Arthur Janov's Blog, page 26

The Memory of Hurt

There is a well known study of a population deprived of food that happened in the Netherlands.    It  showed how this deprivation was carried on to their offspring for years to come.  It was called the “Dutch Winter” which was produced by the Nazis, and devastated the population.  This was external deprivation rather than pure genetics.  But it was carried on as though it were genetic.  A current study asked the question, “how was it imprinted and what were the mechanisms by which that happened?”  (The memory of starvation is in your genes.  Science News.  Aug 1, 2014, see for ex: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731145845.htm)  And I must add that this is important because it has implications for us humans who were not starved by were deprived; i.e., starved for love, for example.  How does this affect the children who grew up with deprived parents?

My point is that the mechanisms involved may well be the same or similar; that is, as soon as there is deprivation of basic need, dating back to the beginning of life , those mechanisms begin their work.  That deprivation sends a signal to begin to defend and compensate; to change to meet the disaster to come.  The brain begins to “borrow” some methyl to produce methylation to help dampen the pain of deprivation.  And the biochemicals, such as serotonin, also jump into action to help in the repression.  The whole system is swayed, and not just for the moment but organically.  Those changes are imprinted just as the food deprivation in the Netherlands was.  They shape us for lifetime; they determine our later illnesses and our subsequent behavior.  This and relevant studies are learning the exact mechanisms involved.

One key mechanism is known as “small RNA inheritance.’  RNA molecules are produced by the DNA templates that tell the system that needs are not being met: lack of oxygen from smoking mothers, for example.  Something is missing; something is amiss.  We are warned, and later symptoms tell us about early deprivation but we have no idea what that might be.  In migraines, for example, the vessels during the birth process where heavy anesthesia is delivered to the mother, are depriving the newborn of oxygen; the vessels contract and block blood flow, sometimes resulting in a lifelong battle against persistent migraine headaches.  And what is one key therapy for these headaches?  Oxygen.

And what is the cure for later obesity?  Deprivation again.  How diabolic:  We are starved in the womb by external circumstances or a mother on a crazy diet,  that deprivation is imprinted and makes us hungry for life. Then when we are too fat we have to deprive ourselves again.  We see how useless this all is.  Of course there will be regression toward the imprint because it was life saving early on against the memory of extreme deprivation.
We might believe it is genetic because it happened when we could not even see the hurting fetus. We just assume that it comes from some mysterious source…..genetics.  Rather, its source is epigenetics; how life experience plays on the genes.  So we spend so much of our lives unconsciously responding to memory; obeying its dictates and never even knowing we are being ordered around by our history and its imprints.

Do we have free will?  Not so long as that will is being driven by our history.  There is more and more evidence of the imprint, as there should be, because it is crucial to our understanding of the human condition.    How can we ever conduct psychotherapy without including the imprint in the mix?

On Being Addicted

Addiction can be cured, so long as we know what addiction is and what cure means. Once we understand those two factors cure is not far off. Oh yes, there is one more item: need. It is need that that is responding to drugs, and it is need that makes us addicted. Now we have a problem because, after all, what is need? Need is whatever we required to normalize the system. We need water and food and we need love and touching and hugging. I am listing these needs after seeing patients reliving them, so I don’t have to guess what they are, something therapists in history may not have done. And we see the pain when those need are not met.

Needs form a hierarchy from the earliest the latest, from the most remote to the most recent; this means from the most live saving/ endangering to the least endangering. Reduced oxygen in the womb during gestation can be catastrophic and life-endangering. A mother taking drugs can also shut down the fetal system. These are what I call the first line needs, first to arrive in our lives and the last to relive in our therapy. For our therapy is neurosis in reverse; first in, last out: last in, first out. And the pains that accompany the first line match the valence of the need. This may not be obvious but it will become more apparent in a moment or two. For the urgency of fulfillment grows as we descend down the evolutionary chain of brain development. The earlier the deprivation, the stronger addiction and the need for drugs will be. And that is exactly the attention that is missing when we try to treat it. For if we neglect the greatest cause of pain and therefore the time and place for the greatest need for drugs we cannot possibly hope to cure it.

So a hug is very nice when the child is twelve, but crucial just after birth when touch is critical. That period of time has to do with the critical window, when certain needs must be met. For afterwards, no matter how hard we try, the pain remains intact, engraved in the brain and biologic system, for a lifetime.

As I have written, there are similar or the same feelings, say, of hopelessness, that compound the earlier imprint. Reliving those higher level traumas can be achieved but until the wounds during the critical period are addressed and re-experienced we cannot resolve addiction.

