Treating Depression

There is a term that we will need to consider in the therapy of depression—resonance.  It would seem that when trauma (lack of love) is set down early on, there is a specific frequency to the neuronal circuit.  It may be that feelings that are laid down on top of that imprint will resonate with the same frequency. Thus, something that happens in the present can set off an early memory by its corresponding frequency.  It all forms an interlocking neural network.  A minor (or major) current situation, losing a boyfriend, can trigger off the original gloom and doom when the defense system is weak.  Doom and gloom is the byword in depression. I will explain it, not from statistical studies, but in the flesh and blood accounts by my patients.  Thus, a relatively innocuous event can plunge us into gloom and doom because the feelings are related within a single network.

If we do not understand and acknowledge the originating imprint we can neither understand nor rid ourselves of depression. All we have left is to advise, cajole and manipulate the patient, dealing in the here-and-now.  We know that there is a close correlation between high blood pressure and depression, as there is between migraine headaches and depression.  Our body is screaming through its high blood pressure but all we can do is sit helplessly by infusing drug after drug into the patient to control her symptoms.  We have extracted the symptom out of the person for treatment, instead of seeing how the symptom emanates out of a biologic history.  When we don’t understand that history we are confined to an ahistoric therapy.  We then make the symptom “well” rather than the person.

How I Know About Psychosis

I never smoked dope, did cocaine or drank alcohol. But what happened one day was that someone put hash in my cake, unbeknownst to me.  Nothing happened right away so they put a lot more.  One hour later I awoke with a start saying that Bob Dylan was playing inside my body, which of course he was.  When we listen to music it is also a physiologic process going on inside of us.  The hash wiped away all filters so I experienced something with no defenses left.  But that was not the end of the story at all.

I went insane for 20 hours.  I could not stand any input and guided those around me not to input anything; no conversation whatsoever.  Too many trees became overwhelming.  I showed friends how to keep me grounded; still I was nuts. It came out in poetry. I spoke only in poetry for hours.  And I had strange ideas.  The hash might have been innocuous to anyone else but with me and my lack of defenses everything below came to the top; and I sprouted poems that I wrote in my head which was  bubbling with feelings.  It was a benign psychosis but psychosis it was.

Aside from the drug helping me discover and write about the three levels of consciousness, it also gave me insight into psychosis. And we go crazy in line with what lies below.  You know the old saying about mean drunks and nice drunks?  Well, we go crazy in the same way.  Someone filled with rage is going to be a mean nutcase.  In other words when defenses crumble either due to life’s misfortunes or from the use of drugs like hash, the unconscious surges forward.  And it often takes over.  It continuously nudges the top level neo-cortex into action.  The result is often paranoid ideation, someone is trying to hurt me, or they are talking behind my back.  Once it fully takes charge there is very little awareness of what we are thinking or doing.

In my case, I absolutely had no room from any input at all.  Nothing could penetrate, which is why we can never talk someone out of his  psychosis.  We are not talking to the rational mind; we are addressing a brain that is flooded with symbols of his life.  It is not a matter of what ideas the psychotic is using; they are in the service of defenses.  They are an attempt to rationalize the potpourri of feelings rising to the top.  These ideas are essential and are not to be tampered with; surely not to be talked out of.  We need to see strange ideas in the context of the gestalt, of the overall function of the brain.

  We see all this when someone takes an hallucinogen which does pretty much the same thing, unleashing feelings.  Once out of the flooding state we are rational again and can become aware of how we reacted.  It is also true when someone has a transitory psychosis due to drugs; they suddenly get rational when the drug wears off.  But in true psychosis there is nothing to wear off.  The gates have been shattered and cannot close up easily.  That is the danger of most drugs including marijuana.  The chronic use of marijuana produces a paranoid personality.  Not only have I seen it over and over but there are many studies out there that come to the same conclusion.  Marijuana over time becomes dangerous.  It makes sense since any continuous alteration in the brain’s chemistry and routing will eventually produce damage and/or impairment.

