional deficiency very early in gestation is the basis for later overeating.  The over-eater usually has no idea about this lack so early on.  So we automatically chose our poison; and what we choose is often related to that deprived need.  It is one way we know what was missing.  Also, the addict usually chooses something available all of the time, like her mother’s love was not.  So booze, cigarettes, whores, drugs, and so on.  Why continuously go after what is not available when drugs are?  That is what the addict learns early on; until the doctors enter the scene and try to take it all alway.

 Addiction depends on the early need and what you find early on to quell its pain.  One patient found his mother’s wine when he was eight years old.  Later on, he drank; a lot.  Robin Williams used to joke how well he felt and how sure he is well off drugs and booze, until during shooting a film he stopped into a bar in Alaska and saw a bottle of whisky.  He was hooked again.  He was still needing to quell his pain and find surcease.  But the truly only way anyone can do that without excess residual tension and a shorter life is to feel the need ... fully at its source!  Robin saw hope and help again.

 And what does the depressive feel most of the time; “I have no meaning to my life.” And why?  Because he has no energy or “life force’ to get out of bed and produce a meaning to his life.  His repression has sucked the life out of him so he cannot feel any of the elements of meaning. His feelings seem to be buried deep down under the ceiling of repression.  And why?  Because his pain has evoked the chemicals of repression into action; a pain he does not feel, only its after-affects.  He feels down and cannot get up to do anything.  His gates seem to be closed against him.  They have shut-away his meaning.  He is now susceptible to a guru, therapist, a life coach, and advisor, etc.  He needs to be drawn out, he needs someone to literally "breathe life into him".  So many of them, by the way, do have serious oxygen deficit during the birth process which is imprinted and channels us.  The cultist needs to be told what to do and how to act because he has lost his bearings, his feelings.

 I have not mentioned religion that provides so many answers for those are lost, and they tell us what the meaning of life is, ad nauseam.  The more we believe the less we follow our own feelings.  We obey and imagine we find salvation in that.

 Here is one of my bloggers and friends just wrote to me:  “To select Evolution in Reverse as a treatment method is deeply linked to a conviction “that we are the evolutionary result of all history, personal and ancient.” I would never trust a religious believer, who lives by the Bible’s creation story / Genesis and the commandments, at the same time, to be a reliable Primal Therapist. Possibly, he / she can be an interesting PT patient seeking a cure for his / her pain propelled religiosity. My heart rate flew up into the 70’s when Art expressed his surprise that the Catholic Church has priests / specialists who recognize / root out the devil. It takes One (a pain propelled Catholic priest) to know One (the devil). Their roles /specialties are both pain propelled products of the same evolution. (The head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, was appointed Person of the Year 2013 by the US news magazine Time. Without making other comparisons, the same magazine appointed Adolf Hitler, Person of the Year, in 1938.)

 More than 100 years ago one of Sweden’s most talented personalities, the skilled biologist, scientist and Darwinist Bengt Lindforss got his career seriously disturbed by the bishop, acting university chancellor and devil worshiper Gottfrid Billing. In his book, “Why Evolution is True”, Jerry A. Coyne tells us that anti-evolutionism, still today is very strong in the US and on the rise in England and Germany!

 In 2006 only 40% of Americans (down 5% from 1985!!) believed that humans developed from earlier species of animals. We descend from a primate lineage that split off from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago. (In France and Scandinavia 80% of people see evolution as true). According to Jerry A. Coyne, evolution gets bumped down even further in the US when it comes to deciding whether it should be taught in the public schools. Two-thirds of Americans feel that if evolution is taught in the science classroom, creationism should be as well. In the US only 12 percent - one in eight people - think that evolution should be taught without mentioning a creationist alternative…

Seen from the bright side, 12% of the US population means 38 million people…

I think that says a lot.  I hope this provides another perspective on meaning.  Addicts do what they can to live a meaningful life but pain always gets in the way and blunts it.  This is my message.

So What is "Crazy"?

There is so much misunderstanding about what psychosis or “crazy” is. I think that once we take an evolutionary frame of reference it becomes much clearer. Once we know that there are deep brain imprints that resonate with higher brain levels to produce ideas and delusions, we are well on our way. We are the evolutionary result of all of history, personal and ancient. So “crazy” is to encompass all that history, as well. So when we equate bizarre ideas with psychosis we will need to delve deeper; deeper in our personal history and that of the species. Because psychosis must include all of that as the end-point of a process.

