Arthur Janov's Blog, page 43

Why We Must Relive to Get Well (Part 1/2)

So again, why do we have to relive our early lives in order to get well? What is the magic about reliving that cures anything?" Or how does reliving rewire nerve circuits?"
It means that we go back in time to enter pains that were too much at the time to feel. Repression sealed them off. And deep down they were imprinted and kept doing their damage. Once we lift the repressive lid (done in orderly fashion) there is no longer unconscious forces driving behavior and symptoms.
How do we go back in time? Good question and the answer is simple. We don't deliberately decide to go back and visit our early lives; that is a recipe for abreaction. We cannot engage the higher level cortex; we must disengage from it. Cede to feelings; and that is our scientific mission: to provide access to feelings and let the whole organism proceed in an ordered, slow descent into the deep unconscious. As odd as that seems, feelings are the vehicle that take us where we need to go. There is a biologic sensor that knows not only where we have to go in the past by how far.

It is the deeply disturbed that enter therapy, and because of severely damaged gating system, slide immediately down to some kind of birth trauma, way off a proper evolutionary voyage. They usually need help in gating, and we may recommend medication of some kind that temporarily enchances gating so that a proper descent is now possible. Without that there is no integration and therefore no getting well.

A well ordered therapy begins in the present, anchoring feelings in the present which eventually will lead to deeper levels along that same feeling path. Feelings, their chemistry and frequencies bind or bundle similar feelings together and lead the neuro-biologic system by the hand to go deeper; it cannot be forced or decided in advance. If it is decided by a therapist about where the patient has to go there is danger and no integration. We must trust the feelings totally; but first we must recognize them and be able to differentiate them from abreaction—the discharge of the energy of feeling without connection. Our job is providing access and to follow evolution every step of the way. Reliving birth in the first weeks of therapy is defying evolution and leads to disaster. It is arriving at deep levels of consciousness prematurely, skipping evolutionary steps and going through the motions of feelings without feeling. I have seen people who have gone to rebirthing centers and come to us prepsychotic.

Whenever a therapist tells the patient what to feel we know he is already on the wrong path. We must sense feelings and follow the patient, not lead him. We take him by the hand and follow where he leads, not vice versa. We doctors must avoid the temptation to act smart. We spent years in college learning to be smart, and now we must elude it. How ironic; yet the history of psychotherapy was intellectual and provided a therapy of the intellect, exactly what we don't need. We don't let the patient act "smart" we allow her to act intelligent, to recognize her feelings and how they drive her and cause her to act out. When she tries to act smart we help her get to the feeling; of how to please momma or father. Finally it is a great relief just to be yourself and not have to act this way or that to get love.

A Bit About the Stalker

I hope in this piece to save you all a lot of angst and danger. So many of you get involved with a certain kind of person and then are surprised when a little while later he turns out to be a stalker, someone who won't let go, someone who lives only for the day when you come back to him, someone who calls incessantly, and finally someone who makes threats and becomes dangerous. Let's see how he got into this mess and how you got into it too.

This is now a scenario among dozens of possibilities, so I will recount only one. The young boy grew up with no love in his house; his father was cold and distant and is mother slightly warm but he had to struggle for her love. Then one day when he was six she ran off with someone else and he was left with his severe father. It could have been that she was only having an affair or was killed in an auto accident; you name the permutations. The point is that his lifeline and only chance for some love was gone, suddenly without warning. He was truly along, left with this pain and urgent need that lay there as a permanent strata, une couche in French.

Now he meets a young naïve girl and dates her and finally marries her. He is wonderful for the first few weeks and the the couche sets in and gets triggered off because in marriage unconsciously she becomes momma. This happens so often, where the girlfriend becomes mother as soon as she puts on the ring, and everything changes. So what does he do? He becomes possessive (of mother…"Don't leave me), and he is controlling, "Where were you? Who did you see? What did you say?" and on and on. This never gets better, only worse, because the pain/need is imprinted and won't just go away. This got so bad with one of the stars whom I treated that when they went to parties he watched his wife constantly and would not allow her to raise her head to look at anyone. The submissive girl, who grew up submissive to a controlling father, did not see anything wrong with this. It was just her life. She just went on living as she always had, giving in to controlling people so she lived their lives not hers. She paid the price for this because she imagined there was a chance for love.

But one day she meets someone and tries to leave. He says to her, "No one leaves me……and lives to tell about it." He becomes suspicious, paranoid and he will make sure she cannot get away. She is terrified because he can be violent, the violence he felt when his mother left. He will follow his wife in a continuing effort for control. He will sneak into her house and listen to her phone messages. He is completely wound up in this because when mother left that was his last chance at life, and that feeling is still inside of him. He can kill because life alone has no more meaning for him; it means his life is over, there is nothing to live for. That is the pull of love and why love can turn to hatred so easily. First love and then the rejection; and what stops love is his desperate need for it and his overbearing control to make sure he is loved.. This produces the opposite—no love. She needs freedom and he cannot let her have it because to him it means rejection. He will first plead to ask her to come back but when rejection is certain there is danger and it needs to be reported. I had one man I treated who was clearly paranoid and thought his wife was cheating on him. She wasn't but did want to get away; too frightened to try. I called the police because he was an immediate danger. They told me they do not act on "maybe" only acts. So he went home and pumped five bullets into her……and she lived, and he was put away, finally.

The paranoid is unchangeable and intractable in his beliefs because of the imprinted feeling down below that keeps him in its grip; as long as the imprint remains his ideas remain fixed, and they worsen. So when you get involved with a controlling partner who wants to know incessantly where you went and what you did; stay away. It will become dangerous.

