Arthur Janov's Blog, page 37

On Surviving

The central nervous system receives input from outside but also, importantly from insides, as well.  It processes and stores information.  So why exactly are we neglecting the nervous system that processes and contains inner input in therapy?  Is it because we only can treat what we see, and since we don’t see what’s inside we imagine it doesn’t exist?  Or is it because some  of us live in “our heads” and cannot believe in  a life  deep in the interior; a life in the underground; in the zone of the interior?  This is the system that responds to stress and threat.  The system that cares and feels. It is the system of need and deprivation; why ignore it?  It is the system that remembers early hurt and deprivation; of suffocation  at birth and of not being touched right afterwards.  It is the system that needs.

  It is also the system that begins its connections with other brain circuits to help  us mature and make  us whole.  It is the system that begins the maturation of the blood and circulatory systems.  All detours are registered here, and here is  where  answers  lie to early hurt and lack of emotional care and touch.  How on earth can we ignore the key system that  remembers what  must be remembered; the system  that fully informs us of what we underwent very early in our lives?  It is the system that speaks of epigenetics and how genes and their expression were permanently changed.  It is the system that forms our personality, that shapes  how we respond to others  in life;  whether we battle on  or give up easily, our future passivity or aggressivity.  All this is set down so early but it is there for the looking; all we have to do is ask and seek.  How in therapy can we not believe in all this and go on treating only the here and now?    The early traumas take on and store early indifference and neglect by parents; it is early on that some neurons settle in the brainstem while  others find their home in the neo-cortex to make  us top heavy with intellect and prevent easy access to our feelings.  Don’t we want to know how mother’s taking drugs and alcohol caused the detour of key neurons  and changed our bodily functions?  Doesn’t this count when we are trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it?  Don’t we want to know how experience  in the womb reduced the brain’s dendrites and changed inner communication?  This resulting in learning problems and  ADD?  We want to know how experience changed the brain  to  take in  less input and  therefore to be easily overwhelmed with too much stimuli or input.  We must know that all the key major changes have taken  place before we play in the schoolyard.  Even before we have words to describe our problems.

  Our first major phase of development lies in the brainstem where we organize  terror, rage and impulsivity.  From this later  comes feeling and then thoughts.  There is a whole world of living before the top level even exists.  And a whole world of hurt, too.  It is the lowest  level  that impairs heart function  and is the precursor for later cancer. It is the site for organizing later diabetes and high blood pressure.  So when we wonder about an early heart attack or stroke we need to look for answers in the right places.  How is it possible to understand any of this and at the same time ignore its existence?  It  means not only ignoring  months  and years of personal development  but millions of years in the development of mankind.  We musn’t forget that our brain neurons migrate and how and where they go depends on early experience.  And  it is  early experience that ultimately determines brain growth.

  This reminds me of the giant painting of  a nude  and there  is  a  little old lady looking  only at the flowers around her.  We cannot afford to look away and still help people.  Cannot afford to not examine the critical period and not  to understand the importance of that period  for  our development.  How love at fifteen cannot ever, ever make up for its lack at age minus eight months.    And while  I am at it, there is a significant meeting going on by august mental health professionals who are renewing the diagnostic psychiatric manual.  And guess what? They are completely ignoring those key lower levels of our existence.

  When we examine animal life and see  how important  the critical period is, how  those not licked or  nuzzled suffer forever, we know how critical the  critical period is.    How the  brain shrinks  when love  is missing and reduces in size. How the brain is  denser with  early love.  Untouched newborn animals (and humans too) die much earlier.  There is a premature atrophy  of the brain.  It is becoming clear that early lack of love affects attachment  and impacts the  right brain that deals with attachment.  So  what is  it all about  Alphie?  Love Love Love.

On Loving Yourself

 The  New Agers, or what I call the booga booga followers make a big deal of self love. So what is wrong with it?  I have said before that it is an oxymoron.   Oxytocin is what I call the hormone of love.  If you rub an animal’s belly, levels rise.  If you lick her, oxytocin also rises, but if you rub yourself it won’t. You cannot love yourself.   There is more.

What does it mean to “love yourself”?  What it doesn’t mean is to be able to feel love in the present, no matter what.  Because once you are unloved throughout your childhood it is imprinted—you are unloved and feel unloved even when you don’t know it.  It drives all later behavior; either to try to get it (depending on the birth, whether parasympathetic/giving up, or sympathetic/keep struggling).   You give up when the birth is basically struggle and fail; and you keep on trying when the birth was struggle and success.  (I have written about this in my books and blog.  It pretty determines personality, but for now, it is another matter).

     While I am discussing oxytocin I should mention  a recent study where they sprayed the chemical into the noses of human subjects. They had a control  group.  They were all alcohol addicted. Those who were sprayed had fewer cravings for alcohol, afterwards.  They had milder withdrawal symptoms.  The control group   got placebos.    The “sprayed” were less addicted later.  So what does this mean?
Since oxytocin is the hormone  of love, inter alia,  it means  that love stops the craving.  Of course.  And when you are loved at the start of life  there will not be any craving  or addiction later on--permenantly.  All else being equal.   (I have written in the blog about the nature of love and how you can love a fetus; you  fulfill its needs  when you understand them).