What is it, addiction? It is the need to normalize the system that has been deregulated due to early deprivation. The system is then askew as the brain circuits are rerouted and the biochemistry derailed. In brief, the wholes system is out of whack, and will stay that way so long as the early traumas are left imprinted. So if the mother took downers during pregnancy, which also suppressed the baby’s system, then he grows up needing speed or stimulants of one kind or another. He needs to normalize. This is true for what happens to so many addicts. We can be addicted to sweets, cigarettes or alcohol, depending on the early deprivation. Or how the system was rendered unbalanced. A “wired” mother already sets part of the physiology in her offspring; he has been over-activated in the womb. We don’t see it and it is never mentioned but therein lies the soil for later addiction. He may need tranquilizers constantly to calm his system. Yes, there are current stressors but they lie above the prototype set down very early in life. The person may shake and act nervous, be afraid of so much, yet we cannot imagine the genesis of it all; and by the way, it is called epigenesis. Things that occur to sway our genetic evolution. Those early traumas, a mother taking alcohol, make for a new system, a neurotic one. A system that “needs” drugs. So ordinarily we need to eat and drink what makes us normal and balanced, but when pain arrives we have a new set of needs; to undo damage and try to establish a normal system again. Now we know why the majority of men entering prison have drugs in their system. Their needs were not met early on; in brief, they were not loved. Love means, inter alia, filling the child’s needs. “My child knows I love him. I just can’t show it.” Oh no he doesn’t know. His is a deprived system no matter what the excuses. “ I know my child is hungry but I just can’t feed him.” His belly tells him what he really needs to know. He is being deprived and he hurts.

So how do you try to normalize when you cannot shut down anxiety? You take pain-killers which often contain the same molecules that were depleted at the time of the trauma. The supply from inside was exhausted in every sense of the term,. And so he goes to another pharmacy, around the block, one has more supplies, and orders more painkillers. He feels better; he is normalized for a time. Isn’t that what most of us do? Find the missing part of us; we do that even when choosing a life partner. We marry someone who breathes life into us when we were severely deprived of oxygen early on. That deprivation can turn us into parasympaths; passive souls that have no get-up-and-go in us. We tend to get involved with those get-up-and- goers. Or, maybe more efficient, drugs that help us get up and go.

So what is the choice of drugs? Whatever it was originally. A depressed carrying mother may force the child into a coke habit. His system was down-regulated early on. Again, we become addicted to need; that is the hook that forces us into drug habits. Those needs and deprivation are so early as to be unperceived and neglected. Later on, someone who was not loved in infancy can be “bought” for a few kind and laudatory words — “you are wonderful, so talented and so good.” Done. The hook is in.


And that is what drugs do: they create a signal in the brain that all is well, you are confident, and more aggressive. It does without words what approval does, make us feel better. Cocaine is ideal for this, if it weren’t for those pesky heart attacks and strokes that follow. So whether it is cocaine or praise the effect is to make up for deprivation of need. The person becomes a seeker … of applause and praise as a performer, or seeks out a drug that does the same thing. When these drugs normalize for a moment it changes personality; one is more calm, less aggressive (except for cocaine which produces aggressivity). The problem is that the addict suffers from pains that have no name, pains that were imprinted long before words came on the scene to define them.

Cocaine can take care of a gestation where a mother was depressed and down, together with a childhood of suppression and lack of love. It makes the person “up” and assertive. Pain that has no name is often the worse kind because it is nearly always about life-and- death. A carrying mother who is on constant tranquilizers is helping to shut down the fetal system. He cannot be normal unless he can counteract that suppression with other drugs that stimulate; and cocaine does that. It enhances dopamine which energizes the system. Why a stimulant? Because somewhere her system is down-regulated and “needs” it. The person can go from “can’t do” to “can do.” Moreover, it calms the pain; cocaine, after all, has been used in surgery.

Even though we are discussing a lack of love, it would seem that more love would help. Nope. More love can’t get in. What can get in is feeling there is no love, feeling the pains which finally opens up the system to feel again and to feel loved. Early love normalizes the system and makes it feel OK, loved. When that is missing later on, we need artificial help with drugs that boost supplies of such chemicals as serotonin that help block pain. The point is that the person needs it constantly, and it never completely satisfies like early love does. In fact, any ritual we have to do over and over again, whether a mantra or drugs is to overcome what has been missing inside of us. These are stop-gaps, not cures. It can never make up for the lack of hugs and kisses by one’s mother very early in life; never make up for a carrying mother who drinks alcohol.

I have seen suicide cases where the person was so agitated by pain that handfuls of painkillers could not kill. He is trying to kill a lifetime of deprivation and that pain is so great that it is almost unstoppable.

So what do many of these addicting drugs do? The most addicting are those that manage to suppress brainstem, first-line pains from very early in our lives—those pains with no name. They are the most powerful, visited upon a naïve, vulnerable soul who has no defenses. This makes for hard-core addicts that are considered untreatable only because these pains are so deep and remote as to be considered nonexistent.

So what does it matter if I can calm myself by a bit of drugs every morning and every night? And yes, if you need drugs to calm yourself during the day, you no doubt will need them at night to sleep.

It’s the difference between normalizing a symptom and normalizing the system. Vitamins or tranquilizers can help us feel better but underneath the system is still warped, and in areas we don’t even know about. Far better to right the system so that compensatory therapies will no longer be necessary. We can only right the system by going after what “un-righted” it. Lack of love and deprivation of need. So long as the system is warped, I believe there will be a shorter life span. It is akin to a false positive in blood examinations. We feel better, sleep better, with our pills of course, but we are not really better. In fact, there is no “better”; there is only normal or abnormal. It is the difference between a holistic approach (not holistic new age therapy) and a narrowly focused one. It means to right the entire system not just the symptom such as high blood pressure. It can be kept under control with beta blockers, that in effect will block the message of pain to the blood system, but one is still not normal and won’t be until the generating sources are addressed. Being kept normal or appearing normal by artificial means is not the same as being normal. Blocking pain is by no means the same as not being in pain.

