Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

Revisiting Anxiety

2012-01-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

A recent Time Magazine has its cover titled “Anxiety,” accompanied with a serious article about it. (Dec. 5, 2011. “The Two Faces of Anxiety.”). There are many circuitous byways in the piece but if we are to get a grasp on its treatment we need to be sure about what it is. I am not sure that they state what it is, only that in some cases it is good for you. It is never good for you, especially when it revs up the system to prepare for a danger that most often does not exist; that is, that does not exist outside. It does exist inside. It is called a memory, an imprinted memory of danger that dates back to the time we were living in our mother’s womb. The danger back then could have been a carrying mother who drank or smoked, who was depressed or anxious, who did not eat properly, who took tranquilizers and other pain killers or who was chronically upset with her marriage. These are dangers for the baby that menace his life. His system reacts with terror because that is the highest level of brain development, for the moment; and because those events are most often life-threatening. The fear reaction is not quite in place; for that we need a fully development limbic system which at the third month of gestation is yet to come. A heavy dose of anesthetics to the mother during the birth process can shut down his respiratory system and bring him near death. This is the time of rapid brain development where trauma can have long-lasting effects.

We need to understand that once there is terror installed in the evolving fetus the genetic cells change and become epigenetic. Those transformed cells are the carriers of terror. They drive neurotic behavior and all sorts of serious diseases including cancer (the cells that block cancer cells from developing are nearly always heavily methylated, indicating early trauma). The process of this imprinting is carried by methylating the cells; adding part of the methyl group of chemicals to the gene. The cells then carry the “brand,” perhaps for a lifetime. There is such a distance from the time of that imprint, to terror of exams at age twenty that the source is not even considered. What has been imprinted is terror; terror of suffocation, strangling, deprived of oxygen and of being blocked from getting out. All of these are life-threatening and they remain in pristine form throughout our lives ready to surge forth. Terror is later joined by fear, a higher-level event in the brain, a later evolution. They are combined by a process known as resonance so that anything that can set off fear later on may dredge up underlying terror with it. When it bursts through to conscious/awareness later in life we call it panic or an anxiety attack. It is not; it is the same pure terror that was imprinted perhaps decades earlier. It may arrive in disguised form, a phobia or compulsion, but at base it is still that terror, and it is never good for you. When the terror is felt and experienced the phobias fall away.

Thus, anxiety is terror emanating from the deep reaches of the neuraxis; more precisely, from the brainstem that controls digestion, breathing, elimination and other vital functions. Anxiety is not fear; fear is the portal of entrée to earlier and more potent times. It is deeper in the brain and earlier in our evolution. Terror is for radical and immediate action; a key survival function. It is part of our primitive brain and predates our emotional brain by millions of years. When a carrying mother is seriously agitated she is activating her baby, setting off terror response. When the mother’s emotional state goes on and on it marks the genetic cells of the fetus and alters them, imprinting the terror response as an enduring legacy. It is given a different name; it is no longer terror, it is now anxiety, still terror filtered and disguised but the feeling is exactly the same, unchanged. And when our patients relive those early imprints the wrapping comes off the anxiety and it becomes the terror it was at the start; we see it now for what it is and was. It now has a context, an origin. With this reliving there is a radical change in biochemistry of the patient as well as vital signs which tend to normalize. In the reliving of an anxiety attack the anxiety transforms into pure terror; it does not exactly “transform,” it “reveals” what it is. And at the end of the session key vital signs drop to below starting values. When reliving the terror the anxiety disappears because the patient has felt it in its entirety and its origin. They are, as I noted, identical. Once we understand that anxiety and panic are pure terror we understand how it cannot be good for you. Yes, it will get you going, but how do you stop it? And how do you keep it from blocking your ability to focus and concentrate? So long as we think it is anxiety and not terror we will not know how to eradicate it. So long as we think it should be embraced, as the article states, we will be misled in our treatment of it. It is true that this can “get our adrenaline pumping,” but at what cost? Prolonged anxiety will surely cause a premature death, and in addition will damage the cognitive brain and diminish its thinking/reflective capacity later in life. Since anxiety seems to work in reverse order with telomeres (those caps on the chromosomes that indicate how long we may live), I think anxiety is a dangerous thing.

This article by Alice Park claims that anxiety is a “normal adaptive response.” But what is it adapting to? Surely not just taking school exams. Is it normal to be anxious before an exam? Sometimes yes; most often, no. But being apprehensive and suffering anxiety are not the same thing. They live on two different levels of the brain and should not be confused. Anxiety appears when fear has triggered off deeper levels of consciousness, of brain function. It is from the past, historic, not an adaptation to the present. That is why it seems so aberrant. We cannot see what causes it. For that we need to travel the person’s past and see for ourselves, and the person, himself, will see it, experience it, too. We see how in vain it is to deal solely with the apparent problem, exam anxiety, when it has very little to do with the exam, and very, very little to do with current life. It is just that the imprinted early terror is so at-the-ready, so close to conscious/awareness that it does not take much to set it off.

As I noted, the article states that not all anxiety should be battled, sometimes “it should be embraced.” Why would we want to embrace terror unless we really don’t know what it is? What they say is that just the right amount of agitation provides proper titrated motivation and is good for us. And so the article goes on, “the key isn’t not to feel anxious; it is to learn ways to manage that experience.” So no longer do we attempt to understand causes and origins, we just need to development management skills, as though feelings were a business to be managed. The trouble is that we use the top level neocortex to control and manage feelings but alas, all we can do is suppress and mask it. That is part of the function of the frontal neocortex. But feelings are not to be managed; they are to be felt and experienced. Animals know that instinctively. Animals don’t block their survival functions; they act on them. When we block them we are at the mercy of the outside world. And that blockage or repression means a great pressure internally acting on our organ systems, grawing away until serious disease appears.

One of the specialists on anxiety in the article states, “anxiety is neither helpful nor hurtful. It is your response that is helpful or hurtful.” In other words, it is all in your head. It is not whether your dad dies; it is how you respond to it. This is an old canard put forth by the booga booga therapies of the sixties and seventies. such as EST. It is pure solipsism; there is no outside world, just what goes on in your head. Reality is secondary to attitude. Belief trumps reality. So the result is that they treat attitude and ignore facts. The analogy to this is that if you change your mind you can change reality.; an offshoot of Cognitive/Behavior therapy. And they add, “our species would not be better off without it.” (Anxiety). I disagree. We do not need to terror to function except when a truck is bearing down on us; something that does not happen every day. Terror usually keeps us from functioning. I suppose that if you are on the outside looking in, (cognitive/insight therapy) you can come to no other conclusion. If you manage to get inside and look out (outsight) you get a different perspective.

I think it revolves around the idea of where is the danger? If we believe it is outside then treatment focuses on that (which is left brain), by the way, But what if that danger is inside, as it most often is, and it stays there no matter what we do (right brain). We cannot maneuver the inside from outside. We cannot make the left brain do the work of the right. What if anxiety has outlived its usefulness and continues to damage our brain and shorten our life? What do we do then? Mostly drugs and medication. Blocking it instead of expressing it. Once we know what “it” is we can then treat it and let it out and be done with it. It is far easier to try to change beliefs and attitudes instead of feelings because feelings are lower in the brain, in the subconscious and much more difficult to access. For those who live in their heads it is simpler to address the present, the superficial and get on with life. The confusion seems to be between motivation and terror. We never need terror unless a snake attacks. It is good to have that primitive animal, that same snake (and its primitive reactions) in our heads, just in case. We do need to be motivated but it should not be due to negative fear but to positive desire. Some actors state that they need anxiety to drive their acting and make them better. So they are never satisfied; they brag about this as something positive when it is not. They think that to be satisfied is to be smug and self assured—arrogant. They believe that if you are not anxious, and are satisfied with your work you will never improve. Isn’t there such a thing as wanting to make a good something without the anxiety? Can’t we have a sense of the good without terror? Too often the person has never had enough approval early in life and that is what drives him. The need for love and approval. It was never good enough for a critical father and thus never good enough for him. So he struggles; making a virtue out of missing love; thinking it is a good thing. But always anxious and never satisfied can never be a good thing.

In this kind of approach there is almost never a mention of history, of memory of imprints. Never a recognition of generating sources; of origins and causes. Until we deal with origins we can never consider cure because that is what cure is; a plunge into history, to those imprints that drive us.

Toward the end of the piece they acknowledge that anxiety may be related to fear but is “more prolonged and diffuse. “ They need to see that it is an emotion surging from different parts of the brain, and that the earlier the imprint usually the deeper in the brain it is, hence, the more terrifying. There is an hierarchy of feelings which get more powerful as we descend into the unconscious. As we descend fear becomes terror, organized deep in the brain, anger becomes rage, disappointment becomes hopelessness, and so on. There are levels of feelings. We often anticipate catastrophe because we are reacting to an event that has happened long before we have words to describe and understand it. That anticipation is called anxiety by the cognoscenti. We think we are seeing the future when we are only observing our history. That history predates ideas and beliefs. There was never any words for it. Now that we do have words we apply it mistakenly to the present when it is from our personal archives.

On Murder and Being an Intellectual

2012-01-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

Are they related? Are you kidding? Somehow I think they are. It started the other day when I was discussing with a colleague about a very smart scientist we know who has got into booga booga and how ‘we live in a parallel universe but don’t really know it”…blah blah. I was going to send him a piece that I wrote about booga booga, and then decided against it as a useless, vain attempt. He couldn’t hear it. Then I thought about the guy in Norway who killed 60 people in a murderous rampage. Nothing could have reasoned him out of it. Neither my killer or my intellectual could be reached. They were locked into an idea that was unshakeable. The left brain was being crowded out by massive right brain input.

Well, you might say, the Norwegian surely knew right from wrong so he was clearly sane. I mean he could decide on what guns to use and what ammo; what ferries to ride and made a whole series of “rational” decisions. Yet he killed at random. He wasn’t mad at anyone; he was just plain angry and had no specific target. He could not be reached; he was living in a brain that had no contact with his feelings, that absorbed a mountain of rage but could not connect. It was disconnection, dissociation, abstracted and alienated from one’s true self. He was being driven and importuned by his deeper and mostly right brain; beyond his control.

Isn’t that a bit similar to the intellectual who wallows in delusions and booga booga thinking? And he cannot be reached or have his mind changed? Both are victims of a deep and right sided brain that cannot connect. Both have rationales for their behavior and beliefs. These were not beliefs that one can be reasoned with; they had a force that first stops at a way station where complex and paranoid belief systems operate in the left brain, and then if the imprinted force is strong enough, carries the person into more complex bizarre behavior. And the point is that these strange beliefs live alongside perfectly rational thought systems, sometimes precise scientific beliefs. I attended a scientific meeting where one of the presenters said to me on the side. “I know you are from the hidden side of Atlantis. “ He wasn’t kidding, yet his presentation was unassailable. Clearly, there is a part of the intellect internally focused, that bends to right brain pressure, and another part that sees outside very well; the alienated self.

So what is the difference? Insane and not insane? If both harbor serious delusions, false ideas and irrational beliefs is there a real difference? One has thoughts out of control, and other has behavior out of control. We might say that there is enough cortical control left to understand that something may be irrational. Some chance to be reasoned with. With the Norwegian there was no functional cortex available; it was all submerged by pain. Pain became his total reality. Nothing to say, “I am overwhelmed by pain.” People had to die; his whole past flooded in at once leaving him no chance. It’s a bit fanciful what I am writing but it is food for thought.

Here is what science writer Bruce Wilson adds to the mix:

I checked the Wiki entry on Brievek. Here's his diagnosis:

"According to the report, Breivik displayed inappropriate and blunted affect and a severe lack of empathy. He spoke incoherently in neologisms and had acted compulsively based on a universe of bizarre, grandiose and delusional thoughts. Breivik alluded himself as the future regent of Norway, master of life and death, while calling himself "inordinately loving" and "Europe's most perfect knight since WWII". He was convinced that he was a warrior in a "low intensity civil war" and had been chosen to save his people. To the psychiatrists, Breivik described plans to carry out further "executions of categories A, B and C traitors" by the thousands, themselves included, and to organize Norwegians in reservations for the purpose of selective breeding. Breivik believed himself to be the "knight Justiciar grand master" of a Templar organization. He was deemed to be suicidal and homicidal by the psychiatrists."

He was clearly psychotic and a psychopath, but how different is he from Gadafi, Hitler, Kim Jong Il, or a host of other functional crazies?

The similarity between the psychotic and the intellectual is that they've completely lost touch with their right brain. McGilchrist likens our current culture to the world of the schizophrenic: non-feeling, non-empathic, individualistic, bureaucratic, no sense of the whole, rigid, obessed with rules. It's a schizoid culture. Like psychotic murderers, intellectuals are split from feeling; they resort to ideology rather than intuition, they support and uphold insane regimes (including the USA), they follow rules of logic rather than gut feelings, they miss the whole picture and focus on specifics, numbers, statistics, legal arguments, etc. Finally, intellectuals can easily justify mass murder as they did in Nazi Germany.

So I think it's a spectrum, with psychotic psychopathy at one end and cold, calculating intellectual psychopathy at the other end. Think Kissinger, Karl Rove, Machiavelli. You have those in the middle who are semi-delusional but functional.

Peter Prontzos adds: don’t forget the common every-day delusions like spanking is good for children; blind patriotism is good and greed is wonderful. These are delusions created in the zeitgeist and adopted as true by most of us. Our social life, in short, creates our conscious awareness, in a way. I grew up working class. Thus the idea of crossing a picket line was an anathema to me. It was part of my social being, engraved in me. Physiologically, to this day I cannot and will not cross a picket line.

Don’t mix psychopath from the psychotic; they are very different animals. I have written about psychopaths before, and if necessary I will write again. Whatever Breivik concocted in the way of being the regent of the world they came out of a mixture of so much pain until he cracked and then that past became his total reality; there was no present. Rather his past was his present. This is not so egregious in intellectuals because their theories and belief shave a rational patina even if they make no sense. Like the Fox News shrink who claims that Gingrich’s affairs will help him with the presidency unless he is seduced by some foreign power: I cannot make this up. But once you are detached from feelings you can concoct all sorts of nonsense. Yet, these people concoct ideas derived from feelings even though they have no way to connect to them. Like acting dumb and unfaithful is good for you; and for the country!

There has to be a special category for Kissinger. Not a psychopath but some kind of diabolic manipulator, hated by my hero Joe Heller and written about well as a war criminal by Chris Hitchens. Hitchens did us all a service with his book on Kissinger.

So here we have many schools of psychology which are only elaborate rationales for the theorist’s own neurosis. In the early days in the split from Freud there was the Will to Power, That Sex was paramount in all neuroses, and on and on’ raising personal neurosis to the level of a theory. But it was still extrapolated pain; the right side pressing against the left and forcing it to think nonsense. You want objective? Be relatively free of pain. Then make a theory all you want.

Yet they went on with elaborate philosophies, studies that supported their position, etc. Much like EMDR today which is utter nonsense yet has thousands of supporters who swear by it. Worse it has hundreds of “research studies” to confirm its validity. So let me say it one more time, ad nauseam: Once you understand that there is an imprint, an engraved memory that endures even during gestation and dominates our behavior and symptoms, then if you do not address generating sources you cannot change. It is no more complex than that. We can dance around the edges pushing back each surge of feeling and crying out CURE! But alas, it is a chimera.

So Who Needs More Love?

2012-01-19T00:19:00.000-08:00

Clearly those who lack it need it, as trite as that may sound. How do we know who lacks it? That is the question, and here is the answer:

Children who grow up traumatized and unloved will need extra helpings later on to get over it. I define lack of love as not fulfilling specific needs of the child. And that child lived a previous life: life in the womb. And he could sense and feel unloved while being carried because he can sense when his needs are not met. He can sense hunger, terror, fear, hopeless, and so on. All this deprivation leaves a mark or tag on the DNA of the genes and changes the outcome and unravelling of that gene; it can keep the cell from traveling to its proper genetic destination; and choose another destination for us, from hopelessness to cancer or Alzheimers, for example. When there is heavy methylation on the genes in infancy it may indicate some kind of trauma or deprivation earlier on. Increased methylation is a sign of trouble in Denmark. So it may be that cancer later in life is the outcome of no love during womb-life. We plan to correlate difficult womb-life with serious disease. We want to see if our psychotherapy can reverse methylation.

Meanwhile, who needs more love? Those who did not get enough early on. They need an additional helping. I am not sure that will reverse methylation but it may keep it from getting worse. The point is that our biochemistry may speak volumes about our early deprivation even though we are convinced that we were always loved. It is why I am leery of paper and pencil questionnaires in research; taking the word of patients. Taking their "pulse" may be much more accurate.

So who needs love? What those who are deprived need even more than love is the feeling of no love; of going back and feeling the early deprivation; that is what is liberating. It is what lifts the lid of repression and allows the person to be open enough for love to get in and do its best.

A recent study reported by Hanne Johnson (Science News. Dec 5, 2011)looked into kids ages 7-10, took blood samples in those who were reared in orphanages versus those reared in a stable home. They profiled their genomes and found that those who grew up in institutions had a great number of epigenetic changes in cells that are involved with immune function and also those that regulated brain function. Early stress from separation from one's parents impacted later physical and mental health. And these children may be over sensitive to unhappy or harsh circumstances later on. They can take less adversity. To try to parent early deprived children is a double burden for the new parents. They have to make up for early deprivation, and I am not sure it can always be done. In other words, to try to undo methylation will take great effort if that methylation of the genome is to be reversed. Judging by some of our studies or reversing neurosis (vital signs, cortisol, imipramine binding, etc). it is possible to remove some of the imprinted pain, whether that means reversal of methylation we will have to see.

On Scary Movies

2012-01-13T12:13:00.000-08:00

There is a story today about the film Mission Impossible……with Tom Cruz which has been shoved aside in sales by the new film, the horror film THE DEVIL INSIDE. So why is that? Wait a minute. The film is about exorcism; and that is about getting rid of your inner demons through shake, rock and roll and a little screaming. In my patois it is called abreaction. So what does the film do? It installs terror in you and then tells you how to get rid of it: exorcism. This is no different from what is happening world-wide to those who try to follow my therapy through getting patients to smack the wall, scream and get angry. All that is missing from their therapy and the film is context, the origin of the terror.

In the film they give you a context, a symbolic one that stands for the deep terror inside so many of us. It riles up the fear and then shows the ways to release it. And that is one major reason it is so popular. You can be terrorized safely in a warm environment and live through someone else’s catharsis. What a great formula. You can walk out of the theater relieved and calmer and the price was very paltry.

The difference in Primal Therapy is context, connecting with the generating source, the imprinted memory of that terror; therein lies true liberation. So the film goes through the motions of getting rid of the pain without really doing it; and that is what so many clinics do in the name of Primal. You don’t even have to hurt, and that is so attractive but such a chimera.

Why context? Because the origin of the terror, the imprinted memory, lies there and only there. Any other attempt to shake off the terror will fail.

On Homosexuality as a Normal Variant of Human Sexuality

2012-01-08T11:08:00.000-08:00

This is what the American Psychiatric and American Psychological Associations have decided in railing against the idea of Conversion Therapy where therapists try to convert homosexuals back to normal. The problem is that neither knows what normal is. Suppose we show that one year after starting therapy homosexuals have a “normal” level of cortisol—stress hormone. Or that their blood pressure normalizes. Then we begin to have an idea of what normal is and if there has been a deviation. If after we do all kinds of research biochemically and find a normalization of key factors such as natural killer cells and other cells we begin to see what is a deviation or not. So no, homosexuality is not a normal part of sexuality. Not because I say so out of some prejudice, but because science leads me there. And if we give into pressure and agree that it is not a deviation, as the American Psychological Association voted on some years ago, we do harm to those homosexuals who cannot understand the way they are. Imagine voting on sexuality as if it were a political issue to be for or against. Next we will vote on psychosis to see if it is a real deviation. If we ignore deep-lying causes we will never find out. If we ignore brain and biochemical research we will also never find out. We need to delve deep into the system to discover ultimate causes. If we never truly define normalcy, how can we decide what is not normal?

So if homosexuality is normal it cannot ever be treated and changed? I have found that not to be true. A few of my homosexual patients do change after many many months of therapy and very deep probing into the brain and the unconscious. And we never assume anything about it, only that after perhaps of in-depth feeling there is an automatic change in some patients. We never decide a priori that it is a malady that must be treated, but we also do not decide without evidence that it is normal, either. There is so little science in psychotherapy today; and the science that does exist, especially in brain science, never seems to make it into our practice. Even for those who do the brain research they cannot make the atavistic leap into the realm of psychotherapy; into deeply hidden secrets of the unconscious.

Why grace nonsense such as conversion with the sobriquet “therapy?” This is only done by those beknighted souls who think that homosexuality is evil and must be driven out of the human system. Prejudice always seems to supersede facts and science. It is easier, simplistic and doesn’t take much thought. If patients could be helped back into their remote history we would see the pain involved into homosexuality, and then we could add to it copious research extant that indicates that it may well begin with trauma in the womb and at birth. If we don’t look there how can we ever find out. Ah I know: replace it all with prejudice, or in the case of the scientific societies guess and bit and then take a liberal position that it is not “bad” after all but normal. We have just overlooked our decades of therapeutic experience and several hundred research studies. Why? Because we want to be loved and not be prejudiced, which is what it does make us. We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Is that science espoused by august scientific societies? Or is the search for love and praise for being so “democratic.” Sometimes science is fascist; it doesn’t care about our feelings and where their findings lead. It cares about truth. So it should say that sometimes psychotherapy for homosexuality might be good; and that it might be a deviation, after all. Keep an open mind, and above all never vote on matters of science. That is truly ridiculous.

On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 5/5)

2012-01-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

For therapists, what the patient says is put into context by the right so that the doctor can also read the emotional subtext of what is going on. In other words, the doctor is not just listening to words but emotions. The left brain needs to hear words and cannot make decisions until he hears the right words. It cannot suss out what is an appropriate move without them. For example, when president Bush was told the Twin Towers were bombed he could not react immediately. He could not feel what was the right thing to do. So he waited, waiting for instructions so his left brain could decide what to do.

It would seem that deep depression is another one of those right brain imprints that never quite make it to upper level left connection; and so the malady lives on untouched by conscious/awareness. Repression of feelings set in so early that we come to think that depression is some kind of alien, unknowable force. We feel “heavy” because the deep powerful imprints are being held down, and we cannot seem to lift the burden. We are literally carrying a load—of pain. These imprints are all nonverbal and exceptionally early. They are almost unreachable except with a therapy that can get down that deep. No intellectual therapy can touch it; which is why there is widespread use of tranquilizers in conventional therapy. Imagine how far the imprint has to travel to reach the higher left brain cortical canopy and make a connection. Then the therapist says, “tell me how you feel.” All is lost because it is preverbal and nonverbal and cannot be expressed in words.

A little example from my life: someone is writing the story of my life. And so he went pretty far to interview one of my shipmates on the battleship we were on together. My pal recounted the story of a Japanese submarine that came up to the surface and was trying to ram us. Then we and another destroyer fired on the sub and sank it. I have no memory of all this, and I was standing on the gun station next to my pal. How is it possible that I do not remember and never did, except small snippets? I wasn’t there. I was in my past and my terror without cease. Where is my past? I have no idea. But I do know that my left side was not properly registering events. I may have seen what I saw but the left side did not acknowledge it and so I have no memory; and it bothers me no end that my life went by unconsciously. I was unconscious of my life; and it happens over and over again that friends tell me about high school and I have no memory of it. I was so deep in the hold of my early painful imprints that I was never there in the present in my childhood.

Just because the patient is unconscious doesn’t mean the doctor has to be. The doctor needs to know about the right brain and what it holds. When it is ignored any therapy that follows must be misleading. The doctor needs to know about how prenatal events get imprinted on the right and what they do to the left. Above all, the doctor needs herself to be connected.

One might wonder why I believe the force of the imprint never lessens even when we are sixty years old? Because in the reliving the force is there with all of its power, and the blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate climb to monumental proportions.

We don’t need to study brain damage to understand the contribution of each hemisphere because neurosis and the disengagement from the two hemispheres can explain so much. In other words, neurosis is very much like brain damage without there being damage, only dysfunction, which is reversible. That is the good part. We can be disconnected neuro-physiologically through destroyed or damaged tissue, or we can be disconnected through gating without serious damage. The result, however, is the same. One side doesn’t know what is going on in the other side.

Womblife and the Rest of Your Life

2012-01-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

In my book "Life Before Birth", I discuss how life inside the womb can affect us for a lifetime. There is new research on this every day. *

What is pretty clear now is that the carrying mother’s anxiety can often produce anxiety in her baby, not for the moment but for decades and decades. And what does this do? It produces ADD in school children who cannot concentrate nor focus enough to study properly. It produces hyperactive adults who have to keep going and going; making plans and projects without end. And what does that do? It makes it likely that they will die of a stroke or heart attack because the defensive gates are leaky and keep on driving the person unceasingly. This is different from those whose gates are solid and repression is massive; their death of choice will most likely be cancer. And what causes this differentiation? The kind of womblife and above all, the kind of birth; whether it is parasympaththetically dominant, where exit was most difficult, or sympathetically dominant where it took a herculean struggle to get out. The parasympath learns to hold back and not struggle to survive; while the sympath learns to struggle for survival. It is stamped in, embedded and engrave in nearly all systems; all are affected eventually, and in the reliving all are involved again, so that we see changes in most of those systems again.

What makes the difference early on is whether traumas early on are within the first 3 months of life or afterwards. There are times in the very early months when there can be free-floating anxiety with little ability to repress or gate the pain, as the gating chemicals are not yet organized and effective. Later on this may change so that repression does set in, and this may be the difference between anxiety and later depression. Anxiety a much earlier event, and depression a later one, depending heavily on gating. Anxiety, therefore, is much more a primitive response. And it is most difficult to eradicate; it never will happen without deep remote access to our low-lying brain processes. I am discussing embryonic and more likely post-embryonic life (assuming embryonic means up to 12 weeks post-conception). I mean roughly in the first trimester where the reaction is terror because adversity at that time is usually life threatening; a mother who takes drugs or smokes heavily or who is constant very anxious. And this is the time when serotonin and other repressive chemicals are not up to snuff. So we have pure terror that is embedded and imprinted. Later in life anything that evokes fear can immediately become terror as resonance reawakens the connected/related terror. These people are often known as hysterics who overreact all of the time to the slightest input; it is all “too much,” and even a slight request is overwhelming. Their anxiety level is near the top constantly. And all this because of first trimester trauma. It doesn’t have to be excessively overt. Not even perceptible. But it is there ready and waiting. And pure anxiety tells us how early the event occurred. If it is mixed with depression we know even more; perhaps there is a mixture of traumas occurring at different fetal periods. And the result of this may result in colitis fairly early life, and/or other midlife afflictions not excluding bed-wetting, a forerunner for runaway sexuality. To imagine trying to treat excessive sexual impulses without understanding prenatal events.

You see that this excessive reactivity can be a strong survival mechanism to handle early, primitive danger. The problem is that it was appropriate early on but not in adult life where it is excessive. We will never convince anyone about how wrong their reaction is because their physiology and its imprint is saying it is appropriate. The problem is that the body does not differentiate past from present. In the brain it is all the same. And in the reliving of those events the brain state in the reliving comes to exactly mimic the brain state at the time of the trauma. So no wonder the brain can be fooled. Being hyper-reactive was important early on but not normal now. And that is the problem. The only way to solve it is to go back over time and re-experience it fully and then the system and brain will know the difference and no longer over-react. We have seen this time and again as patients relive their past.

*(See the work of Vivette Glover. And also the work of the following between 2002 and 2010……O’connor, Heron and Glover. Also de Bruijn. And Williams and Taylor.)

On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 4/10)

2012-01-02T11:05:00.000-08:00

Let me reiterate: the feeling is experienced; the rape victim invariably creates the same bound hands together during a primal,(her father held her hands as he took her from behind), and she now sees what it made her do. She was hostile to men and became a lesbian. (This is from an actual case that we have filmed). She only felt safe with women. These are the insights that tumble out after a feeling. If she cannot have the insights, then perhaps there was not yet a connected feeling. Perhaps more was dredged up that has yet to be felt and connected. In other words, if there are no insights we are bereft of understanding the act-outs. It is as if to say there were no consequences from a disastrous feeling. And as I noted elsewhere, the earlier and feeling the greater the chance of a serious affliction later on. The valence or force of the imprint never lessens; the left side just covers it up better. So we see here how the obsession with the gas jet and the turn to lesbianism may have the same roots. It is behavior in an unconscious attempt to control a past harmful and traumatic feeling. So in a way, neurosis is the current way we control the past. The only problem is that in the present it remains out of context. It was appropriate to be afraid of father in the past but not normal now to be afraid of authority figures. It is logical but not normal.

So why are there attention deficits? Because the right which is charged with sustained attention is so loaded with pain that it off-loads some of its burden to the left. Now all kinds of inputs are coming in to disturb concentration and focus. The right cannot do its job. Remember that the very early trauma is lodged in the right and takes up space there, and above all, it constantly agitates because pain is driving it incessantly. It needs to connect with the left, and the neo-cortex but the gates stop it. Connection means the end of it as an agitating force. It means rest and relaxation; it means integration. No longer alien feelings but those who have found a home. So long as they are alien the system treats it as a foreign force and considers it as an invading stranger. When the feelings come too close to conscious-awareness the system goes into alarm mode; the white cells treat the feeling as alien and dangerous and the blood pressure and heart rate mount. The happens to almost every patient when they come close to deeply-lodged feelings. The left sounds the alarm when feelings come close and the system goes into alarm/panic mode; mobilizes to keep it all away, while gating swings into action. It stimulates evasive action, avoiding anything that will evoke feelings.

Those who had a harridan for a mother will avoid aggressive women in their lives. Most of us avoid whatever might set off alien feelings; and so in a way we are programmed. Those who had a tyrannical father may become obsequious in the face of male authority in order to stave off anger. The latent fear is already so high that the person cannot take any more. We can tell ourselves—the right self, not to be afraid but it is a weak force against a lifetime of terror; in the same way we can tell our selves not to eat chocolate when the imprint of starvation in the womb hidden on the right is importuning. The left is no match for the imprints on the right. They are always packing more power than the left, as they should; it is our emotional self. So we have an emotional self, an intellectual self and finally, a real self…united. It is that real self that can control things such as overeating or premature ejaculation. Why overeating? Because there is a history underlying it. He is eating out of his history. He is not only hungry now but back then—starving in the womb. He is trying to get fulfilled back then, as well. The same as trying to get love now to make up for no love as a child. Fulfillment is sine qua non; it cannot be forgotten so one is always looking for fulfillment in one way or the other. It is the left that takes need from the right and tries to find ways to get fulfillment, and it is always symbolic because the left side is basically the symbolic side. It wants more and more money because he cannot feel any fulfillment. The left brain sees the steak and the right brain rushes in with its history of starvation or deprivation to make the person eat for both times…..that is over-eating. The intellectual self has no emotional wallop by itself; that is why it is so weak in the face of powerful feelings. So there is sexual stimulation with the resulting premature ejaculation because the early pain is so heavy and the controlling left brain so weak.

On Going Hunting

2012-01-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

In the news today is a photo of two congressmen going out hunting with their orange uniforms and very large guns. I thought: is this fun? What fun could there possibly be to deliberately go out and kill an animal. Either killing a baby that will put his parents into a deep depression; yes they do get depressed; or kill a mama so that the baby will die soon from the same depressive malady that becomes deadly as it affects the heart and liver. Are they aware that they are killing members of a family, beings that have feelings, whose feeling brains are massive? What joy is there in the killing? Oh I forgot, those very big guns. I leave you to figure out the meaning.

There must be something atavistic about this ritual; perhaps it harkens back to the days when the best hunter was the hero who made sure of our survival. And maybe now they consider themselves heroes, macho, like Hemmingway, who measured his shark kills on a scale, in keeping with his loving bull fights, something so ineffably cruel that defies imagination. So again, what is it about killing, mostly a male occupation, that makes a leader of one country visit another, and the first thing they do is go hunting? It is all so Freudian and obvious. Is there any thought to whom they are killing and why? Nope. Just a habit. The quarterback Brett Favre loves to hunt deer with a bow and arrow. Putting an arrow through the head of a helpless deer that is fun for him. But wait, he also placed a photo of his penis on the internet. “I am a man, a tough man, at that.” Is there some relationship? Of course. I kill therefore I am a man. Ayayay. A play on the, I think therefore I exist. His motto is, I don’t think therefore I exist.

Anyone in touch with their feelings could not hunt. They would feel and understand about animals and their feelings and needs. It is a real feeling being; therefore, I would first teach all school children the veneration of all life. They would be in touch with their feelings so that before the impulse to hunt, they would say to themselves why I am I doing this? And the answer would come quickly. I feel insecure. I feel unimportant. I have hate inside me from own parental neglect. And on and on. Mostly hunting is a proof, of sorts, that I am a real person, a real man. And then what? They have to do it most of the time because it is an addiction that comes out of feelings and needs.

Of course there are strong cultural forces at work where hunting is part of the zeitgeist. And from the time the child can speak his head is filled with the glorification of killing. But there comes a time in life when we need to ask ourselves questions about ourselves; what am I doing and why am I doing it? Unhappily, that day never comes to a lot of us. We go through life dragging this body around and never demand who we are and why we act like we do.

I have watched baby chimps go into a deep depression and die after their parents were killed by hunters, and I think, how could anyone do that? I am sure there is always a good rationale but even paranoids have a seemingly good rationale for their murder—so and so didn’t pay up on his drug debts, or she left me for this other guy. But just for fun and for no other reason to call up a friend and dress up in those orange jump suits and go kill, that is way beyond me.

On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 3/10)

2011-12-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

Let’s be sure that we don’t mean awareness. It means experiencing and feeling it. It means having the original feeling again. And that is the difference. Awareness keeps us on the left no matter how hard we want to get to feelings. So if I tell a patient, “You know what feelings you have hidden? A lot of fear.” And she says, ”Yeah, I guess so. Thanks for the information.” That is the end of it. No help. Or if the doctor tells the patient, “explain your feelings.” All is lost because the left brain was used to discuss and explain when it should have first been the right brain. Defying evolution will never get us there. If you think before feeling you still may be out of control; if you feel before thinking you are in control. If I know what is causing my migraines I can get control. If I don’t know I have no control.

Yes, one can do behavior therapy and drive away the symptom which makes the person sicker because she is deprived of an outlet. If she cannot check the gas jets twenty times a day she suffers and is full of fear. The obsession is exactly like taking a tranquilizer. It makes the symptom tranquil but it remains unrelenting because the feeling is. When there is a generalized terror set down at birth or before, (see “Primal Healing” for a full explanation), it stays locked-in. The act out is checking gas jets, and they must be checked many times a day to keep the low-level fear from becoming explosive terror. Now the left brain does not know there is terror forcing the act-out; it just goes on happily with its obsession. And, then the person can reason--after all, it is not so bad. The obsession binds the feeling; thus, the left brain surrounds the right feeling and places a barrier around it; that barrier is in many places, including the corpus callosum.

