Scientific Confirmation for Primal Therapy

It isn’t only what happens in a laboratory with men in white coats that counts as science; I think clinical science also counts in the mix.  And it is not only the need to extrapolate from studying little animals with white tails.  It means studying real people with real maladies.  Which I believe we have done over fifty years, including also research results from outside groups … those mysterious souls in white coats.

Let me give one example.  Over the years we have seen dozens of patients suffering migraine headaches.  Those were the ones with severe anesthesia at birth.  Their Primals (reliving of feelings) were of choking and suffocation, gasping for air.  It was the commonality of most of them, but not all.  But as they relived lack of oxygen at birth, the suffocation went away as did the migraine.  It sounds like we figured it all out right away.  No.  It took months and years of this observation to learn that the whole vascular system was shutting down to defend against dying from lack of oxygen.  It was an extreme conservation move to survive.

Sometimes if the Primal did not finish there would be a return of the migraine, in short, there was still the memory of suffocation at work.  We were learning that the origins of many migraines was this asphyxiation during the birth process.  One of the early treatments for migraines was oxygen.  Now it is pills for shutting down pain, but coffee as a vasoconstrictor can help because it helps shut down the blood flow.

What then happened later on was that almost any stress could trigger the migraine as it also reawakened the original reaction which became the modus operandi for the sufferer.

The first coalescence of lab research and our clinical efforts was found at King’s College, London; Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.  They wondered why pain continued even after the physical insult had gone.  They wanted to know why pain became chronic.  One thing they knew was that in pain there were more pain nerves active.  But why did they continue to cause pain?  Why did these proteins maintain their altered function?  They believed it was prolonged by epigenetics.  After an initial injury there is an “epigenetic footprint”.  The molecular imprint reawakens those proteins again; hence pain.  It tells us about the mechanisms but less often about the “why” of all this.  Why is there a migraine, in the first place? What caused it?

In Primal terms, the imprinted memory is still there and endures, and adverse events can set off the reactions again.  The nerves involved are still there waiting to be activated again.  But they carry the imprinted memory and are vulnerable. The triggers can be any threat or danger, even a criticism, taken as a threat to being loved; worse, to be excluded.

Another point of convergence between lab science and clinical science: A November 2015 study in Nature, Neuroscience (see http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v19/n1/abs/nn.4181.html), found that prenatal trauma was important in leaving traces on the gene of past trauma. This happens to coincide with our work where we actually see patients relive these traumas—a process called methylation.

The lab scientists found that these early traumas were heavily implicated in the later development of schizophrenia.  They studied methylation traces in over 500 cases and found that methylation changes “were most pronounced between pre and postnatal periods”.  We are finding this often during gestation that leads to many different kinds of mental afflictions.  Terror states becoming anxiety reactions in the parlance, the key cause of attention deficit reactions later on. Several studies have shown DNA methylation earlier than anyone expected: in the prenatal life.  And this then, in turn, changes gene expression, so what looks like pure genetics is really epigenetics which can be changed because it is not set in stone.  And a great deal of methylation changes occur very early to start the neurotic process even before we are born.  So in any therapy that deals with later life exclusively may be missing the proper therapeutic target.

It is not ideas that produce neurosis; it is the feeling traumas that predate them. They produce twisted ideas and perceptions and also physical abnormalities.

Here is more of what the researchers point out: ”Whatever risk factors are occurring in the fetal environment in utero, they appear to leave a lasting  mark on the sites that are different later in life in brains of patients (with schizophrenia).”
So there is an imprint that causes damage and endures and affects our mental apparatus.
Wait, isn’t that Primal Theory?  Oh my, we converge.
We must address the right brain, which literally is the right brain which imprints earlier than the left, if we are to help patients.  And isn’t that our goal?