Arthur Janov's Blog, page 7

Treating Depression with LSD: Cure or Hallucination (2/2)

In our research we had much more evidence of how the liberated pain militated towards the last cerebral defense; the neocortex to concoct all sorts of nonsense to explain the inexplicable…..deep imprinted pain that is preverbal and therefore has no name. There exists no words in that repertoire to explain what is happening. A true mystery which Is now whispered in beneficent tones as the ethereal mystical experience, acclaimed as an exalted experience. It seems ethereal because it borders on the religious, unknown, unexplained, out of reach of ordinary intellect. It sounds so sweet….. mystical.

Of the 20 subjects we studied, all took at least ten LSD trips and almost every one had trouble sleeping for months and months. Even tranquilizers could not lower the activation levels to allow a calm system. Is that helpful for depression? Yes of course, if we open up the gating system and release the heavy mound of suppression weighing down the system. Yes, it is a momentary release, but what happens afterward? Is it biologic? As deep depressive patients travel down into the nervous system there is an accompanying lowering of blood pressure. The whole system is approaching fail. Their feelings of impending death is not mysterious; it is truly a state of impending death and the body accommodates. And of course as blood pressure dips into deep lower levels, to accompany a system drenched by hallucinogens, there are feelings of approaching death and thoughts of suicide.

The massive upheaval of pain from the lower depths floods the neo-cortex, infiltrating it with such input that concentration is impossible. It happens to our patients without drugs when they have undergone an infancy, and earlier, of constant and chronic neglect and abuse. The mounting layers of pain soon become laminated agony that no longer can be integrated.

As patients relive these pains in methodical order they begin to eliminate their anxiety and ADD. The thinking inventing neocortex is the last developed part of the brain and called into service when all else has failed. In our therapy patients soon learn what it is and what needs to be done; not to call on Allah or mysterious forces but on their history. To follow messages from the underground that point to stored pain.

Why do I think these power drugs are dangerous? Because it has a lasting effect and upsets the equilibrium of the brain which is now structured to include what the brain already underwent in its ontogeny. Traumatizing that precious brain can never be considered therapeutic. Except by those ethereal souls who tend to believe in the booga booga. I know, I worked with them, including associates of Tim Leary, the guru of drugs. Too often their research falls on prepared minds who can accept the mystical and received wisdom with alacrity. The wife of the director of research took me for a walk while high on LSD. We started to cross the street when I panicked. I looked down at the curb which seemed to me to be a mile down and a dangerous fall. I backed up. I had no aftereffects from it but knew to use caution. For those who are fragile it can cripple the neocortex by opening the lower level gating system and allowing the in-rush of immense, unintegrated, very early pain, which can lead to serious mental problems.

The job of the drug is to open the gates. But out comes voodoo land; latent imprints from the deep interior that scramble any coherence and replace perception with all kinds of irrationality. Irrational thinking is an attempt to maintain sanity, to make life experience make sense even in a twisted way. We not only see crazy; we think crazy. We think in the same way that some think when life has piled on trauma after trauma from very early on. Scrambling is a defense operation that prevents us from facing reality; the early reality of beatings and neglect, of no love, of being sent away alone at an early age….in brief, my life.

Here is an example from a patient describing the result of a psilocybin trip before entering therapy: “On the trip sitting in a car looking out the window at the sidewalk which became a bubbling liquid mass. It looked like bubbling cement. Later on when I judged it safe to exit the car in a residential neighborhood, I saw an alligator in the middle of the street; these were hallucinations that contained the feelings of my youth: fear and terror. Here was a safe place so the unsafe place was bubbling inside of me. The alligator nipping at my heels was only the fear and terror coming at me in symbolic form.”

In my case, further use of hallucinogens would have caused serious damage. If I had continued taking drugs, I believe the symbolism would have overwhelmed me because the gating system would not have been able to recover enough to withstand more pressure. When preverbal (first line) imprints of pain are thrown up indiscriminately they first attack the highest levels of consciousness. But because the nonverbal content cannot be assimilated and integrated on that level there is an overload of unconnected Primal information. If pains come up in a cohesive manner one would then be in the midst of Primal feelings. The problem is that with the drug it rises in undelineated form, vague, putting pressure on the gating system. It is coming up out of sequence and cannot be anchored in reality. Therefore, it takes on a mystical air. The hallucinogen does not allow an ordered sequence to develop. It prevents a slow unfolding of Primal Pain to achieve proper connection and instead it opens gates widely allowing pains from several levels at the same time that have no chance of integration. Those preverbal pains thrown up by the drug, thrust pre-birth traumas into the fray long before the person has relived much less forceful hurts and has prepared the way to live deeper pains. That is why it takes month to prepare the piste toward the inner depths.