Yet this person decides to have therapy, not because he suffers but because his wife told him to as she could not stand it any more. They could not go out to dinner until all the jets were checked over and over. So he goes to a therapist who focuses on the act-out, not the cause. Those gas jets. He won’t get well, although his left brain will engage in a constant struggle to control his act out. The inner pressure remains and will be deadly, in the literal form of the word. When he feels what is on the right he has control at last.

And he won’t change until we help him descend to the origins of the terror, in context. And that has to be done slowly over months, one pain at a time; one lesser pain leading to more heavy ones as we progress deeper in therapy. The primal context is that devilish right brain, all disguised and hidden. Yet only it knows about the terror. There is such a gap between the deep feeling and what it forces the obsessive to do that neither she nor her therapist can make the connection. So what are they left to do? Keep on treating the obsession as a viable entity all by itself, ad infinitum. The left brain has extracted its meaning from the origin. It is a therapy of fragmentation, of splitting the patient off from his symptom. It is inhuman and de-human.

Now we have the intellectual left and the emotional right. When we consider having psychotherapy the left chooses cognitive while the right seeks out gestalt (a kind of free-for-all of do whatever you want approach). Those with intrusion of pain may seek us out. We search out whatever will reinforce our neurosis. Let me quickly add that there can be no real progress in any psychotherapy without the active participation in full of both hemispheres. We cannot get well on one side of the brain while the other stays sick. We cannot avoid the pain and feelings that drive us from almost conception on and hope to be rid of anxiety, phobias and depression. The right holds all those secrets; it is up to the left to make the first step toward a rapprochement with it. This is not intellectual theorizing; what I state has a good deal of research behind it, including any number of split-brain experiments that tell us the function of each side.

(To learn more start with Drs Joe Bogen and Roger Sperry’s split-brain work).

Historically, the reason the left hemisphere gets so active when there is stored pain is that it has to suppress it so that it can get on with its job of concentrating on the outside world, the job, school, etc. The right, too, tries to contain overwhelming feelings so that the left can do its job properly. But when it is filled up it needs help, and it turns leftward for help and connection; alas, the left is absent because it has all these meetings and projects and places to go. It can’t be bothered. The left seeks out success when the only real success is to be a feeling human being who can love and be loved. And the busy man comes to therapy and wants action. But he soon finds out that his left brain has to slow down into the feeling zone and that it must accede to the right brain, something it is not used to. The patient complains of constant difficulty in falling asleep. His lower right level has long nerve networks reaching upward that drive the frontal thinking area to be activated; hence, the rumination—on the left. It cannot let go and allow the right to fall asleep. And it goes on and on because the right brain has been neglected. The pain is saying, “let me out,” but the left won’t do it. And so the symptom. The pain has to go somewhere. And then we treat that pain, the back, neck and stomach, because we did not treat the real pain. Is it really only about pain? No, it is about joy, love and contentment but the only way to get there is over the bridge to the pain on the right brain. Then it is real.

When defenses are weak (when life deals some cruel blows), there can be a breakthrough of deep imprinted terror, and the person claims she is having a panic or anxiety attack. Here the feeling is uncontrolled and uncontained; it has no special context for the moment until the patient takes the vehicle out of storage and rides back in time. The left has to cede hegemony to the right and let it take over, something it is not used to doing. Feelings can lead us to the truth, and that is why we can have such insights as a result because the left now knows what that hidden feeling made her do. The left now knows exactly what circumstances lead to her high blood pressure or his exhibitionism. And the insights flow effortlessly. “I have to show my penis so I can get an emotional reaction (shock)from a woman.” The post session insights are very much part of the primal experience, tying the two sides tightly together. No insights no feelings. Not every time but often.

Let me add in the case of the exhibitionist that before the insights there are many many days of feeling. “I tried every day to get my mother’s attention. She was too depressed to pay attention.” He relived many of these scenes and then the key feeling, “Look at me momma! Please!” To try to have an intellectual insight without all the preceding events and feelings is useless. It remains intellectual, does not seep into the system to make changes.

Let me reiterate: the feeling is experienced; the rape victim invariably creates the same bound hands together during a primal,(her father held her hands as he took her from behind), and she now sees what it made her do. She was hostile to men and became a lesbian. (This is from an actual case that we have filmed). She only felt safe with women. These are the insights that tumble out after a feeling. If she cannot have the insights, then perhaps there was not yet a connected feeling. Perhaps more was dredged up that has yet to be felt and connected. In other words, if there are no insights we are bereft of understanding the act-outs. It is as if to say there were no consequences from a disastrous feeling. And as I noted elsewhere, the earlier and feeling the greater the chance of a serious affliction later on. The valence or force of the imprint never lessens; the left side just covers it up better. So we see here how the obsession with the gas jet and the turn to lesbianism may have the same roots. It is behavior in an unconscious attempt to control a past harmful and traumatic feeling. So in a way, neurosis is the current way we control the past. The only problem is that in the present it remains out of context. It was appropriate to be afraid of father in the past but not normal now to be afraid of authority figures. It is logical but not normal.

So why are there attention deficits? Because the right which is charged with sustained attention is so loaded with pain that it off-loads some of its burden to the left. Now all kinds of inputs are coming in to disturb concentration and focus. The right cannot do its job. Remember that the very early trauma is lodged in the right and takes up space there, and above all, it constantly agitates because pain is driving it incessantly. It needs to connect with the left, and the neo-cortex but the gates stop it. Connection means the end of it as an agitating force. It means rest and relaxation; it means integration. No longer alien feelings but those who have found a home. So long as they are alien the system treats it as a foreign force and considers it as an invading stranger. When the feelings come too close to conscious-awareness the system goes into alarm mode; the white cells treat the feeling as alien and dangerous and the blood pressure and heart rate mount. The happens to almost every patient when they come close to deeply-lodged feelings. The left sounds the alarm when feelings come close and the system goes into alarm/panic mode; mobilizes to keep it all away, while gating swings into action. It stimulates evasive action, avoiding anything that will evoke feelings.

Those who had a harridan for a mother will avoid aggressive women in their lives. Most of us avoid whatever might set off alien feelings; and so in a way we are programmed. Those who had a tyrannical father may become obsequious in the face of male authority in order to stave off anger. The latent fear is already so high that the person cannot take any more. We can tell ourselves—the right self, not to be afraid but it is a weak force against a lifetime of terror; in the same way we can tell our selves not to eat chocolate when the imprint of starvation in the womb hidden on the right is importuning. The left is no match for the imprints on the right. They are always packing more power than the left, as they should; it is our emotional self. So we have an emotional self, an intellectual self and finally, a real self…united. It is that real self that can control things such as overeating or premature ejaculation. Why overeating? Because there is a history underlying it. He is eating out of his history. He is not only hungry now but back then—starving in the womb. He is trying to get fulfilled back then, as well. The same as trying to get love now to make up for no love as a child. Fulfillment is sine qua non; it cannot be forgotten so one is always looking for fulfillment in one way or the other. It is the left that takes need from the right and tries to find ways to get fulfillment, and it is always symbolic because the left side is basically the symbolic side. It wants more and more money because he cannot feel any fulfillment. The left brain sees the steak and the right brain rushes in with its history of starvation or deprivation to make the person eat for both times…..that is over-eating. The intellectual self has no emotional wallop by itself; that is why it is so weak in the face of powerful feelings. So there is sexual stimulation with the resulting premature ejaculation because the early pain is so heavy and the controlling left brain so weak.

For therapists, what the patient says is put into context by the right so that the doctor can also read the emotional subtext of what is going on. In other words, the doctor is not just listening to words but emotions. The left brain needs to hear words and cannot make decisions until he hears the right words. It cannot suss out what is an appropriate move without them. For example, when president Bush was told the Twin Towers were bombed he could not react immediately. He could not feel what was the right thing to do. So he waited, waiting for instructions so his left brain could decide what to do.

It would seem that deep depression is another one of those right brain imprints that never quite make it to upper level left connection; and so the malady lives on untouched by conscious/awareness. Repression of feelings set in so early that we come to think that depression is some kind of alien, unknowable force. We feel “heavy” because the deep powerful imprints are being held down, and we cannot seem to lift the burden. We are literally carrying a load—of pain. These imprints are all nonverbal and exceptionally early. They are almost unreachable except with a therapy that can get down that deep. No intellectual therapy can touch it; which is why there is widespread use of tranquilizers in conventional therapy. Imagine how far the imprint has to travel to reach the higher left brain cortical canopy and make a connection. Then the therapist says, “tell me how you feel.” All is lost because it is preverbal and nonverbal and cannot be expressed in words.

A little example from my life: someone is writing the story of my life. And so he went pretty far to interview one of my shipmates on the battleship we were on together. My pal recounted the story of a Japanese submarine that came up to the surface and was trying to ram us. Then we and another destroyer fired on the sub and sank it. I have no memory of all this, and I was standing on the gun station next to my pal. How is it possible that I do not remember and never did, except small snippets? I wasn’t there. I was in my past and my terror without cease. Where is my past? I have no idea. But I do know that my left side was not properly registering events. I may have seen what I saw but the left side did not acknowledge it and so I have no memory; and it bothers me no end that my life went by unconsciously. I was unconscious of my life; and it happens over and over again that friends tell me about high school and I have no memory of it. I was so deep in the hold of my early painful imprints that I was never there in the present in my childhood.

Just because the patient is unconscious doesn’t mean the doctor has to be. The doctor needs to know about the right brain and what it holds. When it is ignored any therapy that follows must be misleading. The doctor needs to know about how prenatal events get imprinted on the right and what they do to the left. Above all, the doctor needs herself to be connected.

One might wonder why I believe the force of the imprint never lessens even when we are sixty years old? Because in the reliving the force is there with all of its power, and the blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate climb to monumental proportions.

We don’t need to study brain damage to understand the contribution of each hemisphere because neurosis and the disengagement from the two hemispheres can explain so much. In other words, neurosis is very much like brain damage without there being damage, only dysfunction, which is reversible. That is the good part. We can be disconnected neuro-physiologically through destroyed or damaged tissue, or we can be disconnected through gating without serious damage. The result, however, is the same. One side doesn’t know what is going on in the other side.

I have left-brain friends, super-intellectuals who remember everything about their lives, dates, times and places. They are devoid of feelings but their memory is intact. If you had to make a choice what would you choose?

The two brains are symbiotic; and if you get into a therapy that does not fully account for that symbiosis it cannot work.Cognitive/behavior/insight therapy cannot get us deeply into the right side, while Reichian, Gestalt, hypnosis and other similar therapies miss out on the left. It is not like a choice they all make; their brains won’t allow it.

I will use myself to explain all this: I was always a right brainer. My mother while carrying was pre-psychotic, and the day I was born I was given over to my grandmother. When she killed herself my mother then went to a mental hospital and shipped my sister and I off separately for quite a long time to strange families. I never could recover from this and began a lifelong anxiety state that never stopped until Primal. I had serious ADD and ould not concentrate nor read anything complex. I could not pay attention and had to move constantly in class. I had serious image problems; very low self esteem. I was imprinted on the right and was dominated by it; there wasn’t enough left brain development to help repress feelings. Agitation on the right did not permit it. So there was a constant flow of pain from the right that decimated the left side function. I had constant nightmares and was terrified of going to sleep. I did badly in high school and never ever thought of any intellectual pursuit like going to college. But, in the navy I took an intelligence test and scored high, so high I was taken off my ship in mid-pacific and sent to university to study. I got straight A’s and realized “I can do this.” I then went to college and got serious about it. But it was not until Primal that I shook my anxiety, ADD, nightmares and the rest. Now after many decades I can think, and think abstractly. I can plan for the distant future, starting a book that will take years to finish.

The Primal Scream was a right brain piece, full of feeling. It took decades until I could use the left side to embellish my work and include serious science into it. I think now both sides are equal and work in harmony. Not easy. I could finally develop the left side because I got rid of all that garbage that was infiltrating into it from the right. As long as the right was overloaded there could be no harmony. And memory never made it to the left to be etched there permanently. The right had a terrible burden, and needed help. I discovered the help and gave it to myself. I invented, rather discovered, a therapy and could finally could make a marriage of the two sides and they get along famously. I can get to sleep easily because I can cede the left side to the right and get below the constant rumination and nightmares. And I can concentrate very well indeed. Apart from the damage surgeons did on my throat I am in perfect health; all systems working fine. I don’t think that is an accident. I use my case in order to illustrate all this for others.

THE RIGHT LEFT BRIDGE

There is major bridge connecting the two hemispheres; actually, there are several bridges (commissures) but the main one is called the corpus callosum; it carries over eighty percent of all emotional information to the left side. It has two functions: one, to carry information from right to left and back again; and two, to block information from right to left and back again. And why would it block information? When it means a lot of pain, more than the left/awareness can tolerate. Then we rationalize, “God will take care of a everything.”

When in our therapy the gates open up and the information passes through from right to left the patient is in pain. Happily, not for long. Once joined there is finally a way to relax; there is harmony and a mutual understanding. When the two sides make their contribution the patient is being integrated and on her way to getting well. And in our brain research there is a greater equilibrium between the two hemispheres.

The distance between our feelings/pain and our conscious/awareness of it I call the Janovian Gap. The wider the gap between right and left brains the sicker we may be and the earlier we may die, at least in my theoretical scheme. The two hemispheres are working against each other instead of in harmony with one another. The gap really is the distance between the right and left brain; how much information is allowed to traverse the corpus callosum (I call hereafter I call the corpus). When there is a wide gap there is an internecine battle going on. The loser is us. That gap often forces us to smoke and drink and take drugs. That is why the strict intellectual, and I know many in my field, has got to fall sick in his or her later life. And that sickness is often cancer. I wish this were just theory. I am at the age of having lost many friends. I see what they die of and I am rarely surprised. The right-siders, the impulsives, due to leaky gates, in my opinion, most often die of a stroke as the pain bursts through without sufficient control. Here the left side is weak.

On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 2/10)

2011-12-26T12:26:00.000-08:00

THE LEFT BRAIN

It is the left that is the thinker and the believer. It is the cognitive side, devoid of affect. This analyzing but unfeeling hemisphere seeks out single solutions for complex problems; its focus is narrow and superficial especially in my field. It believes what it is told and obeys readily.

One job of the left brain is to re-represent a feeling higher up in the nervous system. It helps symbolize the feeling as the conceptual brain comes online. And we can use that symbol (“he is suffocating me”) to gain access to the right unconscious (real early suffocation). We rely on evolution, understanding how early lower levels of consciousness move upward and forward pushing the next higher level into action. And in those high level actions there are imbricated the lower level imprints—in this case, real suffocation. So we do not have to guess what is there. The nervous system seems to join similar feelings, seamlessly, into its nerve bundles, classifying them as a single category for storage. Therefore, we know that below the symbol lies the feeling, and we are rarely disappointed. We in our feeling therapy never try to change the re-representation/symbol/left-brain alterations of the feeling, (you suffocate me), we only use it to open the door to the imprint, to history. Trying to convince the person that he is wrong in his belief that his wife is suffocating him, is ripping out the belief from its proper context and destroying the organicity of the experience. “OK. I now understand what you mean, doctor, and I see that is not what she is doing.” It is not her; it is his past that forced the belief. It comes not from outside but from inside. If we have no access to that inside we will mistakenly think it is simply her erroneous idea. Again, the belief was given birth by the feeling. The feeling on the right holds it in place.

I hesitate to say this but the left brain when left to is own devices and not softened by the right, is a tyrant, an unfeeling fascist who can do harm. Look at it in social terms; every fascist state denies the needs of its people and suppresses them when they show their face. So needs are not fulfilled and indeed are punished when they want fulfillment. The State is not democratic until acknowledges needs. We are not normal until needs are either fulfilled or felt; until the right brain sees the light of day.

The left brain is the symbolic self; it rises last out of evolution. It has the job of translating feelings from the past into current notions and beliefs, and helps us live in the present. Strange, because it does not speak the language of the right but it can translate it into its own verbal language. Clearly the right does not speak English but it speaks in its own way. Isn’t that odd? The left (say, in psychotherapy) tries to put words onto something that has no words; it is speaking the wrong language but is doing the best it can. Its language is numbers and statistics, after all. It is in theory and beliefs; that is why left brainers love theories and hypotheses. And they stick by them no matter what the reality. So they use the theory to interpret the patient’s words and cannot learn anything new that might contradict the theory.

You cannot get a doctor’s degree in my field without quoting a bunch of numbers. The only proof a student can proffer to get a diploma is statistics. And voila, there is the sought-after diploma, at last. But what happened? On the way the left crushed the right forevermore, never to be returned to is proper place. And they give the student the diploma with the right brain attached in case he may need it in the future. Alas, he doesn’t; I mean, he does, but he can’t find it. He lost it in the seven years of desiccated, disembodied, devitalized and etiolated study.

You see the problem we have had in psychotherapy? Left brain doctors adopting left brain therapies and getting left brain answers for their results. They publish in left brain journals for left brain scientists. Perfect. It reinforces itself and reifies the results in a closed circle of reason. Then a lonely right brainer comes along and says, “Hey I have a new idea.” No one wants to hear it. They are busy perfecting the minutia of their theory. They have a very good rationale for what they are doing.

We do need the left side for science and the right side for feelings but never one or the other. And if we have to make a critique of any other therapy it is because it skews to one side or the other. The right brainers get involved in airy-fairy approaches with little science behind them, (feelings and imagination from the right run wild), while the left brain maintains a narrow focus not seeing the implications nor totality of the event. We need both; left and right working together, good imagination and feelings even beyond the facts, and facts that place feelings and imagination within the constraint of science.

The problem we have in our profession of mental health is that those early experiences lie on the right and do not tell their secrets to the left. That is one reason it remains unconscious. The experience has no words nor scenes to help us know and remember them. After all, life in the womb is wordless and bereft of scenes. Here lies the problem. Ina verbal, intellectual therapy we are trying to learn about the unconscious with a language that is on the left. It’s watching the game from the far-away left bleachers and understands nothing. The right is trying to inform it with its anxiety, obsessions and depressions but the left can’t hear it. The right has the key responsibility for integration of the two sides, but it cannot do it alone; and too often the left is not interested. It has its modus operandi and does not want to be bothered. It never wants to get too emotional. It cries a few tears and believes that is the extent of human emotion. It is not. Clearly, the right is more “human.” It cares about the living and it cares about feeling.

As we mature, the left comes on line, and the right is relieved because it can “dump” some of its load onto the left. What it dumps is the energy and force of the feelings and imprints; not the content. The left hemisphere is like a shadow of the right, only vaguely aware of what the real feeling is. Yet in a vague way it understands a bit. The left is always looking through a screen trying to figure out what the real feeling is. So the person feels depressed but doesn’t know about the deep and early hopelessness and helplessness imprinted there. Then we have a doctor who labels it depression, when that is not the feeling at all. It is a left brain tag from the left field stands describing what may be wrong. Diagnosis is a label not a dynamic description. The left will try to make the emotional information rational, as best it can. When that load is too heavy with right side profound hopelessness, the left side can be overwhelmed. There is then a profound weltschmerz that overcomes the left, as well. And the patient just feels down. The doctor says, “You are depressed.” The patient says, “thank you,” and now what? How do we treat depression when we do not know what it is? The labels don’t tell us much but feelings do. Labels and diagnoses are left brain and can only approximate the right. When the patient plunges into right brain deep hopelessness the depression begins to lift and we have learned something.

So the poor left side, that aloof insensitive guy in our head senses depression and struggles to make sense of what is going on inside. Confusion reigns. (Unfortunately, only the right orbitofrontal cortex, around the eyes, can look back into our history and suss out our old feelings.

As the load of pain increases the left is obligated to fabricate paranoia or fantasy of some kind, “They are after me and want to kill me.” Or it can adopt booga booga, far-out, spacey ideas that are beyond reality. We might call those ideas “crazy,” but it is only the left trying to accommodate the pressure from the right; to encircle and bind the terrible force, and to make it rational. The left is trying to fabricate a rationale for the feeling without knowing exactly what the feeling is; a strange paradox. But if we asked the person who was rationalizing what was the feeling behind it all he would have no idea. It all remains unconscious because of the lack of connection. We see this in the political sphere where groups want more and more arms because they feel unsafe. They concoct an enemy that we must arm against. They will never feel safe because “unsafe” is an imprint, an imprint that forces the left to find a rationale--an enemy. Yet they will only feel safe, ultimately, when they have gone back to feel "unsafe" in its original context.

One would think that the right simply dumps what it can to the left and that is the end of it. But no. There are filters that scramble the message so that only a bit of the memory/feeling gets through. The left must guess what the feeling is, and it manufactures ideation to cover it. To produce the message and its comprehension we must address the brain that is holding the old, old secrets, and we cannot do that with the left brain; that means we cannot use the intellect to accomplish the task. We must seduce the right brain to give up its pain, and it does so reluctantly—and slowly, and methodically and ever-so hesitantly. It is not in a rush to feel pain but it will do so if it is not thrust into it abruptly. Gently, gently is the watchword. The left must relinquish its hold, as well. And we must use the language of the right; simple sentences, a light tone, unforced cadence and mostly non-verbal cues; a touch here a nod of the head there. If you want to talk big words and long sentences go to the left and ruin the session. And above all, do not use abstractions that the left side loves because that throws the patient into the wrong brain and stops feelings in their tracks. We use her body language to tell us where to go; a cough, a tear, a tension all speak volumes and talk to us explicitly. When we feel someone is hurting, a little hug will bring forth the tears, whereas a lengthy discussion or positive cheerleading won’t. It is only what we do in therapy but it takes years to learn it.

Now we see why the ideas we manufacture are so unchanging; they are defending against a deep unconscious feeling that is not changing. And we/the left don’t know about this. I find this incredible that we have feelings on one side that are not recognized on the other. Alas, that is the human condition. It makes us eat chocolate and drink vodka and yet it is as if that side belonged to someone else; I guess in a way it does. What happens is that the left side takes the leitmotif of the right-side feeling and gives it structure. The right cannot do that; structure is not what it is about.

So we have a danger (of the feeling—lack of oxygen at birth or lack of love)which forces the manufacture of an enemy. And now the left does what it can to protect itself against that enemy. In extreme psychosis one puts foil covers on the head to stop the aliens from getting in.

It is pretty much the same in all cases. For example depression, which most often has at its base deep hopelessness. Until the person feels fully that hopelessness, in context, the tendency to depression will stay. And it stays a threat for a lifetime. Where does the feeling come from? Many places and many different times; perhaps at birth being impeded from coming out into life or being strangling by the cord; whatever engenders hopelessness—insuperable odds. This may be compounded later with feeling unloved with no chance at love by two statues (parents) incapable of love, compounded again by a husband later on who is cold and indifferent. All this exacerbates the feeling of hopelessness. So, depression is not a feeling; it is the result of feeling, the suppression of it. The left side is often playing whack-a-mole; knocking down any sign of that hopelessness as soon as it shows its face. The person, driven by right, obliges the left brain to stuff itself with pain-killers without even knowing that there is pain. And if the left knows there is pain inside it rarely knows what it is. That is because the right is protecting the left from too much information--pain. The right is both a friend and an enemy. Choose your weapons; you cannot have both. When you feel fully you have only a great friend who liberates you.

The left brain loves categories which is why the new psychiatric diagnostic manual is as thick as the Manhattan phone book. Each new behavior has a category, so instead of seeing how feeling underlies it all, the experts, under the emprise /hold of the Behaviorists decide to concentrate on diagnostic categories, as if that can really helps or makes a difference in therapy. So now they want to include forgiveness and also gratitude as categories; the only thing left out is sneezing but it won’t be long. The truth is when my patients begin a certain kind of deep cough they are usually into something from deep in the neuraxis and it is truly diagnostic; so you see coughing is a diagnosis. Why list each behavior in lieu of the motivation/feeling behind it? Because feeling has been left out of the mix. So those left brainers are building one by one several thousand diagnostic categories and they do it because the insurance companies require it for payment. Nothing to do with science; nothing to do with the brain or psychology or people’s suffering; more to do with finance and economics. Categories are not people; they are things, inhuman, devoid of humanity and suffering. Doesn’t that fit nicely with giant insurance corporations? And isn’t that perfect for the left brain?

The left adores vocabulary. Big words to confuse and obfuscate(oops)meaning. We then have to wade through the verbiage to see if we can understand it. Again, feelings lead to simple language; the more abstracted we are the bigger and more complicated the words. And that is why when we professionals read textbooks or scientific reports they are almost indecipherable. But if you want another professional to respect you, you need this kind of vocabulary.

If we meet someone who is inflexible we have a left-brainer. If one is thinking about divorce because the wife is so rigid, think about a therapy that will help her join with the flexible, creative side.

The left side has a certain arrogance to it; it can’t be wrong---at least until it is humbled by the right side truths that show it reality. Meanwhile, the left side is that of defense, “I am not wrong. You (or the devil) made me do it.” The left-brainer cannot accept emotional reality until he checks statistics to be sure; to have his unreality verified. The left side, in short, doesn't easily adapt to new ways of doing things. It is obdurate and unyielding. The left-brain doctor thinks she can cure addiction without acknowledging the right. She focuses on the addict’s bad ideas and compelling behavior. But neglects where the feelings lie. The left does not like to hear emotional truths, therapist or addict. It is an unconscious conspiracy of two. But when the load is so great on the right there is a burst-through of pain, and the left can no longer function well, drastic measures are required. “Burst-through" means from right to left; the right is now a gate-crasher. It has to get out no matter what. It needs freedom from constraint, a constraint that may have begun during the birth process where egress out of the womb was blocked.

The left side is the “aware” side, (of full conscious/awareness), and when the depths of emotional pain surges forward the person is suddenly aware of what is down there. But the left side often flees from that knowledge. It is a very reluctant customer, and accepts ideas most skeptically.

The problem is that those early traumatic experiences lie on the right and do not tell its secrets to the left. Worse, the left side is largely indifferent to it throughout life. The left wasn’t even “alive” when all the sturm um drang took place. That is one reason it is unconscious. And why we do not know about it. The left hemisphere has its modus operandi and does not want to be bothered. Its focus is outside. It never wants to get too emotional; in fact, it can’t. There is insufficient emotional equipment on the left. So the person has mastered economics and knows nothing of the body she carries around all of the time.

Too often the left won’t help out with feelings, and indeed, runs from the right and its contents. The left senses danger. While the left brain is telling her analytic/cognitive therapist, “My parents could not show their feelings but I knew what they meant and I forgive them for it,” the right brain is screaming to her feeling therapist, “Hold me. Touch me! Love me just a little.” And that need/feeling is burrowing away in our unconscious stealthily doing its damage, weakening the heart, raising blood pressure and going about the job of killing us because the left brain refuses to acknowledge the need. Not only “refuses” but aids and abets suppressing the need and keeping it out of contact with our left side thinking, comprehending selves.

The left is often fear-ridden, jumpy and startled, with good reason because when the imprint rises from the depths the person can begin to feel terror, not a pleasant experience. The right side is literally strangling while the left side senses panic. Think of this because I cannot get over how bizarre it is. The right side is holding the actual memory and its sensation/feeling of strangling, while the left side is screaming at her husband, “You leave me no room to breathe.” When the right moves toward conscious/awareness that actual sensation starts to become conscious (always think conscious=right intrusion; the transformation of the left from simply “aware” to conscious). But when we insert tranquilizers into her system she will stop yelling, “You leave me no room to breathe.” Because we have further stuffed that feeling deeper into the unconscious so that for the moment it no longer drives the left side to yell about strangling and no breathing room. The closer the right moves to the left the more impelling the behavior. When the right moves all the way over into the left we have a primal. For that we need help because the defense system usually won’t allow it. It is only when the defense system has already opened and the right has broken through that we suffer and become partially aware of it.

When there is a strong right-left defense system, with the person heavily on the left, his interest for a lifetime will be business, science and external symbolic focus (like money and scientific facts). The arts are over on the right; which is why the artist often suffers and takes drugs. He is living inside the pain; the good part is that he is also on the side of creativity.

If one is to be liberated from the unconscious we have to suffer again, as unfair as that seems. The pain has to surface so it can be connected. The right has to cross over into the left; no cure without that. Remember, when all those different approaches out there discuss making us conscious, we need to know what and where the unconscious lies and what it takes to make it conscious. The left almost never has a clue. The right does. It never tells us the reason but we can feel it. The left knows the reason after connection because the feeling is there. The right is ready to connect when the left is. When that connection happens we can finally experience joy. The right has met its soul-mate and what a relief! We are connected, integrated. But wait, there is more; much more to this story. Let’s look some more at the left hemisphere.

The left loves the mechanical. It works point by point in meticulous fashion. It is the left side that is cognitive and helps form belief systems. Its focus is narrow and channeled. It does great brain surgery, but as I noted, don’t ask it to do a riff in a jazz piece. It can read the notes but cannot feel the music.

The left often thinks it feels but it only thinks it. It cannot feel it until it feels, as simplistic as that sounds. It is basically detached from feelings and is devoid of emotion. The left loves numbers, statistics and categories, and the so-called “objective facts.” It is the hemisphere of abstraction, of shredding the emotions out of emotional events and human interaction. Think here of cognitive therapy; it shreds the last ounce of feeling from psychologic observation so that we are left with dry facts.

I note that one of the key functions of the left is to suppress feeling. When the right feeling threatens to become conscious the left rushes in to shut it down; it orders the gates into action. The prefrontal cortex moves against the rising feeling on the deeper right and we remain unfeeling, which is one way we block bad feeling—numbed out. The left makes sure that there is an infusion of serotonin and other inhibitory chemicals (GABA and other repressors) to bolster gating against the right.

It is the left that forgives, blames, regrets, is ashamed, shows gratitude, remorse and appreciation; all of which are not necessarily feelings but looks like them, and can be faked. And if in a criminal proceeding you do not show remorse and say how sorry you were to kill that girl you will not get a reduced sentence. But if you can fake sincerity you will get off sooner. Why? Words, words, words. If we cannot feel we must take your word for it. If we can feel we can suss out the feeling in your words. If there is any.

The left side can manufacture all sorts of rationales to explain why there is and was no love or why I was not wrong and you are. It is expert at defending, while the right succumbs to these left-side rationales, and burrows itself more deeply into the physical system. We do need the left side for science and the right side for feeling.

So now we can understand such symptoms such as obsessions. Obsessions are not just thoughts; they arise out of obsessive feelings which drive them. They are in evolutionary order; feelings at the beginning followed by thoughts and beliefs. One may try doorknobs ten times a day to get over the fear of something being there, i,e,. bugs. The right feels very unsafe, perhaps in the womb with a very highly strung, anxious mother. Later on, years later, the left tries to keep the imprinted unsafe feeling in bounds by checking the gas jet twenty times. What is diabolic is that the obsessive rarely if ever knows what lies in the right brain that makes her do it. So isn’t it obvious that when the two sides connect it means the end of all that?

On Going Crazy

2011-12-25T00:25:00.000-08:00

In the psychologic literature they often equate having delusions with schizophrenia or psychosis. But I believe that there are many ways to go crazy not just delusions; in fact, delusions are the mind’s way of going off track. But what about how the body goes crazy? Remember there are levels of brain function, of levels of consciousness and each of those can go crazy in their own way. I submit that cancer may be the insanity of the cells and those cells may be crazy long before we have the capacity to think crazy. We know now that the DNA of cells on the lookout for developing cancer cells, our cellular guardians, are heavily methylated. Methylation usually means trauma earlier on. It is how the cells are tagged for trauma. That is, as the cells encounter adversity they are marked thereafter and they change through a process known as epigenetics. Those cells are now aberrant. And they can go crazy, spilling over their natural boundaries and continuing on a rampage for years; cancer can be considered psychosis of the cells, but as we evolve the message of damage moves higher up and transmutes, perhaps, into what we usually think of as insanity. It is still the cell DNA going crazy. The point of all this is that we should not only consider current damage, (pollution, bad diet, etc., all valid) but also we need to go back to generating sources to ultimate causes.

There is a good evidence now of how external toxins affect the DNA of the fetus and result in serious disease, whether cancer of psychosis. But the mother is also a spillway of toxic chemicals as her disturbed condition can result in overproduction of stress hormones (cortisol) which ultimately affect the baby she is carrying. Again epigenetics is the study of how the environment affects the DNA of the offspring, how it changes genes and their expression. Thus, the genes are the notes but the epigenes play the music. And they can play discordant music that adversely affects the system into developing cancer and/or later psychosis. There are several studies out now that indicate epigenetic dysfunction and the development of psychosis. Imprints take the notes and twist them according to adverse early experience. The early experience I call the imprint and it means that related DNA has been methylated and marked as traumatic. This methylation may be the culprit in all sorts of diseases later on, including Alzheimers disease. If we find a way through reliving to de-methylate key cells and that reverses Alzheimers we are our way to an important therapy.

(See the work of B.P Rutten on Epigenetic Mediation of Environmental Influences; and also F. Perera and Julie Herbstman on Prenatal environmental effects on disease. Also the work of Mill and Petronis on psychotic disorders) .

But now consider this: suppose we could treat all forms of cancer in the same way. Remember that trauma is inscribed in the cell DNA from the time soon after conception. The earlier the trauma and damage the more severe the response. It is why, in my opinion, mental psychosis begins its life in the first months of gestation where a smoking and drinking mother, a mother who is mentally unstable, can imprint great damage to the fetus. It is where the brain cells are being organized, but the damage is there long before we have the capacity for a false thought or delusion—a false belief. On its way upward as we evolve, the cells are already reacting to the damage in their own way. And heavy methylation affects both the cancer control cells and the cell DNA that produce mental illness. It is, in short, the same cause, different targets. Those targets may also be “chosen” due to genetics (inheritance), lifestyle, and many other factors.

The task, it seems to me, would be to try to reverse the damage, go back and undo the trauma. That sounds impossible, but there are chemical ways to reverse methylation, and I am proposing psychological ways—reliving the early trauma, even without words or scenes and return the cells to the original form, given that there is not too much damage already. Just because I call it psychological ways, it is still neurochemical at its base. It is just a more natural process without introducing chemicals into the system; rather, allowing the entire organism to normalize and see if the methylated cells return to normal.

I have written about resonance in my new Life Before Birth. It means that feelings that are related, hopelessness, for example, all levels of our personal evolution, bundle together so that when we set off one feeling in the present, hopeless over getting into college, it can dredge up related earlier feelings and sensations, deep hopelessness, futility and depression. This means that very early trauma--sensations in the first months of gestation before there are feeling structures in place are also part of the resonance. The primordial imprint and methylation becomes elaborated as we mature so that each new higher level of brain organization adds to the generating source; adding first, emotions and feelings, and secondly, thoughts and beliefs. It is still the same neural circuit. And each level is damaged, as well. Hopelessness is experienced in different ways but at the very bottom of it all is damage that has no words and no scenes. It is cellular damage done in the first months of life; it is a damage that has no words, a damage the predates words by millions of years in antiquity.

