How Our Experience Make Us Into Who We Are

So far I have made a case for the long-term effects of early experience. Let’s see now exactly what happens to make us into who we are.

We know that experience while in the womb, just after birth and early infancy are usually registered down low in the neuraxis. As I already mentioned, we know too that those experiences send their antennae higher in the brain system to inform the higher levels of their existence; first to the emotional/limbic brain for adding feeling content, and then higher up and forward to provide ideas, beliefs and thoughts about the experience. It isn’t just biochemical information that is re-represented on higher levels; the energy, valence and urgency of the imprint is also represented. That is why with even a small banal input there can be over-the-top reactions. That urgency is always there and makes a small criticism seem like a matter of life and death. On the lower level it probably was a matter of life and death; and now it hovers just below conscious/awareness waiting to be triggered off again. This is especially true of those who have leaky gates. What happens in the present isn’t just what happens now but resonates with what happened back then. In the brain they are connected, and in current behavior they are again connected. They slop over each other and make reactions inordinate. I say, “you didn’t do this right,” and your brain says you “I am going to die.” Intervening is “I am wrong. I am bad. I am not good and unloved, and if I am not loved I will die.” This is the second line reaction to the event, which then triggers off the first line: “something terrible is happening and I am in danger.” When there are leaky gates the resonance reaches down quickly through the levels of consciousness down to the first line in microseconds.

Each level takes on a specific role in a feeling; the lowest level adds the oomph, the energy, the immediate reaction; the limbic area adds emotion or feeling, and the cortical level adds understanding and awareness. All make up a complete feeling. It is when we become intellectuals that we may lose part of the feeling component. We become too heavily weighted on the cortical level.

With all three levels we become whole, organic and integrated. We have access to our instincts, feelings and ideas. So as we evolve we drag our memories along with us; each new level of consciousness brings a new dimension to the experience. We can then experience aspects of the experience on three different levels. And that is what a feeling is: an experience on all three levels. It is never enough to explain or discuss our feelings; we must, first of all, feel them. If a level is left out it is not a complete feeling.

On the most primitive level, say, a father and carrying mother bitterly arguing and deciding to separate there is a great impact on the fetus, so much so that the offspring stands a much greater likelihood of become homosexual early in his life. What makes that happen, however, is that the experience alone might not make it all overt if there were not an absent father and tyrannical mother (as one of many different family configurations). This frame of reference shapes how the affliction will evolve. It channels the underlying trauma and makes it manifest in a certain direction.

Not every child with divorcing parents during pregnancy becomes homosexual. But there is the groundwork already in place; the soil to allow a deviation to occur. It is not a one-to-one relationship but as research shows that configuration alone goes a long way to create homosexuality.

In the same way that many of us undergo trauma while we were being carried but not all of us become hysterics, uncontrolled individuals with heavy impulsiveness and chronic anxiety. This will happen when there is compounded trauma from womb-life and soon after that weakens the gating system. The person then is awash in pain and will need heavy drugs to suppress it; an addict. Someone with the same kind of experience but without too much compounding may have a gating system that works so that drugs are not needed. So clearly, it is rarely one bad experience that shapes us (incest being one major exception); it is compounding that is to blame. The compounding may take place on a genetic vulnerability or previous deleterious experiences that render us weaker. A family history of migraines will force the memory to act on the circulating blood system to produce severe headaches. A carrying mother who did drugs may produce a child who “needs” drugs for his anguish. He is not consciously anguished at first; there is an insufficient cortex for that, but he will be unable to sit still in class or concentrate on his studies. This is how the imprint will be manifest on a lower level. He will be consciously anguished as he grows up. It may be that someone whose mother did drugs while pregnant will abhor them because they disoriented him completely at the beginning. It has so many facets; but we need to focus on generating sources, originating causes that help explain who we are.

This business of informing the higher levels of what lies below means that the higher level will be deviated/react accordingly. Thus, take again the arguing parents, the low-level anxiety in the offspring will move first to the feeling centers producing very bad dreams and effects on one’s emotions, while the newly-informed neo-cortex will provide the insight and explanation for it. And the first-line imprint will cause the cortex to think differently about things; not to see what may be obvious to anyone else—that their child is seriously damaged emotionally. Or as the imprinted memory moves higher it interrupts our train of thought and can cause it to be unable to focus on a task.

What I want to explore now is what happens when the imprint militates to higher levels and how it produces the kind of behavior and symptoms we know too well.

I have discussed in my other works the notion of the “trauma train.” This is the train of events from the time the mother is ready to give birth until she actually does. How the train ends its journey is stamped in and becomes our prototype; it is how we will react in the face of emergencies. The prototype, by and large, is governed by two nervous systems—the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The first is the system of aggressive, of rapid reactivity and drive, while the second, the parasympath, is the system of rest and repose. It is the system of reflection and passivity. Normally, we all have a good balance of those two systems but they are skewed by early experience into one side or the other. The parasympath is the system of low blood pressure, low body temperature and slow heart rate. The sympath is just the opposite. The way we are born has a “cut-print” aspect to it and governs our later behavior. The parasympathetic system was the original “freeze” response that foretells the lack of spontaneity and expressiveness. This cut-print is shaped already by the earliest months of womb-life that provide a channel for our behavior. Thus, a smoking mother may make the newborn overreact to the anesthetic given to her. Or it will make a newborn who has been constantly drugged by a tranquilize-taking mother to be all the more passive as a lifestyle. He is already vulnerable to lack of oxygen, for example. But the ramifications are widespread. Obviously, it cannot simply be a birth trauma that accounts for so much later behavior, when that trauma may sit on nine months of previous deleterious events, and those experiences also shape how the birth trauma is experienced.

The trauma train that ends with the newborn stuck and unable to get out easily may imprint a “struggle-fail” syndrome into the offspring. Try hard and then give up too quickly. Here the mother may be given heavy anesthetic that in effect paralyzes the baby and stops so much of his efforts. And how quickly that happens can determine how quickly one gives up and stops trying later in life. The struggle and succeed can inculcate someone who learns to struggle for everything she gets; struggle becomes the watchword for her life. She becomes ambitious wanting to “get ahead,” and does not let obstacles get in her way. She drives and struggles when she shouldn’t. She takes on too much and works under great pressure.

And there are of course those who have to have pressure to function. They learn to wait until the pressure is on them and then they whip into activity. Such things as waiting until the waiter is there before ordering in a café. Or not getting the class assignment in on time; waiting till the last possible moment and then make a move. They have to feel the pressure…. Back then.