This is the origin of abreaction, which I have written about extensively. Those patients who come in and begin to undergo birth Primals are often pre psychotic and need tranquilizers, never hallucinogens. The level of pain must be heavily controlled lest the patient slips into a beginning mental affliction. It is very difficult from that break in defenses to find normalcy again. This is also true of those chronic users of marijuana. The defense system is called in to help out but it loses its impact after a while and there can then be a break in defenses with strange ideation and hallucinations. Defenses are weakened so much that often there is no recovery or only partial recovery. If they go on with seemingly benign drugs such as hash they may lose their sanity and fall into periodic delusions and paranoia. I am against legalizing these seemingly innocuous drugs because they can cause psychosis in fragile souls. And they do not liberate anyone or anything.

In some literature these drugs are classified as hallucinogens. A person first taking cannabis may laugh or cry more easily and seems more relaxed and less depressed. But over time he will pay a heavier price as mental symptoms appear, not always obvious to him. These are also openers of the gates of repression, but more slowly done over great amounts of time. Their memory system will slowly suffer as will their cognitive abilities. We want a free lunch but it is wrapped in a nightmare. Unwrap the fragile covering and we get open mental illness.

One serious trauma can produce it at once. Incest by a parent can produce it as the person who is supposed to protect you becomes the danger. I have treated several of these cases; the earlier it occurs the more likely the psychosis. In Europe I once treated the daughters of a Nazi officer. They both kind of made it until the older daughter found out he was also sleeping with her sister. She fell into psychosis. It happened more than we imagine among the Nazis. The trauma was “I am no longer loved.”
There may be many roads to Nirvana, but all are posted with same sign: Danger Ahead. You will lose your mind if you stay on this road. Only feeling is healing.

Treating Depression with LSD: Cure or Hallucination (1/2)

I read a recent article in the New York Times about new research in treating depression with hallucinogenic agents (see http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mushrooms-psilocybin-cancer-anxiety-depression.html). I found the article – excuse the expression – mind-blowing. And I suffered a flashback to a time 50 years ago when I, in my youthful stupidity, took LSD on two occasions. One was a very bad trip and I decided the experience was not for me. After I did research on the effects of hallucinogens on the brain, I decided it was for no one.

I was under the impression that experimenting with mind-altering drugs was a thing of the past, along with The Sixties, Timothy Leary and Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds. And I thought the dangerous notion of treating mental disorders with hallucinogens had been discredited, or at least abandoned. But I was wrong. It seems like the old adage forever holds true: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Today, there is a renewed interest in the use of hallucinogens to treat depression, accompanied by much hype, as The Times article indicates. I believe his resurgence is a sign, not of progress, but of our failure to understand brain science, and in particular, methylation. To say little about what is anxiety and depression, which they are studying.

The article published Dec. 1 in the Health section of The Times is titled, “A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace.” It reports on two experimental studies – at NYU’s Langone Medical Center and at Johns Hopkins University – in which cancer patients were given doses of psilocybin, an illegal hallucinogen. During the eight-hour sessions, patients were provided with eye masks, ear phones, programmed music, hospital setting, the whole panoply of the proper accouterments necessary for an “out of space,” serious experience. Their question: Can the drug reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients?

The results: 80% of cancer patients “showed clinically significant reduction in psychologic disorders.” They often had mystical experiences which I would like to know much more about, because my explanation is quite different from those who write about it. Too often, in my previous research, those studying hallucinogens thought that mystical experiences were a good thing, beneficent and healthy. My view is different. It is dangerous for reasons to be explained in a moment.

  But what if the psychologic disorders and physical aberrations such as cancer, are essentially the same thing; stemming from the same source and originating during the same evolutionary time frame. We have seen this many times over in non-cancer patients, and have also seen it with cancer patients. We have seen serious psychologic afflictions such as anxiety making their appearance during the earliest time frame, during gestation and just after birth. We have also seen patients who have been reliving those very early times who have incipient, inchoate cancer. Our research has not gone as far as to justify a hypothesis about anxiety and cancer but in my papers I have alluded to the possible relationship between them. Our future research into early trauma and cancer will delve into it much more strenuously.

Here is an important result of the Langone study: “The intensity of the mystical experience correlated with the degree that their anxiety and depression decreased. Why is that? The usual statistical studies which should explain it, do not.