    OK now you feel deeply unloved because you were.  How do you go from there to loving yourself?   I mean, it is good to take care of yourself, stop  acting out  that you deserve nothing, stop  being  self destructive; all that helps.  But hug and  kiss yourself?  A little pat on the head when  you were five?  But with the imprint the unconscious will still drive  all that bad behavior no matter what.   Of course there  are stop-gaps and we should all do what we do to feel better, but none of that, NONE OF THAT,  will help us feel loved.  Why?  Because we were indeed  unloved and it is registered  and re-registered throughout our childhood.   We feel unloved and nothing will cover that over because it is now engraved into the system.  We are unloved in the brain, the blood and the muscles; we are unloved in the cells.  All of those register trauma  (lack of love is trauma) in their own way.  It helps a lot to know that you are attracted to those cold fish who cannot love so that you can struggle to get love out of them but need wins out.   Yes,  conscious/awareness helps, but it fights a losing battle.

   Cognitive therapy, focused in the present, which is what the left brain  does, can help us  understand the kind of situations  or  people to avoid  but they cannot begin  to touch the drive that makes it happen.   They, and therefore the patient, never understands the unconscious.  And never gets well.   That includes the therapist  who helps the  patient skim along the top, never  asking “why?” A little word with a big meaning  that is avoided  in that  therapy.   They claim that they don’t need to know why.  Yes they  do.

     It is the difference between help and cure.  If you want help you don’t  need to know why.  But the unconscious will never  cease to  drive you even when you are not aware  of being driven.  It is the function  of the  unconscious  that you  remain unconscious.   So you shouldn’t know, otherwise, you would be in  pain all day long and your face would  show it.  We would all walk  down the  street grimacing and frowning and hunched.  What a world.  That is truly the world of our unconscious; thank God (If I may call on it for a moment) for the disconnect.   Repression saves  and  repression kills; it creates and destroys.   It is optimistic because it doesn’t  understand  the true situation; and that optimism kills us because it denies the pain and keeps  it alive and active, gnawing  away within the system.  It is unrelenting which makes our behavior unrelenting and unforgiving.   We become obsessive because of it.   We are forced into wrong choices  by the unconscious and it is unwavering  in its neurosis.   Why?  It seeks out the early situation again for us to try to  master it; so we seek out the critical ones when we had critical mothers, and  we  seek  out cold men  when we had  a cold father.  We need to start again  to try to make them approving and loving.   We need the struggle.  Why can’t we go straight for  love?  Because the imprint is supreme.  And it  stays unconscious.  We go for the unlove first.  It is all we know.  If we feel unloved and that we don’t deserve love, we DO NOT  GO FOR IT.   And believe me. When we were  not  loved we  nearly always feel that it is our fault  and  that we do not deserve  it.

How Long Will I Live?

  There are several ways to know about how long we will live.  First, if you drink and smoke a lot it won’t be very long.  If you do a genetic test you will get an idea, but also a very good way is to measure your telomeres.  These are the ends of the chromosomes which, if you expect to  lead a long life the telomeres need to be long.  The shorter they are the shorter the life, in general.  And the real question is what is their function and why do they get shorter and therefore shorten our lives.

  Lifelong stress will shorten your telomeres, which shorten under stress or adversity.  Telomeres  form the ends of the chromosome that shorten under chronic financial problems, long-term care of  a loved one, emotional neglect and being unloved,  including getting divorced, or suffering chronic anxiety.  It is one way that anxiety kills.  It is that chronic stress indicates a system-wide problem that is expressed in telomere length.  The key ingredient for this is long-term stress resulting from more rapid DNA replication.  And the key ingredient, then, is imprinted stress that causes rapid DNA turnover; generally the earlier it begins the more deleterious it is because unavoidable stress is deadly.  Living in the womb is about as helpless as we get.

  Of course what stress does is ramp up levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that work in see-saw fashion with telomere length.  The higher the cortisol the shorter telomeres will be, in the long run.  When we couple higher cortisol, shorter telomeres together  with higher body temperature  and elevated blood pressure we have an index of a shorter life.  Fortunately, there is something we can do about it since we do lower vitals after one year of our therapy; body temp is on average one degree less and blood pressure in hypertensives are 24 points lower.  We have not as yet done telomere studies.

  There have been studies on healthy adults who started in life in an institution; they had radically lower telomere  lengths. (see Nature.  Vol 490.  Oct 11, 2012).  More important, mothers who underwent severe stress while they were carrying (death of loved one) had offspring with lower than average telomeres.  I have not seen studies on telomere length in those with adverse gestational lives but we plan to do it.  Particularly, we want to study imprinted stress that continues in our system long after the very early trauma.    We must never neglect the imprint; it is the way we  engrave experience in the total system.  A person can claim that he had a wonderful childhood but if his telomere length is shorter than average we need to examine him more carefully.    When we have shorter telomeres we can expect that the person will be more vulnerable to such diseases as diabetes  and heart problems.  The shorter length individuals are much more likely to develop cancer, by the way.  And dementia is another great likelihood.  Can you die from neurosis?  (chronic imprinted stress). Absolutely.  Can you suffer from premature serious illness?  Yes, Yes.  Can we avoid it? Yes, yes.  Take out the pain.  It’s the pain, my friends.  Take it out and there will be far less smoking, drinking  and drug taking, and therefore, longer telomeres.  It is the telomere that are shouting out the pain in their own way,    We need to listen.  And we need to talk back to them in their own language—physiology.  And we need to say, hang on, friend, we will take your pain away, even if you do not know it is there.

