Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 13/20)

The Miracle of Memory

I was looking around at some people I know and at least one third of them had the malady of needing to move constantly: organizing trips, making reasons to go here and there, and in general, keeping on the move. Does all that constant going and coming lead to strokes and heart attacks? I do think so. Why? Because below all that movement is a giant, silent scream, born of ferocious suffering, suffocation and being stuck; first in the womb with a mother who smokes and takes drugs (unavoidable for the baby), and followed by a birth process where again he is stuck and cannot get out easily. Hence now the need to keep moving. If I tell the average person this, they think I am delusional. But I assure you, I am not.

I have seen thousands of patients relive all kinds of traumas: one key one that is widespread is being trapped in the womb, suffocating and unable to get out. Trapped, suffocating, unable to move; those are the key feelings involved. They could not scream then and they cannot scream now, but once they as adults are in the feeling they can first grunt and try to move and feel then, later, at birth... scream. It is not the screaming that is liberating. It is the reliving of the true feeling – being stuck – and then the scream to express the agony of all that. Now we can actually observe the pain. Reliving changes the imprint, reduces it and begins the resolution process – demethylation. Screaming alone is not what we are after; it is the total agony of the reliving, and then the reaction – screaming. Reactions alone cannot do it. And that is what is wrong with all those early scream clubs in universities that began with the publication of the Primal Scream. Yes, screaming relieves the pressure involved in the reaction but does nothing to the imprint. Let us never believe that relieving is reliving. One is amelioration; the other, cure.

In reliving birth, we vividly see the tremendous pressure in the build-up after the traumatic event early on; not only the birth trauma but also many other traumas where the mother is taking drugs or smoking and drinking and the fetus/baby cannot escape. He can turn his head away as if to escape but, alas, he is trapped. And that feeling impressed into a vulnerable body remains there as an engraved memory and will drive her behavior thereafter: “I have to move. I have to get out of here.” That is the leitmotif of his or her life. And it never, ever leaves! The person is literally trapped in the memory, a trap that has chemicals stronger than steel to bind them forever. It is a chemical conspiracy to make sure we never, ever feel liberated. Even though the inner feeling is feeling bound, they cannot feel it. They are too busy trying to get unbound, acting out trying to get liberated.

I find it astounding that the real feeling is not felt immediately when it occurs; alas, it is too painful for the moment when an infant’s whole being is so vulnerable. The price we pay is never knowing our feelings or where they come from. Can you imagine someone saying to himself, “Wow, I am bound by a feeling in the womb!” In that womb, there are obviously no words or concepts or scenes. Only a physical feeling – no air, strangling, feeling crushed and suffocating. So how can there be a memory? There is no memory as we think of remembering, but the body remembers exactly. It remembers feeling trapped and suffocating because in the Primal that is what comes up and what we see. And in everyday life we lug those feelings around as a weight, as if carrying a ten-pound steel bar around constantly. We are carrying around those devilish chemicals that trap us.

And what changes those chemicals? If screaming won’t do it, what will? How about dampening drugs, such as SSRI’s, the serotonin enhancers? They shush the scream but never, never change the memory, the imprint. The memory is not designed to be changed. It remains in order to be experienced and liberated. That is the miracle of memory. We have the mechanism for our own liberation inside of us, if we only knew it. And how about using drugs to slow us down so we don’t move so much? That just helps the build-up of pressure. It exacerbates the problem and aggravates the need to move. And if we cannot act-out enough then the original Primal imprint will burrow in and seriously damage key body and brain cells. The genes may be transformed into oncogenes, and serious disease gets its start.

So when we see the constant motion we understand, but we never see the agony. Why no agony? Because it is busy being acted-out to relieve the agony before it is fully felt. So we cannot possibly see it, and the person in motion cannot feel it. That is the idea: that it disappear before it is evident. Now we know why psychotherapy is at such a loss. And now we know what could be behind high blood pressure and migraines. I had one patient who was sexually never satisfied. When she could not have sex her blood pressure rose to dangerous heights. Drugs could not help her. What could? Discharging the pressure permanently by feeling the need – a Primal. That helped and... cured. Relieving the pressure is not what cured; it was reliving the feelings that created the pressure. There is no comprehension in relieving; lots of comprehension in reliving. And this is the crucial point: There are no insights following relieving, yet many insights following reliving. It is one among many ways we suss out true feelings.

Why cure? Because it dealt with the origin of it all – the original methylation and imprint. Primals change the chemical composition – less methylation, decreased serotonin – and diminish the memory so that we can really change our behavior and our proclivity toward disease. How on earth can we understand anorexia without knowing about the link between research on early trauma and later eating disorders? The research states that it is largely due to key epigenetic changes that take place very early in our lives that alter fetal programming and the evolution of the fetus/baby. So now we see why starvation or reduced calories in the womb can lead to later over-eating. He is eating for now and eating out of memory. It is no different from the desperate need for warmth and love after a birth trauma where the child was abandoned right away by a sick birth mother. He entered a cold world with no succor; no kisses or hugs. That desperate need begins here and is stamped in. Early deprivation means overcoming it by doubling the efforts to be loved. Depending on other factors, once repression and gating sets in, there is the shutting out of any love due to a defense system that won’t allow it in because it reawakens old pain.

Let us not forget the critical sensory window where those events are engraved for a lifetime. That is where we therapists must go, to that window where trauma was impressed into the brain and the whole system. We must look into it seriously. If we do not, then we cannot understand anxiety states in our patients or ADD, which detours focus and concentration. It is not here-and-now; it is there-and-then that must be our focus because there-and-then determines here-and-now, to a great extent. If we exclude there-and-then we would never know that my patient’s need for sex took root in a first-line imprint, an early trauma, which was so strong on the physical level but had no words, nor screams. Beware the ides of here-and-now. The brainstem, almost fully developed at the time, absorbed all that trauma and is therefore heavily methylated. We never will see that until we bring patients down to that level; yet that could take months and then we need to know what to look for. That is why it took me decades to figure it out. It is not evident.

So if people are in deep pain, why aren’t they all walking down the street screaming? Because it’s not accepted social behavior and could lead to arrest or commitment to a mental hospital. But what they can do is scream out the agony via a migraine or heart constriction (angina). And we rush in to treat the heart condition or migraine or high blood pressure. That is where it is obvious but that is not where the problem lies. It lies hidden in the memory embedded in the lungs and surroundings, in the arching back and the constant movement. We see what we see – the obvious – and miss what we cannot see. It would be ideal to be searching for what we cannot see: a lens that magnifies Primal Pain. Alas, not likely.