Our Toxic Inner Life

Most of us agree that toxic chemicals in the environment can affect a carrying mother and her baby. When they spray pesticides onto fruit and vegetables it can deform the growing fetus. But if I told you that the really harmful chemicals that deform the growing fetus are also those that are "sprayed" from inside. If the mother is anxious and her cortisol levels are high, those stress hormone levels will infuse the fetus and affect his growth and brain development. The baby has to adopt to new and abnormal levels of stress that he should not have to adapt to. His system has to rev up to handle the input; it has to overreact in order to meet the threat. It has to react inordinately, and that overreacting my dog him through life. He may become the hysteric who is tense and responds excessively to a normally neutral stimulus. He is operating near the top all of the time. He, too, is under stress, an imprint that is embedded into his system.

The input of cortisol and other hormones affects the evolving brain, and in the first months of gestation there is an effect on the primitive brainstem that governs all of our primordial reactions: digestion, elimination, urination, breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. Also, it affects the alimentary canal, so when years later under an anxiety attack there are "butterflies in the stomach" we know where and when their origin. It is one of many ways that we know the cause and origin of panic and anxiety attacks.

When there is what I call a first line imprint there is perforce, a first line reaction; that means one of the key functions of the primitive brainstem must be involved. So there is a churning of the stomach, a pressure in the chest, a generalized terror, a need to pee, inability to eat, a racing heart and an elevated blood pressure. And yep, the doctor who examines you says it does look like an anxiety attack. But who can guess where it comes from? The disconnection between our lives at minus eight and our lives at forty is very large and it would take a giant leap of faith and science to make that connection. But we do. But patients make that connection all of the time; they come in anxious and descend to very early imprints, only after months of therapy, and it is they who make the connection, not us. What a relief, we don't have to figure out anything.

At the start of the third month of gestation we are beginning to have an intact nervous system. And traumatic events are still registered very low down. It is only months later that there is an inchoate feeling system where feelings are imprinted, primitive as they are. We now have the beginnings of the limbic area with the amygdala. Thus low level terror can move to join the limbic system where fear is organized. Later on in life when fear is stimulated it can trigger off related deep-lying terror, and we have a panic attack. This happens when there is a violent household where fear is commonplace. The infant is terrified all of the time and the gating system that should hold back terror becomes faulty. Too many assaults on it.

Let me make sure we understand this: a first line trauma engenders a first line reaction. When we see it, a racing heart, for example, we have an idea of what trauma caused it and when. It helps orient us to where we have to go in therapy. Yes, current events can trigger it but through the process of resonance it sets off a first line reaction. We need to begin well anchored in the current situation and feeling and then later descend when the patient is ready for it, which may be some time. We never want to defy our personal evolution and plunge into first line imprints and reactions before the patient is ready. From that we can get abreaction, and worse, psychosis and delusions.
But when someone is very sensitive to low oxygen levels in a room, we can bet that it stems from early on when oxygen was life saving. You have only to witness severe locomotive breathing when a patient is down there reliving oxygen deprivation to understand my point. It is a good bet that it is brainstem originated.

Now suppose the carrying mother drinks and smokes. Can you imagine the chemical pollution affecting the fetus? The child has no chance. It may not show right away, but I have been in this métier for 60 years and I can attest it will cut your life short. You can easily understand this if you live in a wine field where they spray every day with chemicals. But it is the same when you get sprayed from inside every day.

You know why children need to be born to two loving parents? Because the carrying mother needs love, protection and caring while pregnant, and it takes a partner to do that. And when there is an absent father the mother and baby suffer. The mother needs to know that her partner will stay around and be there for her.

And when the father is hostile and impatient they also suffer. She needs a kind, patient environment to rear and carry a healthy baby. I have written in my Life Before Birth, soon or now in bookstores, that arguing parents(when mother is pregnant) lead to babies that have serious allergies, and for males, a greater chance of homosexuality. This is not booga booga talking; there are research results. But it should be obvious that the mother is under stress and her stress hormone level is constantly high. The pregnant mother is spewing out stress into the baby and forty years later the adult now has some heart problems.

Here is what scientists have found when there is a high cortisol level in the carrying mother: the baby's nervous system is slow to develop and he will have learning and studying problems; the muscles are not developing properly and there can be a lack of coordination later on, and constant fear. ("Prenatal Programming of Human Neurological Function." C.A. Sandman, et al, International J. of Peptides. Vol 2011. For those interested in the science of it all, read this).

The time when a mother should be most calm is during pregnancy. A revolution or war in the surroundings can be catastrophic for the baby. But a war between the parents is a catastrophe.

Addendum to "Skipping Steps"

This is an addendum to Frank's story.

Since writing Skipping Steps, the insights keep coming. The meds slow me down so I can be more conscious of what's going on around me. Of course, by that I mean that I feel more as well as become more aware. My first insight was patience, I don't have to get this over with as fast as I can. I'm more grounded in the present and I'm not quite so controlled by the panic and terror of the past. I can let other people be where they are at and join them there. And then the big (to me) insight of Don't Skip Steps.
Since then I recently had another big insight: Softer. I admit that you've really got to be inside my skin to understand what that means to me, but I'll try to explain. When I hold a pencil, or mouse, or almost anything, I grip it like someone is trying to take it away from me, or that my life depends on not letting it go, or that I'll lose control if I relax my grip. When I type, I strike the keys hard to make sure they do their job, and harder after mistakes. When I write, I feel like I'm holding on to a plow being pulled by a wild horse, dragging me all over the place while I've got to keep the rows straight. This leaves my writing with a hard, coarse, jerky somewhat illegible appearance. When I talk, I'm desperate to make sure I'm heard, making my voice louder and sharper than it needs to be.
Oddly enough (to me) I've been somewhat aware of this for a long time, but this is the first time I've been able to feel how unpleasant it is to me in the doing, not just the result. And this leads me to another insight. I'm always careful. But it is a carefulness born of fear rather than love. It arises from wombs eye fear that something terrible is going to happen to me if I don't watch out. I want to remain careful, but in a positive way born of love for myself, and for what I'm doing, along with love for those with whom my life transpires. It's a carefulness that comes from within rather than from the outside.
I also have to add that this change doesn't happen cleanly, and instantly. It is a slow process of being more conscious and noticing those things that sabotage my daily life, and applying conscious effort to change. Because the truth of the matter is that I've had over 72 years practice reinforcing these imprints, and my only advantage is that I feel what they do to me, and also feel what it's like to relax and go slower, softer, and consciously careful.

