Do We Really Have a Shot in Life?

It may be that our destiny is sealed before birth, and then our basic personality is simply reinforced or compounded but not changed. Here is what several studies have found. That trauma while we are being carried affects us for life and sets up vulnerabilities that dog us forever. This is especially true when there are serious disputes and maybe violence between the parents during the gestational period. So the background level is high, and when there are dust mites or allergens in the environment this person will suffer the most. It is different for everyone. For those who are susceptible to migraines even a slight disagreement might lead to the symptom. And here is where heredity comes in, for there may be genetic tendencies toward migraine or high blood pressure or whatever. What will finally set off the symptom is the level of imprinted stress which raises the level of vulnerability.


There is a certain level at which symptoms appear, and that also means there are certain levels of pain that raise the risk of the development of symptoms. Our inbuilt serotonin level may then be inadequate to keep the symptom at bay, and so under just a bit of stress a migraine appears. It appears because the system cannot manufacture enough pain killers to suppress it. In general, what I have seen in therapy over and again is when patients become overwhelmed with a feeling, a symptom appears. It says: Overload.! Stop! Suppress.! It is somewhat of a biologic law. When a therapist makes a mistake and allows too much feeling to rise, or when she plunges the patient into pain before he is ready we will see a symptom. It is not always a therapist’s doing. It is simply through the process of resonance too much early pain has been dredged up too soon. The patient’s gating system is weak and cannot withstand too much input. One way we know this is that the vital signs rise sporadically throughout the session and do not fall below baseline at the end, as happens with an integrated feeling.


So the symptom in daily life comes up, which means overflow and the person goes to a doctor for migraine or to a shrink for anxiety, and what do they do? Prescribe painkillers. And they help; they bolster our own chemicals such as serotonin. Those drugs push the pain back down below the level of the symptom, and so, voila, the person no longer suffers. That is, she is no longer aware of her suffering. They push back the manifestation; not dealing with the real underlying force.


Let’s go back to gestation for a moment. If the mother has a chronic fear of a violent husband that fear gets transmitted, not only as fear but also as a chronic stress level. And the baby senses she is being born into a dangerous world. Afterward, she may be constantly on the qui vive, alert and too vigilant for whatever happens; a chronic apprehension. She has learned an important lesson in life before there was a social life. “You have to watch out for danger!” And what is that danger? She does not know. So later in life what does she do? She manufactures dangers—paranoia—there is someone coming to hurt me.” And that is a direct transmission from her mother, now duplicated by the offspring. The mother was in a chronic stress mode due to her chronic fear of her husband, and although it seems genetic it is her life experience that now makes the child believe she lives in a threatening world.



And as she enters into life this child has now compounded pain. This happens when life is terrible for the her. The mother has died, the father has left, a sister was killed, a parent was an alcoholic. There was no love anywhere. And she is now full of symptoms, perhaps full of allergies. And too often she goes to a shrink who focuses on later life experience because it is the most obvious; a divorce, a drunken mother, etc. But that is the origin; not the base. It is secondary. It is ignoring all those catastrophic events at birth and before. We know now that due to resonance later painful event resonates with something earlier and the whole force is evoked. It drives the brainwaves very high and fast, and the vital signs also very high. One simple example. There may be a heredity tendency to migraine; the mother and grandmother had them, but the fact of depleted oxygen both during life n the womb and at birth (a smoking mother and too much anesthetic at birth) affects the blood circulating system resulting in migraine. It is a primal or primordial response to the original circumstance. In order to eliminate the symptoms we have to go back to the trauma and its original context for resolution. That is, there still may be a tendency to migraines but it never becomes an overt symptom without a trauma that affects oxygen levels early on.



Symptoms appear when the person smoked pot for years that wears down the defense system. Then that very early pain comes bubbling up and the person senses that early fear again; there is that danger again, the same one the mother suffered from during gestation. The fear she transmitted to her son. Paranoia sets in. Paranoia is the idea evolving out of the fear. It says beware! Something or someone wants to hurt me; a danger concocted to justify the fearful ideas. The focus also happens in the general zeitgeist when those loaded with fear imagine the communists are coming to ruin their lives or the mafia. The danger has to projected onto a group that society has defined as dangerous; so they have a socially-institutionalized paranoia that doesn’t seem so weird or pathologic. The idea blends in, is accepted in the zeitgeist. But notice carefully because it is a mistake often made in shrink-dom; ideas follow out of feelings, not the reverse. Most of today’s psychotherapy is based on ideas changing feelings, which is not the case. Ideas can suppress feelings, but that is a different story entirely. But today too many focus only on ideas and insights neglecting neurologic science and evolution.


Let’s see how this works: When we are conceived and after few months we produce receptors for stress hormones. If the mother is highly stressed, if there are serious problems in the marriage the child will be born with an inability to handle stress. His stress level is already so high that he cannot deal with any more input. Later on, everything seems like it is too much. The slightest task become overwhelming, and that was set up before our birth. And then later the parents pile on the homework and the chores, believing that the tougher the homework the better the school. It is too easy to focus on all that to the neglect of original causes, the generating sources. The maternal stress level is imprinted in the baby. It is imprinted via the addition of methyl (methylation) to the stress gene, known as the GR gene. This then affects the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and we have a stress syndrome. We are less equipped to deal with trauma. And that inability is imprinted permanently. It is in the genes, actually in the epigenes, meaning, what happened to those genes while we lived in the womb. It looks so fixed and unchangeable as to be purely genetic. It is not. A mother’s chronic depression can produce the same result. It is not just a psychologic depression; it is how her chemistry changed due to her mental state. That chemistry is what affects the baby. It speaks to the baby in a special biologic language. So here we are; science is finding, is that stress in the carrying mother can imprint tendencies for a lifetime in her baby. And that is what I mean by, “Do we have a fair shot at life?” Not always.