The good part of this is that as we begin a reliving, starting with a disappointment and despair in the present, the circuit will open up to deeper feelings until finally the reliving incorporates damage long before we had words. We may not be aware of is the added trauma from the past but it is there as part of the feeling, incorporated into the feeling circuit. And it is in this way that we may undo severe very early damage that may have caused cancer, in the first place. It is all part of a gestalt, of an overall imprint that has its antennae higher in the nervous system; related together, perhaps, by chemical similarities and by similar electrical frequencies.

This is not entirely theoretical since we see this taking place every day. As patients begin reliving they dig deeper in their nervous system as the therapy goes on., which allows for deeper more comprehensive access to the deepest imprints in the system, imprints that share a commonality—specific, shared feelings. It may be one reason that we rarely see cancer among our advanced patients. This, of course, needs to be tested. It is not that the patient tries to go deeper; it is that the system opens up all on its own permitting deeper access. If we hurry it by forcing the patient or giving him drugs it can only damage the process. It can produce mental psychosis as things are being brought up prematurely. Evolution needs to take place, and that means that we need to learn from evolution, seeing how our present structure has evolved over many years, but adding on each time new structures. Thus there is a base, a primitive reptile, that becomes a chimp and finally a human, in the same way in our personal evolution that we are humans in the present reliving, descending to our mammalian era and finally down to the basic reptilian epoch. All levels are part of our humanity. The point is that they are all related, still in our systems. Evolution has not discarded them; it has incorporated them. I see our personal evolution, ontogeny, in the same way. Each trauma leaves a trace, a tag, that is related to other similar kinds of trauma later on. There are representations of the original imprint on higher levels; thus, each new level adds its contribution to the memory--the imprint. They all add up to what makes us human both in phylogeny (in human history) and ontogeny (our personal history). It is those markers or tags that identify and inform the specific feelings to each other. Combined, they compound the feeling and its pain; adding to the force that one day will cause serious disease. Cancer, then, is the end result of evolution just as deep early imprints result in mental psychosis later on. They are part of the distortion and dislocation of the function of cells. The imprints change the neural circuits resulting first, in the psychosis of the cell—cancer, and secondly, psychosis of the mind—schizophrenia; deformation and distortion of the neural cells. The system can only take so much before there is a breakdown. We call that cancer and psychosis but it is all part of the same evolutionary process. It is an ineluctable result of our history; how then can we properly understand it without a return to that history? If history and historic imprints are the cause, and if we ignore them, then we can only beat back the symptom and never eliminate the cause. That is why there is an inevitable fall back into cancer and psychosis; the generating source is still alive. That is why we need to wait years to see if the sufferer is “clear,” if she has escaped history.

So to resume, since this is a rather complicated subject; the tag or marker on the primitive gene DNA, the epigenetic imprint is methylated; then as we mature those markers are rerepresented higher up so that first we get cancer and then later we become psychotic all from the very same imprint and distortion of the cell DNA. It is the antennae of the imprint that creates the havoc; the re-representation on higher levels the culprit. Here is one reason we can go crazy in life when there is adversity. It is not just that event, a family member dying, but what those cells contain as information that puts us over the top.

On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 1/10)

2011-12-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

Nearly all of us know that our brains are split in two: the right and left brains. They are very different, like two separate parts of us. They have their distinct personalities and functions. One is more human/feeling than the other, as we shall see. When they don’t work together there is conflict and we are in trouble. We may get sick early in life and die prematurely. Sounds like an apocalypse, and it is. Connections between the two brains can be life saving. They need each other desperately in order to establish our humanity; this is not just an intellectual idea. If we don’t have them working together we are less human, as I shall show as we go along. The question is: what makes them not work in harmony? How do we get them to do so? And what does each hemisphere do exactly?

Let’s look at each side and see what they do:

THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE

First of all, we should know that the right side came into being first and is primordial in every sense of the word. It is the feeling hemisphere. It helps store old emotional memories inside its orbit. It absorbs and registers our very early trauma while in the womb. The early experience has no words nor scenes to help us know and remember them. After all, life in the womb is wordless, nor are there scenes attached. It is all sensations and then feelings. The right brain has the key responsibility for integration of the two sides, but it cannot do it alone. It needs a partner. We will see who that will be. Clearly, the right is more “human.” It cares about the living and it cares about feeling. It is more sensitive and caring. It senses nuance, honesty and insincerity. `

The right side is flexible and prefers a panoply of choices. It is no accident that creativity increases in those who have had a left hemisphere stroke. (The right controls the left side of the body, and vice versa). So many of my patients have discovered their artistic capabilities after therapy; they have been opened up not only to the pain on the right but also the creativity. Research has the shown a jazz riff (improvised solo) to be strictly right brain. In short, it is the feeling side that handles creativity.

One of the reasons for the right’s flexibility is that it is better myelinated early on, meaning it has thicker myelin sheaths (a kind of fatty covering) around nerve cells that help them transfer information to other cells. It is more able to inform the top neo-cortex of what information, including pain that it is holding down deep. There is much to discuss on this hemisphere subject.

The right side is musical, it comprehends tone, and nuance, the subtleties of sounds. In therapy the doctor needs to be aware of shifting tone because it offers us the subtext of what is going on in the patient. The tone exposes the right brain while the left brain of the patient rattles on with sophisticated big words. We understand the right side pressure by the torrent of words the patient uses. If she is loaded up to the gills with feelings the words may rush out toppling over one another, and spill out under great pressure. A slight little wobble in the throat tells us that feelings are right there. Music helps us deal with patients; it helps bring up key feelings and scenes. It evokes a special time in their lives. It is the right brain expressing itself, its emotional self. And when patients recall scenes and events, sometimes we ask them to sing the song or hum along with the radio; up come feelings. We are addressing and giving voice to the right brain; very helpful in a feeling therapy.

To repeat: the right brain is the feeling one for good and bad. It takes precedence in our lives, gathering into its maw all the unhappy events of our early life, including life in the womb; the carrying mother’s drinking cocktails, staying on a strict diet to keep her shape, a stressful job, and/or fighting with her husband. The right hemisphere is the keeper of the truth of our early lives and what happened to us emotionally. The right cannot sustain focused attention. The left can and does. The left is interested in what is going on exactly. The right maintains a more general vigilance.

The right lacks focused attention; just what is needed in class when the teacher gives an assignment. The right goes into panic mode and the person cannot learn.XXXXXXX Anxiety suffuses and suffocates the left’s attempts to learn. It crosses the corpus bridge (explained in a moment), to upset the status quo. “You know,” says the right, “my right hippocampus which is suppose to handle the memory of new events cannot do the job.” It seems to be overwhelmed, and that is why anxiety cases have such poor memory of past events. The past is mostly a blank as the brain structures charged with memory have defaulted under the imprinted load. And information on the right cannot inform the left of its experience so the memory does not get embedded on the left, and the person later on can hardly recall infancy and childhood events.

The right is often so loaded with feelings and pain that it cannot pay attention to the present; that is, it cannot focus on the present when the past is demanding attention, as well. When the past is full-up with terror and anxiety, memory vanishes. It is no accident that the right hippocampus is involved in emotional memory, and not the left. It always sees the bigger picture, and is always looking for patterns of behavior that would fit into that whole. There is a poverty of detail on the right which the left can supply. The left side loves detail. The right can’t be bothered. If instructions say, “pour out exactly two tablespoons into a saucepan,” all goes blank. The right goes by “feel” and guesses how to do it. Precision is not the right’s forte. That intuitive side is necessary in a feeling therapy, (but a little science is also helpful).

A patient can explain how afraid she is all day long but when she gets down and feels it in past context, it is another story. The left hemisphere senses terror but only the right has access to it; it can feel it in all its strength. When there is a breakthrough of feeling to the left side there can be a panic attack; the right is purging itself.

To repeat: all of the very, very early traumas are mostly processed on the right side, even before the left side comes into maturity; before it exists as a force. And those early experiences are imprinted and engraved in the system. And since the original experience is non-verbal the reliving must be non-verbal. And since the original experience was accompanied by a blood pressure of 170 over 115, the reliving must duplicate that exactly. The imprint cannot lie; it is remembering in its own way--neurobiologically. And when there is a reliving of the birth trauma there are very high vital signs throughout the process. It is our way of verifying the reliving is a true event. Therefore, no therapy that is intellectual at its base (cognitive/insight) can work on this. There needs to be a different kind of language to get the patient back there.

No level of brain tissue can do the work of a different level of brain function; the left can never do the work of the right. We need to address the painful feelings on the level at which it occurred and in the hemisphere that holds it. We cannot use words to get us to preverbal times. This is the basic mistake of today’s psychotherapy. Trying to verbally comprehend that which has no verbal rationale; that which cannot only be understood in non-verbal ways: that must be relived without words, words that had no part in the original imprint. It makes as much sense as getting the right limbic, feeling brain to engage in complex mathematics. That is not its job. You cannot talk complexity to it but you can sing to it. And because there are no words you can hum to it. Now you know why those who stutter or suffer cross dominance of the brain can stop stuttering if they sing. You can actually pinpoint the cause in this way. When we take words out of the equation things get simpler.

The close colleague of the right hippocampus, is the right amygdala, the agent of fear and deep feelings. This is one of the key structures to limbic area feeling. The amygdala is also involved in overall emotional processing. When deeper level terror in the brainstem comes up to join feelings of fear in the right limbic area there can be an out-of-control panic. When the right amygdala is loaded with feelings it seems to engorge waiting to get rid of its load. New research indicates that the offspring of depressed mothers have enlarged amygdalas. Among other functions it scans the environment for threats and sends signals of fear so that we may react appropriately. These people become adults who might be supersensitive to threats, and when the valence of it early on was enormous we have the soil for later paranoia, someone who sees threats everywhere. This is particularly true of those long time pot smokers where the right side defenses weaken and become more and more of a threat to the left. Then the left has no choice but to produce more and more strange ideas, essentially paranoiac in character. Those ideas tell us clearly that feelings are threatening and defenses are crumbling: beware! As the years go on those ideas become fixed and unassailable.

(Science: “How Sad Moms Change A Child’s Brain. Aug 22, 2011).

A carrying mother’s deep depression makes a change in the baby’s brain; there are no words or scenes to express it or remember it. It is remembered organically. There is a tag on it, a mark made by a process known as methylation which labels the experience and alters the expression of genes and influences behavior. The genes are often interpreted wrongly by the nervous system but the addition of the chemical methyl group to the cells marks it for a lifetime. It creates an epigenetic event which changes how the genes unfold, or at least how the brain interprets those genes. When a gene changes is “face” it sometimes cannot be recognized. This change not only affects later behavior but also the propensity for certain serious illness including cancer. And these traumas are heavily right brained. So later in therapy when we address the patient and have her explain what is bothering her she simply does not know; the left brain wasn’t in the loop at the time, and the right brain is not talking, literally. Yet she is depressed and doesn’t know why and cannot seem to get out of it. Meanwhile, the event is tagged and waiting for connection. Until there is that connection—the hook-up, there will be damage. It is clear that only an organic, systemic therapy that can reach preverbal events can change things and help the patient get well. And that means not using the left brain primarily to accomplish it. The left brain is in secondary position.

There is ample information now that when the carrying mother is under stress she is spilling stress hormones into her placenta; it impacts the fetus who is thereafter under stress, as well. It is now an imprint that will endure perhaps for a lifetime.**

**(“Prenatal Programming of Human Neurological Function.” C.A. Sandman et al., International Journal of Peptides, Vol. 2011)

We must remember that most all of the very early traumas are processed on the right side, even before the left side comes into maturity; before it really exists as a force. And those early experiences are embedded into the system. And since the original experience is non-verbal the reliving must be non-verbal. And since the original experience was accompanied by a blood pressure of 170 over 115, the reliving must duplicate that exactly. The imprint cannot lie; it is remembering in its own way, neuro-biologically. And when there is a reliving of the birth trauma there are very high vital signs throughout the process. It is our way of verifying the reliving is a true event. Therefore, no therapy that is intellectual at its base (cognitive/insight) can work on this. There needs to be a different kind of language to get the patient back there.

Both the feeling/limbic structures (hippocampus and amygdala) are part of the feeling aspect of our being and are principals in dealing with emotion. Discussing one’s fear is left brain; feeling it is right brain; think of the difference between psychoanalysis and primal. Explaining one’s feeling without the actual experience is invalid, as we shall see. It cures nothing. Discussing feeling after having relived the imprinted memory is valid. The evolutionary cart is not before the horse and the system says, “Each his turn. Mind your manners; feelings first, thoughts and insights second.

When the right side is saturated with painful feelings it becomes overwhelmed. This shows in later life as the inability to do several tasks at once because the incoming input on the left is vying for space with the internal right side activation. It becomes all “too much.” Then begins the avoidance of any task that would overwhelm the already filled-to-the-brim container. The left is not sure why it is doing this avoidance, and indeed, it remains mostly unconscious. It just acts-out, and the act-out is as unconscious as the feeling. The person is simply easily overwhelmed, seemingly by the input from outside but in reality, from old remote imprints from long ago. They surge forward and keep us overloaded. So when the husband gives orders to do this and the wife blows up and scorns his constant demands, she just “can’t take any more.” So there is constant information coming from the lower levels of the right brain telling the left of its troubles but it doesn’t want to hear. The right is saying, “Listen, there is something that I have to tell you that will save our lives.” And the left says, “Try later, I’m busy right now. I have projects to finish.” And the right responds, “You don’t understand. I have a connection to make and you are so distant; you need to welcome me.”

On Rearing Decent People: How the Imprint Works

2011-12-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

A kid acts up and acts out and we ask, “who does he take after, his mom or dad?” Maybe his grandmother? Or maybe none of them or all of them. I will need to explain. The point I am going to make is that we are pretty much driven not so much by our genes but by our epigenes; that is, what happens to our genes as we mature. Because experience, especially while we live in the womb, channels those genes into diverse circuits, turns them on or off, and generally, controls their behavior. Is it nature or nurture? It is what happens to nature through our nurture, and that is not a play on words. What happens to us early on doesn’t change our genes but changes how and when and if they are expressed. And there are chemical processes that help explain all this, as well. I won’t make this complicated but it helps us understand ourselves and others if we take a little effort to suss out how this all works.

So it is not surprising how signals from the environment change the expression of our genes. What may be surprising is how early all that takes place; from the earliest months after conception on. The fetus (and embryo) changes according to its environment; we are too used to thinking about environment as what happens on the playground, in school or at home. But what is crucial is that the mother is the key and only environment for the fetus in the womb. What happens to the mother happens to the baby, as well. When she is anxious her stress chemicals are dumped into the placenta and affect him. He is born into a world of stress; he anticipates a stressful environment throughout his life, and it doesn’t take much later on to set him off. His latent stress level is already very high. When the mother is depressed the fetus can be down-regulated so that many of his biochemicals are also depressed. He will be in the “hypo” mode where his vital signs are low and there may not be enough key chemicals, such as thyroid, produced. His physiology duplicates his mother’s. He is a reticent and diffident child with little aggressive, little energy and drive and little enthusiasm for life.

I have been writing about the imprint for over forty years. It is how early experience becomes engraved in our system and endures, driving behavior and symptoms for years to come. We now know a bit more about that imprint. It is a chemical signature, actually two of them. One is methylation, and the other is acetylation. Very early on when there is stress, the carrying mother and father are arguing all of the time, there is the release of part of the methyl group which attaches to the DNA of the baby. It is like a “stop” or “caution” signal that says, “go slow.” “hold back,” “do not express yourself.” It “speaks” in biochemistry but it still speaks; it just has not words for it as yet. There will be words for it years later. Meanwhile, when there is serious trauma while we are being carried the genes are being methylated; and once that happens there is a greater tendency to depression and suicide later on. In the brain study of suicide cases there was a much greater incidence of methylation of the genes that turn off stress than those who died of other reasons. It would seem that in stressed babies there may not be enough steroid chemicals to overcome the methylation, and then there is overt anxiety. The stress system is in overdrive and cannot adjust properly. It may be that there is insufficient serotonin secreted to bind or gate the stress. Higher levels of methylation adversely affect the output of serotonin. . We need serotonin to help in repression and gating in order to keep us feel comfortable. What analysis of serotonin often reveals is not only trauma but the fact that it is unresolved. I believe we have found a way to resolve pain.

In early loss of a mother or in early abuse there is increased methylation. And I wonder if when we resolve those pains we also decrease or reverse methylation. It is true that genes and epigenes change us but it may also be true that we change them. And then they are visited upon our offspring. One thing has been found. If deprived babies are later licked a lot by their mothers there is a reversal of methylation.

In short, methylation is one major factor in the imprint that I have been putting forth, lo these many years. It endures and can cause major serious symptoms as we go through life. Not the least of these is cancer. Cancer cells most often have changes in the epigenomes which become abnormal; that is, there seems to be trauma to the cells that may cause them to go out of control. Cells that ordinarily prevent the appearance of cancer are heavily methylated and less efficient while the genes for cancer cells themselves seem to be less methylated. So we have a reverse function; cells which shut off are not, and cells which should be functioning are not. We do not want a “go” in developing cancer cells.

There is also a “go” signal that can attach, as well. It is called acetylation, and the genes are infused with acetyl chemicals. The “gates” are more open and there is greater expression, for the moment. That is, activation is enhanced. So we seem to have repressor activity (methyl), and activating processes (acetyl). Love, or positive rapport, tends to enhance acetyl production (animals who were licked a lot after birth by their mothers). And it can sometimes overcome an excess of methylation. The point in all this is that early life trauma can change the baby for a lifetime. It puts an indelible tag on the cells. We are thereafter programmed. It is now a memory trace; an embedded memory that affects so many aspects of our neurophysiology. This methylation is a record of our past, our history of adversity. Remember, it is not just a tag affecting recall of early life circumstance, impacting only the top level cortical memory processes. It is neurophysiologic, with its effects everywhere in our system. When we remember trauma it needs to be physiologic, as well. And it is that kind of memory that is resolving and curative. Because it is the embedded memory we are after, not the detached, disembodied, eviscerated, devitalized, etiolated memory that is never resolving. How we behave, in short, gives us clear clues to what happened to us very early in our history.

We behave according to the imprint; and we will not make major changes until we revisit the origins of that imprint. It can be done.

On Why They Kill Themselves at the End

2011-12-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

Almost every week now, there is a story of a mass killer that fires on many people, kills a few, then turns the gun on himself and commits suicide. Why do they do that? Why not just kill? Because then, the neurologic sequence would not be run off. Let me explain:

I use the sequence of my patients in their reliving as an example. First they feel amorphous pain and suffering, then they attach a scene to it such as “they don’t love me. “ “You bastards, why don’t you love me (fury) ?!” Then the patient begs, “Please love me.” And finally, “It is all hopeless.” If we think of the gunman who seems to follow the same sequence. Often the wife has left and taken the kids who give him love. He is furious and wants to kill (in Primal) but actually does kill in real life. Then there is the ultimate hopelessness and giving up (in therapy the truth is finally felt and sets the patient free) but in life the gunman stops at hopelessness and kills himself. He has gotten rid of his anger but there is nothing left, nowhere to go with his feelings and no resolution. Life has lost its meaning.

Patients feel that way along the route to full feeling but they do not stop there, and if they do leave therapy too soon they will be stuck with those feelings forever. What gives the kick to those feelings is very early trauma that digs up rage plus a lifetime of no love from the parents and then finally, the loss of love in the present. The stalker cannot stand the feeling and checks up all of the time on his wife. The killer is more emerged in the feeling and kills. Both cannot stand the loss of love; the difference is, I assume, that the pre-birth and birth traumas add a layer of extreme feelings to the mix, which cracks the defense system and places the person out of control. And it is those early traumas that compromise the part of the cortex that controls feelings and create the out-of-control sequence. This happens very early on when the cortical cells are just being evolved and proliferating.

This analogy isn’t theoretical; I have seen this run off in patients, and the more unloved and deprived they were earlier on, the more violent the tendencies. Happily in therapy it all remains internal and benign. Outside of therapy it is a catastrophe.

On Pain by Inadvertence

2011-12-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

You know I read a lot of case histories of abuse, sexual and otherwise and other terrible events visited by parents on helpless children.  But I was thinking that in my case and in many others the pain wasn’t overt and obvious.  It was the subtext.  Let me explain:
     As you know we all have needs that change as we grow up and evolve.  And parents, when caring and loving, fulfill those needs.  Natural and normal.   But suppose they don’t.  Then you grow up unfulfilled, but you don’t know it since you never had your needs fulfilled in the past.  You don’t know you should be hugged and adored.  You don’t know that you should be cherished and protected.  You don’t know that you should be talked to kindly with care and asked about your feelings.  So what happens?  Since you don’t know that should be the end of it.  Ahh, not so, because the body knows better than our conscious/awareness; it registers pain and it stays and drives us even though we never know it is there.  Isn’t that amazing?  So you cannot get on with your life.  I never knew there were needs that had to be fulfilled until decades later when I felt them; either that, by some accident, someone fulfills a need or two: a stray hug or pat on the head, and are suddenly aware that something is amiss.
I have already accounted how I went to a friend’s house when I was twelve and their mother was in the kitchen, leaning against a butcher block discussing life with them. I ran home and told what I had seen at dinner.  My dad yelled at me and I never knew why; it was a rebuke against them that I wasn’t aware of.
Then two years later I was walking out of a café and it was a circular glass affair where a mother and her young daughter were going in.   I
heard her say, “You know people are not perfect , and you have to learn to accept other humans sometimes with their flaws. “ Five or ten seconds, at the most. That’s it.  But I never forgot those words, nor the faces of  those two people.  Why? Because I never knew parents could talk to their kids. It was an epiphanic moment, not conceptualized as yet but it had a great impact. Later, I realized it was pain by inadvertence.  It was not what my parents did, but what they did not do.   It was missing and that is why I never knew about it; until I saw it and learned something that stayed with me.   And what they did not do left my needs unconscious; in the oubliette.  Yet, I was a mess, could not learn, could not sit still or concentrate.  I was driven by unfulfilled needs; i.e., pain.  This was a pain that no one could see, yet I was sent to doctor after doctor for a constant running nose (my tears found another route).   You cannot deceive those needs nor forget them because the body won’t let you.   The title of my next book ought to be “death by inadvertence.”   This is not a joke because those needs we don’t know about are killing us; they give us heart attacks far too early and also cancer.   You see, it happens because the needs not fulfilled are pain and that calls into being repression.  It is that repression pushing back feelings that will kill us.  And all that goes on without our knowing it.
Those are the needs we are never aware of.  We have to read books about  “attachment theory” to get a hint about it.  Imagine, we need to read a book and theory about holding your child, looking at her in the eye with love and talking to her a lot.  It is like reading a book about the tribes along the Amazon.  It is so alien.
  You do not get over those needs and “get on with life.”  They cut short your life so you cannot get on with it; oh yes, for a while you can but you can’t fool mother nature and she will get you while you are not looking.

What Does the Brain Do When Attacked?

2011-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

(I am taking part of this from somewhere but I lost where? Part from Shirley Ward)

The brainstem takes care of sensations and vital functions such as breathing, heart rate, hormonal output, the alimentary canal, digestion and urinary processes. Interestingly, during the zygotic period after fertilization of the ovum, the first organ to develop is the alimentary canal and digestive system. Bodily sensations of fear, such as stomach ‘butterflies’ or pain, originate in the alimentary canal and digestive system.
After fertilization, an embryo develops from the 3rd week, the primal brain structures (the spinal cord, midbrain) developing simultaneously with the organs and limbs. The brain/body architecture morphs into recognizable form by the 11th week of womb life. The first three months of womb life are ostensibly the most critical period of human development, because this is the time when all internal and external brain and bodily structures develop. During this critical period, the exposure of an embryo to certain agents such as chemicals, drugs, alcohol, nicotine and or cortisol may cause major congenital malformations. and safety are of paramount importance.
The period from the beginning of the 3rd month to the birth is known as the fetal period. The main characteristic of the fetus in this period is the rapid growth of the body and the brain and the maturation of the tissues. The brain functions in a partnership with the body and early embryonic memories are stored in the cellular structures of the body as well as the brain.
The zygote, embryo or early fetus has primary needs which can be met by the parents. These primary needs require the mother and father to be nourished in the healthiest way, to be fit and not have toxins in their bodies. The mother needs to be calm and contained, in other words, happy and contented. She needs to know that her partner will support and help her. The father of the baby needs to be involved and taking full responsibility for his paternity. It is best if each member of the couple loves each other and that they exist in a peaceful society. This state of affairs creates the best possible conditions for the tiny being to develop in the womb.
Very early experiences of stress or traumatic events in the womb , such as lack of oxygen or nourishment, or increased cortisol levels when a mother is exposed to prolonged or severe stress, will affect the brain stem. Neuro hormonal and chemical receptors and pathways of the brain are permanently affected by stress in the early period of brain development of the embryo A state of war, food shortages, famine, violence, conflict or loss will induce severe fear and anxiety in the parents, and particularly the mother, affecting the neuro-chemical development of the unborn child.
When, as adults, we experience inexplicable symptoms for example, sweating, increased heart rate and respiration, it may be that our primal brainstem memory is being triggered. Many people experience adult anxiety, panic attacks, fear, depression and other so called psychiatric symptoms, which may well be related to the very early months of womb experience.

A zygote and early embryo holds cellular memories of womb events in the body. No information is ever lost. Think about this. In terms of trauma it means that whole groups of people may be carrying memories of trauma that many generations ago and echoes of which are stored in the body and particularly in the brain stem. Unfortunately, because these memories are not easily retrieved, humans tend to act out their traumatic imprints on others and the world around them.
It is incumbent on us to prevent unnecessary trauma occurring to our offspring, and therefore recommended that each one of us, both individually and collectively, become conscious of our own traumatic imprints and commence a healing journey, both alone and with others. This link to Shirley ward’s article describes how people feel when they are assisted to relive their early conception experiences. http://primal-page.com/ward2.htm
Love, the way humans feel love, is the greatest force in the universe. It is love that will help us heal and reassemble our past and our future. It is love that will help us to educate, to guide and to show others how to conceive in love.

How to Measure Progress in Psychotherapy

2011-11-27T11:27:00.000-08:00

Look, we all agree; we have a triune brain--3 brains in one, each with different functions. So one brain can be sick and the other two not so. Or two brains can be sick as a result of compounded early trauma. So isn't it silly to measure progress in therapy and leave out half or two/thirds of the brain? This is what is going on in psychotherapy today. We do followup studies with paper and pencil tests of mood, attitudes, comprehension and other intellectual/cognitive tests. And what do we get? A one third appraisal. So the mind works but the body is a wreck. The engineer functions very well at work while his body is preparing itself for cancer. Or the mind does not work, as in attention deficit disorder, but the body still gets migraine; or the ......you get the idea. Part of us can be more damaged then the rest of us. But all three parts need to work well and in harmony for us not to get seriously ill.

Can you imagine an MRI specialist studying only the cells in the kidney but not the mind? Not a good idea because the sickness starts up there. And we need to cross-reference all parts to see how they interact. We need to get out of the fragmented approach, taking the head and muscle cells to understand migraine, when all we will understand as a result is how those cells work, not how the system works together with other systems., and how that interaction produces symptoms. Again, I am pleading for a unified field theory of illness; illness of all kinds. Yes we need specialists who know more and more about less and less, know how the muscles in the neck work, how they contract and what happens to the blood vessels, but not anything about headaches, their cause and sudden appearance. Yes, they say the vessels contract and this or that happens to them but never why; never the ultimate cause, and certainly never the demise of the symptom and how we can achieve it.

So we treat a drug addict and we measure him afterward. And she feels great; all those great meals, massages and lectures. They work to drown the fish. But we measure the biology and there is a raging cauldron down below; the cortisol level is chronically high and can be life threatening. So much for self-awareness. Or vice versa: we are strict medical scientists and we measure cortisol and the person seems OK but he still feels terrible.You see what I mean? There are parts of us that need to be examined. It may take a combined crew but it will be more accurate. We have been fragmenting the patient, dissecting her because it is easier to study than the whole system as an ensemble. And we get a full blood panel, and we read the numbers and they tell us whether the patient is sick or not. Not much interpreting going on. We become bean counters, so much of this, too little of that and voila, you got diabetes. And of course it is worse in psychology because we do not have enough precise measurements to give us a precise diagnosis. So we ape medicine and imagine we do. We don't.

What Did You Do in the War Daddy?

2011-11-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

This!

On Being Crazy and Creative at the Same Time. How Come?

2011-11-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

There is an article in the May/June 2011 Scientifc American Mind on creativity. Here is what they propose: Creativity flows best when barriers are down. (Good). Creative people do not fit in very well socially. Both creativity and eccentricity are the result of genetic variations. (Not Good). That unfiltered information reaches conscious awareness in the brains of people who are highly intelligent and can process this information without being overwhelmed, leading to creativity and exceptional insights. Creative individuals are more likely to believe in past lives and other mystical and mysterious unsubstantiated notions. That they all have what is known as cognitive disinhibition. That their mental filters do not work properly. They may suffer delusions and hallucinations, which I think is another form of creativity where we create scenarios that come out of our deep-seated feelings.

If we can indeed create a mysterious scenario we may avoid cancer, in my opinion, because it means that there are leaky gates which allow feelings to push upward forcing new ideas. We need to study to see if creative people die of cancer versus the more likely possibility of strokes and heart attacks, because lack of creativity in my opinion often indicates massive repression and therefore great pressure on the cells.

And of course when you have leaky gates it means massive first line trauma and damage that can lead to strange and mystical ideas….unidentified flying objects, for example. The more unidentified the better. Vagueness allows all kinds of kooky interpretations. Leaky gates, you may remember from my writing means broken defenses and unfiltered input. What we have in the author’s schema is a group of correlations; they then try to put them together to draw scientific conclusions. But correlations do not delve deep down where generating sources live; and that is what we need in order to understand the phenomenon of creativity.

I use myself as an example. I always was interested in music but I was never really good. When I play in a mental hospital band and played alongside a great but crazy trumpeter I realized that I was never going to be as good as him. I was too anxious to learn properly. My gates were more than leaky; they were flooded. I was totally right brain where the origins of creativity and nutty ideas and beliefs reside. Later on, much later on, as I developed an intellect I could see and feel feelings and how they drove behavior. I had creative insights mostly because my gates were still leaky. And I also needed and finally had a working intellect. I could think and feel, and think what I felt. And that is one reason it led to primal. I had basically illiterate parents so I never had to be smart for them. And I wasn’t. They lived in their own world so there was no way I could be to get love from them. The good part is there was no neurosis I could adopt that would work. I was an anxiety case completely.

Creative people focus on their inner life. Non-creatives focus on the externals. They effectively lack an inner life, an internal access to their feelings. They are blocked off from their feelings and from creativity.

On the Origins of Comedy and Other Neuroses

2011-11-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

There was a story in a paper about the French comedian Dany Boon, famous over there and genuinely funny. But where did it come from? He says it: “My mother was pregnant with me at 17. “ She was then disowned by her father because her husband was a French North African. (Black). His mother cried all of the time because she was totally rejected by the family. Dany tried always to cheer her up. He needed a happy mother, and he did his best. He had no father, of course, who took off early on. So he was reared by a young kid was neither ready for motherhood and had no support. Dany shifted from child to parent; he found he could make her laugh by acting funny and telling jokes. He elevated his neurosis to an art form, which is what a lot of us do, perhaps not so successfully but we try. We get smart in school in order that one’s parents have an intelligent child. We all try to get love in the way that parents point us, even unconsciously, both them and us.

But we see here how what happens to us as young kids has a lifelong effect. Some of us have the means to please the parent and others don’t. When we do we don’t suffer as much; we transmute in this case depression into humor. We no longer feel the hurt of not having a normal, loving mother; we are too focused on pleasing them at all costs. Dany later bought his mother a house that made both of them happy. He became what parents usually do; help out the child, and she was a child.

This cannot happen to everyone. Another child might work hard in business to support the child-like mother. Dany perfected his neurosis. Anyone else would have had to find another way to get the mother to love him. His way of trying would become a template or prototype that would follow him throughout his life. He would go on doing his schtick everywhere and for others as well. His behavior would become fixed and enduring. It starts with a parent and ends up as a lifestyle.

Dany might take drugs later and never know why. He would not know that he hurts too because he was too busy attending to his mother. All of his life would involve taking care of her so that he could finally have a loving, happy mother; something that will never happen. She was and is an unloved child. She needed a father much more than being a mother. Her need became his life. Isn’t that true of so many of us. A failed athlete like Andre Agassi’s father became Agassi’s life. A failed actress becomes the destiny of her daughter, and so on. Parental need becomes our destiny. My father felt stupid and the only way he could feel smart was to make me stupid, which he did at every turn. Later, I would never consider college because I felt too stupid to do it. I would ask him something like the meaning of the word, which he never knew, so he would say, “Look it up, dummy.” That feeling stayed deep inside and colored all of my life. Until…….I was sent to college as part of going to flight school, and I got “A’s”. For the first time I began to feel not stupid.

So to reiterate; your parent’s needs become your destiny; not only any parent but the one where there was some possibility of love to be had. That is the one that sets you on the struggle. Once the prototype sets in it applies to everyone and everywhere. It becomes your personality. All to handle a pain when you were very little.

On the Abuse of Xanax

2011-11-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

In the NY Times of Sept 14, 2011, there is a front page piece on Xanax and its abuse. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/in-louisville-a-centers-doctors-cut-off-xanax-prescriptions.html

It is an effective medication for anxiety. And it can be addictive. Indeed, any drug that reaches down deep to suppress pain and terror will be addictive, by definition. It is addictive if it works.
So what do the chiefs want to do? Eliminate it; not exactly eliminate it, but not write scripts for it. And they want to do that because there is a great clamor for it. In short, it helps. So of course, they want to stop it.
In the accompanying photo is a woman who has debilitating anxiety attacks. For those whose defenses work, they cannot imagine what that is. But it is terrifying and no one seems to know what to do, except push it down. But what it if we finally know what it is, and instead of pushing it down we let it up in small doses and be done with it? We can do it and we do do it. And it is pure imprinted terror set down in the first months of life, and by that I mean during gestation and at birth. Once we know what “it” is we can start to find a cure. We have done exactly that, and it is no longer a mystery.
The earlier and deeper the imprint, the more pain, and the stronger the pain medication needed to quell it. Of course, it is addictive, meaning sufferers want more and more. Why not? If you had leaky gates, you would want it too. The original terror and pain weakened the gates holding it back and when that pain and terror was compounded later in life by a tyrannical shrieking mother, for example, then the gates are under assault. The results are panic attacks and bouts of anxiety (the same thing) that seem to come out of nowhere. It seems like nowhere, because the origins are so deep and so remote. It is not an abuse of xanax. It is the proper use of it, given the level of pain and terror involved. If you’re the chief doctor and your gates are solid as a rock then of course you cannot sympathize with all this.