The results of both studies were also released concurrently in the Journal of Psychopharmacology (December 16, 2016). I saw no reports on the deleterious effects of this drug on patients, which to me, should be a sine qua non of any research: Can it do harm? The mystical experience these patients underwent seemed to me, based on my own research, to be signs of overload. That is, the unleashing of mountains of pain which is not always evident, even to the patient with pain. What seems to happen is that the gating system, charged with suppressing deep pain militates to where it is needed to control the level of pain. That is, to keep the system from being overwhelmed by the input. Heavy pain becomes a beacon to guide the pain to where it is needed, to aid repression and keep us unconscious. Nevertheless, the impact of high pain levels weakens the defense system so that further use of drugs can produce a crack in the gating system, leading to strange beliefs, such as being at one with Allah. These ideas, like many symptoms, are signs of overwhelming input. That is, when defenses falter, symptoms appear to absorb the input. These symptoms such as migraine headaches, or hallucinations, are indicative of too much input into the neurobiologic system.

The input happens when the repressive gates weaken, allowing accumulated pains from the start of life into higher levels. What also allows this to happen is the use of hallucinogens which blast open the gates, allowing far too much pain into the system. Normally these pains stay in the neurobiologic “cage.” Bur forcing drugs into the system allows the influx of historic early hurts to ramify throughout the body and brain. The gates give way. The result is serious cognitive aberrations, such as mystical experiences, which are no more than ineffable, laminated loads of pain arising in vague and diverse, aleatoric form to higher brain levels. Once the pain breaks through, those higher brain levels are then forced to concoct esoteric ideas without form, as the brain starts to lose cohesion and boundaries.

What are these pains? Trauma during gestation, birth and infancy. A smoking, drinking mother. An anxious mother living in chaos. An impatient parent who demands too much from the baby. A carrying mother taking drugs or ingesting medicine that alters the baby’s metabolism. And on and on. They are too numerous to adumbrate.

When those pains suddenly break through after a lifetime of repression, they cannot be enumerated nor defined by the patient, not his doctor; hence, they are considered mystical. It should read “mystery” rather than mystical because that is what it is for the victim, who never sees himself as victim. He swears he has been liberated. “Liberated” temporarily from his pain, it seems.

Precious Advice

Here is the response I sometimes get from so-called well wishers:   “Hey, time has passed.   Get over it and get on with your life.   Blah blah blah…”  This is not a well wisher; it is the  ultimate denier.  And the more you try to get over it the shorter your life will be. You cannot leave a trail of emotional debris scattered around while you “get over it.”  Biology will not permit this wait because you cannot get over what is now part of you.   Now here is the problem: if you are enmeshed in mental activity and insights and explanations you are in fact stating that memories are mainly in your thinking, remembering mind.  Yet our work and recent research says the opposite, that key embedded memories that contain the mountain of pain are located much deeper than that. And you cannot  just get over something engraved in your neurology and biology. And get on with your life.  Your life is driven by those memories, ad nauseam.  It is like telling someone to cut off his hand and get on with his life.  Well with imprinted Primal Pain he has cut off something far more important for survival:  his feelings. They should guide and direct him but alas, they fail because they have been left in the wilderness.   I was going to say, “left in the wilderness without  trace,”  but unhappily there is always a trace.  A trickle of methyl that marks the spot and tells us where the memory lies and how forceful it is.

It damages us and then screams its message, “I am suffering and I cannot stop.  The pain originates right here.”  It demands that we return to the scene of the crime and address it again. You mean to “suffer all over again.”   We can rationalize, forget and deny but the memory does not; it stays in its pristine form, unchanging, clamoring for surcease.   Yes you have to suffer again but this time there is an ending.  The first time we could cry  but repression rushed in to stop the overload.  This time in therapy the therapist will help stop any hint of overload which can often lead to the deadly abreaction and the blockage of feeling. That is what overload means; no more feeling.  It is already too much.

So what are we getting over, at last.  We are not; we are forgetting, denying, changing the subject.  We are changing our mind in the guise of ”getting over” something.  And yes, we can force the top level mind to change the direction of memory and pretend mentally that it does not exist.  We can play tricks with our minds but never can we play tricks with deep-lying trauma whose memories have penetrated the deepest levels of the brain and, like the methyl trace, are part of us biologically.  And those are the memories that wreak havoc with the system creating  afflictions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and numerous others.  And those are the same maladies that require addressing on the level where they were imprinted:  diseases that become systemic because the deep-lying pain has  also become systemic.