Blocking pain means a daily ritual of some kind or another; a bit of drugs, some coffee, a couple of cigarettes and a coke or two. Then we can get out of bed. It is the parasympath, the down-regulated one that has trouble getting up and getting going. Conversely, it is the up-regulated that cannot stay in bed and has to get going immediately. He needs to be calmed before facing the world. Sometimes just moving from one appointment to another can help. So long as he can keep moving. It discharges some tension or anxiety inside. That alone can calm. Being held still, unable to move, as in being sick and in bed can produce more anxiety (an analogue of the birth trauma, unable to move and get out).

So when we consider our behavior we need to think about how our personality tendencies were stamped in, for our behavior, like taking drugs, is usually done to normalize ourselves. We are constantly seeking balance without even knowing that we had been unbalanced. To stop addiction we need to back to our starting blocks and see how we were sent off; then we will know what to do.

On Primal Memory

 I think that Primal memory is of a different order of being from just plain cerebral memory.  When I go back to my childhood and earlier, I am always amazed at the clarity and purity of my memory.  Even with ninety years of experience it is if nothing ever happened to change or moderate that memory.    I wrote recently about the lady who cared for a young lion and then put him in a shelter.  She came back five years later and when the lion saw her he draped his arms over her and kissed and hugged her.  And I had a Primal.  It was the love I never had.  The Primal began with no one was ever happy to see me (the lion seemed to be in ecstasy), then moved on to a scene where I was home and my parents never looked at me or talked to me and suddenly I felt the need……hold me, cherish me, tell me you love me…….and on and on……….the pain of no love which I was never able to articulate because I never knew about love.  Until you get a smidgen of it, you cannot imagine what love is about.  When I was a bit more open to my feelings and saw a film, Brief Encounter, I began to see about love, and I began to realize what I missed. Just to be hugged was such a revelation when I first saw it.  But the point is that I was transported back to that lonely experience where every drape, chair and pillow was so, so clear.  Every facial expression of my parents was so ,evident…. No life there.  No emotion, no sign of caring.
 I felt like I landed on a foreign land but actually it was just a hidden one.  Hidden because the memory was too painful to be faced abruptly.  But once I got there, it all seemed so familiar.  I saw it with new eyes, new awareness and a new perspective.  I saw it.  And oh my, it hurt.  That hurt kept me from seeing it. I mean how can you be acutely aware that the rest of your life at home will be loveless?  How can a young kid accept that?


 And when I make a pit-stop at my childhood, feelings take me down to the gestational period and I relive a birth trauma where I cannot open my mouth no matter how much I want to in order to get some air.
 That experience with no words is also pure and untrammeled by later experience; it is like nothing else ever happened. And because it is so early it is imprinted for a lifetime.  It makes us act it out.  Never comfortable with a low roof over my head,  never have any blanket over my head, panic when someone pretends to choke me, and I had to get out every morning for coffee in order to come back and feel relaxed.  I  “got out” at last.  Getting out in the morning was my act-out.  There are many, many others who have to get out and go, traveling all the time, making dates, having projects never relaxing.  All the same act out.  And if you tell those people who cannot stop traveling what they are doing they would be insulted and think you are nuts.  That is because the feeling is bound inside the act-out and drives it.  It is hidden through the act-out; i.e., getting out.  It is the logic of the imprint and forces us to behave in certain ways.  I had to go to a café  each morning for years, never knowing why.
 Worse, never knowing I was being driven by a memory 80-90 years old.  Imagine!  Yet when we open up the system the driving, imprinted memory just sits there waiting its turn to see the light.  It doesn’t just sit there; it gnaws away at the system for years and years.  When the cover is taken off, when we literally open the gates it can breathe life again and react as it should have years before.  So when I say, I feel liberated, it is exactly the case.  That memory has never ever changed.  There is a purity about it that is unequaled.  And when I come out of it, there is a great wonder about life and the brain.  A wonder how Primal memory never leaves us ……….until we experience it.  Then we have a normal memory shorn of its powerful impact of pain.  With a Primal reliving, the lower memory then climbs the ladder of the brain to a cortical area where the memory is kept.  It is not longer hidden and out of reach.

 Why hasn’t it changed?  Because it is life saving; the act out is a constant reminder of what we must do to live normally.  We must never take it away from the patient until she is ready because it is crucial to our survival.  The act out, which we do time and time again is talking to us, but sadly we cannot hear it.  Every day, in every way, it explains what we are doing and what is behind it but we turn a deaf ear.  So we go on interrupting cause we cannot wait…… back then…………now transposed to the present.  If we can learn about our act-out we will discover intellectually, what the early imprint is about. It is right there all of the time whispering ever so softly as if it does not want to be heard before we are ready for it.  It says to us,  “you interrupt because you could not get out of the womb easily; so to wait means death is lurking.  And it has such an urgency that we interrupt.  We have to get those words out.  When we reliving getting out, it all becomes clear as lower level memories join with their cortical counterpart to make sense of it all. I use this example because impulsive patients almost always have this experience; not my interpretation of it, but because I observe.

 When we do experience it, even pre-verbally, afterwards, it wends its way upward to offer us insights of what it was and how it drove us.  The higher level cortex now explains it all for us and helps make sense of its power.