   The brain is a most delicate structure, never to be fooled with.  We often don’t see psychosis here because this kind of psychosis is not so blatant.  Let me give an example.  We have friends in Europe who insist that someone (a movie star) was murdered.  Every bit of information pointed to a suicide.  But they would not accept it. They smoked pot every day of their lives.  The result was manufacturing notions that had no basis in reality……a benign psychosis.  In real psychosis the paranoid ideation is much more bizarre because it is driven by imprints very deep down in the neuraxis.  When an imprint evolves from deep in the brain it is heavy; because of its whopping valence the ideas it drives must perforce be far out and strange.  So we can be strange and slightly nuts or be a florid type of psychosis.  Choose your poison but be careful of marijuana; it is not innocuous in any way at all. Believe me I am not a moralist.    But I want to save mental health.  Marijuana is not the way.  I know that it temporarily eases repression in those who are intellectual and deeply repressed.  It makes you feel at ease … normal … for a time.  Much better to get to your feelings in a systematic way and not need drugs at all.

The Psychology of a Great Actor

  I  have often thought about what makes a great actor, not a good one, but a great one.  Marlon Brando is one, Gerard Depardieu (France)  is another.  I think what it involves is those with leaky gates and therefore great access to feelings.  They can portray emotions to their depths because they are already awash in them. It makes them great and already out of control.  They are impulsive, aggressive, narcissistic, having never enough love and attention, and above all, self referent: that is, everything they say or do is related to them. You say something and they immediately retort, “I remember when I..,……” blah blah.  They are always story tellers , and the story is usually about them.

    Their whole world is acting and that is where they are real. They can blend into any character and become that character.    Reality is not their thing except inside a fantasy character.  They have no self-consciousness because the self is in the character; they are not examining the character, they are living it.  They are it.  One of my actresses put it this way:  “I’ll be anything you want me to be, mommy,  if you will only love me.” Alas, that is not to be because because too often the parent is also self-centered and has no time or space for anyone else.  They cannot give anything to anyone.  The minute an actor steps back to look at the role he is playing he is no longer great; he is as they say in French, quelconque.  He  is everyman, a wanna-be.  Let’s be clear; when an actor thinks too much about what he is doing he is back in his head and apart from the role.  He has to be in it totally to be great.

      So why is their lives such a mess; and it nearly always is.  Because they cannot love anyone.  The unloved children go to a therapist who claims: you have to love yourself.  What nonsense. How can you when there is nothing inside to do that? That is a double mind-fuck. Now the children have to wonder, “What’s wrong  with me” Why can’t I love myself?  And if they imagine that they can love themselves then  all is lost because they have bought the fantasy without the essence.  If they knew anything about neurophysiology they would know that you cannot love yourself unless you totally distort the meaning of love, and neurologically there is a critical period when you can be  loved and only during  that period.  If you try to “love yourself” at age forty, good luck.  You need to be loved when the critical period for love is relevant and that is during gestation and infancy.  That sets your life.

    I am trying to figure out how you love yourself?  You tell yourself “I love you?”  You hug yourself?  Buy nice things for yourself?  What??  There is no good answer because it  is nonsense. This is doubly true if a great actor goes to therapy; he will incorporate the therapy and therapist into his narcissism and not change  one scintilla.  He can’t.  He  is  driven for love and manages to find a profession where  he can think he can get it:  Applause, “they just loved you tonight, “ blah  blah.  That is  what he gets for love but he keeps on perfecting his craft to get more and more.  I have treated some near-greats but the dynamic is the same.  Love me, love me.