What if the pain does not get elevated to the neo-cortex and remains fixed lower down? What if the pain is gated somewhat so that the pain remains on the limbic level and below? What if upcoming pain is partially blocked so that there is no obvious neo-cortical affects that makes us delusional; having false or crazy ideas? In other words, depending on how early and how severe the input we can go "crazy" on different levels of evolution and brain maturation.  And infancy “crazy” has a different configuration from that of an adult who has the capacity for words as part of her psychosis. Autism has a different shape from adult psychosis.

So we see that hallucinations, false perceptions, hearing and seeing what is not there, impacted by feelings of danger are lower and earlier in time from delusions of persecution. We see worms crawling on the wall or see images of the devil as does one of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court. No one says he is psychotic because there are no obvious delusions; they are obvious to me, however.  And yes, that is "crazy". Actually seeing the devil is seeing an image that you manufacture, unless you believe there is a devil and that devil can be seen. If you believe that you need to close ranks with the crazies.  When we take terror and pain, very deep and remote pain, out of the system those "devils" take a hike, not to be seen anymore.  They do not go away until after months of primal therapy where the patient reaches catastrophic suffering and terror, the imprint, that gave birth to the images, in the first place. Again, why is that? Because pure terror is mostly a brain-stem affair and when the fear is strong enough it propels that delusion. Then we say, "the devil made me do it". And this is reinforced by the Catholic Church which does recognize the devil and has certain priests who specialize in Exorcism.  To say that the man in the booth over there is sending me messages, is slightly different from conjuring up a devil to explain what is happening.  Did you get that about the Catholic
Church? They have specialists who root out the devil!

That is one way we know where the culprit, I was going to say, "devil" lies, but I will leave the pun alone. When patients in Primal Therapy go deeper and further back in their evolution the "devil" diminishes, which is one way we know what is behind the illusion.  Illusion is a false sense; delusion is a false idea. Generally, false sense is more remote in origin, as it was in our personal maturation.  We smell odors before we can think about what to call it.  And, as I reported in past blogs, there is evidence that the specific sense of some smells occurs during womb-life. The mother’s odor is recognized right after birth by the baby.  If we smell odors as an adult we can almost be sure there were real early memories behind them. And those memories will lay way back in our lives, so strong that it stayed untouched for decades.

But, on the other hand, as the patient relives first-line deep brain imprints (terrible suffocation at birth) some of the delusions begin to disappear.  We can actually observe the shaping of a delusion. In a lesser fashion, when a spouse wants to leave her husband because he is "suffocating her", we may find the origins deep in the brain. Of course, there may be real external reasons; but still there is a crucible for all this.

So what is crazy? It is a deviation of the whole system and a rerouting of the neuronal, brain-path circuits. The great level of early pain, we saw two brothers both pre-psychotic whose mother took heavy drugs throughout all of her pregnancy, who were "crazy" from the start; very delayed talking and walking slow mental development and great difficulty in focus and concentration.  They ended up being diagnosed as psychotic because they showed evidence of delusions; crazy ideas. That is the contribution of the cognitivists who believe that we need evidence of false ideas, delusions, before we name anything as psychotic.  We can "see" that kind of psychosis before our eyes. We rarely can see the deep anguish that lies deeper. In that sense, organs can go crazy when the cells overspill their banks and become cancer or later Alzheimers disease.

It would be strange, indeed, to think that only the top level cortex can go crazy. That is a narrow view of our complexity. We go crazy in different ways depending on our genetics, epigenetics and later life experiences; fighting a war, for example. Although I fought many battles in the war, I believe that my family life did me in, far more than battles. That is, I fought a much more serious battle as a fetus and infant, with no one to help me; all alone with no one to turn to, and no one to lean on.  Those early battles change everything and for life. They are embedded deep in the brain and we fight that battle for the rest of our lives.

More on ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)

Imagine trying to concentrate while trucks and trains and cars are whizzing by, make noise and creating tumult.  Well that is going on in the brain of those who belong to that not so exclusive class of ADDers.   Where do all those trucks and cars come from?  Those are the imprints/traumatic memories are shooting up noisy information from below.  And they never stop, trying to tell the higher brain about so many dangers that the person no longer knows where to turn.  He cannot select out  a single task to focus on because of all those inputs (trains, trucks and cars) whizzing around creating tumult. The brain has to focus on so many inputs, so much incoming information that it cannot concentrate on one thing alone.  Focus means to eliminate extraneous input from outside and inside and select one single topic.  How can anyone do that when the input is so strong and intruding?    It has to be intruding because it includes life-saving information.  Something we must pay attention to.  It tells us there are things inside—memories—that need to be addressed and resolved.  And the ADD person must give priority to memory, for that is lifesaving.  That imprint is saying, pay attention to me.  And because of that, what do we get?    ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER.   It is signaling to every part of the higher brain;   I am important and can help you live.  It is not attention deficit; it is hyper-attention disorder; having to pay attention to many other things.  Remember it is a lifesaving fact.  The brain is performing correctly with ADD, not something to be overcome and done away with.  It is warning us; hence the need to be hyperactive.  The imprints over-activate and keep the person going and going, running from the terror, while the information is pushing, seeking higher neuronal ground.  It is carrying out its function of trying to inform us of the imprint.  So activation blocks and suppresses through hyperactivity; keeps us from focusing completely on what lies inside.  The imprint is so strong and life-endangering that we have to keep running away; our minds go everywhere at once.