Here lies the crossing of the road where  conventional psychotherapy plays games with the brain, making it mindful, or unleashing volcanoes of pain. When taking hallucinogens, for example.  But not making the slow, painful, journey into the zone of the interior to meet with the devil also known as birth with  drugs, lack of touch, lack of nursing,  or a nursing mother taking pain killers, and you can fill in the blanks.  And it remains a “blank” until we can give it a name---pain.  We use any kind of painkiller, no matter the name, because it erases for a moment the real problem, imprinted agony.  Why?  Because we cannot see it, and above all, we cannot feel it because the system in its wisdom has shut down the pain just so we cannot feel it.  Imagine what a miracle it is that when deep pain becomes overwhelming we have a mechanism to shut it down for decades, and oft- times, for all or our lives.  How about that for efficacy? We  survived because we could build and create despite our pain.  And we could die prematurely because of that same pain.  We pay a price for repression; that is, for cutting away part of us so we can go on creating and inventing.

When we go deep in the brain we can feel it in all its agonies. And patients tell me that is a pain that does not hurt. I would say that it is a pain that has an ending, where each session is limited to what the  patient can feel and integrate.  That is the need for an expert therapist.  To make sure that patients do not suffer too much and are not pushed to go on feeling beyond his limit.   For that reason we need feeling therapists not someone who delights in watching someone writhe to prove what a good therapist he is.

Believe me, it I could have gotten over it and got on with my life I would have but memories endure; they are a life force we must deal with.  No way out and no short cuts.  I always knew the danger of abreaction but it was only recently that we know how to reverse it.   In long-time abreactors who wanted the easy way they often become untreatable.  So caution and care; do not treat your body as a toy or plaything.  There are serious consequences for not doing it right.  I can tell who is an abreactor, but treating it is a whole other matter.

 An example:  my cats were yelling for their food this morning.  And I got anxious and wanted to feed them right away. It is also the reason I am known as some one who gets things done.  Why?  I felt about that need to feed the cats.  It took me back to my asking my father for something I wanted to buy.  His answer was either "Later”.  Or no response.  He was incapable of acting spontaneously.  This helped make him a loser.   He could not get going on anything.  Kept it all inside, and died early of a massive heart attack.

It was all of a  piece; he could not say anything spontaneously, could not show love or affection, could not reach out to touch or hug.   Everything was “later” for a later that never came.   He just could not make a decision.  He was happy to drive a truck and have no one bother him, which he did day after day, never putting his life in question or what his life was about. He never read a book, listened to music, never escaped that tight circle he called life.   He had to have it that way because he wanted no surprises not even a son who asked for something.  To put it off for him was never having to make a decision or do anything new or different.  He was comfortable doing nothing and never changing his routine.

I became the  opposite; wanting to find out more and more; reading religiously, becoming a musician, traveling to various countries; you get the idea—to become the opposite from him.  That was my way to survive.  I learned from him; how not to be.  Money was his only interest which was something that never ever interested me.  He never laughed or joked.  Never saw the humor of life and above all,  never saw any beauty in the world.  I learned to travel to art galleries in many countries.  I learned foreign languages.  He dined at the 5:30 at inexpensive restaurants, not because he liked the food but because it was cheap.  Money dominated everything.  I never knew there was a place to buy clothes apart from the little Mexican shops on the East side.  He never gave gifts because he could not give.  A man with a short fuse, angry all of the time, something I never am.  I heard his screams constantly and vowed not to be like that.  He was my inverse role model.  A man with no interests and no knowledge and no idea how to interact socially. A man without friends whose wife was mentally ill.  She was also my mother….. A five year old who called my father, "daddy". "Daddy can I go to the store now?"

She was always a thing, a nonentity to me.   I needed love and believed I could get it from my father until I learned better and saw a man who could not love.  As Shakespeare described him: a man with no music in him. I made my own.

If You Value Privacy?

If you truly value privacy do not ever join the Navy. I will tell you why. 3000 of us slept head to feet every night.  If anyone snored then none of us slept.  If you wanted to do a serious bathroom, do not go to the john. There are little tin gutters with water flowing through them to wash it out.  We sat on the gutter facing guys just facing us with all the grunts and noises.  For me it was humiliating.   And worse, during battle and rough weather, the ship was rolling up and down and sideways and “material” was flying all over the place.  Unbelievable.  When we tried to zip up and walk out, the waves were so high that we had to walk up a huge hill to get out, usually we bang against the steel doors. Or as the wave was deeper we found ourselves hurtling downhill to leave. If we were eating then food fled everywhere.

During battle the 16 inch guns moved the ship 16 feet to the side and buckled decks. Their noise was deafening and many of us on the gun mount went partially deaf afterward.  If a bullet stuck we dared not touch it as it was white hot.   I had a machine gun mount just on the side of the 16 inters. And I never once considered that I was shooting at human beings, the mothers and children who ran into the sea to escape our shells.  These were not Japanese soldiers, they were families who lived there; it was their home, until we arrived.  I was never mad at anyone, I was just doing a job…..to kill.  And when a submarine tried to sink us we fired on the men who run up to the top deck to escape.  We blew them up to the top with our depth charges.

