The Merger of Nature and Nurture: How the Outside Becomes Inside

 Over the years the question is always raised,  is it nature or nurture? What causes so much behavior and so many symptoms: the genes or experience?  I vote for both, and if I had to give an edge it would be to experience. But I am getting ahead of myself.  Because what seems like genetics may now be experience, and vice versa.  That is due to the new field of epigenetics where experience modifies the genes, how they express themselves, if they are blocked and how they are modified and when.  We need to look at them as an organic unit, each influencing the other.   Perhaps for a lifetime.   Certainly there are pure genetics; color of hair and eyes, but when it comes to plasticity, malleability and flexibility of symptoms and behavior we need to consider both.

 Such a thing as heart attacks in our fifties.  If we don’t consider experience and only genetics we will never solve the puzzle; for it turns out that stress changes the lymphocytes, the white blood cells to increase, and when that happens the extra cells stick to artery walls slowing blood flow, forms clots and produces a block in blood vessels: and, voila; a heart attack.  The problem is that we tend to look at current or childhood stress when the real origin may be in our womb-life.  (see: “New Study May Explain Why Stress Can Cause Heart Attacks.”  Nolan Feeney, Health Research, June 22, 2014 (see for ex: http://time.com/2909884/chronic-stress-heart-attacks/)).  As I have noted, stress is life endangering when it is at its most potent and stressful.   We need to take off our blinders and look further into the past, where experience, deleterious experience, is not so obvious.   We cannot see the fetus suffering from a mother’s smoking but it is there.  Here is the first inkling of how the outside (stress) becomes inside (heart attack).  What happens with stress is that it de-normalizes the system; either too much or too little.  One lady I saw felt “toxic,”  no one knew what she meant but she decided to move to the desert to feel “non-toxic.”  Until she had the feeling;  her mother was a chain smoker and she was toxic to the daughter she was carrying.  She produced heavy toxicity in her; it became an imprint and remained in her system. Once relived, many times over, she was over it and finally knew why so felt toxic.

But there is much much more.

 I also want to introduce you to an important scientific paper by M. Meloni (The social brain meets the reactive genome; neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology   Hypothesis and Theory.  21, May, 2014 (see http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00309/abstract; the full text is available for free)).  He sums up so much of the new science of epigenetics,  malleable and less fixed than we might imagine.  And they are heavily influenced by genetic factors. And like us humans, genes need always to be considered in the context of their milieu.   It is the interaction of genes and environment that bring the phenotype into play……and too often we look at the phenotype (what we can see) and ignore origins as the cause of our problems with behavior and symptoms.  When someone grows up in an alcoholic, violent environment we understand the causes of his delinquency.  Why not growing up inside the womb of a heavy smoker?   Doesn’t that help us understand his later breathing problems?  Only if we know where to look.   And that environment is often womb-life.  The good part of this is that when we can tease out some environmental factors they can sometimes be reversed.   Not so with genes. Therapists need to pay attention to the latest research in birth practices and pediatric discoveries, that I often write about.  Just that simple fact, that we respond to our environment can lead us to discover proper origins.  I hasten to add:  we respond more forcefully as that environment becomes earlier.   And as we grow up and have children of our own, that environment can be passed down the hereditary chain.  In short, what happens to us in our lives can be visited upon our offspring.   Not always the bad stuff but also the good; mother rats who often licked their offspring had healthy offspring and so was the baby’s offspring, as well.   (This is Michael Meaney’s work, as well as Moshe Szyf’s).  What they noted is the Primal position, as well, that there are critical periods in life when the environment affects us the most.  And clearly that is in the first weeks of life; not life on the planet, but life inside the mother ship.  I am writing mostly about methylation and how the environment becomes embedded into the cells where nurture becomes nature.  I mean if our life experience affects our offspring it acts like genetics; yes?    I mean the outside has become the inside.

 In animal studies they find that methylation patterns during the critical period can be engraved in parts of the limbic/feeling centers; i.e., the hippocampus.  And those patterns become stable and enduring.  And that can mean being vulnerable to later disease. (They say, “modifications of methylation patterns (the imprint) are encoded and  form long-term outcomes”). Briefly, imprints can make you sick.   Abuse is what seems to change methylation patterns, and especially during the critical period.  What is important here is that heavy methylation in the feeling centers can ultimately lead to mental illness.  It becomes the crucial for bad mental reactions.  The imprint has altered the hippocampus in such a way to make one vulnerable to further trauma.  The imprint is a fixed an enduring form of cellular memory according to Meaney/Syzf/Meloni.

The researches and I, both have come to the conclusion that the imprint can endure for a lifetime. Once fused it is most difficult to pry nature away from nurture. They, in effect, become one. And when the fetus or infant is stressed the expression of the genes change.  They can be up-regulated toward expression, or down-regulated toward repression. ( a lot depends on what chemicals are “borrowed” to embed the event/memory, the acetyl group or the methyl group).  What investigators are finding is no surprise at all.  That licked/loved infant animal babies are far better at handling later stress. And vice versa; when babies are not loved they have a harder time handling stress and adversity.  Do I mean that love is that important? Yes.  It is no wonder that the rate of lost productivity in jobs (30%) is due to some form of mental illness.  Very early stress leaves offspring less adventurous, much more cautious and wary.  And above all, they are more susceptible to drug addiction.  They are in imprinted pain.   When booga booga addiction centers miss out on all these early causes there is no way they can cure addiction.  As I have said numerous times, “You cannot love addiction or neurosis away.”   The point is that adverse early events leave a mark, a trace, an imprint that endures and affects behavior and symptoms.   It is then too late for love.   Yes it helps a bit but once brushing up against the imprint it is useless.  Because of the pain the gates won’t yield to feelings; they won’t let them through.

 We human beings are social and so are our brains.   They take in outside life and transform it into lots of internal stuff.  And then we look at the phenotype and say, aha, it is genetic; or worse, we say, “It is your job that is causing so much stress.”  It is rarely both; either we are born with it or we got it last week.  Like high blood pressure, for example.  It is Primal Pain that kills us prematurely, not so much diet.  Although I would not neglect diet, but normal people generally choose healthy diets, according to any number of studies.   If your system is balanced so will be your food choices, and choices in life, for example, like a proper partner.

 So who we are is not in the vapors.  It is in concrete experience; and that experience usually predates our life before birth (to name my most recent book). There is where we need to look and there we will find causes; we will find key memories that have driven us and caused so many symptoms that have been a mystery.   There we will find cure.