Skipping Steps The Untoward Consequences of Cross-Dominance (Part 4/4)

(This is part 4 of Frank's story)




REVELATIONS!
It slowed me down. Just that let me see a lot that had I'd been rushing past in my desperate hurry. The akinesia subsided considerably. I started feeling more comfortable in my skin. For me that was a novelty. I started noticing that the people around me, for the most part, were sitting still. I realized that when I sit in a chair, I am in constant motion searching for a comfortable position that I never quite succeed in finding. I stopped chewing my tongue. I've been doing that ever since I can remember. Now if I start to chew my tongue, I notice it and don't feel compelled to chew it.
Patience. I've always been impatient, both with myself and with other people. This is an emergency, and I've got to get this over with! This includes my every conversation with other people. I need to get this over with before they have a chance to hurt me. Then I can go off by myself and fantasy how I wanted the conversation to go. A few weeks ago, I walked up to the glass table at the Center, and I let out a big breath. David asked me, "Why do you do that?" I asked why, and he said, "You do it quite often, and I was just curious." I had no idea then, but now I do. It is because I'm always waiting with bated breath for things to get over with. Once the Minnie crisis passes, I let out a big sigh of relief.
Now I can ask, "Why? What's the rush?" In my sessions that followed I could easily see the answer to that question. It's fear of my father and mother. With them it was real. I had to get my interaction with them over with and get away because I knew things would go from bad to worse. This, in my act out, is transferred to any person in a position to tell me what to do. And it goes deeper. I've got to get out of here, right now or I'm done for! Of course that is seeing it from a wombs-eye point of view.
I feared these medications might keep me from feeling in my sessions, but that fear dissipated with my first session. However, it was different. I have in the past been a straight 3-2-1-2-3 patient. I always feel great after a session. I feel a lot and as I've previously stated, have great connections and insights. But this time my session wasn't so clean cut. It took a little longer to let myself open up, but then it proceeded as my sessions usually do. That was until I went through a very painful birth sequence. At the end I started to cry.
At first I thought it was a defense and tried to drop back into first line. But this kept happening until I finally let go of my image of how a session should go, and simply let the feeling take me. My body took over and started going in every which way. My arms and legs flailed, while my whole body writhed and turned and jerked and jumped. My head was banging on the mat as I shrieked and cried. And then it culminated in a complete body tremble. This sequence came in waves and repeated itself over and over until my body was spent.
Then the connections: My God, that's what I've been trying to do my whole life, and my whole life has been a struggle not to do that. I've been struggling to look normal, to be normal, to feel normal, and I finally got a taste of what MY normal feels like. And the more I feel that in sessions the less I'm driven to it in daily life – which means I struggle less and less to control that urge as it diminishes. It is diminishing because it is what I had to do then, not now. That whole feeling is terror, which followed me from womb to cradle and beyond.
My life right now is in a whirlwind of change, but got interrupted by a really, really, really rotten bout with pneumonia. I thought this was my last Christmas, and didn't really care if it was. I wanted to get it over with so bad. But then I remembered how Primal that feeling was, so I decided to hang in there. Now I'm pretty much on the mend.
I started this little quest in order to be able to do better therapy. But what I didn't know is how much it would affect my whole life. Before I started on my meds as an adjunct to my therapy, I would have described my world like this: I am a very messy packrat; I'm disorganized; If I lay something down (such as a tool), I've lost it. I spend hours every day looking for things I've misplaced. And it gets worse and worse because I let things pile up. If I have something in my hand, while in my office, and want to set it down, I have no place to put it. I never know where anything is. Every surface in my office is piled high with books, papers, bills, toys, electronic parts, boxes, tapes, DVDs, and everything else you could think of. Look around my house and you will see thousands of books, video tapes, CDs that I'll never watch or read or listen to. But getting rid of them is worse than an amputation. I open a package and I don't have time to properly dispose of the wrapping. I leave it where it lays and I'll take care of it later. I never do. So I live my life in clutter that is too overwhelming to even address. And I suffer. I feel helpless, hopeless, and ashamed. What is the matter with me? But I'm too busy to bother with this. I never stop working and never seem to get anything done.
Patience. Going slower now, finding my pace, and something new: Letting other people have their own pace. Be with them, not manipulate them to be with me. I don't need to impose my images on anyone else. I don't need to finish other people's sentences for them. Let them find their own words. That is not really helping them. I only think I know what they are trying to say, but I really don't know. The scary thing about that is that I didn't know that's what I was doing until the meds slowed me down to where I could see. In subtle ways it makes everything feel different.
I notice more. I look around my house and realize I don't want to live in this clutter. All of that brings its own boatload of distress. My priorities are shifting. First up is to turn this place into one that makes me feel good. I don't have to do it all at once. Just one small thing at a time, and take my time. I look at all my stuff that I can't bear to part with and now I'm wondering what the hell I ever wanted with it. Most of it is an Albatross around my neck. My wife rented 2 big dumpsters. In no time they were full and my house is looking better and better. We replaced some curtains we've been going to replace for years. The office is clutter free, as well as our bedroom. The bed gets made in the morning. Our dressing room sinks are no longer covered with clothes and papers and receipts and old prescription bottles. I want that sink clear and clean and now it is.
Once the clutter is gone and I'm moving slow enough to put the things I use back in their proper place, I'm not spending so much time looking for things. I'm selling all my books worth anything and dumping the rest. All the books I have kept are on bookshelves with spines facing outward so I'm not forever looking for the book I need. It's now easy to keep the house clean and neat – especially the kitchen. Dishes don't stack up simply because I don't want them to.
I've been too busy for three years to get over to my ophthalmologist for a check-up on my good eye, and to the ocularist and get my other eye polished. Now I've taken care of that as well as getting a new eye made.
Finally, my life is no longer like living in a funhouse filled with distortion and imbalance where perspective and priority are pure guess work. When I started to sell my books on Amazon, I thought the whole process was so complicated, and required so much work, keeping track of orders and not mixing them up, assessing them, wrapping them, getting postage and shipping them, that I almost didn't. It just made me feel weak, helpless, and overwhelmed. But then I decided not to let it get to me. I'll try just one and if that's okay, I'll try another. Pretty soon I had a hundred books up for sale and had sold 25. The process still seemed confusing, however. The man at the post office suggested I buy myself a scale and purchase postage on line instead of waiting in line at the post office. He showed me that it was cheaper as well.
But it was while I was trying to process about 15 orders one night that I had my biggest insight so far. I had just gotten a couple of orders mixed up. I slowed down, retraced what I had done, and WOW! I had skipped a step and it put everything in disarrangement. I couldn't remember what I'd done or not done, I start to get anxious, unsettled, unsure…. Then the light went on. DON'T SKIP STEPS! It is one of the first Primal Principles we learn. We know that if you skip steps in a session, it is ruined. But I'm going so fast, I have to skip steps. I've gotta get out of here. In the meantime, I'm cross-dominant and my brain is mixing things up to begin with. As I look over my life in detail, I can see that most of my foibles as well as really big calamities have been caused by skipping steps.
An older Primal Revelation has taken on new meaning as well. As a child I had to have the right answer, and I had to do things right or there was hell to pay. This leaves me focusing on how I'm doing instead of what I'm doing. Nowadays, just like then, as soon as I do that, I stop being fully conscious of what is going on. In training we can be watching a tape of a session and I'm trying to pay close attention. Suddenly the tape stops and France asks, "Was that the right move, or would you have done something else? Equally as sudden I realize that I don't remember what I just watched. I had experienced just a subtle shift of attention from what was happening to how I was doing. It was only for a few seconds and now I'm in a head spin trying to get my mind to recapture what just transpired. My mouth stops working right, and my mind goes blank, and my impulsivity takes over and I say something that is off the wall, immediately realize it and then struggle to repair the damage, making things worse. This while my desperate 1st line need to get out of here comes shooting up, leaving me in a mess, pretending I'm not.
Now I'm catching myself more as the process starts to happen. I can stop it if I just stop, relax, and let the tension flow out of my body. At times that can be like waking up.
Patience. I need to have patience with myself, first of all. I need to go slow enough that I can remember left from right, and remember to help that left eye and right hand stay in tune with each other. I have spent my life in a state of panic, running for my life. I didn't have the time or capacity to make sure I wasn't missing steps. Now my life is moving a little slower, and I not only skip fewer steps, when I do, I notice. That gives me something tangible to work with. Don't skip steps is not just a Primal Principle. For me it is an axiom for life:
DON'T SKIP STEPS!