What Really Counts in Our Development

  As I have pointed out, the brain develops  into  three different systems.  I call them the first, second and third lines.  The first  is brain stem and parts of the archaic limbic  system, the second is basically limbic system, including the amygdala, hippocampus and other structures such as the anterior caudate nucleus.  Each of these structures (including the striatum) contribute to our general feeling capacity.  They are connected to the top level prefrontal cortex to help us be aware of our  feelings; this is the area of insights.  And they are evolved out of the brainstem that provides the energy and gravity of feelings.  The  first line is silent and wordless.  It grunts, exhibits rage, terror and great physical reactions that are never expressed in words; that is why we need higher levels to provide those words when necessary.  But less us not believe  that the cognitive level by itself  can make any changes--insights.  It  misses out on the serious sensations that exist on the deepest brain  levels.

  So we have a basic primitive ineffable level, a higher  emotional one  and finally, a verbal one.  All together they form a fully feeling experience.  When we relive events from our childhood there is generally all  levels involved.
There is the memory by  the third line, then we add the emotion to  it in therapy and then allow  the punch of the  feeling to join in.  When  we  relive events before birth, during gestation, it  is a first line experience where there are no words or even tears.  When we read a speech too often we lack the emotional level; it remains dry, cognitive and intellectual.

  When are born we have most of the brain neurons we will  ever need, except for  some limbic brain cells that go on developing throughout our lives.  Early on the brain is developing networks and  circuits where different brain structures are connected to each other.  But lack of love and  trauma during early childhood seriously affects how the brain develops and what networks there are.  The feeling system  will recruit  aspects of the limbic system into a  feeling  network.  Except  when there is little emotion in  the environment, when the parents are two stones who  do not react much.  It affects the brain  development of the child.  The emotions  become stunted.  The cognitive level may go on developing but it leaves the  emotional level  behind.  We get brainy people who don’t feel much.

  We know from much research that neglect in the first months of  life on earth adversely affects brain development; there  are later learning problems and relating difficulties.  But picture the traumas before birth  during gestation; imagine the kind of long lasting damage there will be.  This is the kind of damage that affects physical systems, the precursor to  heart problems later in life and cancer. Why so?  Because the newly forming heart cells (and other cells) are being affected by a  mother who is anxious and/or depressed, weakening the baby’s  circulatory system.  First line damage equals first line  reactions.  This damage may not be apparent for decades but the beginning vulnerability is already there.  It has changed the way that neurons develop and differentiate.  There is now a sort of detour going on.  And more, there  is suppression of those traumas automatically so  that each  trauma  evokes its own repression, and  here we may have the beginnings of later  cancer.    This means that first line repression is heavy and  deleterious.

  Speaking of cancer, I am hoping to carry out some research to follow up on something we did decades ago.  We did a double blind study of Natural  Killer (NK) cells which are part of the immune system charged with watching out for newly developing cancer cells in order to kill  them.  After one year of our therapy there is a significant increase in NK cells.  What I want to do with  a research team is pierce the tumor take out key cells, multiply them a  lot and then re-infuse those extracted cells back into the person’s system slowly over time.  If I am not mistaken those infused  cells will kill only the tumor cells and nothing  else. This will be a lot more efficient  than chemo therapy and will only destroy cancer cells, leaving the healthy ones alone.  And because NK cells are genetically designed to go wherever there are the bad cells it will  be less dangerous  and far more effective.  All we need right now is the money  to do  it.

  When I discuss  the idea of detour it may be exactly what happens in the brain, for there is a migration of neurons from the brain stem up.  And when there  is trauma those neurons may well take a  different route in  their development (see the work of  Bruce  Perry in Texas). This migration is foremost  in the earliest months in  the womb  so that a mother’s smoking or pill-popping alters the  migration and brain  evolution.  One way this happens is that we are born with  a certain gene pool  but how  these genes evolved is  due  to epigenetics, events impacting genetic development.  This determines how the nerve cells  evolve, how dense the dendrites are and how they connect with  other nerve  cells.  Dendrites accept the messages from other nerve cells.  When they are sparse or less  dense we don’t get  the full message.  A carrying mother’s smoking can alter the baby’s oxygen supply for life.  That means breathing problems later on.

  So we have an ordered evolution of brain cells from the stem cell area  on  upward.  And each new  system appears on a fixed time-line.  These systems occur  in order so that we can’t speak at 3  months.  Brainstem functions include digestion, breathing and blood  circulation.  If later on  there are symptoms in these areas, we need to look  at first line events.  Did  the mother  smoke heavily in  the  first 4 months  of pregnancy?  If so,  there are likely to be serious developmental problems including evidence of  mental illness later on.  These primitive neurons are there long before the  cortical neurons exist, both in evolutionary times and in personal ones.  And during  gestation and the first months of life on earth they are the most sensitive to environment impacts.

  This is no more than saying that there are critical  windows when the system  is the most  sensitive. Not  being touched  at age ten  is not going  to have  the impact if there  is no touch right after birth.  What  this means is that the  critical period for the first line is far more  malleable than  later critical periods.  And its impact  the greatest, which is why we  always need to include  this period in any of  our studies, and especially in our therapy of patients.  This first line is  the epoch of  longest lasting effects and of  the greatest impact in terms of our  evolution and brain development.  This has been emphasized in a study by Cornell University (Nov,  21, 2007.  “Trauma Earlier in Life  May Affect Response to Stress Years Later”).  During womb-life there is a new organizing framework which determines  how  the person faces life later on.  The brain is  “settling in.”  And it imprints this frame  of reference to guide our lives.