 This process should never defy evolution and occur with intellect first with its cerebral insights, and then feeling.  It must always be in the order of the development  of the brain—feelings first followed by insights.  Those intellectual insights can never be curative without feelings preceding them.  Careful, obey the laws of evolution because they are rather strict laws.

More on Stress in the Womb

Maybe it is hard to imagine a fetus suffering stress, but when a mother deprives herself of nutrients and the baby suffers, that is called stress. He cannot voice it but his stress hormones shout it out all of the time. Because it may be the first stress, it comes to be what the baby expects and automatically changes his system to adapt to his new environment. It is a completely naïve and vulnerable system. It may be called first-time learning, and it lasts. It continues on because this is the world he first meets and he cannot know it can be any different; just as if the mother is chronically depressed, where her system is continuously “down”. The baby adapts and maybe years later gets hooked on stimulants, uppers, to galvanize his system which was depressed long ago. If the early environment at home is suppressive and highly disciplined while lacking love and touch, we have the makings of a depressive. The point is we must not neglect those early beginnings in our understanding of mental illness. Let’s suppose he cannot concentrate in school at age eight. This is part of a post traumatic stress response which we cannot see or even imagine. He has been damaged in the first weeks of his life.

Just the simple fact of a carrying mother having an eating disorder can disrupt the baby’s eating habit later on. I have written extensively on epigenetic change. For the baby is traumatized even though he cannot show it; it becomes imprinted for life. It is called prenatal programming. A personal experience to demonstrate the point. At age five I was smacked repeatedly for crying by my father. I remember everything about that event. I learned and never cried again until adult life. So you see how early life impresses experience into the brain and physical system. If that had happened at age 12, I doubt there would have been such an imprint. At age five he was my only “friend.” I knew no one else and nothing else. He was my whole world. When he smacked me I thought I was wrong and bad. It hung onto my system for decades. I had no one to complain to and discuss with. At that age he was my entire world; my mother being psychotic. Since I have primalled about this, it lasted a very long time. And who knows if it didn’t play into my later ADD. My system still felt those smacks all my childhood, and prevented me from crying. I lived in a barren, sterile world with no love, but that was the only world I knew. The earlier the trauma and deeper the imprint with great force. So it comes out later as never “needing” love, never needing touch. It reawakens the pain if love comes along; thus it is avoided.

If the carrying mother continues on with crazy diets you can see the damage that it incurs. So here we have a field concentrating on there- and-now while the greatest damage has happened back then. How do we now? As patients approach these very traumas all of the vital signs mount inordinately.

Proper nutrition is one way the mother inculcates love. But if she is on drugs, so is the baby. The blood- vascular system are in many respects, one. Worse, the baby can be born addicted. He ”needs” the drugs later on. And if his system has been biochemically depressed, it may militate towards sex problems where libido has been suppressed, as well. After all, so many individuals complain that taking pain killer suppresses their libido. Imagine taking in pain killers at age six months pre-birth. The dose of the tranquilizer for the baby is many times that for the mother. The system begins to adapt to this neuro-chemical state. And it may be less aggressive, less able get and keep an erection. It is all part of the imprint where passivity was life-saving. When shutting down was the only way to block the input of heavy painkillers.

If I had to measure how strong the imprint is, I would state that gestation is the most devastating, birth and infancy next, childhood later and then adult life. So when we confine our psychotherapy to late years we neglect the key life experiences that formed us, those years when vulnerability to catastrophic afflictions set in. This is a short-hand observation of what impact life has on us at different epochs of our lives. It is the reactions we see in our therapy by patients reliving certain events during different stages of ontogeny that indicate the strength of the pain they suffer. And it is nearly always the gestational/birth traumas that have a massive impact on us. So reliving the lack of touch right after birth is critical, while reliving lack of touch at age thirteen is less critical.

So we cannot say that here-and-now therapy is progress in psychotherapy; we can say that proper therapy must always address our beginnings.

Why We Need Safety

There is a confluence of two events, quite unlikely, that explain something about human nature.  The first is something that my colleague, neurologist Michael Holden and I wrote about over forty five years ago.  It was about amoeba that lived in dirty water with black ink poured in.  They absorbed the black ink, as an external  menace into a vacuole and then when the place has clean water they discharged this intruder.  Back  into the water.  The second event is something I see on TV all of the time.  Someone is discussing the loss of a friend or relative and they tear up and scrunch their face and then it shuts off and they say “Sorry.  Excuse me.” They do not seem to understand the mountain of tears lying below. It is those tears that need to be dredged up and experienced, otherwise  they stay locked up and continue to gnaw at the system. The person gets sick years later and no one knows that they have been sitting on all those unfelt emotions.

How do we know?  Because people come in and cry those itty-bitty tears only to discover weeks and months later in therapy what they have been sitting on.  Then the inundation begins.  And when that happens, there are major changes in many biologic measures, as well as alterations and normalization of many vital signs;  blood pressure and heart rate descend.  Also there are significant changes in brain wave functions.  In other words, tears can change all that. And because that is  true it may well be that repressing those tears plays a real role in a number of illnesses, not the least of which is hypertension and heart problems. Not just one day of holding back tears, but of years of it happening.  Because to hold them down takes effort and energy which is being used up all of the time.  It takes work to hide from ourselves.