If we are so worried about all this why not try to find out what “it” is and find ways to deal with it; maybe put it under some kind of control so that the users can be watched and helped. Then we don’t have to waste time pushing back all of those forces in the unconscious. Dr. Scott Hedges seems to think we don’t need Xanax at all. He thinks there is trouble in paradise because the patient habituates to it and needs more and more. Of course it needs to be supervised, but no eliminated. The chiefs are worried about withdrawal, which is a legitimate concern, but here again we can control withdrawal with so many new drugs (have they looked into oxytocin spray?). Let’s not stop the pain killers that ease the suffering of so many. Let’s work around it in order to control adverse reactions. If we learn what “it” is we will have a better handle on it. Making it an opprobrium to take something that eases hurt seems to have it all backwards. Let’s get it straight.

Everybody Hurts

2011-11-13T11:13:00.000-08:00

When I watch TV it seems like every commercial is about some kind of pain killer: Tylenol, ibuprofen, pills for stomach distress, headaches, high blood pressure and on and on. The best kept secret is that we are nearly all in pain but nobody says it; the emperor is really naked but we all are looking the other way; we are looking outward instead of inward. The distress is caused by this or that in the environment, we think, but never what is inside. That is obvious since few of us can look inside.

We are all hurting but in different ways; the hurt goes to where we are most vulnerable. That is the health crisis that no one speaks its name. So why is that? Because no one can see it! It was installed so early and so subtly, long before we had conscious-awareness, that it doesn’t even have a name. So I give it a name: Primal Pain. And a location: the imprint: and the chemical means: methylation. But what we may not be aware of is that its one of the leading causes of death among us, more so than deaths in traffic accidents, according to a recent study. Some of us are in so much agony that we take far too much medication and threaten our lives. We use Xanax, Vicodin, Fentanyl, Demerol, Oxycontin and Soma; we are treating the wrong thing, and that is why we do not get relief. We treat the symptom and not the person; we treat appearances and not generating sources. That gap I call the Janovian Gap. It is between origins and our conscious awareness of them. So long as Primal Pain exists it will militate toward wherever it can. Worse, sometimes we have both headaches and back aches so we take pain killers for both and again risk an overdose. The medication normally will not kill us but when we take more and more it will.

And what are we really killing? As trite as it seems, it is lack of love. Not just hugs and kisses but any lack of fulfillment of need very early on is also a lack of love. You know, the child is hungry and we say sorry it is not time to eat; or I just don’t have enough today. It is the equivalent of saying, “I know you need love. I do love you but I cannot show it; but you know I do.” The body knows no such thing. It marks the event with a marker that says, “Pain.” And we carry that pain for a lifetime. When the carrying mother wants to keep her figure and diets while pregnant the baby hurts. It is all so subtle and that is why we do not recognize it later on except what is obvious: a migraine, stomach ache or back aches.

And then there are more needs as we grow up that need fulfillment. When there is more deprivation there is more imprinted, enduring hurt. And it goes on and on. The migraines keep on coming back because the generating sources have not been touched; the same with high blood pressure or allergies. There is plenty of evidence now that a mother’s unhappiness while carrying can end up as serious allergies in the offspring. So let’s all understand what those TV ads really mean; and let’s all agree what is really wrong. OK?

On the Need to Believe

2011-11-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

Yep. There is a need to believe but not in the way you might imagine. There is a neurotic need to believe that comes out of pain, more specifically hopelessness. And in that kind of belief there is nearly always an element of hope—the deity will watch over you, protect you, love you and not let any harm come to you. You can name the hope of our choice but what we are exploring is the process of dialectics; how one thing mutates into something else, usually its antagonist. Dialectics is basically the interpenetration of opposites: here, hopelessness becomes hope. Hopelessness drives hope, and the more fervent the belief the deeper and more powerful the hopelessness; and of course, vice versa.

We are discussing the motivation behind beliefs. The brain doesn’t give a hoot what’s in the belief, just so long as there is one; otherwise we would have no defense against the unutterable pain of hopelessness. Yes, beliefs can be defenses, especially those that grow out of pain. So some can believe in God, others in Brother Bubba, still others in the Hinduism; and they all may derive from the same feeling. The choice of belief depends on life circumstance. You can see how useless it is to spend hours in therapy analyzing the belief when it is not the content but the very existence of it that is important. I have seen time and time again a patient coming close to a very terrible pain and switching into some kind of belief; “You don’t understand. I know they don’t like me and want to harm me.” They switch into beliefs when the feeling tends to overwhelm the cognitive system. And the choice of belief emanates out of the feeling: something or someone(a feeling) wants to hurt me. We rarely allow an overwhelming feeling to come close to conscious/awareness. It usually means that a feeling/sensation is rising out of sequence and must be dealt with immediately.

It isn’t always just a feeling; it can come from the deep brainstem where so many excessive sensations lie: the sensation of being crushed, pushed, suffocated, drowned, etc. All of these sensations and associated traumas can be imprinted very early in our lives, even while we are being carried in the womb or during birth. The hopelessness can derive from so many sources: a carrying mother drinking and smoking where the baby cannot escape the input and is suffocating. Or a birth process where the mother is given anesthetics which are far too much for a five pound baby, and again there is suffocation with no escape—hopelessness and helplessness.

Ordinarily, the biologic system tries to deal with the onslaught with a biologic shift of weight or force to counterbalance the deep feeling. The system tries to balance it so that it does not get out of hand. But still, if the sensation/feeling is very strong and the imprint is already sealed in, then the various high levels of brain function will try to deal with it, as well. The highest level will pitch in and offer up a belief as a way of counterbalancing the imprint. That is worth repeating: the newfound belief is a measure of counterbalance, of equilibrium. So first there are purely biologic efforts, pitching in with gate-enhancers such as serotonin, and later on, as the brain evolves, bolstering it with beliefs; all part of the same process of defense, all linked together. So for example, let’s suppose that the baby’s blood pressure goes up, which is the most she can do at the time. But later that blood pressure, heart rate and many other physiologic effects become part of the defense system. They have to be addressed as an ensemble, not simply separately as discreet entities. And now the defense system is sealed in. The beliefs are not just something to be changed apart from the system but are part of the personality. What someone believes is a part of her and is not just some whimsy or caprice. In our therapy we never just deal with strange and bizarre beliefs; we always try to get beneath them and find the driving force.

On the Frequencies in the Brain. How the Brain Learns About Feelings

2011-11-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

In my book on life before birth I talk about the 3 levels of consciousness and how the imprint that is laid down deep in the brain while we live in the womb has spokes going higher containing that information which is integrated on the feeling level/limbic system, and finally on the cortical level where beliefs and comprehension lies. Through a process of resonance each level relates to the others in what I think is a matter of frequency. So suffocation even before birth when a mother is a heavy smoker or drug taker sends up antenna to the feeling centers where we manufacture a dream where we are suffocating and then finally to the frontal cortex where we believe someone is suffocating; “Leaves me no space to breathe.” And what is reciprocal is that currently someone leaves me no reason to breathe, crowds me, and then the cortical brain sends antenna down to the lower levels where each level reacts in terms of its capacity. The feeling level adds emotions to the mix while the very low brainstem level enhances all physiologic reactions and provides much more charge value or energy.

That is why I say that primal therapy is neurosis in reverse. We use the same electrical brain networks going up and down. They are all related through, I submit (only a hypothesis), frequencies. Each level has its own contribution to the totality of a feeling—energy/force—feelings—comprehension/insight. Painting a feeling is not feeling; it is painting…..symbolic of a feeling. Not a total physiologic affair, and hence never curative or ameliorating. It is basically an act-out. Nor can you play your feelings and make progress. Of course, if you are close to feelings you can play more "feelingful" but it is not therapy. I know. I used to do music therapy with psychotics in a mental hospital. We would play jazz for the catatonics who could barely move, they had what was known as “waxy flexibility.” We bent their arm to the music but it stayed there. I never saw any progress.

What they also found is that very high frequencies are not conducive to feelings and their connections. There is a feeling zone in my opinion, and when patients come into therapy with beta waves, very rapid waves, they are far above the zone.

It may be that a new patient will lock into a feeling for a moment and then skid off into an abreaction, because it is less painful. She has been detoured off the proper frequency; there is something “off” there and when one is tuned to feelings one can sense it. This is no more than to say that each synapse has its preferred frequency and may not accept any other. And the frequency is perfectly rhythmic. When the rhythm is thrown off there is less learning and less cohesion; less cohesion of feeling. What I think we do in our therapy is retune the brain, especially those who have imprinted stress. Once the pain and trauma is relived the brain normalizes; goes back to its proper tuning. And, lovely, we go back to the proper inner tune; we are finally in tune with ourselves: literally.

On Murder Again

2011-11-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

I am going to explain what happens when someone “snaps” and kills. Specifically, regarding Scott Dekraai who killed eight people recently in Seal Beach California. He says now, some three weeks later, that “I know what I did.” So how is that possible to know what you are doing and still do it? The catch is he didnt’ know what he was doing when he did it, only later.

Is that possible to know one minute and not know the other minute? Absolutely.

Let’s talk about the crackup. But before I do that let me offer a little reminder; There are three levels of brain function. The top level is the thinking, comprehending one; externally oriented. Lower down is the feeling brain that adds emotion to the mix, and still deeper there is the instinctive reptile brain that processes the same instincts as the reptile. It adds urgency and power to emotions and to beliefs. All three have separate functions and yet are interrelated. And they communicated with each other by chemical means and also by electrical frequencies. And when something happens in the present it resonates with similar feelings from the past and they join forces. When defenses are weak, something in the present can trigger off allied sensations and feelings and then we get a powerhouse response. All three levels are involved in a conjoined reaction. Normally, there is a good defense apparatus so that the resonance does not reach too far deep down, thus limited the force of the reaction.

Here is how resonance works in the domain of anger. Something in the present makes me very angry; my wife is divorcing me and trying to keep the kids. My money is running out and she still wants more. She refuses to see or talk to me. She turns the family against me. I have been let go at my job due to injuries and I have no prospects for a new job. All looks bleak and I have no alternative. All these are assaults on my defenses. And they weaken so much that it all crumbles and there is no barrier holding back deeper pain. The problem is on the feeling level there are powerful emotions, but as they resonate with still deeper levels, anger turns to rage and fury. Human mild emotion becomes murderous feelings as the deepest animal/survival levels move to the higher cortical areas, levels. In my lingo, the third line gives way to the first line reptilian brain where violent feelings reside. And for that moment the third line inhibitory brain is ousted by the first line instinctive brain and there can be murder. The deepest brain level becomes the highest one temporarily. There is nothing left of the top level of the brain whose main function it is to inhibit. But that overwhelming force may only last minutes. Once the rage is expressed the pain level diminishes and some of the third line thinking, reflective brain returns to function. And Scott can now say, “I know what I did.” And he knows now but at the moment of crisis he did not know what he was doing: his rage machine took over and he became the reptile spewing out fury indiscriminately. After all, it is the top level that discriminates. It was usurped for that moment, the critical moment when he murdered eight people. It is not unlike orgasm. There is a heightened agitation followed by release and calm. In sex we begin to lose sensations such as hearing as the whole organism is involved in a non-verbal highly emotional response. For that moment there ceases to be high level intellectual capabilities.

I have seen this rage over and over again when very disturbed patients begin to relive a memory on the emotional, feeling level and suddenly are impacted by the lower levels. They begin to pound the mattress and the padded walls with an enormous fury that can go on for thirty minutes to one hour. In therapy they can direct the rage, connect with it and not be overwhelmed by it. Not so, on the street. I have filmed this rage, and those interested will see it when we release the film. The patient seems to be out of control because he is in the grip of powerful deep forces. But it is a therapeutic situation and is not acted out. It becomes acted-out when someone has no idea that he is in the grip of powerful feelings emanating from deep in his unconscious. He is helpless before them and has no idea about how to control them. His unconscious has taken over. And he kills.

And we can say of these people who are sometimes out of control that they may be pre-psychotic. All that really means is that their defenses against the deepest level of the brain are very weak due to the constant onslaught of pain early on in their life. And what do so-called anti-psychotic pills do? They dampen the lowest brain levels from responding. They help hold back the first line. They do this by souping up the top level so that it is more active and effective; and at the same time there are inhibitory medications in it that block the lower level pain; thus, we get a more active cortex and a less active brainstem and limbic/feeling brain. And in this medication there are chemicals that we should produce ourselves, such as serotonin. But we don’t because very early trauma has exhausted supplies, and we cannot make enough to blanket the pain. So when our inner pharmacy cannot do the job we need help from the external one. We can call it anti-psychotic medicine but all it is doing is making up for what we can no longer manufacture ourselves. Poor Scott had so many current assaults coupled with a lifetime of them that he could no longer inhibit nor defend. His defense system was not up to the job. Now when it is far too late he probably has a somewhat weak defense system that can inhibit. That won’t do his victims any good.

The lesson we can take from this is that when deprivation and severe trauma exists while we are being carried, the first-line defenses are already in a weakened state. As a kid he may have had uncontrolled temper tantrums which evolved into murder. Was he responsible? Yes and no. But we can go a long way to avoid murderous rage by making sure there is as little trauma as possible when we live in the womb and of course, a good birth followed by a loving childhood. No drinking and drug-taking by the mother. No fights with her husband. No crazy diets while carrying. It is easy for me to say. I am only the messenger. It is up to all of you to listen to the message.

Serotonin and Anger

2011-11-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

In my writings I have emphasized that early experience can deplete supplies of pain-killing chemicals that we produce, such as serotonin. And then we need to take medication that enhances supplies, medication found in many tranquilizers. Now there is a study of this in the journal of Biological Psychiatry (Sept 15, 2011). Here is one thing they found: reduced levels of serotonin make us more prone to aggression; something I have discussed for over thirty years. In other words, serotonin helps regulate serious emotions, especially those that can cause harm. And when there is very early trauma or adversity in the womb and at birth our ability to control our impulses is compromised, because our systems over a long time have evolved in order to keep anti-social impulses under control; otherwise we would all go around killing each other. Still it seems like all too many go around killing. Those, in my opinion, had very early trauma and neglect, and have diminished repressive capacities. Their brains are deficient. It might not show up for decades but they will be a danger.

What the research showed was that low brain serotonin made communication between certain areas of the brain more tenuous. Not any area of the brain but specifically in those areas dealing with feeling. Not just the feeling centers but their connections to the top-level control centers, the prefrontal cortex. So here we have confirmation that when there is diminished serotonin the prefrontal area has a much tougher time to control feelings. The researchers discuss the emotion of anger but I am certain that it applies to many of the deepest feelings we have, whether terror, hopelessness or helplessness. One way we know this is that we prescribe tranquilizers for depression, which has at is base both hopelessness and helplessness. When we suppress those feelings we tend to feel better. And when a carrying mother feels depressed there is a good chance that the offspring will also have a tendency to those feelings, as well. It all depends on later life experience.

We see again how the top level thinking area and feelings work in see-saw fashion so that the very active top level cortex can control the lower level emotions; or not. That is, when the top level is compromised the control evaporates and we have an impulsive individual. And we may have a criminal or someone who takes risk when he shouldn’t. Or we have a volatile husband who beats his wife. And so they go to a counselor who encourages him to control himself—anger management. But the cortex cannot manage the fury that lies sequestered just below the surface. And no counseling will ever, ever, change that. Exhortation does soup up the prefrontal area a bit, and in so doing arrays the forces of thought and belief against feelings, but that is at best ephemeral. The faulty equation between feelings and control centers still exists and will continue to exist. And obviously, we must address that equation and normalize it, which can be done. No amount of talk and encouragement will achieve that. That is the trouble with anger management; feelings were never evolved to be managed. They exist to be expressed.

And now the investigators concoct a new nomenclature for this: “intermittent explosive disorder.” (Now officially known as IED). Isn’t that the same as blowing up every now and then? Again, we are trying to ape medical diagnosis, while the inventor of this new diagnosis bathes in glory. Oh my, that love of diagnosis with fancy sounding names that does nothing to enhance science. But the behavior/cognitivists hold sway today and so they continue to add this behavior or that to a long list of so-called neuroses. And they believe that behavior is indicative of neurosis, rather than what drives it. It is as if there is no unconscious. Everything for them is observable. They believe only what they can see when most neuroses are hidden and not observable. Can we “see” depression? Can we see anguish? Can we see rejection internally? These are not single behaviors; they are systemic problems that affect the whole system. The real culprit here is the psychiatric diagnosis manual, which has as many pages and afflictions as the Manhattan telephone book. It is that thick because the behaviorists control all this.

When professionals limit themselves to the here and now they have eliminated the time and epoch where and when they could understand origins and generating sources. They have cut away the elements that could offer understanding. And who suffers? The patient.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 13/13) ... The End

2011-11-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

Let us use an example. A young man does everything he can think of to please his therapist. He tries to be an exemplary patient, admits readily to all resistances, produces insights with great mental clarity, shows concern for the therapist's own feelings, finishes early to avoid being boring, and so on. Clearly there is an underlying feeling. Now therapist and patient could sit and discuss what is going on between them. They could even uncover the fact that the young fellow never could please his father and is, through his relationship with the therapist, still struggling (symbolically) for parental blessing. Further, the young man might wind up with insight into his relationships with men in positions of authority.
From the Primal perspective, however, we feel that he has still only shaved the issue. His behavior represents an act out of a need. Until it is felt no amount of insight is going to eradicate the motivating force behind it.
In Primal Therapy we may use a head-on confrontation of the behavior. "You seem to want to please me and impress me," the therapist might say. Since the therapist has so openly put his finger on the sore truth, the patient might admit it with words like, "Yes, I want you to think I'm a good patient." The next step depends largely upon the patient, but one course open to the Primal Therapist is to request that the patient say exactly what he does want from the therapist. He would be encouraged to use words that really express the pleading displayed in his behavior: "Please think I'm a good patient. Please think I'm a good boy. See how much I do for you. Give me a word of praise. Say you see how much I do just to please you. Please like me." And so on. The therapist doesn't choose the words. The patient finds the ones which help to evoke what he is already feeling. And the words usually become that of a young child as does the tone of voice.
This type of direct speech serves a number of purposes. It gives direct, succinct focus to the feeling, expressing it without distance or elaboration. It enhances vulnerability to the feeling and thereby helps to diminish the time barriers. The patient finds himself a child pleading for love. The time dissolve is not complete but it has begun. Often at this point the patient is swept into deeper feeling (which means deeper into his past), without any additional interaction with the therapist, who now sits back and watches quietly. At other times the dissolve into the past can only occur after steady probing by the therapist. "Who did you want to please so much?" might be asked, along with similar questions which lead to previous experience.
Through his response to the therapist the patient now may find his father clearly and vividly in his mind's eye. The symbol (the therapist) has faded into the real person. The Pain and need previously transferred onto the present is returned to its original target. It is no longer the therapist the young man is trying to please, but his father. He is right back in the old situation. His body and mind are beginning to respond with all the reactions he sat on for so long and which he rechanneled into a never-ending struggle to please.
At some point it may be appropriate for the therapist to interject an instruction for him to speak directly to his father. "Tell him what you need," might be suggested. With the emotion welling inside him, the patient speaks to his father. "Please see how good I am, Daddy." He might repeat it, or try several different ways of saying it, as the feeling moves him. The feeling will put the words into his mouth if he gives into it. He will not have to search for words. They will literally come to him, riding on the waves of Pain which now engulf him. "Daddy I need you, can't you see. Please love me Daddy, please." There is a simple, heart-wrenching quality to the expressions of grief which rush through and out of him. This finding of the real voice can be one of the most moving events to observe.
I do not suggest that one such experience will cure transference. The needs which promote and sustain it are strong; they have been there a lifetime, embedded in the body and bound by defenses of all kinds. But this "inside-out" experience of the underlying Pain does in time fade the filter of symbolism so that the patient comes to see the therapist much more as he really is.
It is not the place of the therapist to provide any corrective emotional experience. He is there to help the person liberate his own innate corrective processes. Sometimes it is helpful if the therapist reveals an aspect of his own life. For example, one therapist tells of a patient who was recounting how he never did anything with his father. The therapist remarked how much it had meant to him that his own father had often taken him to baseball games. This contrast opened some inner door; the patient broke into tears and was able to feel his own loss.
Does this mean that a Primal Therapist be himself totally? Obviously not. The session does not have the equality of a social setting. The therapist implicitly agrees to keep his personal business out of the way. He agrees to be there for the patient, using his skills, sensitivity, and the intuition honed through his own Primal experiences to help. In real life there are no guarantees against being exploited or threatened by the reactions of others. The formality of the therapeutic setting provides those guarantees. Knowing that there is someone competent in charge makes it safe to give in, be little, and feel the Pain of a suffering child.
The authentic corrective experience is the correct experience. It means a "matching up" takes place on all levels of consciousness. Thought, emotion, and sensation realign, not separately but wholly and simultaneously. The patient now not only thinks he needs a father to love him, he feels it and succumbs to the sensations which are inherent in that feeling. This is the vital point. He is not just aware of the sensations, nor simply made uncomfortable by them, he is overtaken by them. Sensation and cognition meet at the point of emotion.

In sum, modern analysis departs from traditional methods in several basic ways:

Although early life experience and repression of trauma are seen as causative of ongoing psychological conflict, therapy is centered around the patient's functioning in current life situations.
The neo-Freudians downplay Freud's theories on infantile sexuality and libidinal drives while focusing on the patient's present intellectual (ego) defenses, interpersonal relationships, and particularly on his interaction with the therapist, which is seen as the key to providing a "corrective emotional experience."
A therapeutic course is typically much shorter, because a) it aims for observable change in "adjusting" to current circumstances, and b) much of the past, and particularly repressed experiences, are excluded from therapy.
There is less free association and more "directed talking." The neo-Freudian therapist is more active in guiding and evaluating the patient's thoughts and words and in supplying "insights."
Therapists are more apt to encourage patients to explore what they feel, but only up to a certain point. Freud and early post-Freudian theorists better saw the importance of both uncovering "forgotten" memories and of permitting memory's feeling component to surface simultaneously.

Overall, in steering clear of the patient's traumatic past in favor of the here and now, neo-Freudians ensure that their therapy remains in the realm of talk and ideas and that it will gloss over what causes and continues to fuel neurosis. When feelings do surface, the analyst usually encourages the patient back into a cognitive mode, in search of insight and understanding, not realizing that it is not insights but Pain that is curative. The patient is not sick because he lacks insights; he is sick because he needs to feel his Pain.
Thus, like hypnosis and traditional analysis but in contrast to Primal Therapy, modern analysis is non-dialectic and non-curative. Analysts do not see that it is in feeling utter, abject hopelessness that the patient can finally achieve real hope for himself. That in feeling his fears he can become courageous, in feeling rejected he will no longer have to isolate himself. In feeling small he can finally grow up and leave the past behind.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 12/13)

2011-10-31T11:06:00.000-07:00

Pain and Ego Disintegration

Psychoanalysts tend to view intense outpourings of emotion as a threat to the ego. The ego must be protected against "disintegration" -- against being overwhelmed by unconscious forces.
Of course, patients do cry in analysis. Some analysts even encourage crying. Most stop it short, however, when it nears Primal intensity, because they fear the patient will "fall apart." It is seen as an episode bordering on hysteria, and the patient will be given anything from tranquilizers to shock treatment to calm him, particularly if it goes on for any length of time.
I believe that one reason analysts cannot tolerate Primal feelings is because of their view of the unconscious, and more importantly because they are defending against their own repressed feelings. From my own experience doing conventional therapy, I rarely if ever saw the intensity of feelings we see in Primal Therapy. For a therapist to have one primal is to know the force of primal trauma. It is also to stop being afraid of powerful feelings. In addition, the therapist would never again have to guess or theorize about the unconscious. Paradoxically, because analysis does not go directly to the unconscious, analysts are forced to theorize about it.
We all know that the expectations of the therapist can have a tremendous impact on the patient. I believe that when the analyst distrusts intense emotions as dangerous and disintegrating, the patient picks up and internalizes this distrust. Then, what might have been a solidly intense experience becomes a fearful, hysterical one -- not because the emotions are disintegrative, but because of the distrust and suspicion inherent in expressing emotions.
Psychoanalysts fear Pain also because they do know what to do with it, and do not see that there is any permanent way to relieve it. We might all agree that neurosis starts with repression; we might agree that repression is necessary because we could not bear to fully experience something at the time it occurred and thereafter. Yet psychoanalysts cannot see that reliving the trauma -- or actually living it fully for the first time -- would in itself resolve the neurosis. Feelings and neurosis cannot co-exist. Concepts and neurosis can.
In many ways it seems that analysts equate the ego with the constellation of neurotic defenses. They do not want the defenses to disintegrate because they perceive their task to be that of reorganizing them into a strong ego. The paradox which analysts do not grasp is that it is the perpetual containment of Pain that is disintegrating. This great reservoir of agony weakens the defense system year after year.
In Primal Therapy, we aim for the controlled disintegration of neurotic defenses; we want a "nervous breakdown," a breakdown of the repressive defense system. This does not mean inviting psychophysiologic chaos, as our critics assume. We guard against the collapse of the whole neurotic structure all at once, working instead toward a gradual dissolution of repression both in specific instances of re-experience (a primal) and as an overall aim of therapy. The dialectic to which Primal Therapy conforms is that "falling apart" (of defense---if appropriately handled) leads to integration. Otherwise there is disintegration where one level of consciousness is alienated from another, thus ensuring the fragmentation of the individual.
People suffer because they are in Pain and cannot feel it. Primal Therapy provides an environment in which the Pain can be felt; not looked at, not understood, not analyzed nor even "felt" about, but felt as and for what it is. It is not disintegrating. We can measure the integration with our brain maps. We can measure integration in the slowing of heart rate and lowering of blood pressure. The person is becoming whole again.
I can understand how intense feeling might appear disintegrative. If it is abreactive in nature and not properly connected to the past it will be. The defensive impulse to rush in with one sort of anesthetic or cognitive smokescreen or another is very strong and is supported by an entire culture that is very heavily geared to the suppression of Pain. The trainee in Primal Therapy often has to learn not to intervene, not to try to close off the patient's feeling; he has to learn how to avoid satisfying his own need for control. If healing is to occur, losing control is crucial: not in the sense of mindless abandonment to insane impulses, but in the sense of a total (yet survivable) loss of repression so that the rage felt is enormous, the terror really terrifying down to the bones of personality structure. Losing control over one's neurosis is the way to rediscover the natural self-regulation which exists within any organism.
It is not up to us to define the so-called "ego" and then make our patients fit themselves into our concept of its well-adjusted version. That makes the patient's reality subordinate to the analyst's concept. Our job is to allow patients to define themselves and to discover their own health, which they will do if we do not constantly get in the way of that process.

Transference and the Corrective Emotional Experience

In analytic theory, the patient develops what is termed a "transference relationship" with his analyst. This means that the patient's unconscious reactions toward his parents are projected onto the doctor. The patient then encounters the difference between the analyst's reaction and his parents' past reactions and theoretically experiences a "corrective emotional experience." Psychoanalysts believe that experiencing neurotic behavior patterns from childhood in relation to the analyst now will aright the neurosis by showing the patient that his reactions are no longer suited to adult life. So important has the corrective emotional experience become that Franz Alexander, who coined the phrase, called it the "central therapeutic agent" in the psychoanalytic procedure.[1]
If, for example, a patient's parents were strict disciplinarians, unjustly harsh and critical, then a good experience with a different kind of authority (one that is understanding, accepting, and reasonable) should correct the old neurotic view. The idea is that the patient displays all his neurotic patterns toward the analyst. He can't take it when the analyst is nice because he never had it. He may even get paranoid about it, believing that the analyst is trying to trick him or manipulate him. But when he gets permissiveness and acceptance from the analyst, he should begin to understand that not all authority is harsh, unyielding, or unfair. He begins, according to Alexander, "to experience intensely the irrationality of his own emotional reactions."
It seems to me that the analysts have stood the process on its head! The problem with their corrective emotional experience is that:

the trauma is old while the ending is new;
the focus is on irrational behavior in the present when it should be on Pain; and,
the real problem is with the parents, not with the analyst.

No present relationship, even one with a skilled and compassionate therapist, can in itself resolve irrational behavior. It can be deterred, redirected, but not resolved -- because it is not irrational. It is logical behavior given the antecedent circumstances. One needs to match the behavior with the original context in order to make it rational again. People experience the truth of this every day. A person who feels worthless because he was made to feel that way when very young can be told repeatedly by teachers, friends, and colleagues that he or she is really worthwhile and successful, all in vain. The old, worthless feelings are prepotent because childhood experience has engraved them throughout the person's entire system. So a person can be praised to the heavens yet hear criticism and that is what sticks. That is what matches the underlying feeling.
Even in apparently happy circumstances the neurotic will act neurotically. An example is the neurotic who marries a compatible, cheerful, and understanding person, and yet continues to suffer from chronic depression. Why doesn't that love alter the depression? Is a corrective emotional experience limited only to someone with a title "doctor," or can it apply to other lesser souls, as well?
If we are trying to change a viewpoint, then the analytic method may achieve it. The corrective emotional experience may well enable people to mentally separate past from present and to identify what is "irrational" in their present attitude. But such activity occurs at the most refined mental level, with emotion regarded as nothing more than a point of reference.
The premise of a corrective emotional experience might be expressed as follows:

Analyst to patient: You feel that people, especially those in authority, don't care. I'm here to help you see where that thought comes from, and to demonstrate by my behavior that that is a false assumption.

This is all well and good but misses the mark. It ignores the fact that the patient's idea that no one cares is a statement about his life (no one did care), not just an item from his private thought collection. It is the tip of the psychophysiologic iceberg. What if the person feels better and is relieved to learn that his feelings are irrational, out of tune with current reality? So much the better. That is helpful, not curative.
There is nothing wrong with changing an unrealistic view of authority, but it does not happen by telling a patient how irrational his feelings are. Feelings and irrational conduct toward the analyst are only symbolic substitutes for the original Pain. Why bother with substitutes when the original experience can be recovered via feeling?
Changing a viewpoint is well and good, but it is not enough. The irrationality of present feelings is only half of the neurotic picture. The other half that contains the seed of healing is the rationality of those feelings in their original context. A parent who is constantly harsh with a child forces the child to be defensive and "tough." Given the early context, this defensiveness is logical. The only way to experience that rationality is to relive the original event, not with a new ending in the present, and not in relation to the analyst. It must be relived with the very ending it actually had before repression set in, the ending that meant great suffering. Then the therapist will not have to convince the patient that it is irrational to be terrified of the waiter, the postman, or the doctor. The patient will simply no longer be terrified because he has finally released the original terror belonging to the original trauma. Once this occurs, he will automatically treat current relationships rationally and appropriately. This is not simple theory. This is what we see in our patients after a course of Primal Therapy. Neo-Freudian analysts have made important modifications in the stance of the therapist from the strict "blank screen" neutrality of the Freudian model. That is a good thing. The aloofness of the traditional analyst promotes transference because the patient can so easily project all his needs and repressed feelings onto the therapist. If this "blank screen" is inviolable, then the transference is maintained at the instigation of the therapist. When this is done deliberately it is because transference is seen as one way to unearth the subconscious.
What we are really talking of here is a trick. The blank screen tricks the patient into delivering up the repressed, unresolved conflicts of childhood. It is a device because the analyst is not being himself. The analyst hides so that the patient may reveal himself. But we have found that you really don't need tricks. In spite of their defenses, most people are willing to tell someone what is hurting them. Furthermore, it can be a hindrance if the therapist is forever neutral and aloof.
While discarding the barrier of the blank screen is a good thing, we must not regard the more human interaction of the therapist as fundamentally therapeutic in and of itself. Though it helps, the genuineness of the therapist is not the key to health except to the degree that it supports and encourages the real key, feeling, to have its way. It must be tied to the dynamics of the disease under treatment. The more human relationship is to be supported because it enhances the feeling process. It is easier to let go in front of someone you feel you know than in front of a detached figure who reveals nothing of himself. Total detachment may be appropriate for analyzing transference but it does not provide an atmosphere for full emotional expression.
In Primal Therapy, we recognize the inevitability of transference, but we do not make it the center of therapeutic attention. We do not try to enhance it or diminish it. All deprived people symbolize onto others. Unmet need attaches to whomever may seem likely to fill it. There is no doubt that the therapy situation lends itself to an exaggerated transference, particularly because it is an unequal relationship. The therapist is inevitably an authority, the one in the know. The mere fact that he is in a position to accept trust and provide help has a lot to do with the patient's symbolization. The patient reveals much more of himself than the therapist does, which may make the patient feel small and the therapist appear big or grown up. So transference exists willy nilly. The question is what to do with it.

[1]Alexander, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, p. 42.

The Music in Us

2011-10-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare said of a man who seemed all repressed and unfeeling, “that man hath no music in him.” How true it is because music lies down in the limbic system; and if you cut off the top level cortex you can still respond to music….and feeling. You wonder why we remember songs from our youth and still know the words? Because we still did not have a fully functioning, repressive neocortex; because we still responded to the music out there and in us. There was music in us until it got crushed out. It was feelings that sealed in our memories of the music and words, and they meant a lot to us, expressing our lives at the time. It all lies down below our later development which covered over the essentials, the guts of our lives. Then was when our emotions were strong, everything was new, including love. Our reactions were strong, often exaggerated but they engulfed us and gave big meaning to our experiences. Some keep that music alive, keep the access to feelings, while others let the music die and lose access. Having to struggle in life, with children, with job or school all help dampen our music and as time goes on we listen less and less to it, outside and in,particular, inside. Music helps keep our feelings alive, and vice versa. They are companions in life.

We can tell who has that music still; there are those with no warmth, no kindness, no concern nor empathy who understand so much and feel nothing. And it shows in their demeanor; in their dry unemotional relationships, in their lack of perception of the feelings in others. It is a solipsistic world for them. In the absence of music they relate to themselves bereft of song and harmony. They have no sense of emotional harmony in the way they relate, dress, furnish and make choices. Their friends are also bereft and are chosen for that manqué. Their philosophies of child rearing; their "Weltanschaaung" are similar because they hear the words but not the music. They can’t dance but they move to the unseen and unheard music of their lives. Beware a president who can’t dance. We need a human president just as we need a human parent. Someone may move too fast to that unheard music and therefore does not take the time with his thoughts and decisions; nor do we want someone who dances too slow and who cannot make up his mind. We need something between a waltz and rock and roll.

“I’ll Have a Cup of Enlightenment, Please.” “Will That Be With or Without Feelings, Sir?” By Bruce Wilson

2011-10-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

Mindfulness meditation is the current zeitgeist in psychotherapy. Not surprisingly, it fits hand-in-hand with the other dominant therapeutic modality: cognitive behavioral therapy. In fact, there is now a hybrid of the two called MBCT - mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Both techniques are based on the same mechanism—detachment from feelings and thoughts. The “how” of mindfulness meditation can be summed up simply: sit still for 30 or 40 minutes, keep your eyes slightly open, follow your breath, and pay attention to whatever is going on in your mind and body but don’t do anything about it. Just sit there. When you catch your thoughts drifting, get back to the breath. There are variations on this theme, such as walking meditation and meditation while doing yoga or manual work. In a word, meditation is about paying attention. Be here now! Nothing more, nothing less.

