Repression Kills

  There is a story in the paper about the actress who was a publisher  as well.  She died of Leukemia at age 59.  So the question is,  why did she die so early?  I cannot  tell you about her except that she died young; and so it begs  the question why  some of  us die early.    For most of us  it  is almost impossible to comprehend the power that lies within all of us—the power of the first line.  This is the power of traumas that occurred while we were being carried,  at birth and sooner after.  It is the power and the force for survival, because adversity when it happens very early after conception is  nearly always a matter  of life and death.  At the very least that danger, imprinted, is a harbinger for later mental  illness.  A mother smoking and drinking in the first months of pregnancy puts her offspring in danger of either psychosis or serious drug addiction later on.  It is incomprehensible to an outsider because they have not seen the explosive pain when  it is unleashed.  This reliving is not a one  time affair but occurs many, many times (Primals) over months and years.  It is only then that we can understand what lies within us and the pressure and damage it can produce.  Then cancer is no longer a mystery because we observe this pressure in our therapy; it all becomes clear.  It is a mystery to me to this day that those who carry terrible pain around do not show it!  There is the impassive face engendered by repression that keeps it all deep in storage.

    I have discussed epigenetics in my blog and my books, about how adversity early on changes the switches for key genes which then serve to compound repression or inhibition.  These switches turn on or off the gene and so help set in what seems like genetic changes. Basically it is the mechanism of closing the gates  or opening them.  And there are different chemicals that accompany the epigenetic events (methyl and acetyal groups, for example, producing a process known either as methylation or acetylation).  It seems that for each and every pain we endure during gestaton and at birth there  is a change in the chemicals that enhance the repression of pain.  When the pain or adversity is prolonged the system is overtaxed, and we now have the mechanism of leaky gates; that is,  repression begins to falter due to an overload of chronic pain.  It is the consistency of the pain that causes the overload.  There is a limit that the brain can handle.  The gates become vulnerable and do not do well afterwards.  It takes very little trauma after that to produce a symptom such as ADD.  Once you have seen the force of these traumas that are being relived, psychosis  and addiction are no  longer a mystery.  We see what it takes to push that force back  down.  Heavy doses of heroin are no surprise.  That is why we know that  in most heavy addictions there is great first line trauma imprinted deep down.  We see it in our studies of the brain and vital signs, as the patient approaches first line, there is a radical rise in all of these measurements.  And with integration of these imprinted memories there is a radical drop in these figures that remains over time.  A  carrying mother chronically depressed or anxious is changing the neurophysiology of the offspring.    It is, in short, a constant  trauma that the baby must deal with. It is not just one drink or one cigarette,  but unending stress.  How do we know?  We see it in the stress hormone levels in our beginning patients; always high at the start of therapy.  And  comes down permanently over the months.

  Of course in my psychoanalytic days I never saw any of this and could not even imagine that this pain and its force existed.  You need a theory for that which acknowledges the whole notion of deep pain which includes memories lodged in the brainstem and ancient limbic system.    And lodged with the force of the original trauma.  It is no wonder, then, that theories  and therapies that avoid the notion of imprinted pain are bound to go astray.

Without a theory of pain how could  we ever get to the bottom of  cancer and heart disease?  Or migraine and high blood pressure?  Our theory is not just something “nice or interesting or amusing”, it is life saving;  it means reversing serious mental illness.  We see this all of the time.  Many of us think that good diet will prolong life, and it is true, but not half as true as how soon repression makes us sick  and kills us prematurely.  Repression kills because it distorts basic physiology and detours brain development.  And repression forces the kind of unhealthy eating habit that makes us sick  early on.  Repression kills because, unconsciously, it forces us to deal with imprinted pain every minute of our lives.  It forces us to find ways to act out feelings or suppress them. There is another way—feel and experience them.

  We can never get to the bottom of  Leukemia or cancer without  seriously looking into very early life to see what first line trauma there was.  If we have no theory of brainstem trauma we will never understand it.  And if we have no  such theory that we are not keeping up with psychologic/brain science.  The wonder is how we all manage to keep deep pain stored away, never once acknowledging it. The body does and gets sick.  And it makes us sick on the deep cellular level, the level where the  early imprints lie.  All the pressure to keep pain stored puts the cellular  development at risk; eventually we  find serious illness, which  should not be a mystery but a foregone  conclusion.