So what does India ink have to do with it?  Amoeba, as a basic minute cell shows us a biological process; waiting for safety, a welcoming environment to allow us to rid of all the junk and pain inside.  And that is exactly what is missing in psychotherapy; first, a notion of all the tears inside that must be experienced, and secondly, the need to provide an environment where those tears can be let out in full force.    That is right; “full force,” because rarely does a therapist sees that force, neither in others, nor in himself or herself.  They see this as “too emotional” and, “out of control.” So the tears are “discussed” not felt.  We do not live in a culture where full emotionality is not only accepted but welcomed. There lies the rub, to quote an old pal of mine.  What is his name?  William something.

The problem is that psychotherapy that evades and avoids emotions makes the patient sicker.  All the emotions are entombed in the head and the body goes on suffering unconsciously.  So in helping a patient become mentally aware he is at the same time becoming more unconscious.  What a dilemma!  We can learn from that amoeba.  He is only doing what is actually human:  waiting for a loving, warm environment to show his feelings and unleash his pain.  Let me add:  crying about it is not enough.  It has to be crying in context.  Tears must emanate from felt pain, not as an intellectual exercise, not as directed by a well-meaning counselor but tears that arrive automatically when the actual early memory is evoked. And careful, it is not always words that express the feeling.  It is often in body language or non-verbal emotions.  We need to know how to read that language.  That is why it takes so long to do primal therapy correctly; that mysterious language that lies below verbosity and has so many hidden meanings.  Those means, “I am not loved, no one wants me or cares about me,“ drives so much of our behavior and later symptoms.  And why is that? Because those meanings derive from actual early experiences where we were not loved.  They are not inventions. They correspond to reality, and reality is what we must deal with.  It is the name of the game.  We are historical beings; we cannot avoid history and get well. Our own history.

Crying without specific context and memory is only abreaction, the discharge of feeling without feeling it. It cannot ever be healing.  We are going back to origins remember, and that means long, long ago.  Feeling is healing, to coin a phrase.

Suffering, Pain, What is the Difference? It All Hurts.

No, No, my friends, there is a big difference.  In my scheme most of us suffer but few feel pain.  Why is that?  It is a bit of a tale but pray let me clarify.  First of all they come from a difference play in the brain and play a very different role; and you better hope for pain cause it will take you out of your suffering.

If I kick you in the cojones you suffer but it can go away. If your father kicks you there you feel pain and you suffer because it has multi-determined meaning; as Freud said, it is over-determined.  How could my father do that?  Does he not love me? I feel hurt, wounded and unloved: I suffer.”  That suffering has implications that hurt and make us suffer.  A broken heart is suffering. A faulty heart valve is pain. Pain can be fixed; suffering is another matter.

There is a structure called the ACC  (anterior cingulate cortex).  When we are babies and mother disappears we send out a distress call; a specific call that demands, “Whaa, Come back now.  I need protection and care.”  We need love and protection at all times when we are young; we don’t often get it: stop crying and stop acting like a baby.  And so we do and we begin to lose that alarm signal that makes help and comfort rush to us.  The pure pain areas overlap with the emotional suffering part. When research subjects were make to feel isolated and rejected the ACC got busy but the higher ventral prefrontal cortex did not.  And from the research we begin to know why it hurts so much to lose a family member.  But the distress can be lessened with painkillers, as we all know.  What they were showing was the difference between emotional and physical pain. They were not identical and involved different areas of the brain.

For my purposes it is the over-determination, the meaning of the pain that is repressed and remains unconscious so that we then walk around and not feel the suffering we are in.  “They don’t like me and there is nothing I can do.”  It happened to one of my patients who was born in error; neither parent wanted him and they made him pay throughout his life just for being alive.  The parents made up reasons for disliking him; but it was clear. He had “ruined” their life.  In suffering the ACC can mount while the pain centers remain aloof.  And what is our job? To make suffering into pain.  Why on earth would we do that? Because all of that suffering means unrelenting hurt.  That suffering must be made conscious, which means conscious/awareness/pain.  Then it can be dealt with, resolved and put and end to it.  So long as it hurts we cannot shake it.  In other words, according to the research we need to bring the limbic lower level suffering up the cortex.    It needs to be made consciously/aware.

Too often the patient demands help with her suffering so she is given tranqs and painkillers and the suffering is subdued for a time. But it will always return because it has not been made into pain.    And the suffering that is most troublesome and that cause serious addiction, is that from the brainstem. It is often horrendous and remains suffering because it is so deep and remote and inaccessible.  When we make that into pain we are on our way.  Pain is resolvable and suffering is not; it can only be suppressed.  Suffering is diffuse, amorphous, without shape, time or place.  It is an imprint often without words, but it endures for a lifetime.  Pain is a conscious, connected event which takes suffering makes it specific and we are done with it.  Pain, like the kick in the cojones, stops the vagueness; it is over and done.

It has been disconnected from its source, time and place and therefore remains a mystery.  When it becomes, “Oh my God. They hated me and blamed me for it.  And I thought it was my fault and that I was bad and unlovable. “  Or it can come from a traumatic birth and or a carrying mother drinking alcohol or smoking.  Many ways to suffer; only one way to feel pain.  Pain is connected and specific; you cannot be driven there by a therapist but you can be led there when the time is right.