Buddhist meditation, such as that practiced in Zen, strives for a combination of concentration (such as counting the breaths) and open awareness (listening to sounds, noticing things in your environment, etc) The goal is the same—to be attentive to whatever is going on within you and without you, as the Beatles song goes. Vedic forms of meditation usually include a mantra or phrase that is to be repeated over and over while keeping the eyes closed. The intent is to create a state of bliss, which some people call transcendence but I call spacing out. TM, à la the Maharishi, is a form of Vedic meditation.

Today’s popularity of mindfulness in psychology stems from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, famous for his stress reduction clinic, established in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. You could say that Kabat-Zinn made Zen Buddhism scientifically respectable by stripping it of its religious trappings and subjecting it to clinical research. Over the past 30 years, mindfulness meditation has swept throughout the medical world and is used to treat patients suffering from cardiac disease, terminal cancer, chronic pain, drug and alcohol addictions, and a host of other conditions. Indeed, the research shows that mindfulness meditation can bring a lot of benefit. Practiced diligently, it can reduce the stress response, lower blood pressure, improve immunity, ease depression and anxiety, and even thicken areas of the cortex involved in the regulation of emotions.

So if meditation is so good for you, what’s the problem? The problem, as Janov states, is that it is based on suppression of feelings, or rather, dissociation from them. Meditation is often not calming at all; in its more intense forms, it is practically guaranteed to bring up feelings. Humans are just not made to sit still for hours or days at a time like some sessile creature on the bottom of the sea. We are born to move and to feel, and when feelings do come up in meditation, they can be intense. Serious meditators often experience extreme anxiety or depression—even panic—but rather go into those feelings to find out where they originate, as one does in primal therapy, the meditator is told to sit still and observe them as one might observe clouds floating across the sky. Feelings are neither here nor there. They are to be regarded merely as sensations that arise from nowhere and go back to nowhere—ahistoric, meaningless, even delusory. Over time, the capacity to feel is attenuated as one’s consciousness becomes increasingly rooted in the moment. Here and now. Here and now. Here and now….

Truly dedicated meditators—those who meditate for hours a day and attend frequent retreats—often get to a point where they feel disembodied. Their sense of self diminishes as they advance toward the ultimate goal of enlightenment, where one transcends space, time, and life and death itself to become one with the universe.

Beyond Life and Death? How Real is That?

Admittedly, meditation can make you calmer, more focused, resistant to stress, and more functional, but it must be done daily. In that sense, meditation is like an addiction that requires its regular fix. Stop doing it and your feelings come rushing back. Meditators often report feeling more peaceful—even joyful—after years of practice, but at what cost? Where did the trauma go? What access to feeling has been sacrificed? I know meditators who seem more like animated pieces of wood than feeling human beings. Others may smile beatifically, but exude an aura of passive aggression under the peaceful exterior. Despite the dozens of studies reporting positive results, despite the brain scans showing thicker cortices and lower vital signs, one is led to wonder what happened to the pain. Does it just vanish? Is it true that mindfulness can heal trauma, as its proponents say? Or has the pain just been driven deeper into the body, leaving an appearance of being healed?

My hypothesis is that mindfulness meditation encapsulates those painful feelings and keeps them dissociated from awareness, much as an oyster encapsulates an irritating grain of sand within a pearl. And one must keep them encapsulated with daily meditation for the rest of one’s life. Therapists who specialize in treating PTSD say that mindfulness can help someone examine their traumatic feelings – look at them from afar so to speak – so they can be “reprocessed.” Reprocessing usually means “reappraisal” – i.e. rethinking your feelings rather than taking them at face value. Once again, it is an attempt to control feeling with cognition, in direct contradiction to the affective neuroscience principle that feeling (affect) always trumps cognition.

Personally, I've found mindfulness meditation to be useful for dealing with present-day stress. It can and does provide strength during those times when you need to keep things together but I’ve never mistaken it for healing. It is only an adjunct; a tool to help with difficult feelings and situations until one can resolve them through action in the present or through primaling, whatever is appropriate to the situation. Without attention to feelings, mindfulness meditation is little more than a virtual lobotomy.

Bruce Wilson

All You Have to Do Is Lie Down and Feel It. Really.

2011-10-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

All you have to do is lie down and feel it.....REALLY.

I was reading Arthur Janov's blog about MBCT...: Mindfulness - whatever that is , and Cognitive therapy : Just ignore patient's history and treat the RESULT of history, mix both and you have a new therapy.....REALLY ?

So : we are going to talk forever about what ails us. We are going to look at the crazy miserable person we have become - we are going to talk about it for hours, days, months, years, try to understand it, forgive and move on... REALLY ?

.......And we are never going to go to the origin of our behavior : all these arcane reasons : why we do what we do and how we become who we are : our history : all these minutes, hours, years of misery, of registering day after day that we didn't matter to the most important people in our lives, all theses instants when we needed a feeling of tenderness that told us we were OK, all these moments of silence when we needed THEM to be interested in us, their children, all these moments of utter despair for not being looked at with a smile, listened to with genuine interest, laughed with, accepted as a child human being, all these seconds of wretched pain for not being loved by the two most important people in our lives, day after day during all the years spent with THEM as we developed into adulthood....

..and none of it mattered ??? Or we can ignore it for ever and just deal with the surface result ?? ?

So, the surface, who we are now, isn't the result of all these seconds of agony, of our need for love, of the agonizing pain for not being loved ?

Yes of course it is , but since it is all buried, covered, deeply entrenched in the past, let's leave it there and not go back to it. It is the PAST after all. Let's deal with the present...

Except for : Every pain has been buried, by and in our brain. our physiology : There is repression" in and with every part of our bodies ( and we aren't going to feel it ").

All this unconscious burying, rerouting, denying, which built us into who we are, the result of which is taken at face value and dealt with forever....If we lived two thousands years it still wouldn't be enough to dig out every strand of the rerouting of the pain in our system, -all the defenses being mostly unconscious- that we had to erect in order to protect ourselves from the abject pain of not being loved.

So why bother, why even try ?

To this day, I don't even understand why people don't see that and why they persist in wasting their time, their lives really, trying to figure out, talking ABOUT something they don't have access to . How can we understand something we really don't remember ? ""Intellectual understanding of buried feelings "! It would be funny, if it weren't not so tragic...

It is tragic, because we have only one life and we are going to spend it trying to figure out, trying to understand, trying to explain, trying to forgive...WHAT ? What we cannot figure out (it is all buried), understand ( the millions of rerouted neurons in our brain), forgive (our parents for not loving us) etc.....But what about the rage and despair that they didn't love us, what about the impossible task to understand that they destroyed our real chance at our lives, the one and only one we have, and forgive.

Yes, in most cases, it wasn't their fault : they weren't loved either. Yes we can still understand and forgive. But so what ? What about the imprinted misery/ neurosis : the rerouting of the Pain into all theses automatic defenses : mirrors inside mirrors, blocking our past, rerouting all our feelings and our thoughts, keeping us unaware of our original needs, our history, who we were, who we were supposed to become and who we became, : unconscious, neurotic, lost, hurting, looking for something, always.... But looking for what : ourselves ??

This sounds like a tragedy, doesn't it ?

But the real tragedy is all this group of very important people, all these scholars representing a whole profession, parading onstage and telling the people, : we are going to help you have a better life with MBCT : We have concocted a little cocktail of a bunch of theories, ideas of what ails you and we are going to fix you : a little bit of this and of that ( if you talk enough, and understand enough, never mind the part that is unconscious : your history). We promise you luminous days, full of words, understanding and forgiveness.

And the tragedy is that all these poor lost souls, will believe it, buy it, go for it and lose their only chance at life..

Yesterday I had a Primal : What is that ? Feeling the hurt, the helplessness , the hopelessness of not being loved, the anger, the despair, the need... to be loved...by THEM, as a child.

I was in pain yesterday, so if I wanted to feel better I knew all I had to do was : Go lie down and feel it it.

..and once again: the miracle happened : after 2 hours of crying, becoming that hurt little girl again, being with THEM, looking at THEM as if they are with me now, talking to THEM, begging THEM to love me. I understood new things, new strands of my life that have been pulling me forever in some unreal behavior"", I understood a new piece of "Why" "All my life".......

Why all my life, again, another huge piece. ...

Why ..I have been who I am, why I react in this way each time, why I get hurt so easily, why I could never do this, why I always did that, why I couldn't love, why I pushed love away, why I couldn't feel good, why I didn't sleep well, why life was miserable and so why I didn't care about it, why the sun on my skin left me indifferent, why beauty didn't touch me, why others misery didn't mobilize me , why, why, why my life could be so meaningless at times....,.,.

WHY : and it is so incredibly simple really : Today as I am writing this, I marvel at the miracle it is : I can go back there, not in thoughts, not by some exercise, not by talking a pill or chanting : but having "access" : whenever I want I can go back there, go back to the moments, the images, the sensations, the memories, the needs, the despair that little girl felt. It is all there, buried in me : all I have to do is let myself FEEL IT.

I still marvel at how my brain, my body have kept pristine, alive and real, all these instants where I felt I wasn't loved, how the memory of each second was buried but stayed in me.

How I had to NOT TO FEEL IT to be be able to go on, and so repress this unacceptable fact that the people who should have loved me most, nurture the best part of me, whose love should have made me grow, develop, allow me to feel joy and warmth, feel that all was well in this world, DIDN'T.

Who I was ? : Tragedy : my one life, : miserable, drugs, drinking, failed relationship, successful, so what ? .... a life that belonged to someone else ...literally..So why live : suicide attempt : five minutes later : over....

No, a reprieve, New York, a book :
"We are creatures of need"
I have needs ? I should have been loved ? It is not all my fault ? THEY just couldn't ? I am not bad, doomed, crazy forever. I can kiss my psychoanalyst good bye ? There are no reason for anything and certainly, no more reason to try to follow the myriad of ways I have been rerouting all this pain that made me a stranger to myself. ? You mean it is possible to undo all this misery, not to be stuck in my past forever ? You mean I can have a life, MY life ? it is all in a book.

........ I will know who I am, I will BE whom I really am, I will feel good, I will sleep well, I will be able to love really and may be to be loved. I will be able to feel my life in the present because the past will be gone, I will remember it but it won't pull the strings all the time..I will be free from it ...ENFIN, at last ?..

You mean, it is possible ? ... I left my job, my car in a street in Paris, left my key with a friend, flew to Los Angeles..

...and yes it is possible...It all happened and it is even better that I could have imagined : When I hurt, the past is always more powerful than the hurt in the present, so all I have to do is :

LIE DOWN AND FEEL IT

Each time, I go back there, that little piece of me, repressed, buried, comes alive, I feel what happened, I become that little girl hurt again, I understand one more piece of who I am. I come out of this incredible trip in the past, and then : I am completely in the present light, happy, alive, myself at last .

I still marvel at the fact that once I feel that old pain, my old needs, all the different ways I unconsciously denied them, avoided them, all this tortuous behavior to keep them away, all becomes clear : How my unconscious becomes conscious, and how I know now and forever : who I was, and who I had to become, and now finally : who I am.

...and I want to thank the man who figured it all and put it in a book . I thank him for my life.....forever.

So what I don't understand is why would anybody want to waste their life doing : What is it called : MBCT ?

France Daunic Janov

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 11/13)

2011-10-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

Neo-Freudian Shifts in Free Association

Free association, the staple of orthodox Freudian analysis, has given way to what Harry Stack Sullivan and others have called "more genuine communication." Sullivan thought that free association was too often a case of patients and doctors indulging in "parallel autistic reveries." He and other heretical analysts led patients to talk about significant aspects of their lives in a more directed way.

Talking may produce insight, recognition, enlightenment, and all the other facets of awareness which analysts prize; , but it does not restore c onsciousness. To heal, t alking must lead into deeper levels of experience and memory.
I dealy, therapists should limit their directives. To speak while the patient is plunging into a non-verbal early event would be to abort the feeling. We cannot communicate verbally with a patient who is her non-verbal, pre-verbal brain. The genuine communication here is the fluid connection between the levels of consciousness within the patient and not the quality of the dialogue between patient and therapist. What is difficult in the training of primal therapists is to teach them how to ask a non-verbal question. It can be done.
What is clear in doing our therapy is that one cannot transgress levels of consciousness; the therapist must remain on the same level as the patient.

Time in Modern Analysis

One needs time to fully penetrate the depths of the unconscious. The statutory analytic hour (usually lasting only 45-50 minutes, in fact) means that the therapist is setting a limit at the outset as to how far his patients can go. With such a short time, what else can they do but restrict themselves to matters of the now? Going into the past can very easily seem like a waste of time. The way analysis treats it, it is.
The person in an analytic-style therapy may relate a current situation which unwittingly leads to a primal scene; there are tears and a welling up of feeling. What happens next is crucial. If this occurs at around 30 to 35 or 40 minutes in a 45-minute session, the analyst's response is predictably one of stepping in to seal off the emotion while encouraging the patient to organize his thoughts for tomorrow. From the Primal perspective this patient has been cut off from himself, stopped dead in his tracks, right at the point when an important primal feeling is about to occur. He is robbed of the only experience that can profoundly change him.
The painful feelings are memories that take their own time to be told in their own form. The 45-minute session suits a cerebral therapy where one feels for a few minutes and can then stop with impunity. Therapists may feel something has been achieved when they see their patients crying for a few minutes about a scene from childhood, but crying about and being in the grips of childhood is the difference between a few tears and sobs, and reliving ineffable Pain for two hours. It is the "old" tears we are after; the tears the child should have cried and never did. Baby tears are curative. Adult tears are ameliorative.
The shortening of the psychoanalytic session is bound to keep the patient hanging on. He either has to talk fast to get the feeling that he is covering the topics important to him, or he slows down and is able to deal with only a fragment of what is going on. He has a distended session. And no matter how many times a week he comes for therapy, the breaks in the flow of unconscious to conscious are determined by the clock on the wall, not by his inner time.
Imagine having to squash the feelings yet maintain a grasp of what came up, assimilate the analyst's interpretations, try to make sense of one's own thoughts sparked off by the aborted experience, all the while clinging to some tentative meaning with which to step back into the world until the next meeting. It is too much to ask. Such an approach inevitably produces a greater amount of headwork and therefore confusion. Meanwhile, having encouraged this confusion to some extent, psychoanalysis then presents itself as the means of unravelling the confusion through the medium of understanding. Thus the analyst ensures his own indispensability.
It might be argued that patients who go three, four, or even five times a week would invalidate my complaint about the distended session. Presumably, whatever was interrupted one day could be easily picked up the next day. It can't because the defense system has recovered sufficiently to prevent access. Indeed, the repressive barriers may be strengthened, because our defenses reflexively tighten their hold when Pain comes close. At the very least, patients are caught in the contradiction of allowing unconscious feelings to surface followed by a need to restrain those very feelings. A certain indeterminate cycle occurs here. The patient comes close to Pain, then is encouraged to push it back down and "think about it" until the next time.
Furthermore, I can't for the life of me figure out what the difference is between therapy three times a week or four times a week. Presumably, the four times a week goes deeper and further, which in my experience is not the case. Any analysis, even if it goes on seven days a week, will go no deeper than the defense system will allow. Unless Primal techniques are used, the therapy will remain on a superficial level, no matter how convinced the patient and therapist are that they have gone deeper. That is why many of our former patients who entered Primal Therapy after years of psychoanalysis say that in the first three weeks of our therapy they had gone deeper and learned more than in all the years of analysis.
I am convinced that the kind of material a patient dare not face until she is ready in psychoanalysis, which could be a year or two down the line, is material one can get to in two or three primal sessions. We also find out that the really deep material is nothing that can be recounted to a therapist, nothing that a therapist need dose out to a patient. It is something that neither one can recognize until the feeling is felt and is over. If the therapy is done correctly, Pain will arise in order and in integratable doses. The really deep material remains absolutely out of reach of any analyst who could not possibly guess what traumas lie deep in the neuraxis.
What also makes psychoanalysis interminable is that four times a week therapy deepens the dependence on the therapist, who is meanwhile encouraging his patient to be independent and "responsible." But in these terms, to really take full responsibility would mean to stand on one's own two feet and stop asking for constant advice. Still, patients don't really go to analysis for advice; they go for comfort, reassurance, understanding, warmth, and kindness -- and above all, a chance to talk to a "daddy" or "mommy" who will finally listen and care. The price they pay to get this is to be a bright student, offer up brilliant insights and remain forever dependent. As long as the therapist is in the driver's seat, the patient will continue to be a dependent passenger.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 10/13)

2011-10-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Neo-Freudian Analysis:
The Noncorrective Emotional Experience

Introduction

So-called neo-Freudianism covers any number of different theoretical angles and therapeutic methods that have been developed over a long period of time by many different psychoanalysts. They come together as neo-Freudians because their positions , developed from Freudian psychoanalytic concepts modified rather than discarded the Freudian model for the origin and treatment of neurosis. Neo-Freudians tend to reject the same Freudian notions, though they do not always replace them with shared viewpoints.

At the head of the neo-Freudians were some of Freud's own colleagues who defected from orthodoxy at one time or another. Key figures in the emerging heresy were Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Eric Fromm.[1] Although all of these theorists parted company with "the master" on significant issues, none of them rejected Freudian thought or methodology wholesale.
Emphasis upon the influence of childhood experience was maintained by the neo-Freudians, with neurosis still viewed as the result of unassimilated childhood disturbances. While "intrapsychic conflict" is still part of the more recent analytic focus, early life experience has been increasingly relegated to that of a reference point. It is thought to be helpful in understanding how the neurosis emerged, but is not considered to play an active role in recovery. The most obvious parting of the ways with Freudian orthodoxy came over the issue of instinctual drives (the libido), a central dynamic in the Freudian scheme. The neo-Freudians dispense with the issue of infantile sexuality (or at least show far less concern for it), favoring instead a focus upon the present environment with its ongoing interpersonal dynamics. As a result of this trend the matter of repression and the unconscious has gradually lost attention, with the here-and-now interactions of daily life coming to the fore.
Therapy for the neo-Freudians focuses on how the person feels in his environment, what he perceives his needs to be, and how he sets about satisfying them. It probes into problems of "self-evaluation" (such as insecurity, unassertiveness, and low self-esteem) toward the goal of helping the patient develop practical "self-management" skills. Working from the premise that the patient is disabled by bad experiences, the main thrust of neo-Freudian therapy is to provide what Franz Alexander termed a "corrective emotional experience." Here it is believed that positive experiences in therapy will undo tangles wrought by the bad ones. For example, because the patient "learns" in therapy that not all authority is strict and unyielding or indifferent, such new, good experiences will adjust his view of himself in the world and enable him to set about life with sensible, realistic attitudes and restored self-confidence.
The magical notion is that by working through the transference and aided by the corrective emotional experience, the person will change. Unfortunately, iIf chang e w ere as simple as a corrective good experience , then all neurotics who have loving partners as adults should stop being neurotic. Not the case.
After all, transference in Freudian terms means transferring emotional reactions in the past onto the present. It doesn't mean simply transferring onto a therapist. Whatever needs remain unfulfilled from child will be transferred onto anyone, including one's children. Thus the child becomes the act-out for old feelings and needs.
All of this is no more than saying that you cannot "love" neurosis away. That concept is an old liberal, democratic notion that love solves all.
Does it not make better sense to avoid analyzing the transference and go straight to the need, which is omnipresent? The transference will then no longer be possible. Besides, emotions are not there to be corrected; they are there to be felt. The emotional residue continues on until they are felt. If one hates one's father and is transferring that onto a therapist, a soon as the hate is felt in its entirety, over months and months, the transfer will disappear.
In modern analysis, the length of therapy tends to be much briefer than the protracted excavation of Freudian psychoanalysis. This seems to be the case 1) because immediately observable change in adjusting to the here-and-now is the objective of therapy, and 2) because the vast area of experience which lies behind the barrier of repression -- the past -- is largely removed from the picture, or if not removed entirely becomes a kind of after-thought of the therapy. Thus there are usually fewer sessions per week, with a reduced emphasis upon free association. The neo-Freudian therapist is generally more flexible and eclectic than his orthodox counterpart. He tends to play a more active role with his patient, intervening more readily to focus on patterns of attitude, behavior, and self-evaluation.
In the end, neo-Freudianism drifts towards behaviorism, bringing principles of learning and even conditioning to bear. By abandoning the more abstruse mysteries of Freudian thought, the neo-Freudians have allowed the vital importance of key concepts like repression and past causes to lapse. Because of the inadequacies in Freud's original techniques for dealing with the past, in their efforts to discard the inadequacies, the neo-Freudians have thrown out the past altogeth er, not unlike throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Shift to the Here and Now

Freud believed that current personal problems were founded upon the repressed experiences of childhood, the key to which were the stages of psychosexual development. Beyond that he was concerned with the clash between the murky remnants of man's primitive, instinctual life and the civilized being that he endeavors to be. Thus, neurosis resulted from the intrapsychic conflicts created by repression. For this Freud prescribed a lengthy mental probe into the unconscious to discover the root causes. This painstaking reconstruction of a person's history, when set against the backdrop of man's evolution and innate biological constitution, would lead to understanding of what was wrong and, in turn, provide the person with more conscious control over his life. The interpretations by the analyst and the patient's growing own insight would allow him to adjust to the prevailing realities of civilization.
The neo-Freudian analysts depart from this classical approach in several ways. The shift from emphasis upon discovering unconscious conflicts rooted in childhood to a focus upon current life situations has been gradual, as each generation of analysts has become dissatisfied with various methods of its predecessors. The first phase of rejection was instigated by Freud himself who, during the latter part of his life, had begun to lean towards making the ego rather than the id the concern of analysis. In a sense, it was not the personal past that was rejected but the innate, phylogenetic legacies of the species' primitive past that lost their central importance. Freud spoke of analysis necessarily fluctuating between the id and the ego. Modern analysts rarely bother with the id and its libidinal drives. They prefer to focus instead upon the ego and its defense mechanisms: the here-and-now aspect of consciousness. Those analysts tend to call in the individual's past only when it serves to throw light upon how the ego is conducting itself within the present environment.
Although modern analysts agree that neurosis may be the end product of repressed conflicts left over from childhood, they do not give these conflicts the same importance as did Freud, nor do they focus on the same conflicts. The patient, they would say, lives here and he lives now. Therefore the context demanding the most attention is the present one. Whatever its historical basis, the neurosis thrives at the moment and is clearly bolstered by the current environment in which the patient moves and has his being. This environment inevitably includes what are rather laboriously called interpersonal relationships. True, new-Freudians acknowledge, how the patient conducts himself within that environment may have a lot to do with how he grew up. But once he has become enlightened (which is the task of therapy) he will discard these anachronistic, self-defeating behaviors in favor of more suitable ones for the here and now.
The late Franz Alexander, a pioneering founder of psychoanalysis in the United States, enunciates the modern Freudian relationship to the past in this statement:

We could center the patient's attention on his real problems and should turn his attention to disturbing events in the past only for the purpose of throwing light upon the motives for irrational reactions in the present.[2]

This declaration equate s only the present problems with "real" problems. It is presumptuous for the therapist to decide where the patient should focus his attention. Certainly the patient with his problems should be allowed the right to go where he must.
To refer to the past only to "throw light" upon motives is to miss the point on two counts. The past is not simply a record, a library of academic information; it is a living state which infuses, permeates, and in many ways determines the present. The neurotic does not live in the here-and-now. He is stuck in the past. His present is colored by the past. To use a modern colloquialism, "the past is happening." It is not a separate story written in the pages of some carefully preserved personal history book over which dust has fallen, but is alive in the cells, tissues, and chemistry of the brain and body. We are what we were, trying to get what doesn't exist; acting out a past we cannot feel. Yet we erroneously refer to the past as if it were an external place physically distant from us. To see someone racked by a repressed grief, to see man or woman dissolve into a hurt child, is to understand how the Painful past has lived on within us. To feel it oneself is to understand that much more clearly.
But the neo-Freudians have moved away from addressing that past and toward Behaviorism: stamp in good behavior, stamp out the bad/neurotic. This is not an improvement on Freud. Quite the opposite. They have moved toward a non-historical, non-dynamic approach when the opposite is called for. One can use behavior therapy, biofeedback, and other techniques to correct the blood pressure, but the tendency remains. Correcting the blood pressure through behavioral techniques tries to get the patient to live in the present. But it is only ephemeral.
Among the non-libido analysts, there was a move towards encouraging patients to show feeling. There was an increased recognition of non-verbal aspects of consciousness. However, these new directions were never taken quite far enough.
Karen Horney, a very well known analyst in the thirties and forties was one of the first to ask patients to report what they were feeling rather than just what they were thinking. It was a significant step. But to Horney the task of therapy was still interpretation of attitudes towards the self and interpretation of defenses. Although she paid attention to non-verbal signals in this endeavor, there is no indication that she saw beyond the underlying dynamics. While she accepted that a person could recall his past and reveal it verbally, she apparently did not recognize that emotional intrusions which often accompany these revelations are not simply caused by the memories entering awareness, but are in fact repressed memories themselves. They are not signals of ideas, attitudes, wishes, or other elements of the mental sphere but signals of the imminent eruption of intense Primal feelings. Freud and early post-Freudian theorists had a much better idea of the importance of not only uncovering "forgotten" memories but of allowing the affect or feeling bound up with the memories to surface simultaneously. His descendants would have done better to return to some of the original aspects of psychoanalysis. Although many modern analysts do pay lip service to the notion of allowing the feelings inherent in repressed memories to surface, what they do in practice often militates against such an experience.
The neo-Freudian equivocation toward actually feeling the past seems to have turned more recently into a headlong flight away from it.

[1]_I am not including Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Rank, and Sandor Ferenczi. Although Freudian thought was their springboard for defection, they ventured beyond what is generally known today as neo-Freudianism.
[2]Franz Alexander, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (New York: Ronald Co., 1946), p. 88.

On a Few Kindly Words

2011-10-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

I watched Sixty Minutes last night as Andy Rooney said goodbye to TV. In his goodbye speech he noted that he became a writer because a teacher once said to him, “You know you can really write. Keep it up.” That was it; one sentence that set him a life pursuit. And I thought how little it takes to help kids find a direction in life. Just a few words when the child is seven or eight, a few words of encouragement is all she needs to pursue a talent. And how rare is that encouragement. Why is that? Maybe parents cannot see their child for who she is. Maybe they are so into their own need for encouragement that they cannot see that need in others. And it doesn’t even have to be direct encouragement. So many of us remember the name of a kind teacher decades later, and remembered that her kindness got us to study and learn; not the readin, writin, and rithmatic admonishments of our leaders. It is kindness that gets us motivated and always will be.

I still remember the names of my grammar school teachers who talked to me with warmth and caring. Mrs. Lopez taught me Spanish and Mr. Summers taught me typing. I still am good at that many decades later. And I remember my teacher, Mrs. Kirk, who took me to the zoo when I was in kindergarten at age 6. She recognized that I had a mentally ill mother, something I did not know, and wanted to be kind and caring. I only realized years later that she selected only me to go to the zoo. So how come after all this time I remember their names and not any of the others? And how come I learned what they taught? They fulfilled a deep need, a need in all of us, that I was not aware of. And they were human and acted like humans, not just like “teachers.” Isn’t that a lesson in all of our endeavors? What works is humaneness, a little caring and a little encouragement. It is not strictness and a driving teacher or boss. The good people make you want to learn because in that learning is love or how it gets translated.

And what amazes me is how little it takes. Just a few words over many years can make a difference. It says, “You are good. Keep it up.” Instead, because it is lacking, the child grows up acting out the need by driving herself so that others will say, “you know you’re good.” And then she comes to us as a patient to cry out, “Say I’m good!” Why? Because all the new encouragement still makes her feel empty and dissatisfied.

And current praise won’t be enough because of the critical period; that is the time when needs must be fulfilled. Encouragement at age seven is important, and when it isn’t there it will help slightly to get it later on. It will never stop the act-out if you cannot get it when you need it. Needs must be fulfilled on a timetable and only then. Then the love is locked-in and keeps us safe and content for life. When fulfillment is not there we are locked-into trying to get it forevermore. And “tough love” ain’t it. You can scare kids into behaving but that is not the same as loving them and having them really want to behave. Isn’t that true of all of us?

On Mindfulness Therapy: Or Mindless Therapy

2011-10-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

So, Drs. Dan Siegel and Jack Kornfield are giving a seminar in November at UCLA called, “Mindfulness, Healing, and the Neurobiology of Love.” Clearly it is exactly the opposite of what they advertise. And then there is the dubious claim that after the workshop the attendee will:

Identify three ways to heal trauma
Describe the nature of self
Demonstrate mindful practice to reduce suffering
Apply trainings of love, kindness, forgiveness and compassion

That is a tall order; far too tall for what they offer. And as a bonus we can get credit toward our professional license by attending. It is recognized by the California Board of Psychology. Dr. Kornfield, a former Buddhist monk and now is director of the Insight Meditation Society. Dr. Siegel is clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

So, what is it this mindfulness? I was going to say, more booga booga but I won’t, just yet. But we have to ask the question, “Where is the science in psychology and psychiatry today. What happened to our field? Is it bankrupt and taken over by the mystics? If so, why?

One reason is that too many of these professionals are left brainers, in their heads, intellectuals in the worst sense of the term, and they cannot merge ideas with feelings to see how necessary feelings are. Or in this case to use the intellect to get to feelings is nonsense; as anyone who reads neurology would know. And I have heard Dr. Siegel lecture on it so he should know. But the longest trip in the world for him is the trip from the left to right brain, from the neocortex to the limbic area. And what he knows but doesn’t is that we use the late-developing neocortex to suppress feelings when they are too strong; so to use that structure to get in touch with feelings is an oxymoron.

What they say is that you need to become extremely watchful and aware and that makes you at peace with yourself. Watch your in-breathing and out-breathing so you are more mindful. Cultivate detachment and become an observer of yourself; how you move, how you walk and how you breathe. To be very aware of everything around you. And on and on—if you want to become a Hindu. But is this science? Is this what the professor at UCLA should be teaching? Well, they say, we have the research to back up our claims. “We change vital signs and behavior”, and they may well have it. But let’s consider. There is an imprint of key memories going back to just after conception. There are literally hundreds of studies now of this research. Further, it seems like the imprint is engraved by a process of epigenetics involving methylation and other chemicals. The imprint is carried forward and affects behavior and the later development of disease. And we are driven by the imprints all of our lives; which is not more than saying that we are the result of our history, our very early history. If we do not believe this than we are “free” to concoct any kind of theory. But if we follow science we are constrained by it; that is, we must acknowledge history and memory. How can we ignore history and be liberated? No matter what any guru says there is no way to ignore our past and get access to our feelings and become “conscious.” Conscious of what? The external, the outside? That does nothing to help us access our feelings inside.

What they are teaching is how to suppress and get on in life, and then be more kind and forgiving. I repeat: there is no way to avoid historical imprints and be liberated. How can we avoid ourselves our feelings and we kinder? They offer to be more focused on the minutia and therefore we will be able to heal trauma. They don’t say how. They don’t say what trauma is and how it gets installed in our brains and bodies. It is all amorphous and ethereal, as all booga booga should be. We just fill in the blanks. But one thing we know; you can use the top level to block access to feeling, not access it. vTo gain access the neocortex must cede to lower feeling levels of consciousness; must give way to feelings and let go of the intellect. But when you go to school and use your intellect every day for years it is not easy to let go of it. Intellect becomes the apotheosis, and takes the place of where feelings should be.

These people have abandoned our raison d’etre. People hurt; we need to help them with that hurt and find ways to undo it, not to help them play games with themselves. Yes it’s fun at $300 a weekend, but underneath it all people are looking for answers for their lives. We as professionals owe it to them.

Dr Siegel in his video says that in neurosis there is an imbalance in the two hemispheres and we need to bring them together so he suggests guided imagery, relaxation techniques and to be able to name the feeling accurately; he claims when you do that the whole system calms down. In short, to use the top level to bring the two sides together, when it is exactly the opposite; we descend below and to the right, experience feelings and allow them to join the left hemisphere, and then the whole system will calm down. It is all a mind game, and I must reiterate, no matter what the claim, not matter what the research you cannot ignore your own history and be liberated or learn to relax. It is our central reality. Yes, we can try this maneuver or that day after day and achieve a change in vital signs but I guarantee you that the imprint will live on down deep and do its damage constantly. The problem is that you have to do key gyrations constantly in order to achieve some semblance of normal. But it is only semblance, not organic. And as long as the imprint is there you always regress. How can you not?; as long as reality is there you will be subject to it. But of course all this is based on science. If you ignore it, if you avoid epigenetics and the imprint then you can manufacture any theory you want. Hence the merging with the mystics. And of course, the real problems is that devilish intellect that rules the field and makes the purveyors of feelings a pariah or someone not serious.

Siegel says we need to separate awareness from our feelings so you don’t moan and grown about your sadness; to get a handle on your feelings. Sounds good? Wrong. We don’t need a handle; we need our feelings. He thinks we can use awareness to help bring the two hemispheres together. Awareness is what separates them. Awareness came along millions of years after feelings. Why would we use to it for integration? Feelings are what integrates with intellect. Not vice versa. Primitive animal forms have some kind of awareness but they don’t have conscious/awareness; a sense of themselves and what they feel. In evolution the top level of the brain split off into awareness on the left and feelings on the right. Consciousness requires both. So there is awareness a la Siegel and then there is conscious/awareness. It is the latter that heals.

At the risk of being politically incorrect here we have a scientific congress by Siegel and Kornfield, organized by Solomon and Goldstein. I don’t think it is an accident that it is a Jewish operation. Jewish intellectuality is well known as Jews were in many countries where they had to carry their skills in their head since they were not allowed to carry any riches to other places. They were not allowed into the basic industry of America, iron, steel, coal, automobiles so they remained on the fringes, into the intellect. And they refined the intellect until it turned into its opposite, in this case: mindfulness turns into mindlessness as the intellect soars into never-never land, a combination of booga booga, Buddhism (or is that redundant?), taking pieces of neurology and applying it helter-skelter to psychology. Applying it according to a parti pris, an apriori set of ideas that are not organic to us humans. Neurology in this case is sorted and selected according to the intellect and wiggled into whatever hypothesis is concocted at the moment. It is a superimposed notion on human life rather than rising organically from our internal life; from our feelings. Ultimately, too many theories are simply ideas raised from the depths of the unconscious of the creator and elevated to the level of a principle.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 9/13)

2011-10-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

Wish Fulfillment

Contrary to Freud ’s theories , n eurotic dreams, particularly recurrent dreams, are attempts to deal with imprinted pain. Monsters, chaos, and catastrophes all depict the condition of the dreamer's feelings rather than the fulfillment of the dreamer's wishes. In the dream, no matter what the story, there is often a feeling of impending doom; the same feeling that arises just before a patient slips into a devastating pre-verbal primal.