 We had to take our guns and helmets with us during battle because we could not go back inside for days. The ship had to remain waterproof at all times.   We used our helmet to do our defecation and washed it out by dipping it in the sea.  But we had no food and ability for ablutions for days at a time.  If you value privacy would you like to do that? I never thought it was so bad, at age 18.  That is why they get us very young. We know nothing and do not have the experience to question anything.  ayayay.    art

About What Embeds Neurosis in the System

 I have been wondering why it is that battle in combat did not seem to make me neurotic while seemingly innocuous events during home life did.  I think I found one answer.  That old devil… need … raises its ugly head.  What happened early in life when need was at its asymptote, our system made sure that even banal events were embedded in our nervous system. When we needed holding and touch in the first months of life to mollify the appearance of agonizing pain, we found ways to encase the pain (defenses)and made the pain bearable when love went missing.

It seems that it is not like I need a piece of cake every afternoon; rather it is something essential to life and development; it is part of our biologic development that goes missing.  Need is basic to fulfillment; they form an equation and when that equation is unbalanced we become so, as well. It is not just what goes into the mouth; it is what enters the whole system. It is like touch. It is not what we feel on our cheeks.  It is what that does to the whole  system; the warmth, the caring and love. A ruffling of the child’s hair can carry with it a note: you are loved, appreciated and wanted.  A mussing up of hair carries a biologic message that says so much. You are wanted, I feel close to you and want to be near you. One touch contains pages of monologue without any verbal discussion.  Touch is the message without words. But words without touch dilutes and vitiates that message into a loss of meaning.  Words without feeling do not travel to the feeling centers.  The actual message is lost and we are left with vacuous meaning that has lost its power to move others.  It can no longer convey love.  It becomes an empty vessel with no place to land. One then lives on a barren island bereft of meaning and above all, bereft of love.

Combat is not based on biologic need; quite the opposite. it is what happens then there is no chance for it.

So a slap on my face at age five conveyed a new message: you are not loved there is need to afraid. Do not look to me for understanding and compassion.  Beware!  You must obey without question.  And you slip into obedience as a normal thing.  You no longer expect kindness, just the lack of rage.  There is a new “normal” in life: the lack of anger and the lack of danger. No needing love; needing just to avoid menace and threat.

On How the Needs Change in Life

I have often described the timetable of needs; that a baby must be touched immediately after birth;  to be touched for the first time at age six is to late to stop the damage of unfulfilled need… To be talk to and listened to and explained to.  An example of my life might help. I wonder why there has always been a terror of death in me.   I remember that at age six there was an accident with my dog who was hit by a car.  I did not know about soothing and easing the blow with my dog.  I walked away at the very moment when his whimpering and cries begged me to stay with him.  Now I am primalling about how sorry I am that I left him.   I never knew there was such a thing as compassion and kindness.  I never had it and never knew how important it was. Now I beg him for forgiveness.  And I am in agony over it.  How could I have been so unfeeling?

But what also was imprinted was the fear of death and the desperate need to have it explained to me and mollified.  But my parents never talked to me, and I sensed that they never would. If someone had talked to me about fears that I had I know it would soften the blow.  But it went missing and the terror was deeply imprinted.  And in my primals, I learned not only is there a specific time to be held and hugged to ease the pain and fear, but there is a time to talk to children which would ease their terrors. And because it never happened, my terrors went on into the night and became exacerbated into devastating nightmares. Plagued night and day by terrors and night-terrors … and ADD, another phrase for night terrors, the same ones that plagued me all of the time.  In the daytime I could not sit still or pay attention as I had terrors that fed into my system all of the time.  How could I pay attention when internal input was nagging me all of the time?  Those terrors were night terrors, imprinted from birth on when the deprivation of oxygen was so great. Above all, I could not move towards anesthetics, couldn’t move toward air and breath. I was trapped and I needed to move to respond to be put into so much hurt. Trapped is a lifelong feeling I carried with me.  My primal: I have to get out of here or I will die.   I never articulated the notion of death but it was there; the approach of death and more terror.  That was the holdover from the past that dogged me constantly.

So now a Happy Thanksgiving to all of you and to me too! I am making it better every day.

On Why we Take Drugs and What Kind?

