I Am Ninety Now...

I am ninety now so I have earned the right to reflect a bit. So here goes:

 What have I learned about life?  A lot and not much since it is what I have learned about people in my life that counts.  First of all, my great great staff, some of whom have been with me for fifty years, others thirty years.  It is a lifetime together that counts.  And yes, they and I have many flaws but we are all human for God’s sake and that is part of being human. They are not “my staff,” they are my friends, my good friends, all of whom I trust completely.  They care so much for their patients and for their lives. And my wife. We are together night and day for 41 years and it is not enough.  It is a double Pygmalion.  I changed her through the therapy and she changed me through her love. What more is there?

 If you did not suffer, chances are you would not be interested in Primal Therapy, nor my books nor me.  You can live a good life without me but a better life with me.  Why? Because I have found what feelings mean to all of us, and I have found what an open brain means.  Some of you already are there so congratulations.  Many of you, like me, are still learning about me about life and about what drives us.  You mean I am still learning.  Let me give you an example:  I used to work in a meat packing plant where they slaughtered pigs.  I stood next to the racks of pigs and heard them screaming, and thought nothing of it.  And I forgot it.  As my brain has opened up, I now hear those screams all of the time and I cannot shut it out.  It drives me crazy but they are part of me.  It is no different from now feeling the hurt and pain my parents inflicted on me, I now hear my silent screams.  I was never aware of it and never knew about it. After I felt my need over and over again I began to suffer from their behavior and just who they were.  I am ninety, remember, but my life at five years of age never left me.  I was driven incessantly by that hurt yet never knew about.  I could not sit still and never could even imagine that it was due to my womb-life.  I did not concoct a theory about it; I lived it.  l never knew I need to be held and touched until my body ached and screamed it out, time and again.  I did not even know it was about being held and touched until months and years after feeling raw emotional pain.  Then it got specific.  We do sometimes hold patients because it is a good tranquilizer and it brings pain levels down so that they can feel and tolerate it.  We give them a bit of what they need so they can feel more of what they need.  The totality is too much all at once.

 We have turned psychotherapy upside down.  I cannot imagine telling a patient who is crying deeply that her time is up.  It is inhuman. l We have no time limit on sessions.  When they are through feeling and only then do they leave.  They go on feeling, and finally they leave me as a patient and come back as friends.  Good, non-neurotic friends.  I will publish some of the letters I received on my birthday to show you what I mean.  Here is a letter that I received while writing this:

 Dear Art,

 What a privilege it has been to have know of you for so many years and also have met you in person.
 Your life’s work has given me and so many the opportunity to save themselves from themselves. To create a new life or just a life, a beginning of something great. It’s through Primal Therapy that I’ve been able to see myself, slowly become myself, evolve to who I was supposed to be, free of pain, free of painful acting out repression all day, every day.

 I cherish the freedom of my own will, free of being caught by a web of past pain that was ever present, yet invisible. Primal Therapy to me is about awakening from a dormant state of living, letting the original child, the original blueprint, so to speak, flourish and be allowed to just be as it was intended.

 thank you, Art!


 I learned about my terror of death.  Having approached death at birth, being heavily drugged and unable to get out,  I already knew what approaching death felt like; and as I began to feel those early feelings erupted too.  And I had terror attacks, never knowing what they were and where they came from.  It seemed like I was dying NOW,  Pure terror.  I don’t want to leave this earth but I have come to terms with it… still…I have no rationales for what comes later because it is nothing;  no special energy that exists that tells me that part of me is still alive.  Nothing remains of me except in the memory of others who loved me.  If you want to go on living you need to be loved, and you need to love, and realize that what endures is love and only that.  But look, to finally be liberated from pain and to live a free and feeling life is a lot; cherish it.  That is my goal, my job and my life’s work.  I cannot stand to see people suffer when they don’t have to.  I think now of Robin Williams.  Maybe we could have helped him. We have helped so many like him.  But if he knew about us then he would have at least had a shot at sanity and health.  That is why,  not I, but the therapy needs to be famous; to save lives.  Robin had a right to know about us.  He knew about famous rehab centers that did him no good.  I have fame by the loads, my friends and patients, my wife. That is plenty.  Applause is not a good substitute for physical love, kisses and hugs; aaaah  hugs and kisses.  What we all needed and need.  We don’t need a wise man to tell us about the good life; we need someone to help us lead it.  We don’t need someone else’s ideas; we just need our own.    We don’t need brilliant advice; the learning we get out of our own bodies when it feels, is a lot and enough.  What liberates us?  Feeling the pain that kept us imprisoned.  Those bars are stronger than steel.  We never see them or know they are there but they keep us locked in.  They make us behave in the same way over and over.  We act in self-destructive ways without knowing it.  And even if someone tells us we are doing that,  we nod and say, “I guess so.”  After doing 12 years of college and university all I got out of it was to know typing and spanish.  Most of the rest was useless.  Certainly, what we learn in psychology is really useless, coming from a bankrupt field that cannot ever acknowledge feeling.  There is the apotheosis of the intellect even when it is the opposite that counts.  Some of my patients had professors for parents but they could never touch and kiss their children so what good did their intellect serve when they were destroying their children?  And they never saw it.  They were blinded by their intellect and could not see around their blinders.  Feelings opens the pathways for sight and understanding; they opened mine and then I knew the mistakes I made with the children.  And then I could hear the pigs scream, and I will never eat bacon in my life.  What we need is a feeling society and it can start with parents and continue with teachers; but first we all need to know the importance of feelings. They are lifesaving.  Two twins born prematurely, were put into an incubator together.  They had their arms around each other, and did far better then those who lived in an incubator all alone.  We need each other; we need the hugs the caress and the kisses, as if life itself depended on it, and it does.