  What new research is showing is  that those young children who  are abused, neglected or otherwise unloved have smaller  brains  than those who grew up loved.  This implies all kinds of associated problems from learning to  relating.  We and our brains need others; we  need attention  and love and caring.  And we need it during the greatest epoch of our critical  window—the  first line.  That is when there  are irreversible imprints with widespread effects.  Our lives are in danger when we are unloved; when the mother is heavily depressed or drinks.  Institutional children  do die when  there is no love in the first years of life.  So instead of  children not being  allowed  to speak at dinner there  must be lively  conversations all of the time.  They need information and stimulation.  They need food for the brain.  So just imagine what damage happens  to children who  are unloved as children, and  before  that when the critical window is  wide open during first line before  birth.  If we can see the  damage done to young children in  institutions can we  imagine what goes on earlier in the womb when we cannot see the damage?    The  earlier  the damage the more irreversible  it becomes.  Luckily we have a  therapy that goes deep and undoes some of the damage.  But with no first line therapy there  will never be a cure, not if we ignore the crucial critical window where so much impact exists.  There has been an attachment theory around for more than fifty years, but consider the attachment between the baby and the carrying mother where her every mood is transmitted directly to the fetus.  When she is anxious so is her baby; when she is depressed so is her baby.  And as the pain mounts from  womb-life  on  there will be a greater  tendency to shut off the right feeling brain and flee to the left where there is no  direct pain.

  All  I am reiterating is that there is  information and research  to  show that the earlier the impact on the brain the more damaging and long lasting the effects.  We must never ignore this period if we want to help our patients.

Why We Need a Frame of Reference

I am not against statistical research.  It is essential.  But too often research studies are a stand-alone  phenomenon;  true unto themselves but  unrelated to a larger  picture and other key phenomena.  They are not plugged into a bigger frame of reference.  And that is my quarrel with constant statistical studies, especially in Psychology.  Let me give you an example.  There is a new study that states: serotonin promotes patience.  The idea is that animals can wait longer for reward once given serotonin. And, not surprisingly, the animals failed  the test after being given something to stop serotonin production.  Ok .  We have the results, but the “WHY” we don’t have.  Their conclusion:  these findings suggest that activation of serotonin neurons is required for waiting  for delayed reward.  OK fine.  Our clinical experience shows that the more activated  the top level neo-cortex, the less impulses break through to force impulsive behavior.  It is one way we know that serotonin is an inhibitory chemical.  We know that very early neglect and  trauma require  the production  of more serotonin. We now know that a dog can be more patient with injected serotonin.  A frame of reference  would  inform us that high level cortical functioning can be recruited to shut down feelings and make us feel better and be patient; that general inhibition can lead to patience.
And that serotonin can shut down feelings and impulses. And when we do that we increase the ability to wait.  My birth trauma patients are often impulse-ridden.

  I  don’t want to drown the fish but here is one more example: almost 20% of patients with coronary heart disease suffer from major depression.  Another 20% have some symptoms of depression.  Again,  Why?    The problem with statistical  studies is that  we get statistical  truths;  and  in the usual  research we get correlations; this correlates with that, etc.  What  we don’t get are causes of disease.  Correlations never do that, and indeed  in our field of Psychiatry and  Psychology we are looked at negatively because we offer causes or at least generating sources.  Scientists are  too often content to do stand-alone research.  And too often  it is the left brain  that is content with statistical  studies because it requires little further imagination.  We don’t have to engage in pesky thoughts beyond  what we see and  measure.  We don’t have to posit implications.  It is one reason we do not get beyond  Freud and/or cognitive therapy.  Is is why we have rigid, inflexible, dry results.  And scientists seem to prefer it that way; equating  dryness with science.

  These are interesting studies(above) but they lack a frame of reference, which is what I require, “a  truth beyond  the facts”.  A frame of reference is essential in order to make sense of our results.  For that we need experience with patients; to see how theory and research studies merge  with clinical observations—the  proof in the eating.  It is the frame of reference that can tie two disparate studies together and provide broader implications.  It is indeed a truth beyond the facts; that truth requires a frame of reference.    It seems that it  is right brain  that supplies the frame of reference, the meaning and implications of  our studies, while  the left brain deals  with point by point statistics.  We need both in our therapy and our theory.  It is why statistical results are rarely enough, yet psychologic science is stuck there and why so little has changed in therapy over the decades.

Take  migraine. We have had success in treating it.  One  research study found that oxygen therapy helped alleviate its suffering.  It was stand/alone research.  Our own frame of reference  after seeing dozens  of migraine patients over the years, indicates  serious oxygen  lack during  the birth  process, usually due to massive anesthesia given  the  birthing  mother.  It causes a serious oxygen decrease in the baby who struggles for air.  One result of  this  oxygen loss is the precursor for migraine—constriction  of blood vessels to struggle with the loss of oxygen.  And what is one treatment for  it?  Oxygen.  And treating dozens of those migraine people  led us to a breadth of data to provide a frame of reference.  I didn’t  have to concoct a theory; I had to observe closely and note what I saw.  I rather doubt that anyone could come up with  our hypothesis with  statistics alone.  At least now after almost  one hundred years of headache research  I still have not seen possible causes mentioned.

