Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 20/20)... the End

When is that point? 

We cannot change personality so long as the imprint remains to drive us; and the little love we get later on may not be enough to allow us to change direction. And more, the shutoff that occurs with gestation and birth trauma may be so great that we are helpless before it. We no longer can let love in; we first have to feel agonizingly unloved by our parents. We cannot purposefully open up because we are then open to great pain. The pain has to be out of the way first.

Why do we have to feel unloved first? Because it is a memory sealed in and engraved thanks to the process of methylation. That chemical helps to make sure the memory lives on in our memory bank. Once we address the imprinted memory and help to undo the methylation process, the system opens up all on its own. We need to undo repression so that we can feel again. When we "feel" unloved we begin to feel once again. If we open up first to any feeling we will be overwhelmed with pain. If we gain access slowly over time to lesser hurts we will not. We will be on the road to fully feeling.

An article in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health sheds light on this problem by analyzing the quality of interactions between mothers and their children. Researchers from Duke, Brown and Harvard universities conducted a long-term study of 482 adults, using data from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP), a Rhode Island, New Jersey-based observational cohort of pregnant women and their children (Maselko, 2010). The researchers observed the interactions between mother and child at the age of eight months. Those mother-child exchanges were then classified as high- or low-loving interactions. Decades later, the children were studied again as adults. The mothers who were judged most loving produced offspring who were low on anxiety, hostility and general distress. There was more than a seven-point difference in anxiety scores between loved and unloved children, and a three- point differential in hostility scores. Unloved offspring are more hostile. In brief, the higher the mother’s warmth, the lower the score in distress.

Doesn't that tell us a great deal? And it means that very early love is so, so important. Without it we have a damaged soul, someone more likely to fall ill and who has poor social skills. That lack of love makes us unable to interact lovingly with other adults, decades later. Affection is all, even if we had first line pain. You cannot as a parent say, “My children know I love them. I just can’t show it.” Sorry, that is not good enough. It is like saying I know my child is hungry but I cannot feed him. There is that need for warmth that cannot be abrogated. Love is love and there is no compromise. Either you love or you don’t and it will show up decades later in the feelings and behavior of the person. We can “smell” a loved person; they exude it in every pore, in every word and every movement.

I have for decades stressed the importance of early love in preventing the suffering we see in so many patients who didn’t get it. Now, science has found the means to prove the point. As the authors of the maternal love study concluded, “It is striking that a brief observation of level of maternal warmth in infancy is associated with distress in adult offspring 30 years later,” stated lead study author Joanna Maselko, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. “These provocative findings add to the growing evidence that early childhood helps sets the stage for later life experiences and provide support for the notion that biological 'memories' laid down early may alter psychological and physiological systems and produce latent vulnerabilities or resilience to problems emerging later in adulthood."21

Epigenetics is all about experience, about nurture over nature. And in a dialectical process, nurture can become nature; that is, the system treats the intruder of experience as genetic and heritable. And we then confuse the two in trying to understand it. In Primal Therapy, we are the dealers in experience because we have seen what experience does to us, especially very early pre- verbal experience. If one sees one primal one knows for all time how crucial experience is in the scheme of things. The cause is rarely a brain disease. That is an answer concocted by those who fiddle around in neurons and synapses and do not see the brain reacting to experience. If we leave out experience we are bereft of what can give us answers. We see only the end result and miss half of the puzzle. It is like looking at diabetics and never knowing what they eat. If we leave out the first three years in an orphanage can you wonder that we can never know what the matter is? Thinking it is a brain disease is the result of another more serious disease: solipsism.

And neither is the problem “all in your head,” as mindfulness and other cognitive therapies suggest. A true cure can never happen with a cognitive therapy that never touches deep-lying imprints that deviated and deviate the system. Intellectual therapies never operate on the levels that set off deviations. They operate on the derivatives, the effluvia of the early imprints such as deviations in perception or thought patterns or learning. Treating all that never makes a profound change. And who suffers? The patient.

But isn’t this what medicine today is about – treating symptoms? Lowering blood pressure, giving allergy medication, restructuring behavior. It is called “whack-a-mole.” Every time a symptom shows up, just whack it back. And don’t ask where it all came from? Experience takes a back seat as we slither down into the depths and minutia of the brain seeking answers that do not exist there, and never will.

I offer a rather immodest proposal. In our coming brain research we hope to measure the process of demethylation so that we have a quantitative measure of progress and the diminution of repression. In brief, we shall measure pain and how it is stored and where. It may then be possible in this way to undo the driving force of aberrant behavior and the manifestation symptoms. This is to say, that we hope to reduce the primal traces on the genes that have driven behavior for most of our lives. To add to the immodesty, this will mean reversing history and undoing imprints that have held our lives in such constrained fashion, reducing our options for behavior, and reducing physical afflictions.

If our hypotheses confirm our expectations, I believe it will change the face of psychotherapy as we know it. We will let science answer. But, I must add that in addition to science, we have been doing exactly that, reversing the imprint for thousands of patients over almost fifty years with highly significant results. That too, is science at work. We apply our theory to the treatment of patients so that eventually we leave the realm of theory and see the results in the flesh and blood of our people. Theory becomes palpable, in the literal sense of the term. We see it in our addicts who leave drugs far behind, and we measure this “cure” by the reduced traces of trauma on the genes. And, of course, we see their whole lives change after therapy. They no longer think of drugs but make choices in life that are not directed by pain, but by freedom of choice. Then and only then, can we use the word “cure.”

21: Brauser, D. (2010, July 28). High Levels of Early Maternal Affection May Lower Emotional Distress in Adult Offspring. Retrieved from http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/725920