We are doing staff meeting today where three different beginning patients were each taking a different pain killer. And each takes a pill according to the level of consciousness he was on and  of the amount of pain  he suffered. It actually is a diagnostic tool indicating  the level of access the patient has to each level of consciousness; that is, the kind of pain that can access certain levels of consciousness. Predominantly, first line pain often calls for a first line blocker,  the benzodiazepines such as
Xanax or Atavan.  Or when the pain is based higher up and less severe, second line, we may use Zoloft or medication aimed at the limbic system. Here we use the kind of medication that was used up originally in the initial trauma in the battle against a lesser trauma.   It needs replenishing and that is the function of feeling level drugs such as Zoloft.

So who gets addicted?  Those first liners who are loaded with very early preverbal and often during womb life. These first liner may well be compounded by later traumas, neglect and indifference from parents.  Thus, first line pain may not be addicting but when it is combined with infancy and childhood pain may well be addicting. That is why having a therapy of feeling may lessen limbic pain enough to wipe away addiction but still leave the tendency in place. I liken this to homosexuality where the person is becoming less addicted to male love (for men) as he relives first line pain and also some of childhood emotional deprivation embedded in his nervous system. Inside that obsession with male love  is terrible need, and that need, unfulfilled,  turns into the need for surcease,…. a temporary drug fix; i.e, a homosexual affair and/or  a shot of whiskey or tranquilizer pills for the druggies.  We can see from this that nearly every obsession has some kind of need behind it.  That obsession, masking the real need,  And it has to go on for a very long time so long as the basic need has not been felt and relived.

How do I know all this? Because luckily for the past two decades there is research on all this. Long before the laboratory neurobiologic research, we made the discovery of deeply imprinted pain in our clinical work but it took years to quantify the pain.  We  found biologic equivalents that pointed to when the pain lessened.  And years later a new field of methylation came along to inform us of how pain got imprinted, and above all, thanks to measuring demethylation, how pain got removed from the neurobiologic system.  Thus we knew how much pain was in the system and where, and then we found out how the pain was extirpated, and where.  We came onto this because when patients reliving early pain, their drug addiction lessened;  and after a time it disappeared. We saw that there were different levels of primal pain and different nervous systems that imprinted them. And then we saw symptoms begin to disappear but not always; which  led to another discovery; that feeling was healing and that the more the patient felt deeper levels, the more severe symptoms left. We learned how the connections on deeper levels of brain function were essential  to cure.  And that there is no cure without a complete reliving of the basic need for love. And that love has different meaning according to the level were are operating on. The need for calm and proper nutrition, the need for a good and drug-free birth; the need to be touched and caressed,  the need to be safe and understood.   There are many, many more needs and any lack will be marked as pain; I mean marked, literally, as pain leaves a mark of methyl that says “there  is pain” and how much.  As pain is relived there is less pain, indicated by demethylation.  So we now have a marker for less pain and the resolution of neurosis. If the doctor  asks you, “Were you loved as a child?” and you shrug and say, “I do not know”, now you will know exactly.  Because to be loved means to experience basic need and the body knows even when we were not loved.  It cries maladies and makes us miserable because something is missing. In some cases we are sure it is a man’s love or another fix of a powerful painkiller. It tells us, “Watch out! Neurosis has set in”. Thereafter the habit still won’t go away until the need is felt completely.   Until it is experienced we can only be partially well and healthy.  The lack will trail us for a lifetime.  Since every unfelt need prevents full healing we know that feeling equals healing. There are no shortcuts. Biology is not constructed like that.  It never takes the easy way and neither should we.

The Elusive Truth

I often write that the simple truth is revolutionary.  But where is that truth?  How do we recognize it when we find it?  It is often not a truth we seek out; it is a truth that hits us from inside.    A truth that can rattle our bones and can alter our thinking.   I will often an example from my life.
I have been trying to have an MRI for a long time but I cannot make it.  When I undergo the scan it seems likely my whole birth history arrives intact.  And I fall into an anxiety state that is as spooky as anything I have ever undergone.    It is not anxiety; it is terror of approaching death.  So why is that?  Because we carry it around all of the time, and when the circumstances are right it can be triggered again, especially when your head is not allowed to move, one cannot see out and breathing is more and more difficult as Primal suffocation raises its head.  The baby feels all that and is in pure terror with no help, no one to ease the pain and no one to explain.

It takes place on the deepest levels of the brain where no concepts for understanding exist.  And it leaves a trace, a methyl trace (called methylation).   That marks the spot and indicates how painful it was and is.   It  agitates us so that we cannot think clearly and concentrate.  We have to keep moving.  I call it an “imprint” and it stays embedded in the brain and affects our anatomy, biology and neurology.  It later drives our adult behavior and symptoms.   If we do not recognize this we are doomed to not understand any of this;  nor the origins of our compulsive behavior and recurring symptoms.
Our lives remain a mystery.

