More on the Act-Out: Goodbye Robin Williams

There are some common act-outs that dominate so many of our lives.  I was thinking of having to work under pressure; that is, waiting until the last minute and there is pressure on, and then we start to work.

So what does the act-out mean?  It means neurosis: acting in the present as if it were the past.  Symbolizing the feeling from the past in the present.  So it is waiting for pressure to start going.  Needing pressure to get moving.  And how does that start?  Often, but not always,  the pressure of trying to get out and the need to activate oneself to move.  Thus, one exerts great effort in order not to fall into a failure syndrome of utter hopelessness, and the depression that it engenders later on.  There is the need to live together with the impending death surging forth.  One cannot get going on one’s own; one needs some “help,” some outside push to move us along.  It becomes a lifelong event; needing pressure to do or to go or to start.  One is no longer a self-starter; the impetus must come from the outside.

Why do I say that the impetus must come from outside?  Because the pattern usually starts so early in life, established by imprints in our earliest days of life, long before we could be self-starters, depending on mother’s impetus for motivation.  We then need someone to say, "OK, let’s get going.  Put on your jacket."  The motivation must be originated outside, not inside.  Or someone has to get ready, keys in hand, before the person decides to get ready.  Things need to "pile up" before we can be activated.

One sure way to start this off is to pile up anesthetics into the mother during the birth process. It knocks out most of self motivation and produces a whole system that veers toward para-sympathetic dominance.  This person is passive, has a low, languorous voice and has movements that are labored.  His vital signs are on the low side, with low blood pressure and body temperature.  In short, it is all of a piece. The whole system accommodates to the imprint.    And what does he learn from his womb-life?  Patience.  He can wait, because he had to, but then desperation sets in and waiting becomes life endangering, in his mind.  Then he can wait no more and needs to move.

When we examine the vital signs we can pretty well describe the personality type: when the blood pressure, body temp and heart rate are together rather high, then we know the person is a sympath, controlled or skewed toward sympathetic nervous system dominance.  It is those days in the womb that form the crucible for personality type; they all accommodate life circumstance.  They fare around the imprint; and when we take patients down deep we find the little nugget, the key imprints that forced all that accommodation.  And when those early imprints are relived and all the vital signs move as an ensemble down lower, we know we have struck gold. We have found the core of the pain.

Why are those imprints so critical?  Because almost every key adverse event in the womb can be life-endangering: low oxygen, inadequate nutrition, too much agitation,  flooding by drugs or alcohol, etc.  They all affect vital organs and change the system of the baby accordingly. There is a beginning to personality development and we must not immediately ascribe it to genetics.  Epigenetics is possibly more important.  Life circumstances wrap themselves around the gene and alter who we are and what we become.

This is pertinent to the death of Robin Williams this week.  He had just finished yet another round of rehab.  It should inform us of the ineffectiveness of rehab but it doesn’t.  Rehab is big business and it goes on uninformed by strict science so that anything goes.  It is surrounded by great food and exercise programs with a bit of booga booga therapy to round it all out.  And when I hear Dr Drew pontificate on addiction’s causes it makes me worry.  Every TV specialist, and they are often pretty young shrinks, tell us how it is a brain disease for which we need to get help, and  what kind of therapy is there for brain disease? God knows.  They never say.  They are forced into the “brain disease” notion because with no understanding of the imprints they have no other place to go.

Clearly Mr. Williams had deep-lying imprints that could overwhelm any later imposed ideas such as “see or focus on the positive.”  Who can believe that events in the womb are the forerunner of later depression and/or addiction?  I mean where is the science in the rehab centers that speak of methylation and epigenetics?  Where do they speak of the necessity of demethylation; of undoing the imprint and measuring it so that we know what we are doing in addiction treatment?  And who is there in those centers that could help him understand deep and remote memories that have changed his brain?  So he could have some small handle on his malady?  No one, it seems; for first they would need to understand it themselves.  And I see no evidence for it.  If only a professional could speak with him of his deep hopelessness, and get off that nonsensical “brain disease” mantra.

It is as if he had no life before the age of six, no experience to explain changes in the brain.  In other words, when they avoid basic need, they then have nothing to fall back on to explain embedded early pain.  And then they have no means to explain the now ample research to shows how imprinted pain detours basic nerve roots and nerve tracks. So they fall back on empty lectures, calling in "experts" to explain addiction and/or depression with no reference to very early experience.  And so they go on searching and searching for areas of the brain to explain what can only be explained, not by those key areas, which only accompany experience, but by how early experience impacts the whole biologic and neurologic systems.  How does hopelessness change brain function?  Where does that hopeless/depression come from? Is it really deep in the brain? Yes it is down there but it does not start there; it begins with experience and what it does to our thinking apparatus years later.  Experience does change us; so we need to get out of our solipsism and see the world and how it affects us.  The answer lies not in the brain which is most often normal when early experience is normal, but in what a carrying mother’s anxiety and depression does to us.  And it turns out that we end up duplicating the mother’s internal life almost exactly after birth.  If she is depressed we may end up depressed, as well.  We adopt her nervous system and we do effortlessly and without any reflective thought intervening.  We merge with her inner life and continue where she left off after our birth.  We become a "downer" too.  And if she produced all the chemicals involved in depression then so do we.  She provides the template and we act on it.  We have become her neuro-physiologic slave.  Our fate is sealed.