  What  is lacking?  A frame  of reference.  We really can’t come up with a frame of reference with  a one-off study.  We need a good deal of information.  With each patient we gather more evidence, and we modify our theory  accordingly.  Our  patients are our research subjects.  We are now correlating  our vital sign  results.  We will  soon know how and when blood pressure and body temperature change with feelings.  Our results are found in our patients; they have  the answers.

  Our clinical work has found depression  to be  a forerunner for later heart disease because of deep repression involved in  both.  And from our clinical knowledge of how early repression sets in.  When in our work we extirpate pain out of the system we alleviate  depression and possibly prevent  heart attacks.

    It's not that we are depressed  and also then we have heart disease; it is that deep suppression  of early pain, often begun in our womb-life, activates heart cells and affects later heart function.  That is, constant repression is involved in depression and heart disease.  Seeing the whole person allows us to develop a frame of reference that statistics usually cannot do.  Both heart disease and depression emanate from the person and begins most often during life in the womb.  No theory of womb-life--  no understanding of its role in heart disease.  So if we treat heart disease  by stand-alone methods,  leaving the  imprints out of the matter, we are possibly ensuring another attack. This is one reason that in therapy with serious disease if we do not address the generating sources, the imprint, there is a constant danger of recidivism.  And yet if we add imagination/frame of reference to our results we are often looked at as unscientific because we have gone beyond the facts. This is a dilemma because too often getting ahead of the facts can indeed be dangerous  and unscientific.  Look at our pal Freud, he posited childhood sexuality out of his own unconscious, nary a fact in sight.

  The danger is that a largely left brain scientist (a right brain scientist is too often an  oxymoron) cannot objectively supply an untrammeled frame of reference.  Our brain research indicated a more equalized brain in patients after one  year of our therapy.  What this means to me is a more objective one; a brain that will follow facts and produce a relevant meaning, not fabricating theories out of the unconscious.

What Do Psychedelics Do Actually?

    What  they do is explain to us how psychosis happens.  New research informs us about the brain structures involved, but what it does is simply pin down in the brain something we have  seen for years clinically; both help to clarify psychedelic effects.  It is not that brain research is more scientific; rather, it offers the cerebral corollary for what happens clinically.

  The research is by Drs. Carhart-Harris and David  Nutt, using MRI’s to pinpoint what  goes on after a subject is  given a small dose of psilocybin. (See http://www.beckleyfoundation.org or/and http://www.huffingtonpost.com) There was  reduction in those areas of  the brain that, inter  alia,  control feelings and their rise into the top level cognitive  cortex.  It also seems to unhinge parts of the limbic system,  including the anterior cingulate cortex.  Basically it allows lower level imprints to rise unabated into the thinking area;  and from there, because as someone said, it  is like trying to drink from a fire hose, there is an inundation and flooding.  The brain regions dealing with constricting conscious/awareness give way and we get  exactly, not approximately, what happens in psychosis.  The  difference is that in psychosis there is a slow accretion of imprinted pain that finally damages the gating system and feelings rise and  flood the thinking cortex;  exactly what happens much quicker with psychedelics.  The gates are open in either  case; the pain is the  same.  Nothing changes except the time to takes to damage  the  gates and allowing flooding.

  And what happens when there is flooding?  The cortex is exigently  pressed into service to cover over the rising feelings with whatever ideas and imagination the person/brain can concoct.  They have a bizarre quality to them because they arise not out of specific feelings but from an amalgam of them.  The “fire hose” is spritzing everywhere.  And the brain is forced to use its latest developing structure, the neo-cortex, to join the fray.  I repeat: this is no different from lifelong lack of love and trauma that puts cracks in the defense system (including lowering serotonin  supplies), which  then ultimately gives way.  When it (defense) does not give way but only weakens we get ADD attention deficits where the gates are leaky and cannot properly contain the upsurge.  The feelings rise  and are scattered but do not produce full-blown psychosis.  But they prevent careful and sedulous attention to each task; there are  too many tasks,  too much input that breaks  up focus and concentration.  The brain is forced to pay attention to multiple  inputs (leaky gates), and cannot do it.  In this way we could say that ADD is the forerunner, the harbinger, of a psychosis to come.  This only means that the gates are leaky and  will not withstand further trauma input.  The beginning signs of a collapsing defense system can be delusions; this happens often with lifelong use of  marijuana which gnaws away at defenses.  All this  means according the study cited above is  that the areas of the brain that control  memory retrieval are faulty and do not function well.  What some drugs including psychedelics do is facilitate the retrieval of memory; the problem is with these drugs, there is too much retrieval all at  once and the  top level cannot integrate it.  And when there are leaky gates brought on by drugs you get  continued and long  lasting sleep problems as rising feelings agitate without cease.  The feelings rise to just-below-cortical levels so that the top level is constantly stimulated, and falling into sleep becomes impossible.  Sometimes a lone feeling may come up such as feeling unsafe throughout childhood. Occasionally the person can focus on one thing to  alleviate the agitation……"if I try the door knob  twenty times a day I will feel safe".  Often there  is no  awareness of the role of the obsession; the person simply feels better  if she can try the door knobs.  The ritual alleviates latent anxiety.

  This is the difference between what seems like pure statistical  science and clinical science.  Clinically, we see the relationship among disparate phenomena; we understand why this happens and that does not.  We are not bound exclusively by the "facts".  That is, we have a frame of reference in which to place the facts.  This frame of reference is truth beyond facts; it gives meaning to the facts and broadens our understand of what it all means.  This does not mean that we do not use brain science to further our understanding, but that seeing all this in action explains so much and takes us beyond  pure  statistics.  As I said many times; we are after biologic truths, not simply statistical data.  It is data with imagination that we need.