Another Look at the Critical Window

I have written about the critical window for several decades. I want to reiterate why it is such an important idea. It has to do with the imprint. Let us suppose you have been totally unloved from birth on, no touching, no care, only neglect. That "unloved" reality is engraved and remains for a lifetime. Now you marry a carrying, loving person but because you feel unloved you require superhuman caring which no one can fulfill. And sooner or later you will divorce because you imagine he does not love you and you believe her demands are over the top. You see your mate through the prism of your childhood and cannot escape it. All because you were not loved during the critical window: the time when a biologic need must be fulfilled according to evolutionary development. That evolution dictates what needs have to be fulfilled, when and how they should be fulfilled. An example. The child is never touched but the parent says "You know I love you, only I can't show it." Well, the need to be held and caressed is paramount in biology from birth on. After that the basic evolutionary need is closed for business and another need may take its place later on; to be talked and listened to.

The notion of the critical window means "your time is up," and that need can never be filled after that. You can be touched by your adult partner all day long but it can never replace the need and fulfillment when you were five years old. That deprivation is now an imprint and the only way we can open it up is to feel that need again as that child! Everything in the present is symbolic fulfillment. It is not real even though it looks real. I have treated dozens of actresses; ask them if they still need the audience to "love them.?" And if one night there is not great applause they sink into the funk they are always in; feeling the old feeling of being unloved. Once the pain is imprinted it is there for life. Because it is now covered over now by repression we must lift the lid of repression in order to let love in. And oddly enough, the only way to do that is feel unloved..... back then. Thus, to feel loved now we must feel unloved in our past.

Now we come to psychotherapy and the therapist; we are hooked on therapy because we get what we lacked in every session: someone who cares, who is warm and understanding and focuses only on you. That is unbeatable……… and unreal. And you have to go back for more, because it is an addiction, something that calms and assures us. Therapy as a pain killer. It can only be symbolic because the critical period is long gone there cannot be genuine fulfillment. We now need to feel unloved……back then. For symbolic love the minute we don't get it we fall into pain. But fulfillment that happened during the critical window lasts forever; and that is a major difference. It all revolves around the notion of the imprint and the critical window. Remember, we cannot love neurosis away no matter how much we would like to.