  I have treated young actresses who run the minute there is an interview for  a role.  There is a desperation about it as there is so much at stake for them: a chance for love, approval, appreciation, attention; everything that was missing in their home-life.  They will settle at age twenty for hundreds “loving them” for what they missed early on.  And what they missed  early on is  gone  and will never be retrieved.  What they can retrieve is reality; feeling unloved.  And dialectically, that will finally enable  them to feel loved again.  The repressive barriers  have been penetrated and there is again access to real feelings and the ability to feel real love.  A major actor wrote a book about that after his therapy.  The point is that when you are loved you feel it and act it; you don’t go around saying, “I love myself.”  You don’t think about it because whatever you do is natural; the way things need to be.  You don’t run around thinking , I am tall.  That is simply the nature of things. So is feeling loved.  And if acting and getting love from thousands were satisfying then the actor would not be so driven to do it again and again.  But it is like a tranquilizer; it only lasts for a moment.  It is not truly fulfilling because the actor often cannot truly let love in.  Yes of course, there is the true artistry of acting and the actor wants to do it over and over, but I am discussing the inner drive, the ultimate motivation.

So why are actors and directors so depressed when not on stage?  Because they feel what  they really feel, profoundly unloved; they are bereft of their defense.  When they work they can struggle for love,  and there is hope again.  They see the applause, the approval and appreciation. It allows their defenses to work again.  And all is well in life.  They will undergo years of rejection, as they did in their early life, for that crumb of love.  They expect rejection; it was their mode of life early on; they know it well.

Where Do Anxiety and Panic Attacks Come From?

For years I have been discussing limbic fear versus brainstem terror; that is, as we go deeper in the brain the responses become  more exaggerated; mild hopelessness becomes suicidal hopelessness, fear becomes terror, anger becomes rage, and on.  The responses become more primitive as they emanate from a brain that is more primitive; older  and pre-human.  Those deep responses go way back in time to when they were the reigning animal reactions extant.  That brain is still alive inside of us and it provides all of the responses that existed millions of years ago.  In some respects we are still that alligator or shark with no pity or remorse, just instinct.  Those primitive animals are pre-emotion before caring and concern existed;  they do allow us to murder.  They also permit panic attacks.  And where do those attacks come from?  Ah.....They seem to come from a brain where panic is life-saving.  Where rapid and ferocious responses meant survival.    And where someone overwhelmed by his brainstem can  react exactly like the alligator does....and kill. He is acting out of his brainstem.

The panic victim feels threatened but  he doesn't know what he is afraid of.  Or, believe it or not, that he is  even afraid; it sometimes doesn't feel like fear; it is some unknown feeling that seems so alien.  I know what he is afraid  of..... Whatever  lies  in his brainstem.  Oh my, what  might that be?  That is the rub as  my friend old Willie (Shakespeare) noted.  When I was in graduate school I learned about antecedent-consequent reactions.  All it meant was that if there is a response something caused it.  Well in rage and terror something causes it; and it is not ordinary reactions; they are primitive in the full meaning of the term.  So far we have not known what that meant.  Stay with  me  now as it starts  to get interesting.

  What is clear in  my writing is that there are three brains in our head, (The Triune Brain), but we have ignored the first one, that I call "first-line."  In the first line  lies all of those primitive reactions; when there is trauma at birth or during gestation, long before we have an an intact emotional brain, our reactions are coded and  stored down on the first  line, the brainstem and the ancient parts of the limbic system.  When we suffer great trauma during those early times the gating system weakens and we have "leaky gates".  The trauma causes us to use up major supplies of repressive chemicals, such  as serotonin, that impairs the proper functioning of the repressive gates.....our defense system.  Not only does trauma use up serotonin; it damages parts of the brain that produce it, as well as dopamine and epinephrine.  This is especially true of smoking mothers, in my experience.

    We are less defended, so when we arrive at age thirty with  a panic attack it is such a mystery.  No longer, we can now understand its provenance.  It comes out of a remote nervous system, so remote  as to be constantly ignored, yet it is responsible for so much of our aberrant behavior.  Who would dream that inside us  lies all those primitive instincts that  can surge forth when our defenses weaken?  And up comes terror from a carrying mother who smoked and  drank  and who was effectively killing or damaging the baby from diminished oxygen.  That and many other configurations conspire to inculcate terror  in the baby that is imprinted  and sealed in  as a (Primal) memory.  When there is a panic attack or rage attack we must look to that brain for understanding and cure.  It is only with that brain that we can find  causes  and answers. And the cure involves reliving, as I have explained at length in my books and blog articles.  If  you all are interested I will go over it again but I think 2 blog articles ago I discussed in How to  Make a Cure.    Now comes the fascinating part:

Some recent research by Justin Feinstein at the University of Iowa City (Nature Neuroscience 2013), did a study with those who had a damaged  amygdala, the hub of the emotional system.  They did not have normal fear responses.  But if oxygen supplies were lowered and carbon dioxide supplies were increased, mimicking  suffocation (increasing acidity of the blood) there were panic attacks.  Where in the world  did those attacks come from?  Certainly not from the usual emotional structures.  They believe it includes the brainstem!  Because the lowering of oxygen supplies and adding carbon dioxide provoked the lower structures to sense the danger and reacted  appropriately.  Very much like what happens to a fetus when the mother smokes during pregnancy and produces those same effects.  What  all this means is what  I have been writing about for decades; fear and terror  are  two different reactions involving different brain structures emanating from structures million of years  apart in evolution.  However the emotional reactions have some similarities which allows resonance; that is, enough fear can travel  down in the brain  and trigger off those primitive panic/terror responses that I call first-line. It is not ordinary fear; it means a life-endangering cause and that come from our time in the womb and at birth.  In the  experimental patients, it meant and means  terror  of dying; that is what it feels like  to the sufferer because that is exactly what it is.  In the memory he is dying and the fear it evokes has a reason; a reason that is knowable. and therefore explains the reaction....and once known can lead to understanding about first-line and  a  cure.  If all this is ignored there will  never be a  cure,  no matter what the technique  use  to treat it.

    It is interesting that suffocation has such a great terror reaction associated with it.  And not so oddly in the panic attack there is often a feeling of suffocation, cannot catch one's breath, the heart beating so fast that it is about to jump out of the chest.  And these breathing problems are again brainstem originated (included the medulla of the brainstem).  It is all an ensemble of reactions originating deep down that later on set the stage for many kinds of pulmonary problems, asthma, shallow breathing and other malfunctions.  One other part of this reaction is that there may be a certain vulnerability for the suffocation feeling during birth; that is, if a mother smoked during pregnancy there is already a groundwork for the suffocation feeling at birth.  It  becomes  compounded, the anesthesia at birth in the mother and the background of a smoking mother.    We must keep in mind that this is all an imprint from the beginning of life that will affect so many parts of us including constant nightmares........again where one cannot catch one's breath; a nightmare of being in a dark room with no air or someone putting a pillow on our head.  It is fine to treat the nightmare, even to drug or medicate it but we cannot medicate an imprint; that remains to go on causing damage.  So nightmares, panic attacks, breathing problems pulmonary dysfunction are all part of an ensemble, a gestalt, if you will that must be considered as one problem, not many many problems.  Yes, there are many, many symptoms each must be treated until.....until we go to the generating source where it is all  treated at once and permanently.  What we must understand is that the physiology memory comes up intact with the whole panoply of feelings.  There is often too much terror to feel it all at once and integrate it.  That is why it needs to be revisited time and again.  So how does the patient know where it comes from?  Often not at first but after many relivings it becomes comprehensible. Clearly it is so remote an experience that it can be experienced but not immediately understood for what it is.  It is the same when reliving a gestational trauma.  We can experience it long before we understand it, and experiencing it is crucial for integration.  Non-verbal experiences can be relived and experienced on their own terms and in their own way; they can be integrated, nevertheless.  Let me explain further:

There are times when a patient can remember when his dog died, being hit by a car.  What  needed to be experienced and expressed was the repressed emotional aspect of the experience.  The pain needs to be unleashed and finally felt. It is the same with preverbal pains.  They need to be unleashed from their biologic constraints and fully experienced.  They then are integrated and become part of us.  That is the essence of a Primal.  We don’t have to know exactly where  it comes from because the fetus did not.  But he experienced it and repressed the pain.  It needs liberating.  It is what we do.