What Happened to My High Level Conscious Awareness?

  Sometimes the three levels of conscious are sitting right before us for all to see.  I read an article today on Alzheimers Disease.  It seems the victim can still do all of the feeling chores:  affection, getting  a new boy or girlfriend, cuddle up to a doll, take walks with a new friend, cry, kiss, pet animals, and so on.  It means that they can lead a feeling life even when they do not know who they are or where they belong.  They can do all this without an effective  (and affective) third line prefrontal cortex.  They are effectively decorticates.  And yet they can love and  feel loved.

  Now look at the higher level professor, with a super functioning neocortex, someone who wrote a book on the PROOF OF HEAVEN.  He is an M.D. and it is recommended reading by a Ph.D.  It is about consciousness after death.  Here the neocortex is used to keep him unconscious.    The blurb for this book is that he is “living proof of an afterlife.”  Or, as I might describe it, ” living proof of nonsense.”  Unless we believe that we can have experience without a functioning brain.

  What it seems to be is last in first out:  the last to develop, our prefrontal cortex is the first to go as we grow  older.    But we can still have a life even when that happens; it is called a feeling  life.  We cannot do math but we can be overjoyed when someone brings us a teddy bear.  We become the child again who does not as yet have a functioning cortex.    Or in the case above,  they can do math but have lost their child in the process.  Choose what you prefer:  an unfeeling mental giant, or a feeling child.  Who is the more alive?  And if you choose the feeling child you won’t have to read books about experiencing the after life.

Is There Really a Heaven?

Something touched a nerve about this subject because the forthcoming book on heaven is on the cover of Newsweek (Oct. 15, 2012), (Read the article here) and is a new book.  It is written by a scientist, self proclaimed, because he is a neurosurgeon.  Scientist and neurosurgeon and not necessarily equal.  In the field of psychology he is far from a scientist  But  let’s look at what he claims; but first in order to establish his bona fides,  his disclaimer:  he never  believed in near-death experience.  He was a “faithful Christian” but not a practicing one.  I think he means he was a believer but not really a “true believer.”

  He  contracted meningitis, fell into  a  coma for a week, and a good part of this thinking/aware  neo-cortex was shut  off.  “Then on the morning of the seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment,  my eyes popped open.  While  the neurons of  my cortex were stunned to  complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another dimension of the universe.”  He went to a place he never dreamed existed; sorry, I mean he went to a place that he dreamed existed.  This placed him in a “new  world.”  And I am sure that world is new to him: but not to me.  And not to me as a scientist who studies the deep unconscious.  I will need to explain.

As soon as our doctor had  his top level surgeon  brain  knocked  out he was like all of the rest of us: non-scientific schlubs  with no critical/judging cortex to help  understand our experience.  He was no longer scientist but someone who went through what our patients go through every day. The  difference is that our patients are able to connect their experience to higher level processes, where the doctor could not because there were no higher levels operating at the time.  I will have to explain better.  Our therapy is based on the three levels of consciousness, not as a theoretical abstraction but as a scientific therapy that has been heavily researched.  We take patients back to their childhood to relive and integrate childhood trauma, and even before to birth trauma and earlier events during womb-life, which  is neurologically possible.  These events operate  on different levels of consciousness where the deepest level is processed in brain structures that lie on the bottom part  the brain in the brainstem which handles our instincts, primitive experiences such as terror and fury, and imprints early events far below our ordinary levels  of  conscious/awareness.  And  that means far below the emotional experience of a surgeon whose whose life  is focused  on the here and now, not on his childhood and emotional trauma.

The top  level cortex is the thinking, comprehending analytic brain that understands experience, but we have experience without all that.  Look at the Alzheimer patient  who has  a pretty full life, albeit unconscious or unaware, who operates on below conscious/aware levels.  She can fall in love, care for  animals, take walks with someone she cares about and carry on minimal conversations, bereft of fancy abstractions.  She can have a life.  Well that is what  all of us have but beyond  that we have a deeper, brainstem life with  a  little bit of an emotional/limbic  system component that signifies a  life before words and even before the full  development  of our emotions.  I reiterate, those brain levels  exist in  all of us and have their  own operating system that dictates how we respond.    Unfortunately, few of us ever have a chance to go back  to visit  and relive  those experiences, except for our patients.  And what happens when they do?  The  imprinted experience on the brainstem sends its nerve shoots (brain pathways) to higher levels that in turn respond in their  own way.  The limbic area offers  emotions to the mix, and then at long  last  the cortex  enters the fray and adds is ideas and fantasies.  The final step  in our work is arriving  at  conscious/awareness; lower levels rising and  gathering up parts of each higher  level, finally recruiting  the neo-cortex to make sense of it  all.  It  unifies the entire experience into a specific meaning…  “They didn’t love me.”

  How do we know? Well we  have years of research behind us,  discussed in peer reviewed journals, but  also  in our therapy when patients descend  to deeper levels  they not only begin to feel deep sadness or pure  terror but  as  the  feelings expands the brainwaves also  mount, as does  the blood pressure  and body  temperature.  More important, when the feeling is unified there is a descent of key vital signs below starting baseline.  That signifies the beginning of  integration; and over months those vital  signs remain changed as the body changes.  We change all levels of consciousness not just the top level neo-cortex, as happens in cognitive therapy.