So now we know that specific pain is held down by the gating system.  It was meant to be hidden so as not to be too disruptive.  But it continues to spray its agony all of the system, and we get high blood pressure, headaches, even epilepsy.
It is a mystery to everyone.  No one can see a carrying mother chain/smoking decades later but there it is and that is when it all began.  So what we need to do is wait till the patient is far along in her therapy and can safely descend
To lower levels;  we then using primal techniques to help dredge up those early pains from remote times, bring them up with the help of the right orbitofrontal cortex make them concrete and resolving.  That is  a different matter from suppressing pain. One is time consuming and evolutionary, and the other is always an emergency measure.  We should never do one without the other. We can kill pain with drugs while we are traveling to the lower depths.  But let us never fool ourselves; temporary measures, pain killing is not cure no longer how long it lasts.

So Why Are You Gay?

There are as many reasons to be gay as to be straight except one; and that is just a maybe.  Much recent research points out the fact that stress in the womb alters the stress hormone levels and that can change the testosterone levels and that can lead to homosexuality; if, certain conditions are there. First of all, we don’t always know if and how much sex hormones have been altered.  We don’t always know if changing hormones leads to being gay.  Except we know this”  if you give female animal male hormones they display “male” behavior including mounting males.
And they play more rough and tumble with their cohorts.

So why can’t it be that stress to a carrying mother can change her hormones and her baby’s?  Now for the second step—need.  A child needs parental care and loving.  If that is absent he will go elsewhere. Sometimes my patients, a number of them, will wear dresses and walk the streets that way.  That is the way he feels close to a mother who showed no love.  I have written about a mother who left early and came home late from work; a single mother.  The boy lacked a mother’s love, but he found a substitute, her clothes and her smell.  It became a lifelong ritual.  Something he was never aware of it.  He just thought it was a quirk, a neurotic act. But need drove and it and it should not be stopped because it is a signal of desperate need that was fulfilled in the only way possible.

Or the case of a stressed mother who, in the middle of pregnancy found herself bereft of her husband who found a young girlfriend.  That stress is transmitted to the fetus.  If the stress reaction goes on it gets stamped in, engraved as a memory that can change his hormones.  He may be feminine very early in life. Now add a missing father and a distraught mother who is devastated and unloving.  The boy can later gravitate to male love. Not always, but it is a factor in some of the gay men I have treated, over one hundred.  The boy, somewhat feminized, seeks out male love over female love partly due to his hormone shift.  No different from the young animals who seek out males to play with rather than someone of their own gender.  Their interest has been altered, and by hormones.  I am not setting down unalterable rules but rather elements to explain some behaviors.  In the cases of homosexuality I have treated there has nearly always been that first-line deep and early trauma.  Perhaps I am treating a selected group and my perspective is biased, but I could be right, as well. If we never posit these factors we will never know.

This change in testosterone is prevalent in all primate mothers; and it is largely due to the stress of the mother which becomes imprinted into the baby.  The patients come to me and say, “I don’t know why but I have been attracted to men nearly all of my life.  I knew at six years that something  was different.”  So one thing we need to do is a comparative study of stressed and unstressed mothers, and look at any differences.  Is it possible that being gay is epigenetic (due to experience) and not totally genetic?  We need to avoid political correctness and defensiveness and do what is correct scientifically.

Oddly, let’s look at one group of primates, the bonobos. They are gentle and loving and settle most problems with sex.  Not so with chimps, who organize groups to go on raids and kill other chimps.

Bonobos are high in testosterone, male and female, much higher than chimps, Chimps develop their levels later after puberty.  Up until them the bonobos are quite high.  And they play tough with their pals but rarely violent as chimps.  This is only to say that hormones matter, a lot.  And that hormones are radically affected by experience, especially very early experience when hormones are beginning their life and are vulnerable to trauma that can change levels.

Does that mean it is a neurosis? Could be but no more than a man who wears dresses every day. It means that early in life there were experiences that change things. Those experience for the mother can means she drinks, smokes, takes drugs, is anxious or depressed, and so on.

Now the important point: can we or should we treat the hormones?  Yes but only after we know if experience and early trauma changed them permanently. No different from those who have chronic hypothyroid.  Shouldn’t we see what may have caused it? I am of the view that most of us would be born normal if we were not made abnormal by early trauma and neglect.  Yes, we need to treat such afflictions as very low thyroid but let us never forget that for every symptom there can be an ultimate cause.  Why do we consistently neglect that fact?

So why am I not gay?  I had all the elements for it happening.  A psychotic/anxious mother and tyrannical unloving father.  But when I was sexually vulnerable at age thirteen, I was in the back of a car necking with a girl whose name I have preserved in memory. Those hugs and kisses sank in and changed everything.  It made me feel that I could get love from a female.  Having never been kissed she taught me how to kiss and hug. It was the first love I ever knew and it was critical.  So thank you, Liz.

A Past Without a Memory

If you have no memory, you have no past.  Wait a minute, could that be true?  No it is not.  Many of us wander around this earth with little memory of the past, especially if that past was very painful, and very early—predating conscious-awareness. Predating our verbal capacities.