What the “going and doing” all of the time does is help drain some of the activation, lower the level of input, and help us function a bit better.  Isn’t that what pills like Prozac do? To lower the reactions, slow the hyperactivity and help us slow down and relax.  One of the reasons that pills are weak in the face of all this is that there is sometimes impairment of the neo-cortex which should work well to repress, but doesn’t.   The reason there is a failure to repress is that the Primal Terror chews up so much of the painkilling supplies and never allows it to achieve normal levels.  What Primal Therapy does is lower reactivity so that the cortex is not overwhelmed by input and can begin to do its job of integration and resolution; the job it was made for.

This is the particularly true of those whose imprint involves massive terror/anxiety and therefore exceptionally strong input.  That input scatters the organic sense of the brain and it seems like it is in pieces, having lost its cohesion (and it’s cohesion that keeps the train on the right track) in terms of how it functions.  And with the ADD individuals there is often a lack of cohesive, overall, gestalt thinking.  So easily distracted, so easily disconcerted, so often losing the train of thought.  As I said before, when you get on the wrong train every stop you make will be the wrong one.  It is not a matter of correcting the destination, it involves redoing the beginning of the trip; getting on the right train.   And that right train is always the right one, the normal one, the one that instinctively knows the right track.  It is the track of feeling.

I have treated many ADDers. One is now in a doctor’s program who was unable to finish high school.   This is multiplied by many patients.
When we remove the terror and pain over months and years we also extirpate the neurotic drive they suffer from. End of distraction and lack of focus. End of ADD.  

Why is Early Love So Important?

The first easy answer is that you can never get it back; it is gone forever. And one day when you feel empty and lonely, and “down”, and missing something, you may know where it came from.

Remember there is critical period for all of our key functions; once gone it is history, and then we play make-up, trying to compensate for it.  Starving in the womb?  A big eater later on. Not eating for today but for when you were starving because that starving is now an imprint, deeply embedded in the brain.

Not touched as an infant becomes insatiable sex later on; again, trying to make up for the past deprivation.  It becomes insatiable and uncontrollable because being held at the start of life, right after birth is life-giving, survival and the key to normalcy.  We need to make up for that lack so that saturyisis is an attempt at being normal.  
We are trying to get our past back, a past that should have been normal—fulfilling children’s needs.  Alas, it was not.  So we act out symbolically; we need to be touched now!  And often: we cannot get enough. Remember, we are trying to fill up deprivation.  Get our childhood back.

And if we all look at our neurotic behavior, our obsessive act-outs, we will find what was missing in history.  Do we eat too much?  Take painkillers?  Hey that means you have pain.  I have an idea: let’s try to find out where it comes from instead of just trying to get rid of it by pushing it down.  “Out of sight very much in the mind."

You get mad when your husband won’t help you? Your parents also did not.    You are frustrated because the wife does not listen?  Guess what was missing.

Worse, once married the husband’s wife becomes his mother; his property.  He can become dangerous and stalk her.  She must now obey and do all of his bidding.  He is living in his past; in his deprivation, and cannot get out of it.  And she is obliged to live out his past with him.  Otherwise, his fury knows little bounds.

That is the essence of neurosis; living in the present as if it were the past.  No longer able to distinguish the past from the present.  This is what I see all of the time; and this is the primordial cause of divorce.  Unfulfilled need acted out on a partner.  They can’t get along?  Look for the need instead counseling each of them to try harder.

It is that past that drives obsession and compulsion because the combination of past and present is often overwhelming.

Just an aside about not making up for the past:  many studies show the long-lasting effects of early deprivation.  Michael Meaney’s work in Canada, in particular.  One study by Eric Nestler, Friedman from the Brain Institute in New York, reported that when rat pups were deprived of licking early in their lives, they were later vulnerable to stress and were easily damaged.  They had less curiosity and were less adventurous.  Those rat pups who were given lots of love were quite different when they grew up.  They were much more nurturing, whereas those who were deprived were much less loving.  And that lasted.