Anthony Weiner had an imprint that drove him to act out in exhibitionism.   Once the imprint was there the act-out had to return in force and it did. No different from a severe physical symptom; once treated it remains a danger for years to come. It is an ineluctable force from which there is no escape.  We cannot run from the imprint; it is part of us.  On the contrary, we must run toward it, experience it and then be done with it.  It has been part of our lives; only now it must be part of our conscious lives.  My belief is that the earlier and more powerful the imprint the more like it will dog us for a long time. It is that recurring nightmare with the same demon chasing us. I know, I owned one for years.  It never let me be free.  I was living in a nightmare and never knew, but my whole system knew it well and expressed itself every night in those nightmares.  How did I find their origins?  When I travelled deep in the brain to where those deep imprints lay. I relived all the origins and my terrors disappeared. They were allowed to rise above the gating system to be faced head on, and I do mean “head on”. I then knew immediately why I had to sit in a restaurant with nothing over my head. I had to drive  a convertible for the same reason; and that reason was so arcane as to remain unbelievable .  When patients started to tell me, “It feels like I am living my birth.”  I told them, “Enough of that nonsense, let’s stay rational and away from booga booga explanations.  That means “I” the discoverer of this whole process, did not believe in the most important part of it, until, the evidence became overwhelming.  So I fully understand when it is poo-pooed and scoffed at by others. If we do believe in the imprint there is no way whatsoever to understand mental illness. Imprints are the safe haven for the secrets of the unconscious.

It Is Not Only Food that We Ingest

Anything that goes into a carrying mother’s system will affect the baby.   Medication, above all. And we may not be aware of it, but the biochemicals processing anxiety and depression too. The mother and fetus are in many ways one system.  The mother is depressed and so is the baby; he will be largely more lifeless than normals.  Heavy repression is going on, which diminishes energy levels; which is also very true in anxiety where energy levels are increased.  The baby may be born hyperactive and soon may not be able to sit still or concentrate early in life.

Here is a study that throws light on the problem.   (Science Daily sept 18, 2016, Depression in Pregnancy, see https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160928101100.htm)  This study maintains that depression can reduce  the enzyme in the placenta  that breaks down stress hormones in the fetus which then produces epigenetic changes  when the baby is stressed.  The DNA remains the same but how and when it is expressed changes.  Here may be the beginning of mental health problems in the baby. It may look like inherited depression, but no.  The carrying mother’s physical state has much to do with it.  Experience changes how genetics is carried out.  And that too often includes the medications the mother takes which alters the baby”s system.  An adult dose for a newborn may be overwhelming and life-threatening. Any drug can produce major biologic changes in the baby.  We need to be aware of that.  A baby is not an adult.  And too many mothers take a couple of pills in the morning without thinking of the lifelong consequences on the offspring. “It is just a mild painkiller,” we rationalize but it is not mild for the baby.   These pills may aid serious repression. It can set up  a lifelong prototype  of being “down”  in the baby. As the pills inside of him re-set  a new his natural state:  repression.   He is sent to a doctor in his childhood.  He is asked whether he has taken any drugs?  “No” he says, unaware of the embedded memory of drugs that his mother and he took together when he was a fetus that set up a prototype.

In one sense, the depressive mother’s “down” tendency can become part of the child’s inheritance and it becomes very difficult to separate out what contributes to abnormality.  Is it really experience or pure genetics.   I vote for genetics given expression by experience. Is it inherited?   We have to understand inheritance to know what we mean.  Are we inheriting pure genetics (blue eyes) or are we inheriting a hyperactive system which may be a combination of the two. Some of the recent research shows a wide discrepancy between actual age and  methylation age (an accumulation of life’s traumas).  The latter is far more accurate estimate for our longevity.  It makes sense that trauma wreaks havoc on our biologic system and curtails its endurance.

It seems now by carefully studying methylation age (the age of accumulated traumas) we are measuring one’s longevity.  It is something we have noted for decades; that early life lack of love, neglect and lack of touch shorten our life span.  They certainly point to the build-up of serious illness.   Most serious scientific papers urge the search for what factors we can add to prolong good health.  My vote is for our therapy because when we lower body temperature on a long term basis for example, we extend life.  I recently quoted a study on body temp that seems to confirm this point. Why?  Because we reduce the constant work of the body, save energy so that system is more relaxed and healthy. Early life is critical to how long we live and if we are to inherit terrible afflictions.  Love the child at age one and prevent illness at age fifty.    Not a bad bargain.