So what do we do in our therapy?  Recapture our past; retrieve our history.  And why do we do that?  So we are no longer controlled and driven by it.  We are historic beings and need again to be historic; complete and full.  Why don’t we remember so much of our childhood and earlier? I assume it is due to pain which sets repression in motion so we do not remember; so we are not so troubled by it.  But it is there, nevertheless and it directs our symptoms and behavior later on.  So even if we don’t consciously remember we still have a past.

Why should we be whole and complete?  Because being unconscious is life-endangering.    We get involved with the wrong people, sometimes dangerous; we take chances we shouldn’t, gamble on things that are not possible for success, etc.  And being unconscious means we have forces gnawing away at our system, making us sick and shortening our lives.  Is that reason enough?

What we do is help patients retrieve key memories that open up the memory system and give us access to whom?  To ourselves so we can be whole beings, not partial entities.  And if we want to retrieve very early memories of gestation,  birth and infancy we need to understand the memory system; for our very earliest memories are of smells; so early that they bypass the usual routes, and travel directly to the limbic/feeling system,  directly to the memory centers.  Memory of odors are idea, concept and situation free; they are pure and unadulterated.  If we let the patient slip into them totally we often get remote pains that were hardly ever retrievable.

I visited a friend in a hospital recently and there was the scent of ether there.  It brought me back immediately to my own time in a hospital which was horrendous.  It was a pure, unadulterated memory that was attached to a specific time and place; it was a first-line memory from deep in the brain and from a primitive nervous system.  That is, smell lives in the deep brain associated with deep and remote memories, the ones that are difficult to access in normal everyday life.  It is one reason I think our patients might benefit for a trip to visit a hospital.  In the same way that we encourage patients to bring in photos of their early lives, and to bring in music that evokes old feelings and their memories.  Remember, there can be no effective psychotherapy without retrieval or our history.  Unless we only rely on cognitive memory; then we make progress on in  our top level and have neglected two-thirds of our brains and their memories.  To access preverbal events we need non-verbal techniques. Words will never do it.  We need to open up the memory bank to get rid of pain and put the system into a pain free state as much as possible.

So if I tell a patient, “tell me about your life in college,” it is a good idea but never ever deep enough to make a difference in what really drives our behavior.  Yes, we deal with college and school life but not to the neglect of very early memories.  The odors from infancy and before have an enduring quality; the reason?  It often has to do with life and death. Those memories could be of life-endangering events even before we had ideas to remember them with.  But they are there in full force all of the time.  They recede but never disappear. What pain drugs do is make them recede for a while, which feels fine but we pay a price for making our memories that could be liberating into deeply hidden events.  Drugs, obviously make them difficult to access and that means we cannot reach deep aspects of ourselves.  Those memories become the “untouchables.” They will certainly shorten our lives, both directly,  and indirectly through our smoking and drinking to keep them down and away.  We become addicted without knowing it to those memories and their suppression.  We are addicted to our unconscious memories; they hold us firmly in their grasp for a lifetime.  They demand more and more of us to keep them at bay.  And we think addiction centers will change that?    Never.

I should add that some preliminary research points to loss of sharp memory as possibly indicative of beginning dementia, and also signs of depression.  They do not necessarily cause them, but are compadres on the route.  Depression means deep often first line repression and that suppresses memory, as well.  Depressives are “down” in every sense of the word.  I think that one thing it means is that first-line deep in the brain trauma has an effect on deep reactions; hence loss of smell and memory.

On Developing Cancer and How to Stop It

There is exciting new research taking place on this serious disease.  And obviously, it has to do with epigenetics.  What epigenetics really comes down to is experience.  What kind of experience do we have and when? Because that is the harbinger of serious disease later on.

There is so much new research that points to gestation, pre-gestation and birth trauma as heavily influencing the advent of afflictions such as cancer and Alzheimers later in life.

We know now that one of the key ingredients for this change is a process called methylation. Genes borrow part of the methyl group and change their own evolution; making some more expressive and active, while others are repressive and passive or inactive.  And this depends on what experiences the baby has from the very start of life.  And there may be a similar mechanism that is behind many types of cancer, and dementia, as well. Catastrophic diseases get their start early in life when cells are rapidly forming; and the fact of a catastrophic disease often indicates a catastrophic and life-endangering trauma.  In an era when cells are coming into life is the time when bad events can detour and damage them. Damage during this time can be life-endangering, engendering  diseases that become life-endangering, themselves.  These diseases, therefore, often foretell of severe trauma very early on. They are like measuring gauges that point to times of deleterious effects.

It is not cancer that damages adult cells; these cells already underwent trauma and were weakened by it. Adult stress finishes the job.
The same may be true of heart disease and other common maladies. The on and off changes produced by methylation may be a major element in any number of cancers. One obvious reason is that the cells have been altered in radical ways by this methyl process. So what seems normal to us adults may not be normal at all. Our changes occurred so early that they now seem like “us.” And the doctor examining us asks, “Have you undergone any serious trauma in you life,”  and you say, “Not at all.”   You feel normal as an adult even when you became someone and something else before you had a way of knowing anything.  That is why we can suffer from chronic serious allergies after living a womb-life where the parents were constantly bickering.  “Tell me did you have any serious trauma in your life?"  "No not at all." Alas, the symptoms are screaming the contrary.   And asthma is explaining it all in its own language.

