Ken Rose on "Life Before Birth". Part 2/6

Ken Rose: What does Dr. Janov mean when he talks about pain or primal pain?

Jeff Link: When he’s talking about pain, he’s talking about very deep level imprint in the brain. A good example; you very early on when you’re being born, perhaps a mother is very stressed and there’s a number of ways this can happen, but some research has shown for instance that victims of PTSD or mothers who grew up in war torn environments, or mothers who were pregnant during the time of 911, or during the holocaust, all these sort of very significant and traumatic events show a high level of cortisol and that cortisol can be passed to the child. That creates pain in the form of excessive strain on the system.  It is the child trying to deal with, and anticipate stressful life conditions. From an evolutionary standpoint it prepares the child for kind of what they’re going to expect. If they expect to be born into a war torn environment this sort of excess cortisol can help them deal with that. But the reality is that most of us don’t encounter those kinds of situations. Most of us grow up into a relatively stable environment. So then what you have is, you have the environment in conflict with what the child actually grows up in, and that creates a dissonance that continues throughout life.  That’s one form of pain, but he also talks about things like oxygen at birth. If there is birth complications where a child may be partially strangled on an umbilical cord, or if a child is exposed to tobacco or drugs, even heavy anesthetics all that can change the neurochemistry and then create what Dr. Janov refers to as an imprint or a set point that then dictates sort of how the child will release hormones and adapt to life for the rest of his course. It is in essence a hidden script that rules his life.

KR: Dr. Janov writes; “pain is commensurate with the urgency for fulfillment and a mother’s physiologic and emotional state is more or less the offspring state, not just momentarily but for a lifetime.”

JL: Yes, and that’s an interesting idea to commensurate with the need for fulfillment. One of the things he kind of strikes out in the book is how in Primal Therapy one of the things they’ll measure is one of the patient’s vital signs, and the way they’ll see that maybe something was wrong very early on that the patient, him on herself might not even be aware of is in the discrepancy between sort of a normal vital sign reading and one in which there is a problem.
He writes about, for instance; depressives often have a parasympathetic imprint or nervous system imprint. Where their body temperature would be lower than normal, they’ll have a tendency of being pragmatic and kind of passive. The opposite of that is a patient that is highly anxious and suffers panic attacks, we’ll see an elevated body temperature, and just how elevated that temperature is or how far below normal it is, is a good indication of how severe the trauma was from very early on.

KR: So for example if at the time of the child’s birth the mother is anesthetized, the child will be anesthetized, the child essentially will be paralyzed in the birth canal and to maximize the chance of survival is to surrender. This sets up a template, if that’s the right word, for a lifetime of parasympathetic nervous system dominance. It has everything to do with personality and relational capacities, and really everything. It’s so fascinating to understand the theory behind this. The understanding that Dr. Janov presents us with, and then to look at the world, to read the news paper and consider any given individual in the world and really see quite clearly that many of the most prominent manifestations of personality are really the language of neonatal and womb life, of reality in the womb, of reality in the earliest moments of life.

JL: Yes, it has really profound implications. I’ll maybe talk a little bit more about some of the work with exposure to anesthetics and drugs. For example there’s the researcher Albert Hollenbeck who Dr. Janov talks about briefly in the book and he shows that the serotonin and dopamine levels maybe change permanently by local anesthetics that were used with mothers and affect then the mechanism the child has for dealing with pain. So Janov would talk about how the child learns what works to alleviate pain, and develops an affinity for it. He says, “To cope we create what we are missing.” So you’ll see a depressive who may take Prozac or Zoloft to boost certain serotonin and repress that anxiety or pain. Or you’ll see somebody who is the more passive, lethargic, parasympathetic mode, who would be looking for cup after cup of coffee, or even worse cocaine or something like that, to sort of compensate for what’s missing.
He even talks about this with ADD. A lot of kids now are being prescribed Adderall and Ritalin, but again this is a compensatory mechanism to deal with what was missing from very early on. While Janov would say that these medications do cure the symptoms they don’t actually get to the cause of what’s wrong. He has a strong reaction against a lot of contemporary psychotherapy because he feels, and I think he’s justified and correct in saying this, “we’re going after the symptoms but we’re not really digging deeper to try to get to the source and what’s truly wrong. So we have these temporary solutions but we don’t really know all sorts of other things may be happening as a consequence, which we’re not entirely sure of.

KR: He says we’re going to the wrong brain.

JL: Yes.

KR: We’re going to the wrong address, he says.

JL: Right. So while traditional talk therapy would try to deal with some of these issues through a verbal explanation or an upper level left prefrontal explanation where language and meaning are stored. The pain exists in a much different brain, a brain that developed earlier, which Dr. Janov calls the first line brain, and exists at the brainstem, which is the brain that we shared with reptiles and earlier animals, which is more instinctive, responsible for things like coughing or gagging or are instincts but not in any way are things we can express verbally or talk about. So all the talk therapy we’re doing is not really rooting out where the pain was.

KR: Right, the traumas are imprinted in the brains in which at that developmental stage the traumas are laid out, if I said that right. So we have a lizard brain, we have a chimp brain and we have a human brain, and we are traumatized on all three brains. God bless us, lucky us.

JL: I think one of the things about the book is, it is a difficult message to hear. It’s not comforting to know that from such a young age we can be damaged in this way, or we can have these things we carry with us. I mean, when I was editing the book I’d find myself sort of going back mentally to what happened to me at a very early age, or imagining what was my mother going through when she gave birth to me and maybe that’s for many people not a pleasant thought, and I think Dr. Janov would be the first to admit that, that’s right, it can be a very harrowing experience to go back there, but that is really for many people where the pain lies, and it’s not to say he discounts the role of genes, or he discounts the role of events that happened early in life, experiences with parents at a young age, but he does say that a lot of what we’re sort of missing is this whole period of gestation where profound things are taking place, but the therapy isn’t really accounting for.

KR: Right, and it would serve us well to just contemplate just how vulnerable we are in the womb.

JL: Right.

KR: With your permission Jeff; we are talking with Jeff Link, the editor of the book “Life Before Birth.” Would you please indulge me, I have in my notes, I circle things and I underline things, I circled kind of a bit of a long paragraph and I really want to read it, so would you please allow me.

JL: Yes.