Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 10/20)

How Traumas Get Embedded

A recent report from Northwestern University notes that some traumatic memories, such as chronic child abuse, are so painful that they get buried deep in the brain and become difficult to access (Jovasevic et al., 2015). Those memories were created in a certain mood/feeling or state of arousal and “can best be retrieved when the brain is back in that state.” This new brain research provides support for my concept of resonance, which posits that specific feelings on all three levels are inter-connected via related frequencies. In Primal Therapy, as the patient goes back in time in his sessions, he will connect with feelings stored deeper in the brain which resonate with the same mood, as one level of the memory is linked to lower levels. The mood or feeling belongs to a hierarchy of imprints/feelings, where each level gives way to deeper more remote levels, all related in tone and emotional meaning. The links are not only due to similar feelings but reflect historical processes; each link carries us further back in our ontology until we surpass memory as we think of it. We go back in archaic times as well, where there are no words or even feelings, just instincts. For that reason, when a patient uses words while appearing to relive such archaic events, we know it is abreaction, a false memory. When a patient is back in an accent brain, there are no words in the reliving because no words exist at that level. Let me be clear: the reliving is literal, as the patient is submerged in history and lives for a time on that lower level only.

In the Northwestern experiment, scientists infused the hippocampus of mice with gaboxadol, a drug that stimulates extra-synaptic GABA receptors. Researchers describe as getting the subjects “a little inebriated.” Then the mice were put in a box and given a brief, mild electric shock. When the mice were returned to the same box the next day, they showed no signs of fear and moved about freely, leading researchers to conclude they didn’t remember the shock from the day before. However, when the mice were given the same drug before going back to the box, they froze, as if fearfully anticipating another shock.

Researchers concluded that the drug changed the way the memory was originally encoded, so the mice remembered the stressful experience of the shock only when they were returned to the same brain state created by the drug. In other words, they believe that the brain, when drugged, “used completely different molecular pathways and neuronal circuits to store the memory.” And then the authors make this Primal statement: “The best way to access these memories is to return the brain to the same state.” Seems like a quote from my work, but it is no more than arriving at the same reality by different methods. The question is, how do we get the patient back in that state?

I repeat, the means of getting to those old memories needs to follow evolution; that is devolution or evolution-in-reverse. We need to begin at the last or latest link of memory and then use resonance to travel back in time to where key imprints lie. We don’t decide this; it is done by the patient who is often upset by something in the present, and once locked-in will slide effortlessly back in history following the feeling links. His devolution is not random; it is guided ineluctably by resonance.

So is Primal Therapy nothing more than a time machine, a means to revisit our history, to turn back the clock to previously neutral, non-neurotic states? It may sound far-fetched, but more and more evidence suggests it’s true. Scientists are now learning how to wind back the developmental clock on the microscopic level — taking a current skin cell, for example, and treating it so that it returns to a previously neutral, uncommitted state, an embryonic state. Once that is done, the cell can be reprogrammed to become another kind of cell. During this critical window certain needs must be fulfilled and, if they are not, cells may become imprinted in adverse ways.

Here’s another way to put it: once a mark is made on the cell we are psychologically and physiologically affected for life, until, and only until, the inciting event is revisited and relived. And it can be relived unconsciously, through the process of resonance. That is, a trauma that took place in-utero can be re-experienced without a specific awareness of it, by virtue of being part of the chain of pain, once we are locked into the memory circuit. In Primal Therapy, when we explore these ramified events and begin to relive them, we are connecting three levels of consciousness – the present, our past childhood and our infancy/gestation – by descending through three levels of brain development.