The Critical Window: Why We Can't Change

If we have trouble in our emotional life we need to examine our life before birth. When the whole system is gearing up for life on the planet, gestational life has already constructed a crucible for that life outside the womb. Life in the womb is perhaps the most important time of our lives; so much of adult symptoms and behavior can be traced to that epoch. So what happens in the womb becomes a harbinger of what to expect, all on an unconscious level. So we anticipate a catastrophe, ruminate constantly about it, never realizing that the bad thing has already happened. We are actually worried about the past, not the future. If we could drop into those past feelings there would be no more worry about the future. But that past is remote, maybe occurring before we set foot on earth. No wonder it is a mystery.
I have written about the prototype, the “now print” that is engraved in the neurophysiologic system even before birth. Any severe trauma while the mother is carrying can be imprinted into his system where it may well remain for the rest of his life. Here it may change the brain circuits and cause a permanent deviation in the function of organ systems. There is less possibility of that kind of imprint occurring after birth. It is “now print” because it is setting down a prototype of heuristic (guiding) value that will direct behavior thereafter. It is memory of survival, of what worked before to save our lives. And it worked when the input stimulus may have been a life-and-death matter as so many traumas during womb-life are. This will happen despite the fact that there is no fully functioning neo-cortex to remember the scene; it happens below the level of conscious/awareness, which is why we cannot get there through the vehicle of language. Here we have a learning system that is distinct from the verbal learning/memory system that we will develop later. It is neurophysiologic memory.
The prototype folds all that surrounds a feeling/memory, compresses and instills it into a general principle that directs behavior. The principle is survival. When confronted with an obstacle, for example, “it is best to retreat,” not confront. Here is where passivity was life-saving. What the body learns is not struggling for air when the mother is anesthetized at birth, but retreating into less use of energy and oxygen—passivity. To undo that imprint, not so easily done, we need to return to the brain that registered it. We need to relive it. Why? Because the deviations of the system are built on that memory/imprint. All this has already been decided sub-cortically. She is no longer leading a conscious life. We can begin to see why adults do not make profound change even though many have undergone psychoanalytic therapy or have taken LSD or Extasy, can claim deep change. Biologically it seems that this kind of metamorphosis cannot take pace. For the imprint of pain is sealed in and cannot be opened again. It has a label, “Not to be open before feeling therapy.”

Once the window for fulfillment of need is closed, that is, when the need must be fulfilled to avoid pain, I seriously doubt that any comprehensive change can take place.
If someone says that the patient must then be offered a new ending for what he relived, or that she needs extensive insights afterward, we understand immediately that we have enlisted the aid of the adult brain and undercut what the patient has felt during the session.

We know that in reliving gestational life or the birth trauma we are succumbing to deep and long, slow-wave brain signatures, which denotes life before birth. To then appeal to the late developing new-comer, the neo-cortex, with its faster frequency wave to finish off the sequence cannot work. When we add a complex intellectual discussion to the mix we confound the work of the deep unconscious. Essentially it takes the patient into higher brain centers—the neo-cortex. The same can be said for early childhood pain where the brain that should be employed, the right feeling side, is abdicated for the left-brain explanatory, understanding one. In short, we continue to talk to the wrong brain.
A patient with a very rapid, left frontal cortical signature cannot be feeling until we bring her into the feeling zone. The frontal thinking apparatus must recede for a time. And again, language only plays a secondary role. One way we help patients into the primal/feeling zone is to offer tranquilizers to the patient for a short period of time to push down some inordinate pain from gestation or birth. The overload of pain and all levels may prevent a person from integrating one feeling at a time.

We must remember that in dealing with very early life we are mostly describing the work of the right brain. The left-brain focus will not get us there. Yet after a year of our therapy the left-brain often achieves its full force so that each side is more in equilibrium with the other—a more harmonious brain. It’s not just the brain that is in equilibrium; it is the body temperature, blood pressure and key hormones. In short, the person is in equilibrium. Except in rare cases (of perhaps genetics) no person who is in harmony should show high resting cortisol levels.
For a therapist to offer a patient an understanding of his motivation,or to propose a different ending for his feeling/ pain, negates the whole notion of the critical window. That is a time when needs can only be fulfilled; and at no other time. That is an awfully important idea. That means that corrective emotional experiences by a therapist cannot make profound change; indeed strategies by a therapist, no matter how well-meaning, can have only a limited impact. To rely on a more advanced, later-evolved brain to produce change is a vain exercise. The only way to resolve the earlier trauma is to travel back there neuro-physiologically and resolve on that level. Once the critical window is over with/closed, nothing can reopen it but feeling.