Suicide is Painless Repression, Despair and the Relief of Reliving Near-Death Feelings (5/5)

        What has this to do with self-destruction, as some therapies describe the suicide attempt? I was discussing the difference between self-destructive behavior and suicide with a colleague. They are quite different, although you would think that suicide is destruction of the self, but it is not at all like that. Let’s take literal destruction, cutting oneself. This is a later ploy, making hurt obvious. It is a plea for help; “Please see my hurt. See that I hurt.” This in lieu of screaming out that hurt. And the cutter is not often aware of what she is doing or why. It was never acknowledged by anyone because perhaps the parents had no idea of that hurt or even that such emotional hurt existed. There are many aspects of this. Her feeling was, “I’m trying to let the hurt escape,” even when she had no idea what it was. She just knew it was inside and it had to come out.

Another woman, a self-cutter. told me that she cut because it took away some of the emotional hurt which was more painful. It had a beginning and an end. It was controllable whereas the emotional hurt just kept going on. She found out that it was exactly what we do; letting pain out: but in methodical ways so she no longer had to cut herself. The feeling has to be felt deeply to match the force of the pain involved. The patient is trying to let the pain out in the only way she can; make it visible and palpable. If you can at least see it there is something you can do about it.

When there are later circumstances of neglect and lack of love, the deep imprints become compounded and cemented in. Those later traumas (lack of love) increase the repression and force unconscious acting out, such as cutting oneself, to try to get at the source, hopefully, yet unconsciously. But suicide is still a long way off. It is amazing how so often people cut themselves, unwittingly digging out the source of their suffering without even knowing what they are doing.

Suicide, then, is a deeper, earlier sensation/feeling with no behavioral possibilities. They are, indeed, two different things. Even though suicide attempts to destroy the self it is not, oddly, self-destructive. And of course, self-destructiveness it ramifies so that the destructive behavior takes on many forms, such as sabotaging one’s own success or always picking toxic partners. But it is not as direct as suicide. Suicide means one final act. It is not anything in the present that causes it; it is the result of a deep memory.

There are myriad examples of self-destructive behavior, but all the manifestations come from subdued feelings. There are people who set themselves up for certain failure, who always make sure things turn out bad, who drink themselves into oblivion or who repeatedly get involved with a low-lifes they know are bad for them. Here the driving forces are nearly always deep-seeded pain. These are secondary effects of imprinted hurt. Driving with drunk drivers is a good example.

 Another is the case of a graduate student who could not get feedback from his professors for a paper he had turned in. After weeks of “trying to get through” he sent a most nasty letter to the instructor. For that, he was delayed in getting his degree. So he shot himself in the foot because he could never get through to his father and also because he literally couldn’t get through in being born. Being blocked from getting what he wanted and needed had set off a rage in him, and as we know rage is first line, brainstem originated. It is the seat of the most atavistic anger possible. He was helpless before this surge of fury. Resonance reached down and dredged it all up, surging upwards beyond control. He knew when he sent the letter it was wrong; this is what used to be called “emotional.” His emotions got the best of him. They weren’t irrational; they were real but buried deeply.

The Relief of Reliving

In Primal Therapy, we seek access to those deep recesses of the brain, where ultimate healing lies. First-line is always more powerful than later imprints; and they are the most healing, offering up many insights that previous behavior was based on. The insights that flow from first-line feelings are widely encompassing because they are the basis for so much later behavior. Reliving on the brainstem level means complete connection as the driving force of impulses are experienced at last. We connect, in short, on the level of the trauma and in that context only. Here we are dealing with the shark brain: no shouts, no wild movements; evolution has taken over. It means the patient has gone back in time and is living again what went on decades before. Then it was too overwhelming for a naïve and fragile infant brain to integrate. Now, perhaps, he is ready for it.

That is the true meaning of facing yourself and accepting yourself; not in the booga-booga, new-age sense but in the biologic evolutionary meaning of it, where the feeling is now integrated into the physical system. It becomes ego syntonic. That is the real meaning of becoming oneself. As the reliving goes on, the feeling is fully integrated and there is a continued drop in vital signs and body temperature lowers to real normal, rather than “average” normal. In this sense, “integration” is a new biologic state where the whole system can re-regulate itself. Normalization has set in and depression bids adieu. And no one has done anything outside the body. It all originated from inside. That is why I say that everything the patient has to learn is already inside, waiting.

In Primal Therapy, we get patients gradually down to those deep feelings that are so disturbing. And once those feelings are resolved and brought to consciousness, there are no more thoughts of suicide. Why? Because there are no more buried feelings driving the suicidal thoughts. It takes time, but when they get there, they discover real relief, the kind that lasts and lets them live.