Let's look at the critical window in animals; it exists in nearly every animal form. This is not some theoretical concoction I manufactured to prove a point; it is purely biologic and has all the constraints of our biology.

The critical window in the first 10 days of a mouse's life is equal to six months of our lives; and I leave it you to extrapolate the implications., but there is a critical window for mice to feel loved; otherwise they are doomed for life. In order to stave off anxiety, for example, the mouse needs a nurturing mother. And she must "loving" (nuzzling, licking, etc), during those 10 days in order to turn on the genes that will stop anxiety. But if the mother is unloving and indifferent to her baby in that period, the gene never gets turned on and the baby will be anxious thereafter; afraid of new situations, not curious, and hesitant. For this baby, painkilling drugs do help, which shows that lack of love produces pain. Now the offspring becomes addiction prone. There was a study of mice who were not loved early on, and they took to alcohol quicker and longer than their loved pals. If we do not understand the concept of the imprint and critical window we cannot understand what mental and emotional illness is all about. Yes, we need a kind warm environment but that is limited. It eases our pain and helps us function but does nothing at all to change the imprint that drives us; the imprint that may kill us prematurely.

Skipping Steps The Untoward Consequences of Cross-Dominance (Part 3/4)

(This is part 3 of Frank's story)
…AND BESIDES THAT!

Some of my worst traumas occurred after I left home to be on my own. Some may have occurred because of my cross-dominance and ADD, and it's for certain that they all exacerbated them. Just turned 21, and just out of the Navy, working as an operating room technician, I woke up on a nice spring morning to discover that I could barely walk. My balls were swollen up as big as baseballs and feeling like they were going to explode. I got a friend to drive me to the hospital where I worked, and I cornered a urologist I worked with. He diagnosed me with bilateral epididymal orchitis, etiology unknown. He put me on Erythromycin and sent me home. I ran a temp of 104 and was in bed for 3 weeks. When it finally let up, my balls collapsed and atrophied, leaving them tender as boils at the poles. I was also left sterile. This was to me like NOT reaching puberty all over again. I felt humiliated, and have had to be very careful not to bump into things like the corner of a table, or get bumped or hit in the crotch area ever since.
The following March the police came to my house, tossed it and arrested me for all kinds of crimes: I was accused of being the Barstow Abortionist, the Cinderella Bandit, possession of illegal lethal weapons, dope peddling, statutory rape, leader of a teenage mafia, and just about anything else you can think of. I made headlines in the paper, lost my job, and thought I was going to prison (another worst nightmare. One that my parents had been threatening me with throughout my childhood – and my brother was already in prison at the time.) The sergeant who arrested me finally realized that I not only wasn't his criminal and also that I was just a dumb kid that fell off the turnip truck, so he acted as my lawyer at my arraignment, negotiated my bail down from $50,000. To $500., helped me get a bail bondsman, and then in court got the D.A. to stand up and say to the judge, "We demand in the interest of justice that the charges be dropped." And the judge said, "Okay, kid, get out of here."
The following March (no longer an operating room technician, but a hod carrier) I got hit by a cement truck that crippled me for a year. It was my fault, and I got the ticket. I jumped out of a company truck and ran around the front of it to cross the street to my truck, when along came a big ready-mix concrete truck to meet me half way. I turned, looked, and knew I couldn't make it either way. This was really because of my ADD and cross-dominance. It occurred because: As my foreman and I left the Yard to go to a job, I remembered that I forgot my cigarettes. My foreman said, "You ain't gonna be bumming cigarettes from me all day, you little bastard, so we'll stop at your place so you can get some out of your truck, but by God you'd better make it snappy, 'cause we're on company time." Well, I run around like a chicken with its head cut off anyway, so naturally, I didn't see the cement truck coming until it was too late.
Then when I was 25, the worst one of all: I got trapped in my brother-in-law's attic, while helping him install a cooler, and suffered severe electric shock. I woke up in the hospital emergency room with the doctor pinching my eyes to see if I could react. I sat straight up, and he pushed me back down, saying, "Whoa, lay down, your heart's not beating." The after effects were terrible. I couldn't move my jaw for 2 weeks afterward. And that's how long the diarrhea and vomiting lasted. After that, I had a permanent case of the whips and jingles. I couldn't touch a light switch without a big thick towel in my hand. All anyone had to do is say hello to me and I'd damn near jump over the moon. That one still dogs me. Those electric shock Primals are every bit as painful as any of my Birth Primals. But it was those Primals that normalized my startle response.
Probably of equal importance is the fact that I had 3 LSD trips and smoked grass regularly for a number of years. I'm sure it could not do less than aggravate my leaky gates, and further incuse the lack of coordination between my right hand and left eye.
CONNECTIONS
It's harder to get by with money and no drugs than it is to get by with drugs and no money (Old hippie saying)