  We have seen patients approach these deep levels, after months of therapy, never right away, and begin their strange ideas……”I am in a washing machine that won’t stop and I don’t know how to  stop it.”  Or, “I  am  suffocating in a cave. There is no air and I cannot get out.”  These, in my experience, are derivatives of the birth experience (foreshortened here),  that first send up vague  but related ideas, the forerunner of the reliving experience.  It is very possible  in those who approach these experiences too soon  or who have take drugs to get there, that they will get stuck in the fantasy,  the dream sequence, and never arrive at  a connection.  Here is  where our surgeon enters.  Surgeons, and we have treated them, are notorious unfeeling  souls who  left their emotions far behind to be able  to  cut into our brains.  We get them in therapy after a stroke or from some exotic disease.  We get them when they have no other option.  They are the  last to believe  in feelings and the  emotional level.  I am not sure that if we are fully feeling we could take  a knife and cut  into someone’s brain.  But you know what they say, “a shrink is a doctor who cannot stand the sight of blood.”

  So what happens?  Experience on  deep brain levels are like the spokes of a wheel that  radiate upwards and forwards to inform high levels of it  all but without words or verbal  information.  We later put  words and fantasy images thanks to our  emotional levels and then we believe what we have “experienced.”  This only means that the person has stopped short of  connection  and has conflated or grown into a “cosmic consciousness” thanks to LSD, rebirthing and other nonsense.  He gets blocked on the emotional level, in this case, because the meningitis brain is not doing so well and cannot help out much.  And so later he really believes he has “been  to heaven,” which our previous LSDers believe after an acid trip.  We know  from research that the acid takers are flooded  with pain  as the  control mechanisms in the brain shut down with  the  drug.  Their pain of a lifetime surges forward into the top level.  Their  only recourse is to  manufacture another planet with the little cortex they have left.  And  they can construct someplace else where all is wonderful…..pink clouds  and softness,  and especially, where  death  is not only not so bad but a nice place to be—everyone’s dream of heaven.  If our doctor  had written that it was a  horrible experience  it would never be on the front page of Newsweek.    It doesn’t help that he is a scientist; in fact it hurts,  because he has less  expertise on feelings than most of  us have.  He is on another planet; that of surgeons.  He states that although his top level was out of commission his lower brain levels were alive and well. And they are but he never knew what lies on those levels.  It took us forty years to get down to those levels safely and  finally to understand the brain well  enough to know about those three  levels and how they make out our conscious/awareness.  We have been there and have  taken careful notes on our patients” experiences.  They go through pretty much the same thing; first emotional/dreamlike fantasies, (as the limbic system contributes) and later the concoction of elaborate  notions of heaven and new planets of existence thanks to the neo-cortex.  If you want to call that heaven that is fine but don’t give it the imprimature of science.  It is  fantasy pure and simple, even when offered by a “scientist.”  I have  found  that  the minute a scientist gets slightly out of his specialty he tends to talk nonsense.  And he stops being a specialist.  He  leaves off  where we begin.  We don’t dissect the brain  but we dissect what  the brain does with feelings.

  Our doctor  could not do that so he hears beautiful chants  and songs  of angels; by the way, if the top level was  completely shut  down where did  he  get the idea of angels?    He  now sees that we are one, unified beings, part of all the world.  And  then he says it gets  worse: he has  a companion through  it all, someone  young and beautiful,  riding  along  on the wings of  a butterfly.  You need a limbic system to have even an imagined companion, so clearly, higher brain levels were at work.  And  then without  any words a wind thrusts  through  him  and he heard,  “You are loved.  Cherished.  You have nothing to fear.    There is nothing  you can do wrong.”  All three  basic primal feelings that one  gets to in  our therapy over  time.  But it is not an idea; it is a feeling where patients beg, “Love  me just a little.  Say  I  am  good and not wrong,” etc.  Basic needs  that we all have  and need to experience.  It  needs connection which  is  liberating, something  our doctor never had; and needs for a real  experience.  Doctor, it is not the wind speaking; it is your father.

  Years ago there was a  similar book, also  a best seller, who had little men who looked like ET who  bundled off the author to a waiting  starship where they performed all kinds of booga booga on him.  It sounds crazy but no more crazy than riding  on pink clouds with  a beautiful “princess.”  It is all fantasy and does not  make heaven  any more real except for the true  believers.  It is all in the mind.  The doctor believes, “It as if I were being born into a larger  world,  and  the universe was like a giant  cosmic womb.”  Exactly.    A symbolic birth primal.  We have patients who have been on drugs or who are  very disturbed  who have  those feelings;  once they connect, it  all disappears.  But imagine me explain to the doctor that birth imprints stay in the brain  and direct part of our lives. And then tell him that we can  relive it all. He will surely think I am  the  crazy one.  He says that what he went through demands explanation.  Here I am.