We began a cancer and Alzheimer’s study with a medical clinic which did begin to point to early trauma, but for a variety of reasons we could not complete it.  The point is that epigenetics can either favor cancer development or abort it.  Our future study will be to see if our therapy by demethylating trauma can block the trajectory of deformed cells before they become lethal.  My hypothesis is that it can, but we will see. This means that early damage, a mother smoking or taking pain-killers, can imprint  a cell change, which, when allowed to go on can result in disease.   Altering the epigenetics will right the system and stop the detour.   Voracious cancer has been awaiting its chance; we are not going to let that happen. We already see that in the very few cases of cancer we have among our patients. And I believe it is because in our therapy we travel down to the far reaches and depths—the antipodes-- of the brain where serious illness starts its life.

I recently wrote that parents don’t have to do anything to hurt a child; what they exude (tension or depression) can do it all.  This is especially true during our womb-life where depression and/or anxiety can “exude” from the placenta to affect the baby.  He is being “spritzed” with all kinds of chemicals which affect his development.   And in those "spritzes" are elements that are associated with cancer in later life.  (March 27, 2014  Univ. of Calif. Davis)

Tell me, “did you have any trauma?   Nope. That early trauma does enormous damage; more than almost anything we can think of in our adult life.  If you ask that question in a different way, as we do, and examine primordial events to the fetus, we may find an answer.  As the fetus develops, the mother is informing her baby about herself;  is she depressed, anxious, tense, worried, apprehensive?  That information, seemingly benign, impacts him and affects his evolution and personality.  She doesn’t have to act “nervous.”  The chemicals will do it for her.  But the baby imprints “nervous,” and we wonder where it all came from.

When the carrying mother is nervous she chews up her vitamins; the baby needs those vitamins to synthesize methyl groups.  So when the mother is deficient, so is the baby. And that again can change everything. It is becoming more and more clear, as I have insisted for almost 50 years, that our early life is critical; that problems in the womb redound in later life and account for so many illnesses.  The real question by doctors should be, “Tell me about your gestation and birth. Tell me about your parents during that time.”

Here It Is At Last: Confirmation of Primal Therapy

 Whoa, wait a  minute they never mention primal but the work is totally primal.   Here is the headline from Science Daily: Life Stressors Trigger Neurologic Disorders. (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140422113430.htm)  How big a step would it be to take to place  this research into the proper context, give it a frame of reference and help it find its home?  And help it make sense of the research and a proper therapy for the result. This is the work done at Yale University. (See http://news.yale.edu/2014/04/10/yale-researchers-search-earliest-roots-psychiatric-disorders and look for publication May 7, 2014 in the journal Neuron).

Here is the research summary: When mothers are exposed to trauma, illness, alcohol or other drug abuse, these stressors may activate a single molecular trigger in brain cells that can go awry and activate (serious) conditions, such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress syndrome and some forms of autism.

What they are showing is how neglect, lack of love and trauma seep deep down in the brain to impact single neural cells.
They point out that when a carrying mother is exposed to abuse, drugs or emotional she experiences the kind of trauma that can lead to a psychiatric illness later on in the child.  Wait a minute; isn’t that a quote from the Primal Scream?  Gee I hope so.

What is new is that they have identified a molecular mechanism in the prenatal brain that indicates how cells go off track.   What is interesting is that even though the trauma may have different origins it still affects this minute cell.  This cell becomes a trigger for a myriad of effects throughout the baby’s system.  And depending on the genetic vulnerabilities the impact will travel to the weakest link;  kidneys, liver, heart, etc., and sets the stage for serious afflictions later on.   It makes the system more vulnerable which is what the researchers discovered.   The affected cells were much more sensitive to later stress, lack of love, neglect and drug abuse.  In other words, compounding.   It seals in the imprinted memory and makes it much tougher to root out or even to have access to; we have to go through layers of neglect in childhood, lack of love, indifference, violence and other traumas before resonance will carry us all the way back to the origins of it all.  That is not to say that we can always get back to original imprints but we do come close and in some cases we do get there.  The point is that in therapy we need to wend our way slowly through later and lesser traumas before we can ever hope to reach way back into our fetal life.

So can we imagine treating patients with cognitive therapy hoping for results when the beginnings precede verbal memory? And recuperating memory has nothing to do with ideas or explanations?   Luckily, there is something called resonance which is the link among all levels of brain function so that the current ideational level will eventually lead down the chain of pain to fetal life.  If we try to get there fast, the strength of the pain down deep is such that it will immediately flood the top level brain and produce terrible results.   We need to follow evolution in reverse, take our time and not induce flooding.  But if we never go there the patient has no chance.

Trauma changes behavior; first among neurons (yes they do behave) and then throughout the system.  All this reinforces our theory and frame of reference.  And shows how very early trauma changes things.   So here we are in front of a patient with migraines, for example.  And we try to change her attitude about it or we try to rationalize something to make the person strong in the face of it.   In short, we stay on the top brain level; yet we have found that the origin is often (not always) from lack of sufficient oxygen at birth and the cells become so constrained to try to conserve oxygen that we produce migraine.  We see this clinically time and again.  Yes we do need proper research but our clinical work, wanting to know, rather than knowing what we want tells us a story of origins. Why migraines?  Nothing happens “out of the air.” There are reasons and it is our job to suss them out.   If we never look there then there is no sussing out of  anything.