Well, unlike Mom and Gramma, Art didn't just leave me hanging with all this. He was also doing his own research, looking for other kinds of treatment.
One treatment that could hold promise is called transcranial direct current electrical stimulation. The military is using it to amp up learning in order to teach Air Force pilots who guide unmanned attack drones. It helps the recipient to be alert, focused, and more able to find anomalies on the computer screen. It also cuts learning time in half. I have ambivalent feelings about it, because of my experience of severe electric shock. I've relived a lot of it but much of it is still there and vulnerable to restimulation. I fear that it might nullify the positive effects. I was almost relieved to find out that it is prohibitively expensive.
There is also a similar treatment called transcranial magnetic stimulation and another that is chiropractic called BioCranial Technique designed to adjust the bones in the skull to allow better distribution of spinal fluid pressure.
But then Art suggested pharmaceuticals. He thought we should try a neocortical stimulant given along with something to quiet the brainstem. Along with a psychiatrist, we settled on Adderal extended release and a low dose of Inderal as an adjunct to my Primal Therapy.
This was at first a bit of a problem to me. Early in therapy my therapist suggested something along those lines, but the very thought of speed struck a nasty chord. I also feared it would interfere with my therapy. Instead I took Strattura, and outside of a placebo effect at first, it did nothing for me so I quit.
Now I had used speed before. Back in the early 60s my favorite self medication was one of my wife's diet pills (Dexamyl Spansules) along with a whole lot of beer. The problem, when you are young, desperate, and ignorant, is that titration is replaced with saturation. So what might have been helpful and useful went undiscovered. I also had a restaurant in the early 70s, and in order to work 20 hours a day, I took whites (these little pills were the first street manifestation of methamphetamine). By the time my restaurant collapsed, I was in the middle of the blind staggers and a nervous breakdown. I couldn't even say a compound sentence without getting lost. In fact, that is what got me into therapy in 1973.
Nonetheless, Art's suggestion was the most promising. Of course in treating all this we want to get to the origin of the symptom in order to feel the pain the symptom is defending me from. Drugs don't do that. But wait. Drugs used as an adjunct to Primal Therapy might open some doors. So I agreed, even though I was still apprehensive about the possibility that it would prevent me from getting to my feelings. What I had not considered was titration of dose, starting with a 5mg extended release capsule and 20mg Inderal (a sympatholytic non-selective beta blocker). The Inderal dose was fine and I titrated the Adderal up to 15mg, i.e. to a point of alertness without the whips and jingles that can come with speed. Then WOW!

Hearing Voices

They arrested a killer a while ago. His uncle said he came back from Iraq hearing voices that told him to kill. So let's look at this. It would help again if we understand the three levels of consciousness. Here was a troubled kid who went to Iraq and got overwhelmed. Without the war he may have made it but the war was the last straw. It was too much. His early pain was rising; a lot of his anger and fury from early on in his life which already made him unstable. That pain and anger began to rise after Iraq which filled him with rage;; but he did not feel the rage instead he heard voices telling him to kill. Those were the upper level translations of his deep-lying rage. And it turns out that when one hears voices there is actually electrical activity in his brain as if he actually were hearing voices. He was listening to his feelings given voice and he obeyed what they told him. He obeyed because his feelings were commanding him as they do most of us. The difference with us is that we don't hear voices, we just act. In psychotic killers there is an intervening variable.
The voices are subconscious emanating from deep rage that is out of control. In neurosis we feel on the verge of something but we contain it because our defense system is working partially. And we lose our temper but we do not kill. There is enough defense and gating and also there may be less first line rageful imprints at work.
The problem is that this man was required to kill in Iraq. He was given permission and it must have felt a relief. But it provided a channel for murder. The whole experience was too much for an already damaged individual. But now he had a socially institutionalized approval for a monstrous deed, so he needed not see it as monstrous. And indeed most soldiers simply say about killing, "I have a job to do and I do it." It is not killing in anger, which would be logical; rather,, it is murder as a job. Killing is a job description just like any other job. So today there is an uproar in the media about our solders urinating on killed Taliban troops. It is not the killing that outrages the media but the urination. When put on a moral scale it seems to me that murder might be a tiny bit more monstrous than urinating. But you see society has sanctioned killing not urination. So will these 3 dead bodies make us safer? You decide. Don't forget that our soldiers were put in harm's way so that foreigners were trying to kill them. Of course, they are angry and act-out.

When you hear voices it is not you who are killing; you are just following orders, like the Nazis. And you are not guilty. This poor killer had no idea where those voices came from. But he had to obey. Feelings told him what to do just like with us so-called normals.

Skipping Steps The Untoward Consequences of Cross-Dominance (Part 2/4)

