Still More on Depression

Depression has been a mystery for a long time because we have ignored the connection between life in the womb and the trauma that comes with birth with later mental and physical health. If we were to overlay a transparency of the characteristics of depression on the effects of the birth trauma we would find that they match perfectly. Everything a person felt during the birth trauma back then is also a description of her current depression. "I can't try anymore. It is all too much. I am stuck and not getting anywhere, etc. And then the act-outs based on these feelings; A therapist who cannot make a move when it is needed in therapy. The depressive has simply lost touch with her history and has transmuted the old feeling to the present. It is not that the feeling is wrong; it is simply displaced into the wrong epoch. It is real to feel doom and gloom, not a neurotic aberration. It was very appropriate back then at its origins; not appropriate in the present. My definition of neurosis is acting in the present from feelings in the past. But the for moment we must know that the traumas set down in the womb, at birth and at infancy are coded, registered and stored in the nervous system. They become a template for what happens later.

If I were to tell you that depression and all of its symptoms stem from a single event it would be hard to believe, and yet it’s true in some respects, and not true in others; nevertheless, birth trauma is one of the roots of depression. This is not a theory I concocted but rather, a result of observing many depressed patients from many countries who relived the same kinds of trauma. After treating several hundred depressives successfully, doing brain and biochemical research on them, it seems like the birth trauma, which compounds life in the womb, is one causative factor Adding to the severity of the problem is that the effects of birth trauma then become compounded by later life circumstances. Late research has found that the carrying mother's depression often produces that in her offspring. Yet if there were no serious aberrations in the carrying mother and a traumatic birth there would likely be no severe depression later on. . In particular, what is known as endogenous depression, something that creeps up on us without an apparent warning, leaving us helplessly deep into its maw. This is no more than saying that we need to pay attention to the critical window where so many later difficulties are laid down.

Depression (neurotic depression) is not a feeling or some strange, untreatable disease; it is a state of pain and repression. Depression is a system-wide repression that blankets many feelings. It is the history of the body’s experience over time exerting its force. Expression of feeling marks the end of depression: but first we have to know what it is we are feeling and what we need to express. Therein lies the rub. For what there is to be expressed usually cannot be done so in words, because the event itself – birth trauma – is not an event that is experienced in words. The sensations that a baby experiences during birth are generated in an area of the brain that lies far below verbal ability. That part of the brain – the brainstem and limbic system - is cognitively illiterate, but brilliant in terms of its own language. Once we begin to understand this we will see that depression is not the mystery it has been made out to be, and that it can indeed be successfully treated. Once early trauma is imprinted down low in the brain it is literally shouting out its hurt but never in words. We will lose if we try to reach it with words, which is the current practice, it will be a dialogue of the deaf. It speaks in a language of the viscera, the blood system and neurons. We can learn the language and speak to it effectively once we have the techniques. That is what we offer our depressives.

Over the many millions of years human evolution has produced a kind of normalcy in various aspects of our physiology; a sort of narrow range of biologic processes that ensure the best functioning and longevity. So blood pressure has a normal range as does so many other functions. But soon after conception, and before the normal range is definitively established events occur during womb-life that permanently alter those normal readings. So our heart rate is now set at too high a “normal” level. The new level seems normal since it was established early on in gestation. But it is a “reset” level engraved into our systems before the other “normal” levels were established. This new normal may cause a change in the function of our neocortex. We may have a tendency to think too fast for proper reflection. Or we have impaired ability to control and integrate our impulses.
It is easy to think of all this as hereditary. After all, it is a gift from mother; but not in a way we imagined. It is who the mother is[NU1] that is shaping her baby. The child’s emotions may already be warped when he enters this planet: he may be lethargic and passive from the first day on. The download is either loving or non-loving, down-regulation or up-regulation. It forms the matrix for the child’s physiology and brain development and of course his later psychologic state. Hopelessness is most often down-regulation and is the forerunner for later depression.