Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 5/20)

Study after study has shown that a carrying mother’s stress can have long- lasting effects on how the genes unravel and are expressed in the offspring, which is the essence of epigenetics. Those brought up in abusive and unloving homes – under condition of famine, violence, war, divorce, etc. – had lifelong changes in their development, including chronically high levels of cortisol. Women who were abused by their husbands had children with excessive methylation of their gene. And this alteration was passed on to the baby just as if it were inherited. In this way, and in many others, the anxiety and depression of the carrying mother get translated into the baby. In short, he is born stressed. Later on, he will over-react to tense events with higher stress levels.

This is the definition of post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And the point is that many of us carry around this latent high stress level for a lifetime. (We tested many of our entering patients for cortisol levels, and they were universally high to begin with, but dropped significantly after one year of therapy.) If we later add an unloving home and other stress factors, the latent levels become inordinately elevated. So then, a man enters combat and later suffers PTSD; we think that combat did it. Combat only exacerbated the reaction and made it manifest; it became an overt symptom. He was already PTSD, only latent. There is a recent study that proves the point, showing that those who had combat fatigue generally had more trauma growing up (Berntsen et al., 2012).

In that study, a team of Danish and American researchers interviewed a group of 746 Danish soldiers before, during and after their deployment to Afghanistan. The investigators, led by Dorthe Berntsen of Denmark’s Aarhus University, wanted to trace the causes of PTSD and find out why some soldiers developed the disorder while others did not. They found that the vast majority of subject soldiers handled the war experience with little or no psychological harm. Surprisingly, for those men who did develop serious stress symptoms, the cause was not found to be connected to battlefield trauma. Instead, the strongest predictor of PTSD was extreme childhood abuse, not combat experience. Researchers found that the PTSD sufferers were more likely to have been victims of severe beatings, burns and broken bones, or to have witnessed family violence as children. In addition, these soldiers had past experiences that they were unable, or unwilling, to talk about with the investigators.
However, in an unexpected twist on conventional wisdom, researchers found that some of the already stressed soldiers, about 13 percent, actually felt better after being sent to the battlefield. These were men who exhibited stress symptoms, such as major anxiety and frequent nightmares, before their deployment. But once in the war zone, their stress temporarily improved, only to reappear once they were safely back home. The question is: Why would they feel better when suddenly plunged into an unfamiliar and threatening situation? The answer, as this study suggests, is that being sent away to war allowed them to briefly escape their own private battlefield – the family.

“In other words, they showed improvement as soldiers only because they were in such poor psychological condition in civilian life,” concludes an article about the research published in Scientific American. “Army life – even combat— offered them more in the way of social support and life satisfaction than they had ever had at home. These soldiers were probably benefiting emotionally from being valued as individuals for the first time ever and from their first authentic camaraderie – mental health benefits that diminished after they once again returned to civilian life.”(11)

To cure the affliction of PTSD we need to deal with the trauma of combat and also the adversity from childhood that set the stage for it. In other words, there were antecedents for this affliction. Cure occurs when all the current and antecedent factors are addressed and relived. So a soldier can be aware of his combat trauma and unconscious of the traumas underlying it. It is what we can’t see that does so much damage. Moreover, the most deleterious traumas are those that occurred during the early critical period, when need is greatest and pain is at its asymptote. It means that the sealed-in imprint is almost irreversible in its effects (excluding Primal Therapy). War is such a powerful force that its effects can be engraved just as during a critical period in childhood, when the brain is so vulnerable. There is, therefore, a confluence of two traumas: one that is obvious and the other that we cannot see. We must not only treat what is obvious if we want to make sure that the PTSD does not linger on and on. To leave the basic primeval imprint intact and untouched means always that we must do something each day to handle the symptoms which never seem to go away.

That is why we must always include the concept of the imprint in any attempt to understand human behavior, whether it be PTSD or ADD or any number of ailments. It may seem like one abuse cannot be that bad as to cause such lasting damage; but it is one abuse among many, a series of traumas that are encapsulated and imprinted with a force that lasts a lifetime. A mother who fights with her spouse over time is setting up future behavior in the offspring. It not only upsets the mother but it also upsets the baby for life by changing his genetic inheritance. We have treated such cases and they are often punctuated by frequent trips to the emergency room for allergy and asthma attacks.

When a baby or fetus is traumatized he is more sensitive to later stress. His immune system is affected and he is more vulnerable to such things as Epstein-Barr disease or the herpes virus. In other words, when there is a virus around he will be more likely to fall ill, especially if he were unloved even in the womb (i.e. did not have his basic needs fulfilled) (Fagundes, Glaser, Malarkey & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2013). These afflictions are not considered mental illness, but they are often due to the same imprints involved in serious mental ailments. Here there is dysregulation of immune function, but it can have other effects, as well. Do we want to alleviate that immune problem or cure it? To cure it, we must find the imprints. They are there and when the patient is given access he will get there. Memories will come to greet him. Yes, we must treat the allergies, etc., but that only deals with manifestations, not cure.

In order to suffer “mental illness” we need a “mental” component, the cognitive apparatus that allows for mental deviation. Until that evolutionary step in brain development, we will suffer physically from that same imprint. Sometimes it is not different diseases we are dealing with, but different evolutionary stages of our growing up; our ontology. It is not possible to develop an “attention deficit” until we develop the cognitive capacity to pay attention and concentrate. And then it is the impact of multiple imprints or one very strong imprint that sends constant messages to the top level brain, the neo-cortex, trying to inform it of the problems on deeper levels, and thus interrupting normal thought. Those messages are importuning and unrelenting, and keep us from any long-term focus. They are trying to inform us of priorities; what is urgently in need of being dealt with.

(11) Herbert, W. (2012). Embattled Childhood: The Real Trauma in PTSD. Scientific American Mind Sci Am Mind, 23(5), 74-75. doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind1112-74