We see confirmation of this need for love everywhere we look.  It gives us a foundation, and without it we are weaker, sicker, lead shorter lives.  We are more apt to become both depressed and/or anxious as adults.  Shouldn’t all this “proof” say something to therapists?  We need to examine that foundation and see how strong or weak it was. We need to ask the right questions and look in the right places and at the right time in history.  I should not have to bang on about it.
 

The Leap Into Cancer

I am going to take several leaps: the first is to equate the imprint with methylation of the gene cell.  That is, as very early trauma (gestation and its surroundings)enhance methylation, adding part of the methyl group to the cell.  This is  a sort of trace or memory marker that alters the gene and imprints the memory; for life.  Well, “for life” is a big statement since if someone finds a way to rid us of those traces it will not be for life.  Which I believe we have; we are now on our way to confirm this hypothesis.

The point being that the trace of methylation is an analog to my notion of the imprint; an embedded memory that endures and affects so much of us, our minds and body organs.  That is the second leap.  Of course it is complicated matter and I do not touch on that, but by and large, it is a good index of what methylation means.

Why do I make that leap?  Because we are dealing with early trauma and it may well have to with the later development of cancer.  Let me put it differently.  We see very few cancers over the years of our therapy.  I believe in part it may be due to addressing directly the memory trace; over months of Primal Therapy, wending the way down to lower brain levels, finally arriving at the deepest and most remote memories and reliving them bit by bit.  What seems to happen to my patients is that full reliving without words and often without tears,  the mark of primeval imprints, undoes the agony of the memory without disturbing the memory itself.  The memory no longer drives us and impels neurosis.  That means no longer a deregulation of so many organ systems and thought processes.  There is then a systemic normalization of so much of brain and physical processes.

It is my assumption, then, that this normalization reverses methylation, at least in part.  We note in late research on depression and suicide (measured by autopsy), that the heavier methylation is associated with greater tendencies toward suicide.   That so-called “psychologic behavior” is ultimately a matter of neurophysiologic processes.   Not the reverse, mind you, where everything is a brain dysfunction with no reference to or understanding of key early experience.   The brain gets impaired through early experience.  It is not a matter of investigating or changing thoughts and behavior in therapy that matters.  It means looking into the deep neurologic imprints altering the behavior of the genes.  In that way, we will stop imagining that it is all a matter of genetics, rather than epigenetics.  Yes, of course, there are genetic effects, but in my experience they are not so effective and dominating  as epigenetics.  This is being supported by late work in addiction.  (see, E. Heller, et al, “Locus-specific epigenetic remodeling controls addiction-and depression-related behaviors.”  Nature Neuroscience, 27 October, 2014)(see the abstract: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n12/abs/nn.3871.html).  One thing they found was that histone methylation …….the locus in the nucleus accumbens (the reward area) was enough to control drug behavior.   Again, it is no brain impairment; but brain reaction to trauma that may cause all this. What researchers are doing is finding the neurologic concomitants of it all.  Still with no mention of what goes on early in our lives that may produce these changes.

The research I am citing is from “Disorder in gene-control system is a defining characteristic of cancer.”  Dana Farber Cancer Institute,  Science Daily, 8 December, 2014) (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141208145512.htm).

So what are they saying?  Basically, that derangement of the methylation process "has a direct bearing on the effectiveness of cancer therapy". And what does that mean?  That changes and trauma very early in life impact the methylation process and deregulate it.  This makes cancer therapy more opaque.   There are times when this disorganization may help tumors adapt to its altered nature because of trauma.  In short, disordered methylation may lead to cancer progression. This is far too complicated, but there is a strong relationship between imprints and the development of serious disease.  And one way to measure this is through methylation which gives us a quantitative index of how much damage there is and where it occurs.   In brief, when we think of the Primal imprint we need to think methylation.

Let’s stop calling all the disorders of the brain and behavior a “brain disease”.  We have had some success in treating epilepsy.   Is it a brain disease or one of bad early experience?  Or is addiction a brain disease?   We have treated many addicts and have found that when we take away the embedded pain we stop the need for pain-killers.  If we neglect experience, specifically very early experience, we can never know how experience alters the brain.  We cannot understand how methylation becomes “disordered” with adverse experience and what role that plays in the development of cancer and other serious diseases.

What I have done is point the way to the imprint and shown how to get there to change the whole system.  Now science is helping to pinpoint so much that is helpful.  But let us not deify pure science is the sine qua non.  Clinical work here preceded pure neurologic science by years.  Our nerve cells store knowledge and store memory, and in those memories lies trauma and its enduring effects on all of us.   We must address those traumas, not with words but with experience.   Psychotherapy must ultimately involve experience.