THERE AND BACK AGAIN
How I Got This Way In The First Place

Where I come from, birth is hell – especially mine. My birth was a bummer. Although I must confess that I have only my memory to attest to this because there is no record of my birth in the state of Utah, where the tragedy occurred. The hospital in Ogden, where I have always been told I was born, burned down during WWII along with all the records contained therein. And my mother, dead now, wasn't talking. She insisted that she couldn't remember a thing about my birth except that the doctor said I had big hands. The rest of me was tiny. That said, the circumstances of my birth are covered pretty well on pages 209-10-11 of Art's latest book, life before birth THE HIDDEN SCRIPT THAT RULES OUR LIVES.
My mother told me that her milk went sour but I didn't really know what this meant or what it meant to me until Primal Therapy. It doesn't sound so bad. All she had to do was switch me to a bottle. But the insights and connections about how my life was affected by that little bump along my road of life were cataclysmic. This led me to act out a dynamic of self denial. My belief was that what I need most in life; what I am most desperate for; what I can't live without is poison and might kill me. Wanting, for me, was something to fear – and I spent my life keeping my wants suppressed, repressed, and depressed – anything but expressed. Wanting is dangerous. This belief was continually reinforced by my parents. My parents reminded me daily that I did not deserve what little I got. At the table I was a dirty little pig. A common saying in my whole family was "You ain't the only turd in the corral." So I lived in my head. I soothed myself every night with repetitive omnipotence fantasies. That's how I put myself to sleep. They pushed all the ugly realities of my life temporarily out of my head.
But quite possibly my worst trauma was severe eczema. Or, more likely, the eczema was the reaction to my worst trauma of not being touched, held, or caressed = unloved. Hence, if any single trauma after birth set my path to ADD and Cross-Dominance, it was The Itch, that bloody itch. And I mean that literally. I would scratch myself so bloody my parents would cover me with a stinging pink salve. (I still have a strong memory of the smell of it, and it is gut-wrenching.) They would then cover my hands with socks and tie them to the sides of my crib. There they would leave me to cry myself to sleep. Or not. My crying at night drove dear old Dad to rage. "Go in there and shut that goddamn kid up! You shut up and go to sleep or I'm coming in there to shut you up!"
Perhaps if I had been blessed with loving parents, much of this could have been avoided. But I wasn't. I am convinced that my eczema was exacerbated and entrenched by the renewed commitment of my parents to avoid touching me as much as possible. My mother was tense and rigid and wasn't particularly affectionate anyway. And once the eczema took over, I'm sure they were told by the doctor to avoid touching me, as my wounds could get infected. And there was no place on my body that wasn't affected. The eczema was with me in the severe form until I was about 5. After that it was mostly on my lower legs. It eventually left me but I'm still plagued with a lot more itches than most people. It also left me still squirming about, unable to sit still, and chewing my tongue. That was incused to imprint because I was constantly scolded for "tying myself in knots" fidgeting, grinding my teeth, and being completely unable to sit still or, "Sit on that God Damned couch the way you're supposed to. You act like you've got St. Vitus Dance." (Sydenham's chorea or chorea minor (historically referred to as Saint Vitus Dance)[1] is a disease characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements affecting primarily the face, feet and hands. Sydenham's chorea (SC) results from childhood infection with Group A beta-hemolytic Streptococci[2] and is reported to occur in 20-30% of patients with acute rheumatic fever.) My brother spent his sixth year on bed rest because of rheumatic fever, and I suffered a bout of it every spring for several years of my childhood. As a toddler, I also had pertussis, which like rheumatic fever and St. Vitus Dance, is caused by a coccus bacterium. Later my rheumatic fever turned into severe allergies each spring until I left home. So this might mean that my parents' diagnosis was correct. And the allergies, being auto-immune could logically follow the rheumatic fever.
From my earliest memories I was uncoordinated and clumsy. And by the fourth grade the teacher started actively attempting to do something about my atrocious handwriting. Practice, practice, practice, but all efforts failed. To this day my handwriting is really bad. I suspect, even at this early age, I was cross-dominant. But the event that cinched the deal was another trauma that occurred about 10 years later.
I was reared under the watchful eyes of God, Jesus, the angel Moroni, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young in Brigham City Utah, making God very real and omnipresent in my life. My parents had 2 boys, my older brother and me. I was a big disappointment to my mother because she wanted a little girl. Then one day in 1950 they come upon an opportunity to adopt a super cute little girl just 5 years old. Her mother openly hated her and didn't want her. My parents brought her home to live with us. She was effusively charming. My mother almost forgot that I existed. New clothes and toys and presents for Penny. "What about me?" Penny could swear and they thought it was cute. If I did that, I caught the back of a hand along with additional punishments. I wanted her to leave - secretly. She would sing Candy Kisses and giggle to the delight of all who beheld her – at first. Then the reality of her life of abuse began to insinuate. Little things at first: She wet the bed, tried to hide it, and lied about it. She lied a lot. Dad carved a hardwood paddle and hung it up in the kitchen as a reminder. All 3 of us kids felt the sting of the reminder on a daily basis. Now I hated Penny, and desperately wanted her out of my life. Soon Penny was out of control. She'd pick her fingernails until they bled. She would tell any visitor we had that she loved them and wanted to go home with them. My parents couldn't take it. They decided to take her back to her birth mother. I was ecstatic. I couldn't wait for Dad to take her away – secretly. Then one Sunday, he did. I got exactly what I wanted more than anything. She was gone! That night my brother shot me with a bow and arrow and put out my eye. God had punished me for wanting Penny out of my life.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray dear Lord my soul you'll keep
Please let me die before I wake
And I pray dear Lord my soul you'll take

