Why Primal Pain Endures

New information again seems to document that pain memory lasts a long time.  (see https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160512124930.htm) .  We have known that for fifty years but new research shows us where and how. The fact remains that early injury and its suffering carries on perhaps for a lifetime.  They don’t just carry on; they continuously do damage.  And the cells send information of the damage and its agony to higher levels.  This was a study on persistent pain in mice. They found that damage changes epigenetic marks on some genes of immune cells to mark the spot; they carry on the memory of trauma. The investigators wanted to know why pain becomes chronic; and they are searching out the nerve pathway that carry pain along. The point is that there are neural mechanisms that make pain endure.  We don’t just get over it; it is now part of us.  Certain nerve cells become much more activated.  The problem is that with pain they remain in an hyperactive state.  It is not only in our minds but everywhere inside of us.  And the adaptive damaged cells keep in replicating themselves.

Notice, I did not say, maladaptive cells.  Because maladaptive is the way damaged cells adapt. To carry the idea forward, we need to get to those pained cells and experience them fully so that we can now adapt normally.  They point out that neurons acquire epigenetic footprints that affect key proteins. Those pains seem to insist that we must face the pain and react fully.  Otherwise, after a fully reliving why do cells return to their normal state?  It is a matter of unfinished business; we cannot neglect our biology and hope to be normal.

The problem is with most enduring pain we do not know where to look or how deep to go.  So instead of doing what we should, feel it fully, we push it back and hide it until it comes out in a different form: cancer?  Same pain, different expression.  Same epigene, different phenotype.  It is not always helpful to look for different causes for different afflictions; they may be the same.

I have noted that Primal memories are not inert.  They do not lie here waiting to be discovered.  They agitate and gnaw away.  Recently on TED TALK there is a report on nanoparticles “trained” to enter the body, search out developing cancer cells  and kill them, all in microscopic space.  These particles know what their job is and they don’t forget (see https://www.ted.com/talks/sangeeta_bhatia_this_tiny_particle_could_roam_your_body_to_find_tumors).  Our own immune cells clearly have the same kind of memory; they try to do their job but imprinted pain overwhelms them and prevents them from discharging their “daily rounds.”  How do I know?  When we reduce the pain in the system through one year of Primal Therapy the natural killer cells increase; the same kind of cell as those nanoparticles I wrote about.  Deep pain prevents us from being normal and acting normal and having our biology behave normally.