How Long Will I Live?

Good question. Answer: It all depends on your Janovian gap. Proper diet. Check. Exercise. Check. Stress free environment. Check. What are we forgetting? The gap between sensations and feelings in our neurologic system and the conscious/awareness of them. This gap, I believe, is the central internal dynamic that determines what kind of serious disease befalls us, and how long we can expect to live. Another way to put it is that longevity depends on full consciousness. Anything less can shorten your life because it means that there is a measureable amount of repression that is holding feelings down, draining energy and using up previous life resources. It means that various organ systems are required to take up the slack when feelings reverberate in lower brain structures and are unable to connect and be integrated.

I believe that this gap is one of the most important factors in determining how long we stay on earth. The only progress in psychotherapy is to become whole again, to retrieve a self that was lost long ago and to recapture feelings that we disconnected from at the start of our lives. Only a therapy based on the experiential, on the development of the individual’s brain, can succeed. The patient’s whole system must be considered in such therapies so that the whole system can get well, not just a part of it. If we “get well” only intellectually the body remains in pain and this pain will wear down vulnerable organ systems. That vulnerability may depend on genetic factors; a family history of high blood pressure or migraine tendencies.

The real killer, then, is repression; many diseases lie above that bedrock. When there is a force holding down pain, the system does what it can to fight back. (Psychiatrist John Diamond, way back in the 70s, wrote about how the body doesn’t lie). The energy of the pain has to go somewhere, and it travels to the kidneys, liver, heart, or blood circulating system. One way we know this is that after a patient has relived major early traumas, including the lack of love, symptoms disappear; blood pressure normalizes as does heart rate.

Most of our entering patients have high levels of stress hormones; we know that long-term elevated stress hormone levels can lead to a number of diseases, not the least of which may be Alzheimer’s. Let’s be clear: if the actual imprinted pain traveled upward and forward and made a connection, the energy would not travel to various organs. But when there is a disconnection only the energy portion of the feeling is liberated to meander here and there in the system. The pain has an energy source that has to be dealt with somehow. It drives us; very much like a motor that constantly accelerates. As I discuss elsewhere, long-term high stress levels actually diminish the size of the hippocampus—the seat of memory—and thus adversely affect memory. So with disconnection you have a foot on the accelerator and have no idea how to take it off; no way to slow down the terrible pressure one is under. You may simply die due to overwork, the inability to rest. Or of a heart attack from a constantly overworked cardiac system that is in a constant state of vigilance.

Drugs deepen the disconnection between deep pain and the conscious mind. That is not a way to dissolve neurosis and improve longevity. On the contrary, they enhance it, and the so-called improvement is artificial. We think we feel better, but the body knows the truth. And problems continue and life gets shorter.

Symptoms are the expression of imprinted memory or memories of experiences we had in our earliest moments that have been laid down neuro-chemically within our brain and nervous system. That is what lies in the primal universe—monumental emotions of imprinted memories that have been sequestered in the far reaches of the brain. We are now learning how early, and that is while we are being carried in the mother’s womb. These are life-and-death events that impact the system forevermore, affecting heart and kidney function, blood pressure, digestion and breathing; key biologic functions. For a patient to get well, it is necessary to access those memories in a safe way, bring them to conscious-awareness and finally to integrate them. When that happens the individual’s entire system is harmonized, key hormones are normalized, and the system is finally righted. After a connection is made between feeling-sensations and the thinking mind, perceptions are more accurate and a sense of calm and relaxation never before known is finally experienced. As the janovian gap closes the system gets more and more in balance; take for example, the various vital signs such as heart rate and blood pressure. They have a lot to do with how long we live. They tend to normalize after one year of our feeling therapy. Or more importantly, there is an average of just under one degree of body temperature lower after one year of the therapy. All research points to greater longevity as body temperature is lowered. All this means, for one thing, slower metabolism, the less burning up of fuel and the better utilization of oxygen.

Because so many of our patients resolved so many different ailments from colitis to migraines; from hypertension to fewer epileptic seizures, it seems logical that with less wear and tear on the organs they will, and we will, last longer.