There Are Memories That Cannot Be "Remembered"

I have  often remarked that the most important memories that drive neurosis, our behavior and our symptoms are those that cannot be remembered; at least not in the way we think of memory. Therein lies the rub.  Because what can you say when the body "remembers" something that affects our eating habits for a lifetime?  And yet we do not "remember" it?  That is because we are too used to thinking of memory as recall; something we can figure out, that has content and words.  So we therapists ask the patient, "Do you remember your childhood?"  Or, "What can you tell me about your childhood?".  The truth is, "Practically nothing".  Because the important stuff, the experiences that change us radically have no words; they long predate the use of words.  Why? because we have found that gestational life and birth traumas change us significantly, and until we can wend our way down the chain of pain we are never aware of these experiences and how they motivate and steer us.  It is when the neuronal circuits of the brain are getting organized which will direct our lives thereafter.

So what does a "body memory" mean?  When a carrying mother is under-nourished, her baby will have a much greater chance of obesity later in life. He (his body) remembers it all.  We can only put a name on it after months of our therapy where the baby is again a baby crying out for food. And he feels the deprivation and pain of it all.  Or, in a study of mice, they found that the "memory" of nutritional deprivation can be passed onto the sperm of the offspring. ("Inherited memory of poor nutrition during pregnancy passed through the sperm of male offspring."  Science Daily, July 10, 2014)(see:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140710141547.htm).

We might say that neurosis means we are walking around in the constant grip of unremembered memories that the body remembers. We can be "aware" of its harmful effects but unconscious of it. We never experienced the pain of it. Awareness lives on high in the brain, devoid of the direct feeling of agony. It can explain, rationalize or deny but never experience it. How about the feeling of helplessness when unable to move out of the womb into life on the planet?  I have seen how some male patients who have relived that hopeless, helpless feeling see why they could not be aggressive in sex; why they give up so easily and feel defeated so quickly, losing their erection.  They cannot "go all the way".  I know this sounds so psychoanalytic but it is observational science at work.

 It is not a concocted hypothesis drawn out of my derriere.  These are epigenetics in process creating havoc in our system, and we never know why because we cannot "remember" it. When we get down to preverbal experience we can finally "remember" it all.  Now we know why Cialis is such a big seller.  Until we remember we have no control of the memory. We only see its later effects, and because it is still a mystery, we find a doctor who will help us suppress those effects until we no longer experience even the results of the memory.  Enter the erection booster, a doctor who has the secret answer to our sex problem. And since nothing but the real memory is liberating these "experts" can devise all sorts of treatments suppressing the symptom, and any of them might be "effective" for a short time.  It has to be short time because the driving source/force is still alive in the subterranean caves of the unconscious.  Can't concentrate?  Might be imprint of chaos lying deep in the brain.  These memories are so powerful because they are often catastrophic in content, and also life-threatening. Lack of nutritional when we are ten is not nearly as life-threatening as lack of it at six months in the womb.  This includes a mother's chronic depression who has a "down" effect on the fetus. Most of it, including biologic processes are "down regulated". There is poor appetite later on, lack of energy, and so on.  He is no longer a self-started; he needs to be encouraged or led as he cannot get himself to anything spontaneously.  Suffocating from the mother's constant smoking or taking "downers" he learns a passive style of life from the very start. He will need the same uppers his mother needed in order to get going. All because he cannot remember.  And worse, he cannot try to remember as it will produce the opposite effect.  He will use the top of the brain to try to get to what is deep down.  It is like trying to sleep when there is constant noise from outside.  It keeps the neo-cortex active when it should lie quiet.  The same brain at different stages of maturity.  When there are many deleterious imprints,  the top level is constantly activated and cannot relax or shut down.  And if we have to get up out of bed, and shout out of the window at the bikers making a racket, all is lost, and that includes sleep.  Suppose now we never knew about the bikers: it is the brain making all the noise that keeps us from sleeping. We are complete victims.  Of whom?  Ourselves.

I emphasize the early months here seeming to neglect the later years. Those later years are critical in shaping our lives out of the crucible of the gene/epigene foundation. But the early months are also heaviest in methylation, indicating to me that this is where the central damage gets done; where the imprints that sculpt our later lives are laid down.  It is where the needs that make us human are predominant. Neglect here has terrible consequences.


Which selves? The methylated ones, of course.  Why are they methylated?  Because they are signs of our wounds from very early on; the stripes/traces foretell of  disasters yet to be experienced. Those they foretell, as well, of the wounds/imprints we cannot remember in any cerebral way; the ones doing so much damage.  So you think we can do Gestalt exercises and feel free?  Think again; in order to feel free we must free ourselves from an overload of methylation, and in no other way.  We need to experience what has never been fully experienced before.  How come?  Because the pain content was so great that it provoked the gates into action so that we would not experience it.  Back then, we travelled a few millimeters into our private pharmacy and grabbed up as much serotonin as we could to stop the suffering. The problem now is we need to find a way to plunge into the suffering and finally be free of it forever.  Too often we do the opposite. We take serotonin again to bolster the gates against memory (Zoloft, etc.). We deliberately make ourselves unconscious.  And this is the way we try to get well?!