Better had it been my brother they took away. For me he was a monster. He beat me up almost every day. After he put my eye out, the doctor said I shouldn't have any jars to my head because the retina was detached and it could do more damage. My kind parents told my brother he could slug me only on my arms, and could no longer hit me in the face. That held him back a little, but the retina continued to detach and so they made me lie flat on my back with my head between 2 big sandbags with a towel over my eyes so I couldn't move my head. That went on long enough for me to forget how to walk. God don't mess around. But he was merciful. It was about 2 years before my brother resumed punching my lights as my daily bread.
Throughout my entire childhood our house was filled with screaming, yelling, and fighting. I don't remember ever doing anything right for my father. I was often told that if I didn't straighten up I would be going to reform school or prison "just like Uncle Lootie." (I have lots of horror stories about Uncle Lootie) I was told that I was "just not normal" that "There's something drastically wrong with your head" and my favorite, "We're gonna have to take you down to Provo and have your head examined." I already knew that. I was constantly scared in a life that made no sense to me.
That all occurred before puberty DIDN'T dawn. At that time of my glad season my whole life turned into a giant sized humiliation as the assumption of my toga virilus faded far into my future. I was just barely starting to grow hair under my arms at the time I joined the Navy. Not reaching puberty along with my classmates robbed me of what little was left of the real me. Every day I had to pretend that I was NOT devastated. Everyone thought I was always happy, always a big grin, and so easy to get along with. I became extremely careful not to piss off any of my classmates, lest they stomp my little ass. Or worse, they might throw my worst nightmare back in my face. I was pretty lucky in that I did not suffer open ridicule, but the reality of my life was right there for all to see. I wore short sleeved shirts most of the time and had to be careful not to raise my arms and show the world that I had no hair up there. When I was a senior in high school a little patch of hair started to grow, and my father tried to make me shave it off so I wouldn't stink so much.
Now you have to remember that in my mind all of these things I suffered were God's punishment. Add to that: One of the tenets of the Mormon Church is that of a pre-life. And our behavior in the pre-life determines what place we occupy in this life. So being tiny and poor and abused reflected what God thought of me in the first place. And good old God just couldn't resist an easy target. You might guess that I didn't do very well in high school because I couldn't find enough focus, or sit still long enough to do any studying, even though my aspirations and the expectations of my family were for me to become a paleontologist (I loved dinosaurs), or an entomologist (I collected bugs all through high school), or a veterinarian (As a child, all my love came from dogs. So much so that I thought I really was a dog, and God had made a mistake putting me in this awful, hairless human body), or a doctor (Then everybody would love me).
These aspirations or expectations bring up one of the most traumatic processes that occurred throughout my childhood: Whenever I reached a certain age, I was supposed to be able to do those things kids my age should be able to do. It was all just supposed to happen at appropriate times in my life. It didn't. One of my early on Primals began with the memory of an incident that occurred not long after I got married. My Gramma called me up and told me Uncle Rex was moving back to Utah and he said it was all right for Eileen and me to buy his house. I was ecstatic. She told me that she would take us down to the bank and get all the paperwork taken care of the next day. There we were in an office in the bank and they told us that the bank manager would be right in to take care of us. Just before the banker came in Gramma said to me, "Now I'm not going to say a word. This is your business and you must take care of it." I didn't even know what an escrow was. I'd never even had a bank account. Needless to say we did not get the loan, even though I was qualified under the GI Bill. This feeling dropped me right down to being a little boy sitting on the toilet calling, "Mama, I'm done. Come and wipe me." Followed by my mother's voice, "No, you're old enough to wipe your own butt. I'm not going to wipe you anymore." Nobody ever taught me to wipe my butt. But I was supposed to know how because I was old enough. And Mama, just like Gramma, left me helpless, hopeless, and hanging.
My whole childhood was terrifying to me, and I had to pretend it wasn't out of the fear that if I let it be known, those around me would make it even worse. I was so uncoordinated, along with not having any depth perception because I had only one eye, that I had no skill in sports. That humiliation made life a lot more unbearable. Without really being aware of it would isolate myself and sink deeper into my private world of fantasy. When I was by myself, I could play "big" (with toy swords and toy guns and stuff) or I could play "little" (with modeling clay, mostly) or I could lie down and play completely inside my head (I had a whole world in there, and I could have everything I wanted).

More Nonsense in "Science"

I promise never to write about nonsense again but this piece is on the current cover of The Science Section of the N.Y. Times. And I cannot believe what I am reading; as if all late science in our field has been ignored and some video game has replaced it. And this is literal; they are discussing a video app that was promoted by a shrink from Columbia University, given an approval by a shrink from Harvard, and of course, finds its way into Science because serious honchos approve of it. It makes me sick.

OK so what is "it?" "It " is a new app that proposes to take away anxiety and eliminates therapy with a human, altogether; rationalized that most people cannot afford it. "It" is something developed by C. Macleod of the University of W. Australia who believes that those who are anxious are exhibiting an extreme form of shyness. These people, he claims, fixate on hostile faces in the environment. And then in some kind of rationale which I truly cannot understand they do away with anxiety by focusing on neutral faces shown on the screen. Basically you are conditioning the brain to avoid the "bad apples." To try to get rid of the bad choices the brain is making. That naughty brain. I hesitate to ask where the science is in all this? You need to keep on doing it and then they get good results.

I don't know where to begin; such faulty logic. Anxiety is just a bad habit that needs to be changed. No idea what it is or where it comes from. And then to take one narrow behavior and change it in order to rid the person of anxiety is small minded in the extreme. What they do is condition the brain to avoid reality and look somewhere else. First of all, the brain is not naughty; it is trying to survive and develops strategies to do just that. The brain should look like that; it is flush with pain and terror. This is not different from what my mother did when I was a kid and started to cry. She started distracting me: "look at this. See how the doll cries," blah blah. And I did stop crying. Is that cure? Have these people despaired of getting to causes? To generating sources?.... and so devise ephemeral devices?

I could go on, but Benedict Carey, whom I have sent articles, never acknowledged, manages to give this a big space. Why with this nonsense? But it doesn't change anything; doesn't require any radical adjustment, and does not require any science, except pseudo-science where they show that after many trials of looking away there is less anxiety. This is "confirmed" in their studies; so much for statistical truths. Beware! It is as if anxiety is just a psychologic ploy with no physiologic concomitants. No body and no inner suffering. Obviously, these people in their head have never suffered prolonged anxiety; otherwise they could never come to these conclusions. Oh but wait! I forgot! They are marketing the apps.

They have a name for it; and anytime that this happens I get suspicious, as though that will make it scientific; give it a certain cachet or patina that makes shrinks everywhere acclaim it is wonderful. But of course we are asking the choir, those intellectual/s who left their feelings behind in graduate school. Intellectual ploys are all the rage for them because feelings can be avoided altogether. Oh yes, it is called Cognitive Bias Modification; or changing how you see things. If you say it in fancy patois it seems so serious and scientific. If you say it in everyday language it loses something in the translation. Whatever. It all makes me sick because it makes our field a laughing stock, bereft of any science except what they concoct that looks like science but is just the manipulation of statistics. Here the "right" people are promoting it so it becomes unassailable. How do you get to be the "right" people? Flee to your head.