While some dreams may contain wish fulfillment, it is definitely not the essence of dream material. Dream material is woven out of the concrete events of waking realities. If Pain is the chronic ingredient of that reality, it likewise will be the prime mover of dream activity.
Wish fulfillment is a seductive concept that again veils Pain behind a dangerous illusion of insight. Worse, it rarefies the unnecessary Pain of deprivation into an inevitable conflict of infantile desires.

Method

For Freud and his followers, the preferred method of dream analysis – that has r emain ed unchanged for the last century -- use s language, words, and ideas a s the main tools of unravelling. Freud believed that when traced back to its origin, a neurotic idea would "crumble" and the patient would be "freed from it." Unfortunately, intellectual tracing seems quite limited because the neurologic system allow s us to go only so far before barring the gates. Ideas can alter, deny, distort, and repress feelings, but they cannot crumble them. Feelings don't "crumble." They are felt and resolved. And with that resolution goes the ideas which were used to defend against them.
Dreams utilize the first and second levels of consciousness -- primarily the second -- and are another type of language. They use scenes, pictures, sounds, scents, and images to portray feeling. While dreams are still symbols for the feeling, they are closer than third-level ideas to the inner reality. Making associations -- interpreting dreams -- thinking about meaning, just results in more symbols to cover the feeling
Analyzing dreams is the same as analyzing an idea and finding flaws in its logic. You can analyze a paranoid idea -- "people are laughing behind my back," for example -- all day long and not change it one bit. When one succumbs to the feeling of the dream, then one is directly experiencing the unconscious. That means giving into the feeling -- which might be one of terror or blind panic -- and riding the feeling to wherever it leads in the unconscious.

Structuring the Dream

Freud's dream work model requires that the analyst structure the dream for the patient. This action in itself modifies the dream, for the analyst can only superimpose his own view and theory. The dream will have a Freudian slant in psychoanalysis, and a Jungian slant in Jungian analysis. The theory is a preconceived set of ideas laid onto the dream in order to make sense of it. However, no theory is necessary at all, because the memory-imprint is all that is needed to make sense. The dream when felt will lead precisely to the time and place of the trauma. No theory need intervene. The analyst cannot possibly know more about the patient's unconscious than the patient himself. And even if his guess is correct, his insight communicated to the patient will not alter the problem within the patient. It will only give him one more idea to think about, and one less reality to feel. Only the dreamer, not the analyst, knows for sure what a dream means, but he won't know until Pain opens the gates and diminishes repression.
Let's take one of the examples Freud used to show how the application of his technique explained the dream.

A lady related that as a child she very often dreamt that God had a pointed paper cap on his head. How are you going to understand that without the help of the dreamer? It sounds quite nonsensical; but the absurdity disappears when the lady says that as a little girl she used to have a cap like that put on her head at table, because she wouldn't give up looking at the plates of her brothers and sisters to see whether any of them had been given more than she. Evidently the cap was meant to serve the purpose of blinkers; this piece of historical information was given, by the way, without any difficulty.

The interpretation of this element and, with it, of the whole short dream becomes easy enough with the help of a further association of the dreamer's: 'As I had been told that God knew everything and saw everything, the dream could only mean that I knew and saw everything as God did, even when they tried to prevent me.' This example is perhaps too simple.[1]

For Freud it was "easy enough" to see the historical parallels between the dream symbols and the dreamer's past. The patient as a little girl was made to wear the cap, so in her childhood dreams she puts the same cap on God -- she saw the plates of food "even when they tried to prevent me." And Freud believed that arriving at an "accurate" understanding or interpretation in this way was sufficient to undo the trauma.
There is a certain intellectual satisfaction in arriving at such a neat and clear parallel. In fact, Freud felt that "this example is perhaps too simple" because the meaning was so easily discerned. We have found that no matter how simple and transparent the meaning of the dream is, experiencing its feeling is, without exception, never "simple." While the intellect can view the connections as a well-fitted package, the body experiences the connections only through confusion, fear, and finally , agony.
What matters in this dream is the Pain that drove this little girl to her compulsive behavior, and the further Pain of her parents' reaction to it. Beneath her insistent need to see if her brothers and sisters had been given more could be the Pain of rejection and neglect. The dinner food was only a symbol for the love she wasn't getting. It would have been best left to her to tell us what it means, which she could have done had she been encouraged to sink into the feelings in the dream, feeling the Pain of that little girl as a little girl at the dinner table. She must re-experience the rejection and the lack of love; she must feel the Pain that drove her compulsive glances. She must feel the even deeper hurt inflicted by her parents. Not only did they not recognize her desperate need, they punished and humiliated her for it

[1]Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 124.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 8/13)

2011-10-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

Abandoning yourself to thought is a contradiction in terms. Patients need to abandon themselves to feeling. If they are unable to abandon their unreal defensive selves to find the real pained self, then they must indeed rely upon another's interpretation of their experience.
And therein lies the rub.
Defense against feeling is precisely what makes neurosis a matter of mystery and confusion. That the patient cannot be trusted to arrive at his own answers seems to be a self-fulfilled prophecy in the sense that he is prevented from feeling his long-repressed feelings -- the true source of elucidation. And since the therapist doesn't trust the patient to go where he must, the patient doesn't go there and the analyst assumes that the patient cannot be trusted.

Resistance

Freud recognized that in allowing free association he was also inviting freedom of defense, or "resistance," as it was termed. This resistance had to be dissolved by the analyst's interpretations. Primarily, resistance is what "opposes and blocks the analytic work by causing failures in memory," although it also included the patient's criticism of his own associations. Freud believed that analyzing this resistance provided even more insight than the original associations :, as follows:

The associations which people wish to suppress in this way proves without exception to be the most important, to be decisive for the discovery of the unconscious thought. Resistances invariably confront us when we try to penetrate to the hidden unconscious thought from the substitute offered by the dream element."[1]

Freud needed to take this observation one step further. It is not an unconscious thought that the patient resists, but the threat of overwhelming Pain. Pain makes the thought intolerable; and it is the Pain that must be dealt with. The thought is only a cognitive abstraction, neutral in itself, until it is connected to the Pain that forged it.
What Freud did not perceive was that getting the patient to intellectually accept the analyst's interpretation of his resistance did not in fact remove the resistance; it merely changed its form. It is merely a substitution of thoughts, and no matter how accurate the newly supplied ones may be, disconnection is actually maintained.
Analyzing resistance is still a major part of the psychoanalytic method used today. The patient's resistance is worked on as a problem in itself. Freud believed that analyzing the resistance would eventually lead to the unconscious origin of the neurosis when in fact . analyzing the resistance is itself resistance. Analyzing the resistance keeps the person detached from the very feelings that could liberate him. It mobilizes the cortex in the service of repression, locking up the unconscious contents even tighter.
There is nothing to analyze about resisting Pain. Resistance is just one more mechanism of survival, a biological shutdown in the face of overwhelming danger. Ultimately, resistance is fear, and fear comes from threat, not thought. The system automatically resists more Pain than it can integrate. Resistance is normal and a survival function. To say to the patient, "You are resisting this or that" can make him feel guilty for acting normally. Resistance doesn't evaporate until the Pain does. Then there is nothing to be resist ant against .

Dream Analysis

In addition to free association , Freud used dream analysis to treat neurosis. In fact for Freud, the interpretation of dreams was "the via regia [royal road] to the unconscious." In his Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, he described how he came upon the similarity between dreams and neurotic symptoms:

If a pathological idea of this sort can he traced back to the elements in the patient's mental life from which it originated, it simultaneously crumbles away and the patient is freed from it...My patients were pledged to communicate to me every idea or thought that occurred to them in connection with some particular subject; amongst other things they told me their dreams and so taught me that a dream can be inserted into the psychical chain that has to be traced backwards in the memory from a pathological idea. It was then only a short step to treating the dream itself as a symptom and to applying to dreams the method of interpretation that had been worked out for symptoms.[2]

Freud applied his free association to interpreting dreams. In fact, he came to realize that dreams were often the best material for analysis. Since one is asleep (i.e., unconscious) while dreaming, there is little censorship from the ego so that the dream provides the purest possible presentation of the unconscious.
Freud's theory of dreams centered on one main concept: wish fulfillment. He believed that unconscious wishes from infancy and childhood animated all adult dreams. Since "dreams contain the psychology of the neuroses in a nutshell," unravelling their meaning via free association would also unravel the neurosis. Thus, the patient once again reclines on the couch in a relaxed, self-observant manner while producing associations to each part of the dream. Importantly, Freud believed it essential for the analyst to structure the dream for the patient:

If I say to a patient who is still a novice: "What occurs to you in connection with this dream?" as a rule his mental horizon becomes a blank. If, however, I put the dream before him cut up into pieces, he will give me a series of associations to each piece...[3]

These associations, when properly interpreted, would reveal the infantile wishes that actually motivated the dream material in the first place.
Freud broke important ground with his work on dreams, for dreams were generally regarded as nonsense by his contemporaries. Just recognizing that dreams were meaningful was a major breakthrough for psychology. The problem is that his views -- which were again a beginning -- have remained unexplored, unchanged, and unexpanded by his successors. Ernest Jones writes that the conclusions Freud made public in his Interpretation of Dreams "have experienced only a minimum of modification or addition in the half century since the book was published. Of very few important scientific works can this be said."[4] Jones viewed the lack of change as an indication of Freud's accuracy and thoroughness whereas others see it as an indication of his successors' rigidity and compliance.
Based on Freud’s theory, dream analysis is unfortunately another intellectual exercise that negates feeling. Dreams appear to contain images of something more profound. Until real causes are released from below the gates of consciousness/awareness , dream analysis remains intellectual guesswork. In precipitating real change, mind games are not helpful. What is helpful when using dreams in therapy is asking a patient to relive the dream in order to get to the feelings and imprints that gave rise to them. The symbols, images, and stories often reflect imprinted memory. Too often, intense dreams represent early non-verbal imprints remote from the dream itself. To understand an image and its theoretical underpinnings has nothing to do with cure. Only feelings can bridge the gap, and only Pain can lead to feelings. It is feeling that is the royal road to the unconscious; feelings are what is unconscious.

[1]Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 122.
[2]Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 132-133.
[3]
[4]Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, p. 229.

Toward a Grasp of History

2011-10-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

Once we have a firm grasp of history and its evolution we will know that addressing mental illness is not a matter of just understanding it but being immersed in it; submerged in our history, in its feelings, ceding to its power until words (our top-level brain) will no longer suffice; only feelings can. Words will simply not do it; in fact, words are the antithesis of cure, inimical to any therapeutic progress, as odd as that sounds, because they are too often used for a defense. As a matter of fact, in many situations the more the intellectual brain is active the more suppressed the feeling centers are.

I practiced Freudian-oriented psychotherapy for many years. One key reason was that there was relatively nothing else for the practice of dynamic psychotherapy. At least Freud posited an unconscious, and were he alive today I am sure he would not be a Freudian.

Let me start with my first important observation in therapy. A young man in conventional group therapy was recounting a visit he made in New York to see Raphael Ortiz in the theater of the absurd. He said that Ortiz was marching up and down the stage shouting mama! And inviting the audience to do the same. When they did many people in the audience began to cry and scream. I encouraged this young man to do the same. He refused but I insisted. Finally he began to scream mama!, fell off the chair and was writhing in pain on the floor. It went on for a half hour, something I had never seen before. When he came out of it he touched the carpet and said, “I can feel!” He felt different. I taped this session and for years afterward I listened to it to see what secrets this held. I also tried this again on other patients with very much the same result. I knew that I saw something that therapists practically never see but I did not know what it meant. I finally figured out what it meant only years later. I tried to see what these patients had in common. It was feelings—access to feelings that made the difference. It would take another twenty five years to figure out what was going on inside the person and her brain; but there was some basic truth I had uncovered. The result, I believe, is a new paradigm in psychotherapy; and it is not just a belief.

Obviously, if we allow patients to go deeply into their past without any intellectual interference we can learn so much. There lies a sequestered reality undreamed of in our field. And there lies the cure. By “cure” I mean arriving at ultimate causes. If we see time after time that those with migraine often relive oxygen deprivation at birth we begin to realize that perhaps oxygen deprivation may be one “cause” of later migraine. Particularly when those migraine begin to disappear after many relivings. This without a fixed theoretical mind-set. The same is true of many symptoms. Until we see in therapy the relationship between high blood pressure and traumatic events around birth we cannot alter it significantly. “Cure” means addressing and reliving the ultimate cause of our behavior and physical problems. We cannot do that until we acknowledge that very early events, even before birth, are imprinted and endure for a lifetime; that in order to eradicate serious even life-threatening symptoms we need to go back and relive those suffering aspects of an imprint that could not be experienced originally due to their load of pain. In my book, Primal Healing, I document the many, many studies that confirm the enduring power of early imprints.

There is no Jungian unconscious or shadow forces to blind us to the patient’s reality, no id nor other mystical notions. We can observe and later, we may draw some conclusions. Those conclusions would follow our observations. The problem is the need to absorb current observations within some kind of pre-established theory in order to make sense out of it. Some of the past trauma makes no “sense” in the ordinary scheme of things. there are no words nor scenes to put to it. I saw birth reliving for months and told my patients this was absolute nonsense because a local university neurologic department said that it was not possible. But they continued on and I had to reorient my thinking. Not only is it possible but we have seen it now with hundreds of patients from many countries of the world including those individuals who never read about it in my books. It is a measureable event. And we have researched it at the UCLA Pulmonary Laboratory as well in several brainwave studies.

Thomas Kuhn wrote that in the evolution of science there are periodic shifts or jumps that represent major changes in the direction of a particular scientific discipline. He labeled these jumps Paradigm Shifts. In our view, Primal Therapy and Primal Theory represent a major paradigm shift in the science of psychology. And in the course of this new perspective I want to demonstrate how a brain system designed to allow us to function under stress is in fact at the root of our mental problems. It is the story of the evolution of the brain and feelings. And evolution cannot be ignored in the therapy of human beings. Let’s take the case of deep depression. There are now modern techniques to ameliorate it—from tranquilizers and pain killers to drilling holes in the brain and probing deep down. The reason that we have had to used drugs and surgery is because there is no therapy extant that can go deep enough to affect the areas specifically involved in processing emotional pain. We can and we do. It is why we can use the word “cure.”

On Curing Steve Jobs (updated)

2011-10-16T01:15:00.000-07:00

What I write now are simply musings. But I wonder if there were anything that could have cured Steve Jobs. I want to offer a possibility. I use him as an example without fully knowing his early life but only as a means to explain why people get seriously ill so early. Let’s start from my hypothesis that events during life in the womb imprint trauma in the cells and foretell of serious disease later on. (read Life Before Birth for a fuller explanation). These events, a smoking, anxious mother, a drug-taking depressed mother, distort and detour natural cellular processes in the baby. It doesn’t show up for perhaps decades but it often will happen. The carrying mother’ state is reflected in the neurophysiology of the baby. And in Steve’s case it was not an auspicious beginning. His mother was impregnated by a Syrian, heavily objected to by the family; so much so that she had to give her baby, Steve, up for adoption. Can you imagine her state? Rejected by her family, carrying a baby that is a pariah to the parents. She had to be full of anguish. The bad part of that it is not a temporary affair that blows over when she gives the baby up for adoption. That torment can leave a mark on the cells of the baby which may stay a lifetime. That mark or tag has to do with changes in the chemical methyl in a process called methylation. Methylation changes how our genetic unfolding plays out; to me it constitutes the primal imprint. It endures and changes how our genetic legacy plays out. It, in effect, changes heredity through what is known as epigenetics.

But methylation affects many biologic processes, dislocating and distorting function. It changes heredity by turning off some genes that should be on and turning on those that should be off. Our development is affected.

There is new research that points out how the imprint can result in cancer and heart conditions later in life; not to omit Alzheimers and severe allergies. The imprint takes place as the brain is rapidly changing and evolving. Very few of us can avoid these implications. This may have been so in Steve’s case. The earlier the trauma the more drastic the later effects. In Steve’s case it may have begun when his mother discovered she was pregnant; from then on she lived as an outcast. And he suffered from it, a silent agony that was never recognized and never acknowledged. It became overt as he matured. And it was a mysterious disease; no one knew how it happened or why. Oncologists tried to suss out more and more about the disease so as to guess how long he might live. As the cancer went on there was no more talk of cure, just sustaining. But they will never find out the hidden mysteries involved in this disease by only examining cells. We need to look at the generating source; at origins and how it became engraved; for a good deal of current research and my own clinical experience point to womb-life as a serious culprit. How could it not be? A rapidly developing brain disrupted and distorted? It is difficult to suss out because there can be forty years between the primal imprint and the outbreak of disease.

For it is my opinion that under ordinary circumstances people should not fall seriously ill with mysterious ailments at a young age, and 49 is a young age. In fact, I believe that when it does happen that an illness overtakes a person it is almost inevitable that premature afflictions will take place later in life. And here we have a situation where it seemed the father was also banned or at least left with no contact with his son—ever. What we do not know is whether he went to an orphanage or a short time before he was adopted or not. Whether in those crucial days and weeks after birth whether he had love, hugs and caring; or was bereft of all that? If so, the suffering was compounded and the imprint embedded. Thus his future could have been foredoomed, an ineluctable force that eventually killed him. I must add that I am using this example only to indicate the factors that play into later disease so that we can all be more aware of the impact of early life.

I know that there are genetic cancers that may have a purely hereditary source. But it is also likely that there are many epigenetic cancers that come from imprinted trauma during life in the womb—methylation. To refine the notion a bit more, there are hereditary sources in later cancer that may only become apparent when the genetic tendencies are compounded with traumas in the womb. We know now that methylation has an effect on some tumor-suppressing cells so that the possible outbreak of cancer is increased. We also know that in our therapy there is a great enhancement of natural killer cells after one year of treatment. These cells keep on the lookout for newly forming cancer cells and move in to destroy them. They are not strong at the beginning of therapy when imprinted pain is at its height. Tumor suppressor genes can cause cancer cells to die by blocking cell growth. Imprinted trauma can interfere with their functioning so they are but a weak army fighting the overwhelming force.

I have seen this in epilepsy where the attacks may be genetic but the level of imprinted stress puts the patient over the top, and frank disease erupts. And when we remove some of the pain/stress in these epileptics the seizures cease. We have normalized the stress level so that the system can tolerate the input without producing a symptom. Thus, symptoms are often a sign of overload; the body can tolerate just so much stimulation and then slops over into perhaps a migraine or high blood pressure.

We have seen this in some patients who were treated by untrained therapists who allowed too much pain to erupt, the patient becomes overloaded and she leaves with a headache. We know what the mistakes were and we move quickly to avoid that happening. In our therapy the patient can turn a seizure into what it really is, major very early trauma—or, the birth trauma, and we then find that the seizure was the primal turned inside out. That is, when early imprints are threatening they can become a seizure if there is that genetic tendency. That tendency may drive from many sources: genetics, epigenetics, a crash on a bike, serious high fever while being carried or in the first months of life.

Still we rarely see a cancer in our patients which may be due to the therapy and also because most of our patients suffer from “leaky gates.” They cannot repress effectively; hence, they suffer all of the time but there is no massive repression with no outlet, often the requisite for later serious disease. I believe cancer as a deep cellular affliction requires massive repression as we mature. What this means is that great early imprinted pain calls into being massive repression to deal with it. It is an automatic process.

So here we may have an anguished mother, no father which means the mother is all alone to face the birth, a birth that will force her to leave her child forever, and no warm, kind parent to make it alright. On top of that we have a child perhaps totally on his own for the first critical weeks of his life until he is adopted. Let me add that there are critical periods for the fulfillment of need as we develop. Once that timetable has passed nothing can make up for the lack of fulfillment. It can be ameliorated so as to keep the stress level low enough to avoid the symptom but nothing can erase the memory/imprint. That is the basic fact of pain; pain which remains and forever leaves a basic tendency: toward developing a symptom, drug taking or drinking.

There may be a way to deal with womb-life traumas. As our patient digs deeper and deeper into his unconscious he eventually comes to infancy in therapy. That reliving can trigger off still more profound and remote imprints, the first-line physiologic/cellular components of the imprint set down while we are being carried in the womb. The reliving of infancy trauma then incorporates the deep physiologic aspect which becomes resolved and integrated, as well. It may be how we can relive and eliminate those preverbal events. That is, we may undo the traumas that have lain inside us for decades; the traumas that may result in serious disease.

Steve’s having been given away may have been an harbinger of future disease; an ineluctable destiny. It is for this reason that if one has had a womb-life filled with sturm and drang the only way to avoid the unavoidable is to have a therapy that can ultimately dig down deep; a prevention, for once a symptom sets in with possible end-organ damage it may be too late.

Now let’s remind ourselves that these traumas are registered deep in the brain and create havoc, and they resonate higher up as we evolve and disturb our emotional and intellectual/learning capacities. All levels resonate with one another and form a single coherent entity, possibly through similar or identical frequencies. To trigger-off the top level can mean setting off the bottom rung of the memory, as well; and unless the person has deep access to himself, not a usual occurrence, the illness is being compounded; the pressure on the cells greater. The early force has been dredged up by some circumstance in the present but has no where to go so it remains to create serious damage and tendency to catastrophic illness. The more catastrophic the imprint the more catastrophic the affliction. The force is so great that until one relives the first line or observes it there is no way to explain how ineffably powerful it is. Once felt or seen no one wonders how it can create major illness.

I want to emphasize how we can relive something that happened while we were being carried in the womb. It has to do with resonance. There seems to be a specific frequency and/or chemical affinity between layers of the brain. When we relive traumas in our therapy we eventually trigger off the related first-line deeply imprinted early imprints that dislocated cellular functioning. So we relive something in our childhood, a rejection, which gathers up into the reliving process the prototypic early imprint and the whole thing is relived; more than relived, there is integration and resolution. That means that the damaging womb-life imprint is also integrated so that it no longer creates the tendency to disease. The question is whether that disease tendency is really gone and really integrated. Has the imprinted been reversed? We need to study methylation in our patients to see what kind of changes occur as a result of the therapy. We want to know if we truly can permanently remove aspects of our history, of our early traumas so that all critical imprints can be reversed. Can we remove all latent tendencies? That is the generating source, the origin that detoured cellular life can be removed. And I believe it is the only way to do it to conquer the disease; assuming it has not gone so far as to be fatal. Otherwise the cancer comes back time and again. Experts look to the properties of the cancer to figure out why when they should also look into one’s early life to figure out why. Maybe therein lies the answer.

Steve had an idea about all this; for in the Rolling Stone of October 27, 2011, he discusses all this. “In 1972 Jobs met a bohemian girl named Christann Brennan. They soon embarked on a big, messy teenage romance, taking LSD and talking about The Primal Scream, a book by Arthur Janov…… For Jobs it was away to live more fully……and a way to overcome the pain of being abandoned by his birth parents. Steve explained to me how both LSD and primal screaming opened up stored trauma in the medulla. He would repeatedly talk about Janov’s ideas in regard to how mothers and fathers would fail to love their children and walk out on them in so many ways, creating and perpetuating trauma.” He knew. But he could not know what was raging inside of him so profoundly buried into the antipodies of his mind. He was brilliant about so much in his outer world and so bereft of the knowledge of what was killing him.

More on Epigenetics: How Your Life in the Womb Becomes the Story of Your Life

2011-10-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

You know when you see fat people they look like they were always fat, like it was inherited from fat mothers and fathers. Well you might be right…….half right. And it is true that those in school who were fat still seem fatter twenty years later. So why is that? Well a new study out helps explain it. That plus what I have written in Life Before Birth will give us a good idea what that is all about.

The study (“Epigenetic Gene Promoter methylation at birth is associated with Child’s Later Adiposity’ (fat) Godfrey, K.M. et al. Diabetes, May 2011) What it states is that a mother’s intake of food during pregnancy produces epigenetic marks on genes producing a tendency to be fat at age nine and after. Now as I have written before, that epigenetic mark resulting from changes in the methyl is called methylation and is, in my terms, what produces the imprint. It was changed by mother’s fat and her nutrient intake while carrying; increased fat mass along with low carbohydrate levels. This may cause hyper-methylation and a tendency for heaviness in the child. Because the child first learns the most important lesson of her life; what kind of world to expect and what kind and how much she should eat. Her dietary regime is being formed. If it is saying, “you don’t have enough and you need to eat more” then that is the lifelong message. It is not heredity, although it may look like it because the mother is also fat. The big difference was the body fat index.

The link, they say, between mother’s intake and the child’s later tendency to be heavy after a few years is pretty convincing. The uterine environment and the human adult phenotype (how fat she looks) is unmistakeable, as they did the experiment with another group and found the same thing. What it shows is that experience during womb-life will track us throughout lives, and as I show in the book will cause serious disease, including cancer and Alzheimers Disease, in my opinion, and any number of personality disorders. It is the most crucial time of our lives when there is the most rapid growth of brain cells and organ systems. It is here when critical set-points for all kinds of systems and biochemicals are being set down. So there can be deficiencies in thyroid hormone, for example, or not enough serotonin in help keep pain at bay and make us comfortable throughout life. Here is where personality is beginning to be formed and here is where we begin to have weight problems (age nine) for the rest of our lives. Here is where we need to pay the most attention to our babies. If we are not calm and are fighting with our husband there is a greater chance of homosexuality in the offspring. It is not a time to be taken lightly; a new life is being formed.

an Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 7/13)

2011-10-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Free Association

As Freud wrote in his History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, "The history of psychoanalysis proper...starts with the technical innovation of the rejection of hypnosis. ” Hypnosis was discarded for a number of reasons including , the realization that patients could not recall repressed, unconscious material when fully awake. Further, it became clear to Freud that trauma, though repressed, permeated the psyche in a total way, leaving no train of thought unrelated or unimplicated. This recognition formed the basis for the psychoanalytic technique of free association. Free association now replaced hypnosis as the central probing device of the mind.
In the words of A.A. Brill (reference!!!), Freud persuaded his patients "to give up conscious reflection and abandon themselves to calm concentration, follow their spontaneous mental occurrences and impart everything to him. It was the job of the analyst to discover the connection between traumatic memory and the associations provided in this way."[1] .
Sulloway points out that intrusion might be a better translation of the original German than association.[2] Freud viewed free association as a process whereby ideas intruded upon waking consciousness. That the unconscious (the instincts) could not be directly experienced . The only way to know it was through its derivative ideas. Psychoanalysis thus became confined to the level of ideation -- to concept and language. It became the "talking cure." Derivative ideas were made conscious by using free association techniques, having the patient ramble on and on until something significant (to the therapist) was said. This was supposedly a breakthrough of unconscious material, after which the analyst would help the patient gain insight into the connections between the associations and the original trauma.
So, the patient talked and the analyst talked because it was assumed that language was the only means by which we could have access to consciousness. And what is more, in the classical Freudian approach, the analyst said very little, never betraying his own feelings to the patient. His role was to be the silent observer, the donor of insights, and a model of rectitude for the patient. In his Outline to Psychoanalysis, Freud stated this position plainly:

There is no hope of our being able to reach (the real state of things) since everything new that we deduce must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions from which it is impossible for us to set ourselves free.

It was certainly important to realize that the unconscious could be probed directly via language; that language could do a detective job on itself, pinpointing traces from the unconscious. But in restricting himself to the medium of words, Freud was inevitably led to the conclusion that the knowable unconscious was linguistic in nature. To some extent it is, but that is by no means the whole picture, for the principal role of the unconscious is to code and store suffering and other emotions. A child doesn't suffer from intellectual conflict with her parents. She suffers because her emotions had to be buried in order to get along at home
Although unconscious content permeates language, language cannot alone fully express the unconscious. This is because the unconscious is primarily comprised of non-verbal elements, particularly Pain. And because of this the linguistic approach achieves the opposite of its intent: it buries feelings deeper and deeper.
Remember, there are hundreds of millions of years of evolution between the sensate-feeling brain and the human rational one. That is why when one is cut-off from one's feelings one can discuss the most incredible events with no emotional content to the language.
The non-verbal elements lying behind the gates of Pain in the unconscious are knowable in their own ways -- through their own "language" -- through the feelings and sensations , which are the "raw material" of the unconscious process.

There is a tautology inherent in the Freudian concept of consciousness. We only know what is knowable, and what is knowable is only what can be ascertained through intellect and language. According to Freud and the Freudians, t he unconscious is not knowable directly. If knowledge is viewed as the exclusive property of the intellect, then anything beyond the scope of ideas and language cannot be known. What's more, any further discovery of knowledge is limited to the use of these conceptual tools. This would be fine if experience were mediated purely by intellect, yet quite clearly it is not. As the colloquialism goes, there are some things that you just can't put into words.
If Freud hadn't perpetuated the demonology of the 19th century, he would have delved into the unconscious. As it was, he thought such probing to be deleterious to mental health. Freud's discoveries were mediated through the brilliance of his intellect. It is no wonder that he gave such kudos to the intellect (and language) in developing psychoanalytic therapy. It is interesting to note that, although Freud challenged many of the entrenched beliefs of his day, he implicitly accepted the intellectual boundary to knowledge. The unfortunate legacy of this assumption is a psychotherapy in which self-knowledge is attainable only through intellectual activity. By awarding the proprietorship of self-knowledge to the uppermost parts of consciousness, the knowledge gained becomes more and more detached from the reality it supposedly explains. Ultimately, knowledge limited to one level of consciousness reinforces the mind-body split which is itself the essence of neurosis.

The great paradox of psychoanalysis is that we can know ourselves in such a way as to preclude true knowledge of ourselves:

Reality will always remain "unknowable." What scientific work elicits from our primary sense perceptions will consist in insight into connections and interdependencies in the external world, which can somehow or other reliably be produced or reflected in the internal world of our thoughts.[3]

What the above explains is how insight and knowledge of oneself can be used as defenses. Analysis and interpretation of the information provided by the process of free association is where the psychoanalytic method truly fails. The analyst makes the whole business more complicated than it need be. Since he thinks the unconscious will always be a mystery, he pursues off-track approaches rather than going directly to the source. It is intricate work to have to apply principles from the fund of psychoanalytic theory to individual experience. It assumes that the answers to personal experience lie in someone else's head. It distrusts the intelligence of feeling, puts too much faith in mental understanding, and is blind to the fact that traumatic memories and neglected needs are straining to become conscious.

[1]
[2]
[3]Freud, Outline, p. 106.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 6/13)

2011-10-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

Freud’s Theory as Therapy:

The Talking Cure That Doesn’t Heal

The Aim of Psychoanalysis

The goals of a therapy offer a clear definition of what the therapy conceives health to be . In Outline Of Psychoanalysis[1], Freud offers his idea and goal of analysis: "Is it too bold," he asks , "to hope that it must be possible to submit the dreaded spontaneous illnesses of the mind to our control and bring about their cure?"

Obviously, Freud conceived the task of therapy to be one of control -- of getting the illness to submit. Later, he uses the metaphor of war to describe the alliance of the patient and analyst against the illness:

The analytical physician and the weakened ego of the patient...are to combine against the enemies, the instinctual demands of the id, and the moral demands of the superego.

Freud is saying that patients must exist in a state of permanent warfare -- cold warfare, perhaps -- and that the analyst must join the battle as an ally to help the ego in its task of "keeping down the instinctual claims of the id." The chief armament is the intellect, both the patient's and the analyst's:

Our knowledge shall compensate for his ignorance and shall give his ego more mastery over the lost provinces of his mental life.

Unfortunately, neurosis is not an illness of ignorance, and the business of therapy is not compensation -- especially not in the currency of "our [the analyst's] knowledge." Neurosis is an illness of feeling, and the patient has his own knowledge to discover through his feelings. No amount of received information will make up for what he can recover from his own unconscious. Furthermore, "the lost provinces" is what has made him unwell in the first place. Therapy must be a voyage of discovery. A patient must never lose his curiosity or the thrill of self-discovery. If the dialectical process of Pain and liberation, agony and discovery is not addressed, than a "cure" will remain elusive.
The cognitive focus of psychoanalysis is made plain in the Outline. So is the canonization of the analyst as a beneficent provider of health-giving wisdom. No matter how knowledgeable and wise the analyst, his wisdom is not curative. No amount of his acquired learning is as valuable to the patient as the patient's own history and feelings. Only the patient's own natural processes can bring him health.
Freud wrote in the Outline:

The new superego (analyst as substitute father) now has an opportunity for a sort of after-education of the neurotic; it can correct blunders for which his parental education was to blame.

And later:

The method by which we strengthen the pa-tient's ego has as its starting point an increase in the ego's self knowledge. Thus the first part of the help we have to offer is intellectual work...

And:

(We are) in a position to conjecture the nature of his repressed unconscious material and to extend, by the information we give him, his ego's knowledge of his unconscious.

From all this we learn that analysis works from the premise that the problems and solutions to neurosis lie in the thinking brain -- and more often than not, in the thinking brain of the analyst. We also get an idea of how Freud saw his own role in therapy: "We serve the patient in various functions as an authority and a substitute for his parents, as a teacher and educator..." Add to these interpreter, sage, restorer, ally, corrector, critic, detective, historian, persuader and superego, and we have quite a formidable figure. Certainly Freud's followers took their cues from this vantage point.
For many, the Freudian therapist is too presumptuous, and condescending, shrouded in the veil of his own fund of esoteric knowledge; knowledge which was itself intellectually obtained like a catechism. The analyst's attitude is built into the theory, for the analytic process assumes the omniscient, all-powerful authority figure therapist. Her presence should not intrude upon the patient nor obscure the patient's own light.
Since the patient is suffering from a disease of feeling, it is erroneous for the analyst is treat him with intellectual medicine. The power of the process must be shifted from therapist back to patient. One principal task is to provide an environment in which a patient can stop intellectualizing and start feeling. A restrained, intellectual, "proper" analyst exudes and circumscribes the kind of atmosphere in which the patient behaves. A stiff-tie, starched-shirt milieu is not conducive to feeling. It is no different for a child with his parents. If they are free, warm and feeling, the child automatically becomes feeling without one word said about liberty and freedom. The atmosphere is absorbed by a child who lives inside it with no particular awareness. The same is true in the therapist patient relationship. Humility is built into that relationship when the ultimate power and knowledge reside in the so-called "sick" one.

[1]_Translated by James Strachay (New York: W.W. Norton), 1949.