  One part of the explanation is that as death nears  the whole system goes into alarm state.  There is secretion of endorphins  and serotonin as the system fights the  danger, and then it  is  over; or not.  If it is not over, the person may have felt the near-death  syndrome but he never went to heaven.  He touched on hell and that drove his brain to  fabulate heaven.  There have many studies on near death.  Usually it is when someone has fallen into a coma, comes out and imagines she died.  She didn’t.  But that doesn’t stop the notion that “I left my body and traveled to another planet.”  Let us not forget  that Wilder Penfield in Canada, decades ago put an electric probe on areas of the temporal lobe (of those undergoing surgery for epilepsy) and got delusions and hallucinations.  It so happened that the closer he got to the  actual memory site the more real the memory became.  All this means that we can get all  of these fantasies in a surgical setting in those not near death.  The minute that  we interfere with neurotransmitters we can get this effect, as well.  LSD affects serotonin turnover.  And this can result  in  disinhibition  which  then results  in delusions as repression  and inhibition falters.  In  short, we cannot believe what the cortex tells us  when lower brain levels is telling us something else.  But when the cortex offers goodies such  as gorgeous girls and heaven instead of death it can’t be beat.

If I were to take this doctor into therapy we would get to the real feelings eventually but then he couldn’t sell a million books.

More on the Critical Window

I have noted for decades now that there are  critical  windows when events have  their  major impact; windows that seem to open and close at specific biologic timeframes.  I have written about love and when it must happen. There is a new study just out that speaks more to the notion of the critical window.  It is found in Scientific American (Oct 1, 2012.  "The Story of a Lonely Brain."Read the Scientific American article here).  They start out the article  noting that we are social  animals, and when we cannot be social early on, we begin to suffer.    They use brain development as key example, demonstrating the difference between the evolution of our grey matter (the  thinking brain), and our white matter which lies below and has to do with connections between cells, and is  largely subcortical.  As white matter  becomes myelinated it develops into a  functioning cell that permits rapid  response where impulses travel at optimim speed. It is the fatty material that  covers  the cell that  allows it to become functional  spreading the message over long  distances  in the brain.  For some white matter the myelinization continues on into adulthood.    And we go on learning and evolving.    The authors point out that children who grew  up in orphanages had deficient myelin sheaths and  less  white  matter, which made learning more  difficult.  If they were soon put into a loving foster home  there was no such damage.  Their conclusion was that placement in foster homes when  early enough  and during a critical period avoided serious brain damage.  In short, they could "catch  up" neurologically.

  Part of what helps produce myelin are the oligodendrocytes.  Isolated,  non-social mice had stunted oligodendrocytes (OLIGOS) which were often  malformed and had fewer branches.  And worse, the nerve  cells connecting the right and left brains were fewer and thinner.  In other words, the ability to transmit emotional information from right to left brain is  diminished.  The  point of this was that mice that were isolated very early on had the greatest damage; those who isolated later on did not have this.  The damage had to be  during the critical  window.  That is when there is the greatest impact on the system.  Rhesus monkeys raised in  isolation had smaller sized corpus callosum.  They also had great learning difficulties.  All this to say what should be clear by now: that there is a critical period when love can have its maximum and  longest  duration; any love outside that period will have much less of an impact.  This is what they found with myelin sheaths that signal the readiness of a cell to fire.  If the mice were isolated outside the critical period, there is minimal impact.

  So to sum up: mice who were deprived of social contact  during a critical window had  lifelong damage  and learning problems.  So why don't they do good at school when they are fifteen? Maybe we should  look at much earlier times.

Childhood Trauma and Adult Behavior

There is a study done by Kaiser Medical on 17,000 subjects (See for example http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/pdf/childhood_stress.pdf). They tested them on childhood trauma, parents in prison, divorce, parental abuse, etc.  They gave them each an ACE* score: no trauma was zero and it went up from there, depending on how much trauma there was in childhood.  Those with an ACE score of four were 6 times more likely to have sex before age 15, twice as likely to develop cancer and emphysema, more likely to be alcoholics (seven times more likely); while those with a score of six were 30 times more likely to have tried suicide.  Those with zero scores had very little learning problems or trouble in school.  When the scores are four or higher school problems begin.  In short, trauma in childhood  does bad things to adult life, something that probably is a given for most of us.

    But wait! That did not include womb-life where  major imprints and dislocation of function occur.  Where the memories are more deeply embedded, where almost irreversible  damage happens and where  the greatest impact on the brain  occurs.  In other words, the study has ignored the most crucial time of our lives where the crucible  for most later behavior and physical symptoms get their start. For example, it is more likely that the seeds for later  cancer are there, in the  early part of our lives while being carried; then later life  trauma, the  obvious kind, (a parent in prison) are observed and are added to the pathological mix.

    As the brain begins its incredibly rapid development while we are being carried, trauma in this time period is of utmost important.  And this means that any proper treatment means going back to address those traumas and undo their impact. We are not simply victims of that abuse we are responders who can  gain control of  the trauma and surmount it.  It means being exposed again to that very same trauma, feeling  its pain and thereby lessening the impact.  It breaks open the repression and  allows for  full  feeling.  It means undoing the damage.  I have written how this can be done in my "Life Before Birth". It can be done.  We do it and measure the results. One  result is the reduction  of the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. As stress comes down, immune function increases.  It also means that as we experience the early traumas fully, we are under far less stress.  These are measurable outcomes.

  The implications of all this are, among other things, difficulty in concentrating  and studying, and the inability  to sustain paying attention. It means later learning  problems.

   I would have thought that economic factors are important here, but evidently not as important as we might imagine. A loving family is what counts most.

   A carrying  mother who takes drugs,  drinks  alcohol, is highly anxious and/or depressed is starting  serious damage for the child.  So  this study just confirms the primal viewpoint which has been made public for over forty years.


*Adverse Childhood Experiences