 Here is what we don’t need:  we don’t need booga booga therapy, bereft of science, where everyone goes around hugging one another and spouting love phrases.  We need to know that pain is imprinted very early right after birth and stays for a lifetime and will not change with a few well meaning patients hugging each other.  It is good for a moment but cannot last or change anything. We don’t need smart therapists.  We need feeling ones.  Beware the ides of intellect.

 What it is that we all want? Love, of course, but when it is absent and we never knew it, we settle for substitutes…praise, approval, a pat on the head, an “A” from a teacher, a letter of commendation, a medal for work well done,  etc.  And we need those things as strong as we need love because that is what is behind our need for approval.  I know, I felt, “say I’m good” dozens of times in therapy.  That is what I needed, a wee drop of approval, a bit of praise from someone who counted in my life and at the time it was needed.  If I get it now it is nice indeed, but not life changing.  At age five after being called stupid time after time cause my father felt stupid and needed me to boost his faltering ego, that is when it would have done some good.  You cannot make up for what you missed, which is what nearly every therapy does today. Those therapists care about you, are concerned for your success and advise you.  Yet what we all missed is imprinted and fights back against all the help now.  It cannot get in.  We must must must go back and relive, undo the imprint and correct history.  We need to reverse the pain and be free.  How hard is that? Not as hard nor as painful as you might imagine.  You cannot address the present and change your past.  As obvious as that seems; you can only change the past by going back and reliving it, undo the chemicals such as methyl that engraved the memory into the system.  It is reversing the imprint that is the sine qua non.  That opens the gates to feeling and then we can breathe again; literally as some of my shallow breathers began to breathe far more deeply after therapy.  See. feelings opens up the lungs and the vascular pathways so we can breathe and have more latent oxygen in the systems.  It means averting seizures and clogging of vessels.  It means lowering blood pressure all by itself and of stopping lifelong migraines.  It means lowering the chemicals of stress and clearing the top level neo-cortex so we can think clearly again.  You mean feelings can do all of that?  Yes, but, but, Primal feelings, not the unleashing of a few tears and expecting miracles.  It means releasing pent up tears that have lain there silently for decades waiting their turn.  We have given them their turn.

 I have been in practice for over sixty years, since my days on the Staff of Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, Psychiatric Dept. And what did I learn? not much.  I started practicing Primal almost fifty years ago, and what did I learn?  Everything.    Feelings taught me, and I became a patient of my clinic.  I sat in the waiting room and waited my turn like everyone else. And then I started to learn about myself and then about others.    New shrinks must have our therapy so that they can learn, so that they can suss out feelings in others and help them with those feelings.  If you want decent kids and a good marriage you need to feel.  I have seen what a primal child looks like and it is a joy.  His father is writing a book about him.  He just gets up in the morning and says, “wow, I feel so good today.”  So simple and so great.  He learns easily, has many friends and is most popular.

 If you want friends you need to be  friend, not in the booga booga sense, but in sensing when a friend feels bad and you know how to empathize with her, feel with her and be a real friend.  Not in buying expensive gifts cause that has little meaning for a feeling person; yes it is nice but not if it has to fulfill the task of deprived early love.  Then the receiver needs more and more and it never is completely fulfilling.  When you are full of early love, gifts are terrific but they are not used to make up for what you did not get. Then it is never enough; never enough money, chocolate, boats and possessions, fame, clothes and so on.  Never enough because you are trying to fill a vast hole.  Life gets so simple when you feel that terrible burden you carry around all of the time. You need less because what you need you already have…love.

