The Mysteries of Some Behaviors

One of the great mysteries escapes most of us:  why is this child so anxious and out of control, so incapable of doing school work, and mostly hangs out with the wrong people?  Gets in trouble all the time,  several auto accidents,  takes drugs and cannot be counted on.   Recognize him?  He is your neighbor, the guy down the street or the person who works next to you.   He is unstable  and cannot do anything , any project or task, for any length of time.  He is anxious and skittish and very unreliable.   He, and less often she, flits around and cannot be pinned down.  Often leaves a trail of destruction everywhere he goes.    He can be charming on the surface but when it gets deeper he is a mess.   Cannot keep a relationship for any length of time.  Never count on him; cause his word means nothing.

Yet he had stable loving parents who continue to blame themselves. 

So what is wrong?  He suffers from ineffable damage so early as to be unimaginable.   It is ineffable and inexplicable for a reason: it is damage done before we were verbal, and before we had language.  The mind of this person seems like a cesspool of inputs that drive him hither and yon.  What inputs?  The damage inflicted by an unsuspecting mother who drinks many cups of coffee a day, or is highly anxious, keeps on an unhealthy diet, drinks alcohol, etc.   Each piece of damage is imprinted and sends its message through the system that there is impairment there.   It keeps the mind busy dealing with all that information, which is ultimately distracting and plays into ADD, attention deficit disorder.  It is like a phone operator sending the top level brain unending messages which overwhelm its  possibilities for integration.  It is, ultimately, the imprint. It is covered over, repressed, hidden, but its energy sprouts everywhere.  And it is the energy component that cannot be stopped.  We give tranquilizers to block its spread but that is only a temporary measure.  Energy is now free-floating; traveling to the top level thinking area and also to deeper levels of the brain.  It agitates and aggravates. It is the signal left behind that warns,  "danger, ahead."  And believe it or not, the closer we get to it, the more danger it signals; higher blood pressure, body temp and heart rate, all activated against the danger: of what? Terrible pain ahead, lying in wait; a danger so volatile and impacting that seems life-endangering, which it was and is.   It is again, the memory, the imprint that frames the damage lying in wait to be fully felt.  And why all those complications?  Because liberation lies just on the other side; freedom to be out of pain and no longer driven incessantly.  

He is often labeled a psychopath because on the way in the womb towards life on the planet, his limbic/feeling system has been damaged and he no long can feel for others nor empathize.  The imprint impairs the limbic/feeling system from keeping feelings alive and expressive because it too is flooded with damage information.   It keeps him from being stable and being able to maintain a long-term emotional relationship.   The damaged limbic system won’t allow long-term emotional commitment.   And the developing brain begins to lose its adaptability and plasticity in infancy so that the earlier damage cannot be changed.  Any intervention to be effective at all must occur during the brain’s most dynamic growth, just after a trauma occurs.  After that not much can change.   The cure lies at the spot and time of the damage; and that is often during brainstem development and inchoate limbic evolution.  That is why it is all a mystery; its origin is so remote as to be unbelievable.  Yet there it lies with methylation traces signaling damage.  And those memory imprints are traceable and knowable, not in the language of our culture but of the archaic language of our remote ancestors. We are going back to meet them millions of years ago, communicating in their language of grunts and physical signs.  We don't have to travel back a million years because that time is imprinted in our nervous system.  We go back there through a descent through ontology, the evolution of our species.  And when we are down at the beginnings of brainstem evolution we arrive at a time when sharks ruled.  And we must learn to recognize the shark influences and talk their language; and never approach too quickly and abruptly for fear of evoking great terror.  That animal and his simple brain is easily disrupted and rendered dangerous.   If we want psychosis to appear we do rebirthing and then see the flooding, and inundation of the neo-cortex at work, creating delusions to avoid the real pain.  Then "he is one with the cosmos," and other fabrications as the cortex is devilishly busy concocting ideas to fend off the brainstem terror and pain.  He has now risen above the pain and lives in a schizophrenic world where all is wonderful.   It is easy to see that here psychosis is a good defense, and perhaps the last one on the road to serious psychosis.   

Even with his parents, who soon learn that they have little influence on him or his emotions .  We may blame his parents as they may blame themselves but the damage is done before he was born, and they could even touch him. He is behaving as though his parents made him suffer constantly, which they did, only inadvertently.  They certainly did not mean to but their own pain made them act in deleterious ways toward the baby; taking drugs, or drinking or smoking.  And it happened during the critical period with the wide open critical window; which according to very recent research, demonstrates that the fetus is more open to pain and feels it just as strongly, if not more-so, than us. When the damage from an anxious mother, or one who smokes and drinks or fights with her spouse, is deeply embedded, inaccessible and practically irreversible, it is always the imprint.  Therein lies the mystery; an arcane memory lying in the antipodes of the mind out of reach and out of touch.  Who could possibly imagine that a 20 year old college kid cannot concentrate because of damage to his archaic shark brain?  Or that  thirty year old man is hooked on heroin because of damage that occurred when he was just beginning life?   It seems beyond comprehension; and yet there is where real cure lies, and often only then and there.  How we do know?  Our patients go back there and relive the damage and solve so much of it, including heavy drug addiction.  They never do it in a day or weekend; rather it is accomplished over many months.   For that we need patience and a bit of science and a lot of evolution.   
So we therapists have been taught to reassure our patient that it is not her fault. Relieving her of any blame but maybe it is; maybe it is fault by default; not in her control, at least not in her awareness.  It happened when the baby could not scream, or complain, just silent suffering which shows up in force later on when he can behave. And he does.   Do not try to control him because he is not in control, or rather, he is controlled by powerful forces sending out messages of constant pain.  It continues to drive him in every direction possible.  He cannot pay attention.  What do we do?  We drug him, not for what we think is wrong but to cool the imprint which has gone awry.   What is controlling him is far more powerful than any control by teachers or parents, who complain that he is out of control.  We drug his neuro-biologic reactions to calm him down. Sometimes it works for a short time, but not for long.  

My God!  What is the solution?   To attack the origins of it all; I know of nothing else to do but to relive the trauma fully, as painful as it might be.  To relive in small feel-able bits over many months.  That, for me, is what we must do.   Otherwise,  we have to keep pushing it back, an endless affair.  And we cannot just approach the imprint quickly; we have to feel many other feel-able  memories first, and over months before we can approach the deep imprint.  There is where the deep pain lies, we have measured it in many ways, much higher blood pressure and heart rate and changes in brain frequency and amplitude.   That level of pain won’t let us attack it directly; we need to approach it with great caution.   If we don’t we will get the effects of rebirthing: greater damage and more irreversible pain.   This happens because we dredge up great pain which arises out of sequence and is overwhelming and can never be properly integrated.    The unconscious is no place for charlatans who decide they know what to do and they don’t.  Let us never lose sight of our shark brain.  It is ready to pounce at the slightest intrusion. Let us approach with caution.