On Primal Memory

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


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

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

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

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