The Merger of Nature and Nurture: How the Outside Becomes Inside

 Over the years the question is always raised,  is it nature or nurture? What causes so much behavior and so many symptoms: the genes or experience?  I vote for both, and if I had to give an edge it would be to experience. But I am getting ahead of myself.  Because what seems like genetics may now be experience, and vice versa.  That is due to the new field of epigenetics where experience modifies the genes, how they express themselves, if they are blocked and how they are modified and when.  We need to look at them as an organic unit, each influencing the other.   Perhaps for a lifetime.   Certainly there are pure genetics; color of hair and eyes, but when it comes to plasticity, malleability and flexibility of symptoms and behavior we need to consider both.

 Such a thing as heart attacks in our fifties.  If we don’t consider experience and only genetics we will never solve the puzzle; for it turns out that stress changes the lymphocytes, the white blood cells to increase, and when that happens the extra cells stick to artery walls slowing blood flow, forms clots and produces a block in blood vessels: and, voila; a heart attack.  The problem is that we tend to look at current or childhood stress when the real origin may be in our womb-life.  (see: “New Study May Explain Why Stress Can Cause Heart Attacks.”  Nolan Feeney, Health Research, June 22, 2014 (see for ex: http://time.com/2909884/chronic-stress-heart-attacks/)).  As I have noted, stress is life endangering when it is at its most potent and stressful.   We need to take off our blinders and look further into the past, where experience, deleterious experience, is not so obvious.   We cannot see the fetus suffering from a mother’s smoking but it is there.  Here is the first inkling of how the outside (stress) becomes inside (heart attack).  What happens with stress is that it de-normalizes the system; either too much or too little.  One lady I saw felt “toxic,”  no one knew what she meant but she decided to move to the desert to feel “non-toxic.”  Until she had the feeling;  her mother was a chain smoker and she was toxic to the daughter she was carrying.  She produced heavy toxicity in her; it became an imprint and remained in her system. Once relived, many times over, she was over it and finally knew why so felt toxic.

But there is much much more.

 I also want to introduce you to an important scientific paper by M. Meloni (The social brain meets the reactive genome; neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology   Hypothesis and Theory.  21, May, 2014 (see http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00309/abstract; the full text is available for free)).  He sums up so much of the new science of epigenetics,  malleable and less fixed than we might imagine.  And they are heavily influenced by genetic factors. And like us humans, genes need always to be considered in the context of their milieu.   It is the interaction of genes and environment that bring the phenotype into play……and too often we look at the phenotype (what we can see) and ignore origins as the cause of our problems with behavior and symptoms.  When someone grows up in an alcoholic, violent environment we understand the causes of his delinquency.  Why not growing up inside the womb of a heavy smoker?   Doesn’t that help us understand his later breathing problems?  Only if we know where to look.   And that environment is often womb-life.  The good part of this is that when we can tease out some environmental factors they can sometimes be reversed.   Not so with genes. Therapists need to pay attention to the latest research in birth practices and pediatric discoveries, that I often write about.  Just that simple fact, that we respond to our environment can lead us to discover proper origins.  I hasten to add:  we respond more forcefully as that environment becomes earlier.   And as we grow up and have children of our own, that environment can be passed down the hereditary chain.  In short, what happens to us in our lives can be visited upon our offspring.   Not always the bad stuff but also the good; mother rats who often licked their offspring had healthy offspring and so was the baby’s offspring, as well.   (This is Michael Meaney’s work, as well as Moshe Szyf’s).  What they noted is the Primal position, as well, that there are critical periods in life when the environment affects us the most.  And clearly that is in the first weeks of life; not life on the planet, but life inside the mother ship.  I am writing mostly about methylation and how the environment becomes embedded into the cells where nurture becomes nature.  I mean if our life experience affects our offspring it acts like genetics; yes?    I mean the outside has become the inside.

 In animal studies they find that methylation patterns during the critical period can be engraved in parts of the limbic/feeling centers; i.e., the hippocampus.  And those patterns become stable and enduring.  And that can mean being vulnerable to later disease. (They say, “modifications of methylation patterns (the imprint) are encoded and  form long-term outcomes”). Briefly, imprints can make you sick.   Abuse is what seems to change methylation patterns, and especially during the critical period.  What is important here is that heavy methylation in the feeling centers can ultimately lead to mental illness.  It becomes the crucial for bad mental reactions.  The imprint has altered the hippocampus in such a way to make one vulnerable to further trauma.  The imprint is a fixed an enduring form of cellular memory according to Meaney/Syzf/Meloni.