The Permanence of Needs

2011-10-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

Allow me to relate one research experiment we did to verify my point. It was at the UCLA Pulmonary Laboratory.We wired two patients to a number of instruments, oxygen levels, carbon dioxide, and blood samples every 3 minutes while they relived, as it turned out, oxygen deficit at birth, something we had not planned at all. Neither patient observed the other so we had a rather pure experience on the part of both men. After the reliving, we did another experiment where each patient mimicked the primal in every way (same movements and breathing) except being in the past. Both almost fainted after 3 or 4 minutes in what was clearly a hyperventilation syndrome (clawed hands). While in the past feeling they breathed very deeply (I call this “locomotive breathing” because that is what it sounds like and seems to emanate from the brainstem--medulla), for about twenty minutes with no hyperventilation. What the researchers from the pulmonary laboratory found was that when the patient was back in the old feeling and its context of anoxia at birth the body needed oxygen; the patient was “back there” in every way, not the least of which was physiologically. It was evidence of the veracity of reliving; that patients can and do go back in time. And they not only go back psychologically but in a complete biologic state. The corollary to this is that the early need for love stays the same and does not change throughout our lifetime. We seek symbolic, substitute fulfillment but it is never fulfilling and compels us to go on seeking more and more, always in vain. The critical time when need must be fulfilled has past.

The Death of Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T09:10:00.001-07:00

Steve Jobs has died and we lost a giant who changed the world literally. But I ask myself why did he develop cancer at such a young age? And I want to add my thoughts to this question, with the understanding that it is at best guesswork. It is a guess based on years of experience with patients, over sixty years, now, added to a great deal of current research.

Steve was an unwanted child. What does that say? That the mother was having trouble could not take care of him and had no prospect of being a mother to him throughout his life. He was given up for adoption. But in those nine critical months while in the womb there is a tale. And we know now that if a mother is depressed the offspring is also likely to have depressive tendencies. When the mother is anxious the stress hormone levels of the fetus/baby goes up and he too is under stress; not just a stress for the moment but a stress level that is higher than normal and creates havoc in the system. It is imprinted and remains a constant active memory. It requires that the system deal with it all of the time, and that means, inter alia, repression; a closing of the gates so that the pain remains sequestered. The repression is a serious, active force grinding down the system bit by bit, often unknown and unfelt until irreversible damage is done. Research today is full of information about very very early trauma and later cancer and heart disease.

It is my opinion that most of us untraumatized individuals remain fairly healthy throughout life. It takes a massive intrusion while we are just starting out in life before birth that warps the system and begins its toll. It is a stealthy enemy; a quiet, insidious menace that gnaws away month after month, year after year until the organ fails and disease begins its life. I am thinking that it happened to Steve Jobs because a healthy active nondrug taking human should ordinarily not fall so seriously ill so early in life. Of course, this is a guess and if I am proven wrong so be it; but I offer a proposal, a hypothesis, if you will, about what may have played into his disease. It is not an unreasonable assumption. And you know that even when there is no love and no loving figure to watch out for you in the first weeks and months of life the damage, heavy imprinted damage is there. Early it doesn’t take much to do it. And very early in life it can be only a matter of days or weeks with no parental figure that catastrophic illness gets its start. Needs are so intense in the womb and at birth, as well as the first weeks of life on earth. They must be fulfilled.

Otherwise the good seem to die young. So goodbye, Steve, you changed my world and you never knew me. But I am indebted to you for my life today. It is so tragic that you had so much to give and yet you may have been given so little to start your life. Life really is not fair because if there were someone up there judging good deeds and giving out rewards how could he or she have missed you.

On Dying and Death

2011-10-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

Why not deal with death in this blog? I have but I will add a bit. I have seen patients who have an inordinate fear of death; not the normal kind but the kind that says, “I am going to die right now!”. That’s what happens in anxiety attacks; that feeling of gloom and doom. Why? Because it was true but not true now. You were going to die before the defenses stepped in and blocked the feeling. It was imprinted and is now a permanent memory. That is what an anxiety attack is: I will die now! If you have leaky gates that feeling is close up to the top awareness all of the time, which accounts for frequent anxiety attacks and that sensation of immediate death. It was immediate and is now in our imprinted feeling mass, I call it our apperceptive mass.

What can we do about it? Feel it and put it back in the past in context so it’s no longer immediate and constantly scary. We need to feel why we were about to die; most likely lack of oxygen at birth, a drinking or drug-taking carrying mother or a mother terrorized all along her pregnancy, either from internal reasons or fear of her husband and his violence. No matter the source it is now installed permanently in the offspring, and the minute her defenses are weak, death approaches; that is, history surges forth, real memory, not some ephemeral wisp of the past. If there were no immediate threat of death originally, there will be none now. But life in the womb and at birth are often the most perilous of our lives, and it is then and there that pure terror resides. Terror is a memory that lives inside of anxiety and propels it. We call it anxiety but it still that terror of dying. We feel it like it is now because in the memory it is now, not later. It is the memory that is coming up intact.

If you want some advice from someone who had it, don’t think about because it is inevitable and think about life if you can. If your history forces you to focus on the past terror then you have to get rid of it, reliving that past fully. It is the best I can offer.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 5/13)

2011-10-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

To cure someone of neurosis , a patient's inner reality has to be accepted as true on some level.
If the childhood seductions did not occur on a physical level (which they do, all too frequently), then they occurred on an emotional level. The adult with memories of childhood seduction was seduced. As a child he was repeatedly seduced into fulfilling the needs and expectations of the parent, rather than freely being himself. He was repeatedly seduced into acting, speaking, walking, thinking, behaving in whatever ways appeased and satisfied the parent. This kind of covert seduction might be even more harmful than "real" seduction because it is so insidious. Under the guise of parental authority and obedience, the child develops neurotic fears and problems "for no apparent reason." The child feels violated, but he is told that this is what it means to be a good boy. The child has no choice but to feel that all of his fears are without cause -- because the cause is unadmitted. Most parents are guilty of imposing their own wills and needs, of repeatedly manipulating their children to be what they never were and to do what they never did. If Freud's concept of unconscious wishes does indeed enter the picture, it enters it on the side of the parent, not of the child. It is the parent's own unconscious wishes that are picked up by the child and later contribute to the development of his neurosis.

The significance and ramifications of Freud's move away from the real-life trauma of the seduction theory to the hypothesized wishes of the libido theory. A fascinating but controversial insight into the possible hidden motivations for Freud's theoretical shift has been provided by Jeffrey M. Masson ’s book , The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984) ., Masson argues convincingly that Freud abandoned the seduction theory out of a misguided desire to protect both himself and his friend Fleiss. . Apparently, Fleiss had bungled an operation on one of Freud's patients, Emma Eckstein. The operation had been undertaken because of Fleiss' dubious and bizarre theory that sexual problems could be cured through nasal surgery. Eckstein suffered from profuse bleeding as a result of the operation, during which she nearly died.
In an article in The Atlantic Monthly of February 1984 which excerpted his book, Masson writes:

Freud had the option to recognize (his and Fleiss's mistake), confess it to Emma Eckstein, confront Fleiss with the truth, and face the consequences. Or he could protect Fleiss by excusing what had happened. But in order to do this, to efface the external trauma of the operation, it would prove necessary to construct a theory based on hysterical fantasies, a theory whereby the external traumas suffered by the patient never happened, and were inventions. If Emma Eckstein's problems (her bleeding) had nothing to do with the real world (Fleiss's operation), then her earlier accounts of seduction could well have been fantasies.

As Masson points out, once Freud had decided that Eckstein's hemorrhages were hysterical symptoms and the result of sexual fantasies, he was free to give up his original seduction theory. Masson traces Freud's struggle with the issue of real versus fantasized trauma and notes that in 1897 Freud was beginning to recognize that children have aggressive impulses towards their parents. Of course, says Masson, if seductions had actually occurred, then these impulses were natural and righteous reactions to unbearable injury. But once Freud became convinced that the seductions were only fantasies -- that the parents were innocent --then impulses took over from seduction in Freud's theories.

An act was replaced by an impulse, a deed by a fantasy. This new " reality" came to be so important for Freud that the impulses of parents against their children were forgotten, never to reclaim importance in his writings. It was not only the aggressive acts of the parent that were attributed to the fantasy life of a child; now aggressive impulses, too, belonged to the child, not the adult.

Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Masson's reinstatement of the seduction theory met with resistance from the psychoanalytic community. He quotes a letter from Anna Freud, with whom he apparently had a number of disagreements over his disclosures. Anna Freud wrote:

Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of phantasy life, conscious or unconscious phantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards.

As Masson points out, this is a crucial point because most therapies "are based openly or implicitly, on Freudian theory."
Masson does not think that Freud made a conscious cold-blooded decision to ignore his earlier experiences. Nevertheless, he believes that, in doing so, Freud had forsaken the important truth "that sexual, physical and emotional violence is a real and tragic part of the lives of many children."

If this etiological formulation is true, and if it is further true that such events form the core of every severe neurosis, then it will be impossible to achieve a successful cure of a neurosis if these central events are ignored.

Masson further says that any analyst who turns memories into fantasies "does violence to the inner life of his patient and is in covert collusion with what made her ill in the first place." Success in the terms of such a treatment is measured in the ability of the patient to suppress her memories and knowledge of the past and to believe that the emotions which overwhelm her are displaced. This means a denial of self and a denial of reality, which spells the end of the patient's independence, since her health is tied to the analyst's view of her. Masson is led to condemn psychoanalysis because "the silence demanded of the child by the person who violated her is perpetuated and enforced by the very person to whom has come for help."

Masson writes:

Free and honest retrieval of painful memories cannot occur in the face of skepticism and fear of the truth. If the analyst is frightened of the real history of his own science, he will never be able to face the past of any of his patients.

It is conceivable that this concept could be expanded to include not the analyst’s fear of his science as much as his past. In fact, it may be the analyst’s need to deny his own pain, which keeps him from admitting the trauma-filled pasts of his patients.

In Freud's seduction theory, sexual assault is always the central event in the etiology of neurosis. Today it is acknowledged in many schools of psychotherapy that though sexual assault happens frequently and exerts a devastating influence, it is no t the sole cause of debilitating neurosis. Any serious deprivation, neglect, or abuse of basic needs during childhood is a trauma , which leads to neurosis in adulthood. Nevertheless the results of Freud’s misguided theory has resonated in psychology for years. As Masson writes in The Atlantic Monthly:

By shifting the emphasis from an actual world of sadness, misery, and cruelty to an internal stage on which actors perform invented dramas for an invisible audience of their own creation, Freud began a trend away from the real world which, it seems to me, is at the root of the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis and psychiatry throughout the world.

Masson's work confirms our belief that psychoanalysis failed because it attributed neurosis to the wrong causes and in some cases, . In fact, it attributed it to causes that do n’t exist. This was a mistake , which helped set psychotherapy on its misguided course -- on a course , which led away from a dialectical approach to healing neurosis. When subsequent theorists rejected its focus and method , they buried Freud’s important notions. Instead of returning to identify where psychoanalysis veered off track, they shut the door, turn ing their backs on not only the past of their science, but the past of their patients as well.
By abandoning the seduction theory, Freud ensured the failure of his treatment by handing his critics a justification for rejecting psychoanalysis. Today modern Freudians have shifted toward the present by adopting “ego psychology,” an approach that focuses on t he present day adjustments of the patient, beginning a steady march into non-dynamic , here and now theories and methods , which discounted the unconscious and steered away from addressing the generating sources of neurosis.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 4/13)

2011-10-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

A Theoretical Compromise: Trauma Plus Instinct

So far , we have Freud's etiological theory of neurosis has moved through two stages. In the first, childhood sexual trauma was emphasized (the seduction theory), and in the second, instinctual drives were emphasized (the libido theory). Sulloway points out that in this second stage, "neurosis was interpreted as the repressed 'negative' of a stage of perversion."[1] Freud did not leave it at that, however.
The publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920 established the third and final stage of Freud's theory where he renewed his emphasis on childhood trauma as a cause of neurosis. Basically, Freud blend ed his first two stages of thought into a recognition that both factors -- childhood trauma and repressed instincts -- functioned as instruments of neurosis:

Henceforth traumas, operating independently of repressed perversions, were given increasing recognition as major sources of neurotic symptoms...(Freud) subsequently extended the role of childhood traumas to include a regular series of developmental disturbances, or "threats," to libido: birth, loss of the mother as nurturing object, loss of penis, loss of the mother's love, and loss of superego's love.[2]

Sulloway points out that this period of Freud's work also reflected his renewed effort to bring together the two fields of science which he believed would finally result in a unified theory of human behavior:

Of all of Freud's works, Beyond the Pleasure Principle offers perhaps the closest conceptual ties to the unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology, drafted a quarter of a century earlier. One is struck by the bold and frankly speculative vein of both works as well as by their common guiding principle --attempt to unite psychology with biology in resolving his most fundamental questions about human behavior. Biology, as he reaffirmed in the later work, was indeed "a land of unlimited possibilities."[3]

There are, however, important conceptual differences between Freud's Project and his Beyond the Pleasure Principle -- – differences , which might partly account for the non-biological direction ultimately taken by psychoanalysis as a theory and a therapy. Concepts in the Project were based upon "proximate-causal reductionism" whereby the mechanisms of psychophysics and neurophysiology were used to explain human behavior. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud shifted his vantage point to one of "ultimate-causal reductionism" where historical and evolutionary factors moved into the forefront. Sulloway evaluates:

In many ways Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the culmination of Freud's remarkable biogenetic romance about human psychosexuality, a romance first cultivated some twenty-five years earlier in the wake of his problematic Project for a Scientific Psychology. It is historicism, not mechanisms or psychophysics, that pervades the innovative logic of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is also historicism, not mechanism, that enabled Freud to extend his biogenetic romance from the very origins of life itself, through the evolutionary odyssey of primal man, and finally to the conflict-ridden problems of present-day psychological man.[4]

A Primal Evaluation

Sulloway points out that it is historicism rather than psychophysiological mechanisms which characterizes Freud's later formulations. In these formulations we see Freud opt for hypothesis over reality, for "biogenetic romances" and "evolutionary odysseys" over present, personal human experience. Freud became more of a philosopher than an empirical researcher, preferring ontological ruminations over the once-treasured biological mechanisms. Even with his eventual redemption of trauma to a position of importance in the etiology of neurosis, the person under consideration still remained over-shadowed by rather monumental laws of phylogeny. Individual experience took a back seat to the playing out of mysteries inherent in the species.
Of course, phylogeny is part of the dynamic backdrop to individual experience. Nevertheless, each person truly has a life of his own, with an evolution specific to it. If the dictates of phylogeny are what we must battle, then we know we enter a losing cause -- with compromise the only solution. Psychoanalysis teaches us the inevitability of this compromise and helps us to support it. It teaches us to fear the real self as threatening, for with all of its innately perverse impulses our only recourse is to work on control and sublimation. But, paradoxically, it is actually control (repression) of the real self which has lead to perversity, and it is admission (experience) of the real self which makes sublimation irrelevant.
No doubt there are some powerfully influential forces from the occult world of phylogeny which are unknown to us. That is no reason, however, to make those found the center of attention, subordinating the known realities of individual experience to them. We can relate much more easily to our real experiences, real memories, and real feelings than to universal mysteries of which we are but a minute part. It is certainly difficult to understand how we are going to recover from those real experiences by trying to view them in the light of hypothetical universal principles
With the libido theory, Freud disavow s the reported personal experiences upon which his seduction theory was based in order to espouse the exact opposite. Not only were his patients not traumatized by the parental sexual abuse they had reported, worse: Freud now contended that they actually had longed for it as children. This longing took the form of an unconscious wish which was itself a derivative of some primary biological impulse for sexual union with the parent.
It is just conceivable that a child might wish for sexual union with a parent -- or at least appear to -- but it is not an inborn instinctive impulse, as Freud would have us believe. Certainly a child does not need sexual union. If it occurs at all, it is because the child somehow senses that sex is the only way she may have the contact and love she truly needs. Of course, the child would prefer the natural form of attention, but a desperate child will take what is offered. In spite of appearances, however, it is not the sex the child wants, but the contact. The child's need might appear sexual because that is often the only way parents (and other adults) can look at sensual need. Sexualization of childhood need comes not from the child but from the parent. After all, sexualization can only come from the one with sexuality.
It ’s clear that Freud viewed the issue of childhood sexuality from a backward position. Too often, parents want sexual contact with their children, even though beneath that desire lies parents' own neglected primal needs.
The neurotic gets many of his primal needs "satisfied" through sex because sex offers the gratification of all the senses. Therefore it has great symbolic possibilities for ameliorating the past neglect of those senses. In addition, neurotic parents invariably want from their children all the things they were denied in their own childhoods -- affection, stimulation, support, attention, etc. When these two factors combine, the parent is likely to act out his primal needs through sexual contact with his child. This may lead the child to conclude unconsciously: "If I want Daddy to love me, I have to give Daddy what he wants." This idea then gets shortened to: "I want what Daddy wants," which ultimately becomes, "I want Daddy" -- which is then completely misconstrued as a sexual desire. The natural desire for contact came from the child; the sex came from the parent.
How did this erroneous view of childhood sexuality take hold? If children are sexual, then indeed they would have to inhibit their instincts because of the harmful possibilities of incest. But children are not sexual; they are sensual. It is when sensuality is mistaken for sexuality that it is subjected to the taboos appropriate to sexuality and incest. In other words, the necessity to inhibit sexuality between family members is co-opted to help repress sensuality as well.

Infantile sexuality becomes a dangerous concept when it is applied clinically and heralded as a cause for adult neurosis and adult Pain. It is dangerous because it implies that the victim --the child -- is his own assailant. The neurotic adult is left with nothing more than his own childish incestuous desires to explain his agony and his debility. Worse, the concept is itself seductive. It is an adult concept that falsely exonerates the adults who hold it. It perverts the neurotic child's reality by ignoring the deprivation inherent in the very creation of neurosis.
If it is the child's sexual desires that ultimately sicken him, and if it is the cultural taboo on incest that is responsible for such hysterical fear, then no parent need wonder at his or her role. The culprit again becomes an amorphous, impersonal, and immutable force: the taboos of society. The implication is that this conflict is inevitable. All children will desire to have sex with their parents; the desire will always be strongly forbidden; so all children must learn to deal with their desire in the face of the taboo in the best way possible. Those who manage this task will be well; those who don't will be neurotic.

Here Freud is far removed from the grim realities of the neurotic child's life. The child does not fear some abstract taboo, he fears being violated by his parents in concrete ways. He fears being abused, neglected, manipulated, ignored, humiliated, controlled, pressured, raped. He feels fear each time his needs are rebuffed, overlooked, or devalued. He fears not being taken seriously; he fears not having any power to decide how he spends his day, what he eats, how he talks, what he feels.

[1]Ibid., p. 409.
[2]Sulloway, pp. 409-410.
[3]Sulloway, p. 415.
[4]Ibid., p. 415.

On Hijacking Sex - Part 2

2011-10-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

I have written about hijacking before. When there is sexual excitement the lower brain levels are activated along with whatever strong imprints live there. The strong stimulation resonates with the early imprint and reactivates it. It now joins the sex act and forces the run-off of sex via the imprint. It merges seamlessly with the sex act, the build-up and final release so that the person can no longer tell which is which. In the same way that some emotional stimulus in the present activates deep brain structures, and again there is the run-off of sex through the imprint.

Example: a man had a depressed mother who never smiled nor showed any joy. He needed some show of recognition, some bit of joy to see him, some piece of emotion that meant he was important to her. What stimulated him in sex was staring at pictures of nude women showing joy at the sight of their nude man. Here was the merger of primal need and sex. The only way he could discharge the tension was through the ritual that fulfilled his need symbolically. Sexual discharge relieved the tension of his need. Otherwise how could he get relief? The only way was to feel the need exactly for what it was, relive the pain and discharge the feeling in a real way…. A primal.

Another man, and I should say, men, because it is so frequent, had to dress up in women’s clothes and masturbate; or have his girlfriend dress up in a bra and panties and masturbate him. Why? His mother was left by his father when he was five years old. She left for work every day, but left her clothes on the chair in the bedroom. He started out rubbing her clothes all over his body; a way to feel close to her. Later, as he became sexual he would either dress up in women’s clothes, or use them to masturbate with and find relief through sexual discharge. Again the merger of need and sex. Relief through a symbolic channel. Sex looks real but for the neurotic it becomes symbolic channel for relief. As excitement in sex builds so does the need for symbolic channels. And the very early imprint is so strong that it drives the obsession. It becomes compulsive; he can’t stop, not because he is so sexual but because he is so needy and needs to relieve himself through sex.

So when a therapist tries to treat sexual compulsion as a sex problem she may be way off; treating the wrong thing; treating the symbolic outlet instead of the need.

When a young girl is shushed a lot and quelled from showing great enthusiasm it affects sex because her sexual expression is also suppressed. As her enthusiasm in sex builds so does the repression; the result is abortive sex, lack of climax, and frustration. In short, sex is an expression of all of ourselves, not just the sex organ. It is at the core of our being. And altering sex life and sexual neurosis means that a lot of later pain has to be relived before we can significantly affect sex. Check out your own fantasies and rituals and see how it tells you what needs were fulfilled early in your life.

How Long Will I Live?

2011-09-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

I have always maintained that we can get along without therapy with the use of tranquilizers and pain-killers. The only problem with that is that we can cut off the message of very early remote memory to the prefrontal cortex with medication but the imprint goes on rampaging throughout the system. Now, we have some supporting evidence. In the Psychiatic News (March, 2009. “Mortality with Antipsychotic Use in Alzheimer Disease.” Page 25) they discussed a study in which mentally ill patients received antipsychotic medication, and others who did not. (Haldol, Thorazine) The probability for survival was high in those who took no medication. After two years those who continued to use medication had only a 46 percent chance of survival, while those who took no medication had 71 percent chance.

In other words, being on drugs can kill you; and can kill you much faster than not taking drugs, given approximately two groups with the same mental health problem. Yet not being on drugs can kill us in a different sense; producing ineffable misery. Thus, drugs simply suppress pain, leaving its force intact. And, as I have said many times over, repression is the number one killer today because it underlies so many different kinds of diseases. Pain-killers put more pressure on the

system by adding to repression. So here we have a self-deluded state; a person out of touch with what he is feeling, and doctors add to that delusion by helping the patient deny his feelings. Long-term drug therapy can be dangerous to our health.

There is other evidence. There is a greater risk of stroke in those taking medication; an obvious conclusion when we are busy holding back pain and feelings; the pressure has to go somewhere, and the brain is an obvious choice because that is where we focus our mental efforts.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 3/13)

2011-09-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

Freud's Second Model of the Mind: A Tripartite System

By 1914, Freud had reformulated his view of repression. He had originally conceived of the process as occurring in a simple and straightforward manner: the ego was the agent of repression, and the unconscious was the receiver of the repressed material. Now he contended that "a special psychical agency" was responsible for repression, which he called ego ideal, so named because it contained the ego's ideals, and had as its tasks repression, morality, conscience, censorship, etc. By 1923 Freud had changed the name of his new agency to superego, thus establishing his famous tripartite model of the mind.
In a nutshell, this model classified mental activity in terms of its
degree of accessibility to consciousness (whether it was unconscious, preconscious, or conscious), and in terms of its function: whether it was a part of the duties of id, ego, or superego. The ego and superego could operate on both conscious and unconscious levels, but the id remained wholly unconscious. Both ego and superego emerged out of the id, which was the prime material of the mind, and contained "the core of the unconscious, the source of all passions, and the biologically innate in man."[1]
Freud's last discussion of his model of the mind occurred in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938). Herein he maintained the germinative position of the id, and reaffirmed the same general topographic divisions and qualities of mental functioning described above.

Freud's three mental divisions often describe the interactions of the three levels of consciousness at a psychological level. The Freudian model does not correspond to the real neurological structures and functions which science is finding today.
Nevertheless, there are aspects of the Freudian model which cannot be discarded altogether. To be fair, the Freudian formulation does broadly imply (if it never specifies) some correspondence with underlying neurological structures. The psychological components of id, ego, and superego are seen as common to all of us, and therefore must rest upon those physiological attributes which as members of a species we have in common. In other words, the physiological side of the body-mind duality which Freud initially set his sights upon establishing and then abandoned must nonetheless have remained as a background to his thinking. Just because he could not see the connection does not mean that he ceased to believe it existed. We feel certain that if Freud had had the same experience and knowledge that is available to us now, he would have had little hesitation in renouncing (or drastically redefining) the id-ego-superego model in favor of a formulation which could be used interchangeably by both psychology and neurology. That is, after all, what he set out to discover when he embarked upon his Project.
Freud could not "see" the full unconscious, so he called it "blind." Because he did not realize that it could be known directly through feeling, he decided that it was "unknowable."

A Sexual Etiology of Neurosis: The Road from Trauma to Instinct

In addition to his work on The Interpretation of Dreams in the late 1890s, Freud was formulating his sexual theory of neurosis. Since patient after patient had reported infantile and childhood seduction traumas, Freud first conclu ded that these experiences were the cause of adult neurosis: the memories of the trauma had to be repressed, and so various neurotic defense mechanisms were developed. By May of 1897, however, he had shifted this view to what he termed "a big advance in insight" in which he now saw impulses rather than memories as the cause of the problem:

The psychical structures which in hysteria are subjected to repression are not properly speaking memories...but impulses deriving from the primal scenes.[2]

Thus, what Freud had originally viewed a result of personal traumatic experience, he now saw as a result of universal and innate impulses.
By June of 1897 he had conceptualized the Oedipal Complex (hatred of the same-sexed parent by the child), and by July he was "viewing the psychoneuroses in terms of a vicious and dynamic circle of perverse libidinal impulses undergoing continual repression and resurgence."[3] {Emphasis added.} Freud himself wrote:

The result (of the repression and resurgence process) is all these distortions of memory and phantasies, either about the past or future. I am learning the rules which govern the formation of these structures, and the reasons why they are stronger than real memories, and have thus learned new things about the characteristics of processes in the unconscious. Side by side with these structures perverse impulses arise, and the repression of these phantasies and impulses...gives rise to new motives for clinging to the illness.[4] {Italics added}

By September of 1897 Freud had completed his fundamental writing to his friend Fleiss about "the great secret which has been slowly dawning on me in recent months." The great secret was a realization that the reports of early seductions from his patients were, in most instances, simply not true. This was no easy admission for Freud to make, as it brought into serious question the validity of psychoanalysis as a method of psychological investigation. After some inner turmoil, however, Freud reasoned that the commonality of the reports was in itself significant, and that surely it was reflective of some common, underlying principle of human behavior.
Freud now moved on to solve his theoretical dilemma by proposing just such a principle: reports of childhood seduction traumas actually represented infantile seduction wishes. These wishes were secondary manifestations (derivatives) of underlying (primary) instinctual impulses. In other words, infants and children have innate, sexual impulses toward their parents. These biological impulses give rise to mental wishes which must be repressed because of societal sanctions. The wish then surfaces in adulthood as a report of trauma, because that is the only acceptable way to express it.
What is the significance of Freud's theoretical shift? It seems twofold.
First, by minimizing the role of trauma in neurosis, Freud moved the focus of psychoanalysis away from personal, concrete experience and placed it on impersonal, imperceptible instincts and impulses. One of Freud's biographers, Ernst Kris, contended that, with this revision, Freud "turned psychoanalysis into a psychology of the instincts." The irony here is that although instinct is a legitimate scientific concept, Freud's successors have not brought Freudian instincts any closer to scientific (neurobiological) validation than they were in Freud's day.
The second significant aspect in this shift is the validity and meaningfulness Freud attributed to internal psychological processes. Although the memories of seduction traumas were not true in terms of external events, he contended that they did represent a kind of "pseudo-memory" which was a significant and meaningful fact in its own right. He further understood that repressed fantasies and wishes (which arose as the pseudo-memory of trauma) could exert the same lasting effect on personality as the actual experience. This innovative viewpoint really constituted a new view of reality. Intangible wishes, emotions, and fantasies --in short, the invisible inner worlds of man -- were recognized as having a directive impact on us equally as potent as the impact of the visible, external world.

Freud's Mechanisms of Pathology

Three more concepts in Freud's theory of infantile sexuality bear discussion. After 1900, Freud proposed three "fundamental mechanisms of pathological development," which were the vehicles of adult neuroses: fixation, regression, and the pertinacity of early impressions. He drew all three concepts from the biological sciences, reinterpreting them in a psychological context.

Fixation

As we know, Freud by this time strongly believed in infantile sexuality. The question was not whether or not one had had some kind of early sexual experience, but what the consequences of those experiences had been. If the consequences were painful or punitive, a "pathological fixation of the libido" would probably occur, putting the child squarely on the road to adult neurosis.
Freud saw fixation in the psychological sense as the persistence of an unconscious wish , which had been dominant at an earlier stage of development. A simple example of this would be the adult who is plagued by compulsive overeating: in psychoanalytic terms he would be described as fixated at the oral stage of development. Freud initially emphasized the impact of sexual experience producing fixation. By 1905, however, his thinking had shifted to a new direction, now establishing heredity (rather than the actual sexual experience) as the critical factor which determined the outcome of the fixation:

He (Freud) recognized libidinal fixations as having three possible consequences -- neurosis, normality, or perversion -- with the particular outcome being attributed largely to heredity -- that is, to whether there is an organic disposition toward repressing the fixation.[5]

Theoretically, a person with the right genes could undergo a sexual trauma in infancy or childhood and come through it "normally." The main (if not only) variable in the issue of infantile sexuality thus became heredity. Sexual experiences were bound to occur; fixations were bound to occur; but neurosis would result only if there were an unfortunate "organic disposition toward repressing the fixation."

Regression

In Freud's concept of regression, he again moved his thinking away from actual experience in favor of hypothesized forces. According to Freud the regression that occurs in the "severely neurotic" is governed by the "hereditary constitutional factor." This factor was itself a convergence of three different layers of experience -- familial, ancestral, and species-related -- which were either innate or inherited.[6]
Although the relevance of personal life experience was again minimized in this formulation, Freud somewhat reinstates its value with his third concept.

Pertinacity of Early Impressions

In the third formulation of this time period, Freud proclaimed "the pertinacity of early impressions" as another critical factor in his childhood etiology of neurosis. Recognizing the principle as a "provisional psychological concept," he offered a biological analogy from embryological experiments to justify his position: sticking a needle into an embryonic cell mass results in much more serious damage when it is done during the early stages of growth. The psychological corollary was that the earlier a trauma occurred, the more serious and enduring its impact.
Freud believed that early experiences were important to the degree that they affected libidinal development, and that relatively minor experiences could result in adult neurosis. Sulloway explains that Freud's "belief in the primacy of early experience...allowed Freud to attribute the neuroses of adults to relatively small disturbances in childhood libidinal development."[7] Thus instinct (libidinal development) remained the centerpoint for even this principle; it served to further minimize the role of trauma and experience in the creation of adult neurosis by reducing it to "relatively small disturbances".

[1]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 374.
[2]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 204.
[3]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 206.
[4]In Sulloway, op. cit., p. 206. (Original source: Origins, p. 212.)
[5]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 212.
[6]See Sulloway, pp. 289-309, for a detailed discussion of this factor.
[7]Sulloway, p. 389.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 2/13)

2011-09-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Freud's Biological Roots: The "Project for a Scientific Psychology"
Immediately after completing Studies in Hysteria with Breuer in 1895, Freud undertook one of his most ambitious projects: the formulation of a "Psychology for Neurologists." Comprising three notebooks (two of which contained over 100 manuscript pages), Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology was probably the clearest statement of his desire to establish a neurobiological model of the mind. In explaining the purposes of the Project in the opening chapter, Freud wrote:

The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction.[1] [Emphasis added]

The content of the Project was ambitious: Freud proposed three separate systems of neuronal activity to account for the varying functions of perception, memory, and consciousness . He also proposed neurophysiological models for the "ego functions" (such as cognition, judgment, recall, etc.), sleep and dream states, and hallucinatory and hysterical states. Despite these rather formidable accomplishments Freud failed in the one area in which he was most interested: the discovery of a biological model of repression. He had wanted to achieve nothing short of "a comprehensive physiological explanation of...the precise neurological and chemical details of repression."[2] Since he viewed the problems of defense and repression as the "core of the riddle," his inability to solve the riddle constituted a major professional loss.
In writing to his friend Fleiss about the first two notebooks of the Project, Freud lamented that the third one, which dealt with the longed-for "mechanical explanation of neurosis," was not "hanging together." By 1896 Freud had abandoned the Project altogether. This failure triggered a decisive turning point in his career in which he ruefully abandoned the unattainable biological laws for more accessible and less disputable psychological concepts. He wrote:

From this point onwards, I shall venture to leave unanswered the question of finding a mechanical representation of biological rules such as this.... Perhaps in the end I may have to content myself with the clinical explanation of neurosis.[3]

This is precisely what Freud proceeded to do.

Freud's First Model of the Mind: A Bipartite System

What Freud had originally described in the neuroanatomical language of the Project in 1895, he now re-described in psychological concepts in his historical The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Here he presented what was assumed to be his first formulation of the structure of the mind a psychological description of the "psychical apparatus."
The unexpected discovery of the Project in the 1950s threw shadows of controversy over The Interpretation of Dreams , which had b een always regarded as Freud's first masterpiece. In light of the Project, some historians believed that Freud's psychological re-formulation in The Interpretation of Dreams amounted to nothing more than a "convenient fiction [that] had the paradoxical effect of preserving these [biological] assumptions by hiding their original nature, and by transferring the operations of the apparatus into a conceptual realm where they were insulated from correction by progress in neurophysiology and brain anatomy."[4] In effect, a kind of conceptual whitewash job. Sulloway evaluates:

Did Freud...simply retain old-fashioned neurological terms (e.g., "cathexis") while giving them a new and independent psychoanalytic meaning in The Interpretation of Dreams and subsequent works? Or, are the outmoded nineteenth-century neurological constructs so evident in the Project still holding up the creaking scaffolding of present-day psychoanalysis, as Robert Holt insists, and has their cryptic nature insulated psychoanalysis from a much_needed rejuvenation within the fertile field of neurophysiology where it originated?[5]

We have no way of knowing if , as Holt suggests, Freud consciously or unconsciously intended to insulate and protect his theories by means of a psychological reformulation. It seems likely that his new terminology might have been a legitimate attempt to sustain psychoanalytic theory despite lack of scientific corroboration, and to propose concepts that might be clinically useful in understanding the human mind. What is noteworthy in this controversy, as Sulloway indicates, is not so much what Freud failed to do, but what his successors have chosen not to do . That is , o rejuvenate modern-day psychoanalytic theory "within the fertile field of neurophysiology where it originated."

