Imprints and Repression And Reduced Access to Ourselves

When the energy of an imprint is blocked, we have little access to ourselves. This also suggests why depression often involves being sexless, as the system is in the energy conservation mode – parasympathetic. All energy is suppressed. The underlying pain has demanded that so much energy be expended in repression that there is little left over for other things. And the memory endures, keeping the system off balance where the parasympathetic system is dominant.
Tranquilizers that repress pain often suppress sex drive, as well. We produce those same inhibitory substances internally, and can shut ourselves down just as readily as with drugs. If anything that should tell us that we react holistically which is the example of tranquilizers. They suppress pain in a global way and along with it the sex drive. It is not that they target sex specifically, but that when targeting a whole system it must necessarily include sex. That is why the imprint is set down systemically. It is why non-sexual and pre-sexual traumas directly affect sex.
We see it so clearly when patients on Prozac, which is a serotonin enhancer, have diminished sex drive but find it difficult to believe that the very same chemical we produce internally can also shut off sex drive. Now we can begin to see the origin of some sex problems; problems that will not respond to any conventional treatments. A reliving of a brainstem imprint necessarily involves a brainstem reaction. Without the reliving there is a still a brainstem reaction going on which affects sex, yet the memory is out of awareness.
Fortunately, resolving sex problems such as diminished libido by lifting depression can occur without one word addressed about them, per se. The more we feel what caused the closure of our system, the more it becomes safe for the system to be open. This occurs not all at once, but over time. (I discount age here. Clearly, an eighty-year-old is going to have diminished sex drive, as is someone who is very sick. They have less energy available, hence less energy for sex.)
We are captives of our biology and our imprints, not its masters. Once there is an imprint, once memory has become neuro-physiological, we react to our history first and external reality second. Inner life is pre-potent because it has to do with survival. We then see the world through the filter of history. It is why under completely calm conditions we have palpitations. The imprint sculpts new circuits in the nervous system so that certain networks get grooved and are more likely to be used again and again. Later on, that groove may be sexual and compulsive so that each time pain comes up the excitation by pain is transformed into sexual compulsion. It is in the limbic system that the compulsion takes on a sexual focus.

Sex and Healing

We can only heal where we are wounded. If the wounds are preverbal, then that is what must be addressed – such as reliving strangling on the umbilical cord and being stuck in the birth canal. Although it may seem odd to the reader, in order to liberate the body it must writhe, shake, and roll, perhaps, to the early lack of oxygen, or love; traumas that will then free us from their lifelong effects. We need to get down into our bodies. We must again undergo an almost seizure-like response to the birth trauma, which then will liberate seizure-like sexual orgasmic response.


To see a reliving of oxygen deprivation at birth or other early trauma, a reliving that can go on for 2 hours a day for months, is to realize the amount of compressed force that must be diverted elsewhere. It makes the development of "sexual problems" less of a mystery. It explains why people become obsessed with sex, or twist sex into something deviated. The spread of the energy of the pain on the first line can go in several directions – first, to vital functions, the heart and lungs, and also to sex. The pain can seep into sexual thoughts and be channeled into sexual rituals. It makes the ritual an urgent undertaking. The obsession is the end product of the pain, now transformed as it wends its way upward through the limbic system to the cortical thought processes. When we deal only with that transformation, we are on the wrong track, or at least on a very narrow track. As the old saying goes, to get on the wrong train means that every stop one makes is the wrong one. We must take care to board the right train that will take us to our destination. The tracks are nerve tracks with a specific destination. It is a strange track system leading backwards to early memories before chugging forward in time. Then it allows us to return to the frontal cortex and current life.


Sex is the vehicle in the search for relief. It can finally discharge the energy of suffering over and over again. It is a lifetime affair since the imprint is a lifetime affair. Sexual ritual provides relief on the second-line (limbic system), and the first (brainstem). It drives the person to spank or beat his partner while ejaculating or exhibiting himself while masturbating; and it never ceases.


Why is showing oneself naked sexually exciting? It is not intrinsic to the act, except for the inherent meaning it has to the person. We must think of it this way. What would happen if he showed himself naked as a child, without the masturbation? The parents would have seen him and responded to him instead of ignoring him. This is the dynamic in so many of our exhibitionist patients. Of course there are other complicating factors, but the central motivation is often as simple as that. The excitement of being seen and responded to – even with shock – is what excites. He is excited by his need and the hope of fulfillment and relief. The compulsivity of a ritual may be given its impelling strength by the pain at birth, which is a measurable event.


For an exhibitionist, "look at me, momma," can become showing the penis to female strangers so that they will look at him and pay attention to him; and of course, react emotionally. He is getting what he needed as a child, symbolically, not what he needs as an adult. So long as we treat it as an adult problem we are on the wrong track. It is a condensed symbolic act reflecting a lifetime of early experiences. We take the symbolic act out, showing the penis, in group therapy, and turn it back into the need – look at me, momma!


Grown men can’t suck on their mother’s breast, so they suck on their partner’s. The excitement is the same for the baby and the adult who never had enough as an infant. The excitement for the adult is the baby need, except that it takes a sexual turn. The need to suck never leaves. It is very true in my homosexual patients; I mention elsewhere that one man called his partner’s ejaculation into his mouth, "mother’ milk."