Here It Is At Last: Confirmation of Primal Therapy

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

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

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

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

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

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