To reiterate:  because it is now established that lowered oxygen levels in the fetus creates panic in him, it should be clear that a carrying mother who smokes is damaging the baby severely.  Can he really feel terror?  I recommend to you the work of K. Anand.  He did an amniocentesis on fetuses and found as the probe invaded fetal space all of his stress hormones rose; he also grimaced and show signs of distress. He felt pain and terror.

    We have successfully  treated panic attacks (they are anxiety attacks, and they are terror attacks) and rage because we address the first line.  It is not a mystery; it just belongs to an ancient brain system that we have ignored for too long.  If we want to help those in danger of acting out in rage  and to help those who suffer panic we must travel to millions of years of phylogenetic history, deep in the brain  to find our answers.

Estranged From Nature and Evolution

We are all part of nature; the end result of evolution.  Not only are we bound by evolution but are the embodiment of it.  We are evolution; therefore, we must pay attention to it when we practice therapy.  When we ignore  evolution  we always will make a mistake in treatment.  The brainstem was in place before the neo(new)cortex.  And when we plunge patients into the brainstem in rebirthing, it is far too soon and premature in terms of  neurologic evolution.  We unleash primitive material far too soon in therapy; the result is an overload of high valence imprints which suffuse the entire cortex and scatter thoughts, concentration and  focus.  What happens then is the concoction by the patient of weird ideas,  bizarre notions and  non-reality based thoughts as the lower levels feelings drive the cortex to manufacture something that will help suppress those very same feelings.  So heavy feelings cause the production of indigenous tranquilizers—thoughts and ideas —to shut down those very same feelings.  In this case those ideas are the result of repression and is also the agent of repression—the dialectic.  And now we see one key factor in evolution: the ability to fabricate ideas in the service of repression.  And it may well be the one key reason for the evolutionary development of ideas;  to be able to escape the enemy from within…feelings.

  Now let’s  turn it around; the therapy that involves ideas and insights as its key mode.  Cognitive therapy gets stuck in the last stage of evolution and neglects feelings and our history both personal, (ontogenetic), and historical, (phylogenetic).  So on the one hand we  have a therapy that dives into heavy primal material long before we are ready for it, and on the other hand, we remain on one level, in one mode that neglects evolution completely.  Both are  dismissive of evolution and, remember, we are evolution.  And we can perform this neglect when we ignore feelings……too deep too soon; or too late, too late.  We must never be asked in therapy to express  or say our feelings because that is an oxymoron.  There are many pre-verbal feelings that  have no words  Putting words to them  negates those specific feelings.  It uses one level to get to another (words to express feelings); when they are separate and independent.

  So when we anchor the patient in the present and make a slow descent into feelings it will all be natural  and in evolutionary order.  We have to return to the past because that is where feelings first evolved.  Repeat:  the natural order helps us become natural and normal.  We are no longer estranged from our nature; and what that means is that we feel a  commonality with  animals and plants and flowers.  We can again see beauty; that is one effect of a feeling and evolutionary therapy.  That is one effect that cannot be achieved in cognitive/insight therapy.  So long as the feeling band is missing we cannot be at one with nature.  Rebirthing does nothing to re-establish the feeling band.

Feelings do that.

    All this means is that our history lies inside of us; we respond to two worlds at once.  The outer world and the inner one. If there is too much input from our imprinted history we cannot take much from our outer world.  We cannot stand much stimulation.  When there are  imprints from gestation and birth that are lying in wait, trying to get out, moving relentlessly upwards and forwards, putting pressure on the neo-cortex, there  is a tendency to be easily overwhelmed.  Here lies ADD and confusion.    Added to it is addiction, deep, deep addiction in accordance with very deep imprints.  Here lies hysteria and over-reaction.  Here lies impulsive tendencies. Here lies weakened cortical control and  “leaky gates.”  The gates are in an endless battle to keep too much input away so it cannot be overloaded.  And,
 here  lies impatience and intolerance; here lies a mess.