Freud's First Model of Mental Functioning

Freud initially divided the mind into the unconscious system and the preconscious system. Contents in the preconscious system, he theorized, could enter consciousness fairly easily. One need only give sufficient attention and energy (cathexis) to them and they would pass into conscious thought (the "transference phenomena"). A rarely purchased grocery item, an unimportant phone call, the title of a book, and so forth, might slip forgotten into the preconscious for a period of time, but could be remembered. Unconscious contents, however, never had direct access to consciousness. They had to first pass through the preconscious system, which modified them into a form suitable for conscious perception. Thus:

We were only able to explain the formation of dreams by venturing upon the hypothesis of there being two physical agencies, one of which submitted the activity of the other to a criticism which involved its exclusion from consciousness. The critical agency, we concluded, stands in a closer relation to consciousness than the agency criticized: it stands like a screen between the latter and consciousness.[6]

Here we see Freud's free use of metaphor ("it stands like a screen") to depict processes he had formerly described in Project in terms of cell permeability and impermeability, the "inertial pattern of neuronal discharge," and the phi, psi, and omega system of neurones. One might even say this new reformulation anthropomorphizes, with its "critical agency and its "agency criticized" submitting and excluding information between both sets of ideas. This is not to devalue the reformulation, only to point out the degree to which Freud had turned in a different direction.[7]
In essence, Freud suggests that we cannot receive anything directly from the unconscious. All unconscious wishes, impulses, and motivations first had to be censored and altered by a "passage" through the "screen" of the preconscious. This screening process was most clearly observable in dream activity. One could deduce the original unconscious content -- say, a desire to murder the mother -- and see how it was redressed by its passage through the preconscious: in the manifest dream, the dreamer makes several unsuccessful attempts to kill a pesky mosquito. And so forth.
What is interesting to note here is that even at this early point Freud saw the mechanisms of censorship and repression as non-pathological. They could become pathological through the neurotic process, but they were first and foremost a critical part of maintaining normal mental health -- so critical, in fact, that psychosis would result if they failed.

[1]
[2]In Sulloway, op. cit., p. 113.
[3]In Sulloway, op. cit., p. 126.
[4]In Sulloway, op. cit., p. 120 (quoting Robert Holt).
[5]Sulloway, op.cit., p. 120.
[6]citation?
[7]It is important to realize that although Freud had opted to draw this "first crude map" of the mind in the hypothetical (and often metaphorical) language of psychology, he made lt quite clear that he viewed psychological processes as derivatives or secondary manifestations of the underlying and primary biophysiological processes -- which he still hoped someday to discover.

Revamping Psychology

2011-09-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

What we need to do in psychotherapy is to rid ourselves of a class of elite cognoscenti who are the center of all psychologic knowledge. The patient is the only one who has knowledge of her unconscious. We therapists can only guess at it. When we operate on theories that are constructed out of the unconscious of psychologists rather than based on the internal reality of the patient, we become tinkering mechanics, altering our techniques more out of whimsy than science. Until now, there has been no theoretical web that encompasses both psychology and neurology, although there have been attempts to join psychoanalysis with neurology. It is, by and large, a shotgun wedding. It is the same as plastering an old outdated notion onto new science and hoping it will stick. If psychoanalysis ignores key internal realities, it doesn’t matter that we adhere certain neurologic facts to it. It cannot work. Why would we take a theory one hundred years old and join with it research that may be six months old? The marriage can’t last; the groom is far too old for the bride who has new ideas and new information. The youngster is trying to lead the old man but the old man is too feeble to keep up. Better a young theory that works within neurologic principles.

It's a Matter of Life and Death

2011-09-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

Remember how I always say that getting rid of childhood pain is often a matter of life and death, well there is now some evidence about this. (s. Entringer et al. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences2011’ 108 (33)”Stress Exposure in Intrauterine Life is Associated with Shorter Telomere Length in Young Adulthood.” http://www.pnas.org/content/108/33/E513.full)

My position for years is that if we reverse childhood and intrauterine trauma we can lengthen telomeres. Why is that important? Because it seems that the length of telomeres can determine how long we live. I have defined telomeres previously but the importance of this article is that childhood abuse and trauma even while we are being carried will shorten our lives. What the research does not say is how to find a way to reverse the damage so we can extend life a long time. I believe that there are many ways to reverse the damage in neurologic damage but only one way to do it properly. For example, when there is trauma while we are in the womb there is a process called methylation that takes note of the trauma and marks some of the cells; stamped “trauma” here. And that will change us forever, including how long we live.

One way to reverse this damage is to demethylate. Change the methylation so that the damage is reversed. Another way is to relive the damage and be done with it. This is preferable because it is not one chemical that we are dealing with; it is systemic and covers and covers all the accouterments that went with the imprint. The imprint, remember, is that mark, that memory that stays with us for a lifetime. It is not just a wee mark; it has the capacity to change our brain cells, our hormones and the set-points and our neurotransmitters our neurotransmitters for life.

How on earth can we do that? We know that there are three key levels of brain function and we know that imprints of our life in the womb can be installed deep into the brain stem, limbic system and associated nerve cells. These imprints are engraved onto a naïve, innocent and very primitive nervous system. As our ontogeny progresses, our personal evolution, information through nerve tracks reaches up and forward to inform high brain levels; higher levels of consciousness. Fortunately, there are descending tracks descending tracks as well that reach down and affect the primitive imprints. Thus when a patient is reliving something from childhood or infancy that information can descend down deep and reawaken the first-line brain stem imprint which joins the fray; well, not a fray, but it dredges up a force where serious physiologic reactions physiologic reactions join the second-line childhood reliving memory, the feeling, and takes part in the overall primal or reliving event. That is the heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, neurotransmitters, and on and on, join the feeling and give it great force. It is now part of the reliving; part of undoing the damage. We see this in so many ways: during the reliving the first line which is activated, makes the brainwave amplitude skyrocket, we well as blood pressure and heart rate. And afterward. After the total reliving experience, there is a drop in all key indices below baseline. The body is normalizing and relaxing and healing. My guess is that it is also changing telomere length over time.

What we note here is how resonance works; higher levels of brain function trigger off associated lower levels through either chemical affinities or brain circuits (or both)that may have similar or identical frequencies. (much more of this found in Life Before Birth). Each level adds its specialty. The second line adds feelings, the third line cortex adds comprehension and the first line adds basic physiologic force. Think of it as rods that evolve carrying information upwards as we grow up and later when we vibrate those vibrate those rods they resonate lower down and set off deep biologic reactions. We do not see them as such because they are not a separate force; they become part of the overall reaction. As the rods vibrate they turn anger into fury, disappointment into hopelessness, fear into terror; and then as the reactions in the reliving go on there is a final normalization. So we relive the deep early imprints without being aware of it.

Is this clear? That when there is resonance, fear on the top level gathers the lower levels into its maw and uses the new input, (like a rolling stone), terror, as part of its reaction. That is, the very depths of resonance hit the brainstem where fury and terror exist and then they join the feeling being relived. There is no resolution or undoing the damage without reliving all levels. The good part is that we are not usually aware that we reliving a speech-less level; it just signs up and joins the army; an army of feelings arrayed against the suppressing forces of the intellect the intellect. The first line is giving a big physiologic boost to this army.

The feeling brain here joins the reptile brain for a wee party; and that party is a celebration of the joy of life because that is what is happening. We are coming alive again, lifting the yoke of repression and bidding bon jour to joy at being alive. We can’t come alive in psychoanalysis where only the intellect is engaged (ah yes, a few tears but never the first line, which after all, is our life blood).

My goodness. I got off the track. The researchers found that prenatal exposure to stress affected the development of the chromosome regions that control cell aging. It is as usual said in dry, unenthusiastic language instead of screaming out a discovery that will help us live longer. We can be emotional and scientific at the same time. Mothers need to have a calm, content life while carrying; that is for sure. But if they don’t there is a solution. After all, they can’t help it if there was a war going on or terrible famine. They are fearful and rightly so. This study did the obvious; relating stress we can all agree on: the death of a loved on, for example, but not the deception of a wayward husband.

What I have seen is that repressed individuals do get sick with all kinds of diseases too soon in life. They have no idea they are carrying around a message from the womb; letters from the underground (apologies to Dostoyevski), a message that foretells of an impending death.

Telomere length not only foretells of early death but also of serious disease on the way there:diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and I would add, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s .

Here is how they conclude: “A rapidly emerging body of human and animal research indicates that intrauterine conditions play an important role not only in all aspects of fetal development and health across gestation and birth, but also in a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes over an individual’s entire lifespan.” How can anyone make it clearer than that?

On the Inability To Say "Good"

2011-09-21T11:28:00.001-07:00

Let me tell you a story, sadly, not a bedtime story but more like a nightmare. I tell you because many of you want to hear more about me. But I do not write about me as an exercise in narcissism; rather it is always to elucidate, to help others understand themselves.

Many years ago when my father was alive he came over to see the grandchildren. It was 1969. As he walked in he saw a bunch of papers on the dining table, and said, “what’s this?” I said it is a book I just finished called The Primal Scream. He leafed through it for less than 30 seconds and said, “We know all this,” dropped it and went on to something else. He didn’t have time to read even one page but he knew “all this.” It hurt, of course, but it was the leitmotif of our relationship.

He was a failure in everything he tried, took a correspondence course in law and failed that, and felt very stupid. He was, after all, a truck driver. He then would never allow himself to feel stupid again; hence “we know all that.” And he could be reassured that he was not stupid if he could put me down. Which he did at every turn until I was convinced I was stupid and never thought about college until I was sent to university by the Navy. The idea that his “stupid” son wrote a book was far too threatening to him. He could not let himself try to understand it, and maybe find out he couldn’t.

It is an art form never to say an approving word to your child in the twenty years you spend together. But his inner feelings would not let him do anything else. It was too painful to feel like a failure.

Now two forces were at work. One my left brain: “he couldn’t help himself. He had a driving, disapproving father himself. “ And the other--right brain: I hurt. And my primal was, “Say I’m good, just once, please!” There was where the hurt resided. He never thought about hurting me. He only thought about defending himself no matter what the cost to others. He wasn’t relating to me; only to himself. He couldn’t see the agony he was producing because he was trying to extricate himself out of pain. But his need set me on a lifetime goal of “say I’m good.” And I became good at what I did because I worked like mad at it. But it was always there in my behavior until I felt it in primal.

So you now see the difference between primal therapy and psychoanalysis: one is left brain; “after all”, says the doctor, “you have accomplished so much. You really are good.” And primal: “I feel bad. I hurt, say I’m good, please.” That stops the act-out and lets us rest. So the real feelings are down deep and right brain, while the excuse, the rationale is left brain and helps cover over the right brain. It can bury that brain amidst a flurry of rationales. And alas, it ensures that we spend a lifetime trying to get something in the present that never existed in the past. We chase a chimera, a phantom, some ineffable something that, believe it or not, we are never aware of. The act-out is as unconscious as the feeling itself. The chase is on and we simply cannot relax after that. We go to the beach, lie in the sand, and cannot stay like that for more than a few minutes than the phantom rears is head again. We run from the feeling just like my dad. He was a victim of his feelings which he never knew existed but that kept him from loving anyone. He was waiting for it first for himself.

An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 1/13)

2011-09-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

Introduction
Because Freudian and Primal theories appear to have a number of formulations in common, many believe that Primal Therapy was developed directly out of Freudian theory. From a historical perspective, Primal theory is clearly the logical extension of Freud's position on many issues. However, Primal theory did not grow out of a theoretical scrutiny of Freudian literature, nor is Primal Therapy a psycho-emotive rendition of psychoanalysis. Primal Therapy grew out of a discovery which at first appeared to be one person's private experience, but which then turned out to be a primary (primal) experience potentially available to most people.
This is not to say that Freudian thought had no influence apperceptively. On the contrary, the development and scientific validation of Primal Therapy is in many ways a tribute to Freud's pioneering concepts on the biological basis of defense, repression, and neurosis. These concepts show that Freud was "on the trail" of a psychobiology of feeling more than eighty years ago -- a trail that was cut short by a lack of scientific proof ,the primitive state of neurology and neurochemistry, and professional pressure. In effect, Freud was ahead of the science of his time. It is not unreasonable to speculate that, had he had the science and technology available to him then that we have had in this era, he would have arrived at the key concept of Primal theory and therapy: the permanent, neurobiological imprinting of Pain and its release through feeling.

The Evolution of Freud’s Theory:
Attributing Neurosis to Non-Existent Causes

The Early Years

Freud's first inkling of the nature of mental processes came about as a result of his work with Viennese physician Joseph Breuer. By the time Freud joined Breuer in 1882, Breuer had already discovered that hysterical patients could recall experiences under hypnosis which they could not recall in the waking state. The famous case of Anna 0. fascinated Freud, and he discussed it "over and over again" with Breuer.
Anna had developed a disturbing array of hysterical symptoms after the death of her father. Her speech, sight, and limbs were all seriously affected. Under hypnosis, Anna recalled the traumatic scene with her father in which she had sat on his bedside as he lay dying. It turned out that there were unexpected correlations between the details of that scene and the exact location and nature of her hysterical symptoms. To Breuer's surprise, Anna's symptoms gradually diminished with the repetition of Anna's recollection of traumatic events while under hypnosis, which Anna herself nicknamed "the talking cure."
The theoretical outcome of this work with Anna 0. (and with other hysterical patients) was the formulation of a "traumatic theory of hysteria" which described the role of the unconscious in the formation of neurotic symptoms. Co-authored by Freud and Breuer, the publication of Studies in Hysteria in 1895 marked the historical beginning of psychoanalysis. In it, Freud and Breuer observed several important factors:
(1) an experience could be barred from conscious recall if it were sufficiently painful;
(2) it could then be recalled under hypnosis; and
(3) the hysterical symptom matched or mirrored some detail of the original traumatic experience.
They concluded that a traumatic experience could exert a lasting influence, producing symptoms years later, even though the memory of it remained completely unconscious. Finally, they stated that only when the memory was retrieved under hypnosis, and "was accompanied by an intense reproduction of the original emotion, often with a hallucinatory reproduction of the trauma...the symptom disappeared."[1][2] They termed this process emotional catharsis.”
Here we see the seeds of several important principles of mental and physical functioning -- some of which have endured the test of time and some of which lapsed, later to be rediscovered.

* Pain and trauma produce repression.
* Repression results in symptomatology.
* There is a meaningful correspondence between psychological events and physiological symptoms.
* Repressed material exerts a lasting influence until it is released through recall and emotional catharsis.

Indeed, Freud's early work with Breuer broke ground which we all stand upon today, for in addition to laying the groundwork for psychoanalysis as one particular "school" of psychology, he was also laying a groundwork for psychology as a field and a science with its own rigor.

While hypnosis continued to play a central role in Breuer's work, Freud abandoned using it by the time Studies in Hysteria was actually published. He was dissatisfied with hypnosis for several reasons. One was that he found not all patients could be hypnotized . ; another that the hypnotic "cure" of symptoms was usually only temporary; and still another was that it could not influence many types of unconscious contents. Only those which were "seeking expression," Freud found, could be brought forth under hypnosis.
During his work with Breuer, Freud discovered that, if the physician listened sympathetically, patients could recall long-buried memories and motives without the aid of hypnosis. He then developed an approach that is as obvious to us today as it was thoroughly novel in Freud's time: he made the patient the focus of study by asking questions, listening, and then seeking to organize and interpret what was revealed. This new approach became known as the "free association" technique, and Freud was convinced that it accomplished what hypnosis could not: it tapped into unconscious contents, eliciting the "deeper, more primitive and imaginative components of the mind" while the patient was in the waking state. Freud became convinced that the same (or better) information could be retrieved without all the folderol of hypnotic procedures.

[1] Ives Hendrick, Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis (New York): Knopf), 1967 p. 12.
[2]_

On Hypnosis (Part 26/26 ... The End)

2011-09-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

Uses and Ethics of Hypnotherapy

Does hypnosis have any uses? I think so, in two ways. As the forefathers of psychology discovered, hypnosis is experimentally useful as a medium for demonstrating aspects of consciousness and therefore the distortions of consciousness which we have termed neurosis. It seems to pull off its own mask and in so doing uncovers the dynamic of neurosis: the dissociation from Pain. It provides confirmation of the crucial physiological component of memory, the imprinting of trauma, and the physiological effort needed to keep it unconscious. It explains the basis for suggestibility. Through its evident failings, we may better appreciate the meaning of experience. To effect lasting change, so that someone has complete rather than neurotic experience, consciousness must work as a whole.

Having said that, it should be noted that all of the above can be arrived at without once applying hypnosis. These matters are continually demonstrated in Primal Therapy, which is an entirely conscious process.

Perhaps the only occasions when hypnosis is unquestionably valid is in cases of chronic and terminal illness, to ameliorate painful physical conditions, and in surgery. Dissociation as part of the repertoire of the human psyche has long proven an adaptive response to excessive pain. That, after all, is the basis of neurosis. Someone in great physical pain or suffering the nightmares of debilitating disease might as well make good use of this capability. By all means, reach for the internal morphine.

As a foundation for psychotherapeutic treatment, however, I cannot support hypnosis. It runs counter to the very principles and processes of consciousness upon which health stands. In fact, hypnosis itself demonstrates why it is invalid because it reveals itself to be an active agent of neurosis. I cannot see how treating the disease with more of the disease can be helpful in any way. Hypnotherapy relies upon a diminution rather than a replenishing of consciousness. It models and amplifies the dissociation inherent in neurosis. It tends to take a single-cause view of symptomatology, thus bolstering the illusion of short cures. There is a reliance upon external authority as opposed to a trust of inner processes. There is an imposition of foreign ideas and assessments of reality that foster the very kinds of neurotic dependency and susceptibility which therapy should be aiming to resolve.

No matter what the apparent outcome, to render someone still more unconscious of his Pain means to take from him his only chance at real health. Worse still, it means to widen the internal split and deepen the disease.

In hypnotherapy or in hypnosis you can be told you are cold when you are really hot, you can be told you feel good when you feel bad, that you are comfortable when you are really in Pain. You can be told that your hands are numb and that you can numb the pain in other parts of your body simply by touching those spots with your hands. You can be told that you are eating divinity fudge when you are not, that you can recall and repress pieces of a forgotten memory at will and this will put an end to your suffering, or that you are going to return to a traumatic event in one of your past lives in order resolve your problems in this life.

As I discussed before, one can be suggested in a hypnotic state that one is undergoing a burn by a match and actually produce blisters. Thus meaningful sounds emanating from someone else's mouth enter the patient's brain and change his physiology and cellular activity enough to produce a burn blister. This phenomenon raises important philosophic and psychological questions as to the nature of reality. For if you produce a burn blister and you are not burned, what is real? If you are hypnotized to feel comfortable, when in fact you are very uncomfortable, what is real? In these hypnotic experiments, the primacy of psychological events over external stimuli is clearly evident. That is to say that reality is really first of all a matter of perception. What is really happening is that through someone else's ideation, a memory is evoked which takes primacy over current reality. This again is the Primal position -- that the past is prepotent over the present. Clearly there would be no burn mark if one had not already had the experience of the previous burn. And secondly, the concept of burn must also have been in the mind beforehand, otherwise there could be no manipulation.

What is actually being manipulated, in fact, in one's history and the power of that history is manifest in the fact that a burn blister can be reproduced from a past memory with no current reality involved at all. Thus, the hypnotist says you are being burned, the brain scans it's memory for previous burns, and that memory innervates the cells to produce cellular change. In this way, someone else's reality can change your basic brain functioning and immune processes. This is the essence of neurosis: we first respond to our history, and then our current reality.

So it is clear that we have two realities, a subjective and an objective one. It is when we are disengaged from the subjective reality that ideas from the outside will have primacy. When we are no longer anchored in ourselves, external forces become our key reality and subjective realities become secondary. Nowhere is this more clear than with the masses who are manipulated by politicians by the use of abstractions and ideologies that only symbolically fill the void of real need.

In both hypnosis and neurosis you "buy somebody else's program." If you are solidly rooted in yourself no one can convince you that when you are cold you are hot, and certainly nobody could tell you are not in Pain when you are. Our genetic legacy allows us to be unaware and unconscious at times, When this goes on for an extended period of time, it becomes neurosis.

The practice of Primal Therapy shows that it is possible for the conscious, cortical mind to dissolve into the all-important contents of the subconscious without surrendering an awareness of what is happening while it is happening.

Awareness must be allowed in because it has an important role to play in the process of healing. That role is attaching meaning to the Pain, mediating and communicating insight, and integrating and applying the experiences of the lower levels to present life. It is vital for a person descending into unconscious realities to know how he got there and how he got back. It is too important a journey to make with his "eyes closed."

* * * *

On the Department of Grace and Mercy

2011-09-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

With my tongue slightly in my cheek I want to offer an idea I have
held for a while. We make a minister of grace and mercy in the
cabinet. Her job, and must be “her” is to make sure we are all
happy. First of all, that is a tall order since almost no one knows
what real happiness is. So let me say at the outset that the best way
to be happy and content and to have a great deal of your self is to
have been loved throughout childhood. If you have them (parents) you
will have yourself. If they fulfilled your needs you will be whole
and content throughout life. No one else can “make” your happy. So
what can my minister do? She can go into the schools and pick out the
problem children, and instead of punishment she will explain about the
imprints and pain and use the child’s hurt to explain his act-out. He
will learn about himself and finally how to control himself, and the
other kids will also learn about feelings and how they drive all of
us. So a big piece of what goes on in school, many hours a day, will
not be wasted but will be used as the key learning experience, much
more important than learning about this war and that. They will learn
what it takes to get along with others and how feelings interferes
with it or enhances it. They will learn what goes wrong with
marriages and why. They will learn why people get sick and how
repression fits in with all this. It will indeed be merciful. It
will save a good deal of misery and help people be happier.
Remember, being fully loved is what makes us happy; all the rest is
playing catch-up. But that is important, too.

Then my minister will hurry over to hospitals and teach the kids
about their illness, what it really entails, how it happens and
exactly how the therapy will work. Here the child learns about
medicine his body and medication and therapy. He learns what diets do
to the system and why. No more mysteries; we use the child’s
experience to learn from. That is a good way of learning---out of
personal experience. You say doctors don’t have the time. Well that
will be the job of my minister of grace and mercy. She will be very
busy but she will save so much suffering and money. No more special
schools for disobedient kids. They will learn about themselves and
then help other kids. Who better to do it? It is being done is some
prisons. Yes, for a while we need all the institutions for neurotics
but there is something we can do about it.

My minister will organize child rearing and birth giving practices
in many communities so that we all have a better shot at life. Just
simple things like not giving heavy anesthetics to those giving
birth. Like putting the baby immediately with the mother, and on
and on. Like teaching that hugs and kisses are essential…throughout
childhood. Boys need it too and not just to the age of five. That
children need their parents, not boarding school, usually a dumping
ground for harried parents. They need individual attention
throughout childhood.

And above all, let’s the get idea of homework straight. I
recently was at the house of a friend who was trying to get his son to
do his homework. It is a tough but good school, he argued to me. And I
thought, wouldn’t it be better to play with him, to talk to him about
life and love, to hug him and kiss him, and then help with his
homework. Because all this will help ensure his happiness, and
isn’t that what we are all after. A well child is one who will be
successful whether he does all of his homework or not. But that
homework needs to be secondary to making the child happy. My minister
needs to rush in and warn against “tough” schools. They are not
necessarily the best. “Oh!”, You say, “he must learn or how will he
succeed in life.” Make him happy and he will succeed. Do not worry.
If he is totally loved he is happy. Trust me. I have relatives who
were totally loved and all of the kids, all of them, are very
successful. Would you rather have a very successful child who is
constantly miserable? A driven successful person lacks love, by
definition; otherwise he would not be driven.

Just a few hints: ask a child what he wants to eat at least once
in a while. Help him make decisions about his life and what will make
him happy. Where does want to go on Sunday? Etc. etc. What
college does he want to go to? Not the favorite of the parent, who can
help, but he has to make the decision. In other words, we ask kids,
“what will make you happy today?” If you think that would have been
wonderful in your lifetime with your parents, then you know it is
right for your kids. It is not utopian; it is possible now. All it
takes a little change and then watch the difference. Ah love.

(I will add here a bit from another piece I wrote to make my point
clearer):

We can tell the level of pain and its time frame by the kind of
symptom or behavior that is apparent. When something happens in the
present it resonates with or sets off something earlier. In that way
anger that dips into the first line and becomes rage. Or fear becomes
terror, feeling disappointed in the present becomes profound
hopelessness on the deeper level. In the same way when the first line
is close we may go from a mild headache to a severe migraine. It is
not a different entity; it is a continuum which makes each symptom
deeper and more aggravated. So there is some slight adversity in the
present that resonates deeper down and the person goes for a Xanax.
He is quelling first line, deep imprints. Quelling terror and
hopelessness that goes along with the terror. After all, if there is
massive anesthetic at birth and the child cannot struggle to get born
there is terror and hopelessness, and the beginnings of addiction. Of
course the origin is mysterious and unknown. It was immediately
covered over by the gating system.

Thus, each level accounts for something deeper and more damaging as
resonance deeps down into our primal unconscious and triggers off
inordinate behavior or symptoms. First line events, therefore,
represent out of control symptoms and behavior—drug taking. It forces
us into over the top reactions. As long as that bottom rung, the
first line imprint is left dangling and not integrated there will
always be the tendency to addiction. It is that first line level that
contributes to profound addiction; and of course, until it is out of
the way we will always be vulnerable to drinking or drug taking. And
too, it will shorten our lives. There are those who say once an
alcoholic or drug taker always one. Not true. It seems so genetic
but it is not; it is epigenetic (of which I have written a lot). I
have treated heavy drinkers and drug takers with success but only
after arriving on the deepest levels of the brain. A caveat; they
must be treated in house for some time before getting back out on the
street.

origins of ADD and Leaky Gates (Part 4/4)

2011-09-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

Frank: Yeah, and to this day I ache to be touched – just ache. And they wouldn’t touch me, they didn’t want it to get infected… Of course they weren’t touchy people anyway, so that was….

Dr. AJ: Were they very religious?

Frank: No. I was when I was a child. Boy, I used to pray every night: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep, please let me die before I wake, and please, dear God, my soul you’ll take. I used to pray to die every night.

Dr. AJ: Gee, your life was miserable. Can you imagine a life like that?

David: Back to your point, coherence. Coherence was a problem; organization was a problem; time management is a problem.

Dr. AJ: Ok, how about organization?

David: Again, Pressure inside is just blowing the gates, and blowing cohesion – blowing all neurological cohesion to shreds. There’s no cohesion of gating.

Frank: The pressure disorganizes you.

Dr. AJ: So the leaky gates don’t allow you to co….

David: Come together

Dr. AJ: So what does this have to do with leaky gates?

Frank: You are stopping the leaks from coming up?

David: That is a good metaphor. It’s like the body – it’s whole function is going to stop the leaks – the leaky gates and try to give it cohesion. And it’s failing. Right?

Ken: It’s true, but there is another element for me. A lot of times it’s that I don’t care. I don’t care enough to organize something. I don’t care about anything a lot of the time, except finding some kind of peace or connection to myself inside, you know, getting…

Dr. AJ: That’s the whole story.

David: I can understand that.

Ken: It’s like… I finally can cry and then it’s… all this is me, and now I finally feel right. I was going to say that… (turning to David) you were saying something about always being bad or something. For me I’ve always had this unconscious feeling that I’m bad, or not right or something until it finally connects – a connected feeling, and then it’s, Oh, yeah, this is me. It finally feels right. And it’s very rare too.

Dr. AJ: It sounds like a nightmare.

David: Dr. AJ talks about having cohesion in therapy and having connected feelings. I understand that, and I can see it in my patients when they have a connected feeling and see the difference. But, I don’t know how to explain it but there’s a part of me that says, I don’t give a damn about a connected feeling, as long as I’m connected to the crying and the hurt it’s almost like I don’t care what it’s about. And it’s not like an abreacted disconnected feeling, it’s just that some of that pressure that gets put out from me it’s like worth a million bucks, when you go through a lifetime of…. (near crying) and nobody gets it. And you get pounded and pounded, and then they sit you down and say, what are your goals in life? And you just sit there. And part of you feels bad because you don’t have any and you know that you should and you can’t, but a secret part of you just wants to say Fuck you! Go to hell! Don’t talk to me about goals.

Dr. AJ: Because?

David: It’s been hard enough to get here. It’s been hard enough to get through life up to this point.

Dr. AJ: No goals.

David: Goals, goals, what are goals?

Frank: Wow, I’ve always had goals. But one of the things in my life was that when I got to a certain age… Well, everybody my age was supposed to do that – so why don’t you? Well, nobody ever taught me – and each thing – I remember the first – the first Primal I ever had about that - not being able to do things that I’m supposed to do. It started out with my writing – that I couldn’t get published and the feeling went right down to when I was sitting on the toilet saying Mama, Mama, come and wipe me I’m done. And her saying, you’re old enough to wipe yourself, now do it! But nobody ever taught me how. And now I’m supposed to know how, because I’m old enough to know how. And it was the same way… and the big thing that triggered it was when I was first married, my gramma called me up and said, Uncle Rex said you could buy his house, so you guys can have a nice house. I’m going to take you to the bank and get all the paperwork done. And I went with her the next day to the bank, and I sat down there – that was the first time I’d ever been in an office in the bank – and I sat down there, and just before the bank manager came in, Gramma says, This is your loan, now you have to handle it yourself. I didn’t even know what an escrow was. And the thing is that I was qualified to get the loan with the GI Bill. But I didn’t know that. (shrugs).

Dr. AJ: So they don’t educate you, either. They don’t talk to you…

Frank: They hung me out to dry.

Dr. AJ: When I tell my friends that when I was young my parents never said anything to me… they sent me away for three years, well they never said you are going to so and so, they just packed my bags and I was off. They don’t talk to you. (Motions to David) Is that true with you? That’s bizarre isn’t it?

David: I remember asking my dad, You said you were in the army, Dad, what did you do? None of your business. Dad, how old are you? None of your business. What’s insurance. Dad? None of your business.

Dr. AJ: So what should be the cure for this? I’m curious, you said the program helped you. You saw the program?

David: It didn’t help me, help me. It gave me a little bit – like they understand what I go through. That’s about it. But they don’t really understand it.

Frank: How do you deal with ADD? You go to Primal Therapy. One of the biggest gains I made – it was just so funny and I remember telling you about it (motions to David). You get this little feeling and it goes (motions with finger tips together, and shifts them slightly) click. But it affects everything. My inner core just went click… A change in attitude, and that’s when I stopped beating up on myself. It had been a heavy session and David had just said I’m not going to let you come in here and beat up on yourself anymore. And I thought he was in his shit.

Dr. AJ: What.

David: He thought when I said that, that I was in my shit.

Frank: Cause he seemed harsh – and that’s the only time I’d ever seen him harsh.

Dr. AJ: Right.

Frank: But the next day it was just like… God, I don’t need to beat up on myself. I don’t deserve this.

David: And I don’t want to get too close to someone. And I never can trust them. And I remember this particular day just after a feeling, (shrugs) nothing. Ok, I just had a feeling, and walking out the door, and walking down the street, and walking among people and not feeling that fear, that anxiety… and it was like: Oh, my God, this must be what my life could have been. And I had to take pause. It was like… where’s the fear? It was quite an eye opener.

Dr. AJ: You too, Ken?

Ken: Oh, yeah, I mean I’ll just have moments when I have a feeling and really feel connected. It’s just like a moment of grace. It’s like… I’m here and I’m not scared, and I’m not wrong or anything.

Dr. AJ: You live with it all your life and most of the time you’re not aware of it. That’s just you…

Ken: Yeah and then those moments are gone… well, that was something but I can hardly talk about it. Then it’s gone and it’s like, I think there’s something there. I think there’s something better.

Dr. AJ: It’s funny, huh. And
PRIMAL PRINCIPLE: you don’t feel unloved until you get some love in the present, then you can go back and feel unloved. Otherwise, you carry it around with you until you die.
Back to what you were saying, Frank.

Frank: I was talking about the feelings I was having in that session when David told me I couldn’t beat up on myself. And as I remember it was a lot of feelings about my whole family beating up on me. Literally, my brother used to beat me until I was unconscious sometimes.

Dr. AJ: And the parents do nothing, right?

Frank: Oh, they’d say (shaking his finger at Dr. AJ) Now you’d better stop doing that. When I got my eye put out and the doctor said I couldn’t have any jars to my head, they’d say, Now if you hit Frank, you’d better make sure you hit him on the arm and not in the face or the head anymore. He can’t take any jars to his head. And my dad would say, So help me God, I’ll tie your head down in brackets, so it doesn’t move when I beat you.

Dr. AJ: It’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, listen. Guys, we’ve got to have staff meeting.

Ken: Let me say one quick thing, back to the outlet, and me not being ADD – I don’t think. One other thing, when I was a kid. It was all physical, like the sports, and I was one of those kids with a lot of tics. I’d just be going nuts with tics (histrionics), I was all over the place. So it came out physically for me.

Dr. AJ: Yeah, it got channeled into his body.

Frank: Yeah, I’d have said that’s an ADHD thing.

David: I never experienced tics like that, but I remember a session years and years ago that Dr. AJ did for me. In the middle of the feeling I was going towards the birthing, and my eye started to tic involuntarily, and it just kept ticking and ticking. It was just the weirdest thing.

Ken: Mine were voluntary, Mine were voluntary. It was just something that I had to do. Like I could make myself not do it but I felt like I had to do it.

Frank: Like flexing your muscles.

Ken: I would make it happen.

David: Oh, you would.

Ken: Yeah, I do it now even. Sometimes. Not as much though, and I try to hide it as much as I can. When I was a kid it was a lot more exaggerated (demonstrating).

David: Well, what does it do for you?

Ken: I don’t know, it’s just something I have to do it’s some sort of tension outlet or something.

Frank: It’s like an isometric thing. You stretch the muscles so you can relax them.

Ken: Yeah, they were all over the place.

David: I have a similar thing.

Dr. AJ: You don’t have that.

David: Oh, you’ll see me in staff meeting sometimes and my eyes will go like that and my facial expressions. I think it’s similar to what you’re talking about. I think it’s just a little discharge of that pressure or tension or something.
Then talk of the business mechanics of the meetings. Finally Dr. AJ turns to Frank.

Dr. AJ: Was it elucidating?

Frank: Oh, yeah, it was particularly elucidating listening to David. Realizing he had real experience of what I go through.

Dr. AJ: He’s a classic ADD, a classic. It wasn’t until he was with me that I encouraged him to go to school. He didn’t think he could learn. He was sure he couldn’t learn.

David: Yeah, that and I just didn’t want to go through the nightmare of it. And go put myself back into that.

Frank: I was really afraid when I started and when I found myself competing with these young girls… There were 12 of us in the class and 11 of them were girls. They were young girls, and a lot of them already had their masters in something else and they were all the scholars of the school and… How the hell did I get chosen to be in this group? Of course, thank you, and I also got a lift from Joseph Wambaugh.

Dr. AJ: Of course I was also a severe ADD and I could barely make it out of high school and couldn’t concentrate much. And what happened was, when I joined the navy they gave you intelligence tests. And I forgot about it because I had no intention of going to college. But one day when we were on our way to Okinawa and Saipan. We were on a ship – we’d had seven battles already and were on to our 8th battle. Then a destroyer pulls up and says we’re taking Janov off the battleship and taking him back to officers preflight school, because my IQ which I had taken 2 years before was very high. So on the way to a battle, which is serious shit – lot of kamikazes. Then when I went to school, I got straight “A”s and I thought: you know what? I can do this. I could feel my brain change.

(The End)