The researches and I, both have come to the conclusion that the imprint can endure for a lifetime. Once fused it is most difficult to pry nature away from nurture. They, in effect, become one. And when the fetus or infant is stressed the expression of the genes change.  They can be up-regulated toward expression, or down-regulated toward repression. ( a lot depends on what chemicals are “borrowed” to embed the event/memory, the acetyl group or the methyl group).  What investigators are finding is no surprise at all.  That licked/loved infant animal babies are far better at handling later stress. And vice versa; when babies are not loved they have a harder time handling stress and adversity.  Do I mean that love is that important? Yes.  It is no wonder that the rate of lost productivity in jobs (30%) is due to some form of mental illness.  Very early stress leaves offspring less adventurous, much more cautious and wary.  And above all, they are more susceptible to drug addiction.  They are in imprinted pain.   When booga booga addiction centers miss out on all these early causes there is no way they can cure addiction.  As I have said numerous times, “You cannot love addiction or neurosis away.”   The point is that adverse early events leave a mark, a trace, an imprint that endures and affects behavior and symptoms.   It is then too late for love.   Yes it helps a bit but once brushing up against the imprint it is useless.  Because of the pain the gates won’t yield to feelings; they won’t let them through.

 We human beings are social and so are our brains.   They take in outside life and transform it into lots of internal stuff.  And then we look at the phenotype and say, aha, it is genetic; or worse, we say, “It is your job that is causing so much stress.”  It is rarely both; either we are born with it or we got it last week.  Like high blood pressure, for example.  It is Primal Pain that kills us prematurely, not so much diet.  Although I would not neglect diet, but normal people generally choose healthy diets, according to any number of studies.   If your system is balanced so will be your food choices, and choices in life, for example, like a proper partner.

 So who we are is not in the vapors.  It is in concrete experience; and that experience usually predates our life before birth (to name my most recent book). There is where we need to look and there we will find causes; we will find key memories that have driven us and caused so many symptoms that have been a mystery.   There we will find cure.

More on the Act-Out: Goodbye Robin Williams

There are some common act-outs that dominate so many of our lives.  I was thinking of having to work under pressure; that is, waiting until the last minute and there is pressure on, and then we start to work.

So what does the act-out mean?  It means neurosis: acting in the present as if it were the past.  Symbolizing the feeling from the past in the present.  So it is waiting for pressure to start going.  Needing pressure to get moving.  And how does that start?  Often, but not always,  the pressure of trying to get out and the need to activate oneself to move.  Thus, one exerts great effort in order not to fall into a failure syndrome of utter hopelessness, and the depression that it engenders later on.  There is the need to live together with the impending death surging forth.  One cannot get going on one’s own; one needs some “help,” some outside push to move us along.  It becomes a lifelong event; needing pressure to do or to go or to start.  One is no longer a self-starter; the impetus must come from the outside.

Why do I say that the impetus must come from outside?  Because the pattern usually starts so early in life, established by imprints in our earliest days of life, long before we could be self-starters, depending on mother’s impetus for motivation.  We then need someone to say, "OK, let’s get going.  Put on your jacket."  The motivation must be originated outside, not inside.  Or someone has to get ready, keys in hand, before the person decides to get ready.  Things need to "pile up" before we can be activated.

One sure way to start this off is to pile up anesthetics into the mother during the birth process. It knocks out most of self motivation and produces a whole system that veers toward para-sympathetic dominance.  This person is passive, has a low, languorous voice and has movements that are labored.  His vital signs are on the low side, with low blood pressure and body temperature.  In short, it is all of a piece. The whole system accommodates to the imprint.    And what does he learn from his womb-life?  Patience.  He can wait, because he had to, but then desperation sets in and waiting becomes life endangering, in his mind.  Then he can wait no more and needs to move.

When we examine the vital signs we can pretty well describe the personality type: when the blood pressure, body temp and heart rate are together rather high, then we know the person is a sympath, controlled or skewed toward sympathetic nervous system dominance.  It is those days in the womb that form the crucible for personality type; they all accommodate life circumstance.  They fare around the imprint; and when we take patients down deep we find the little nugget, the key imprints that forced all that accommodation.  And when those early imprints are relived and all the vital signs move as an ensemble down lower, we know we have struck gold. We have found the core of the pain.

Why are those imprints so critical?  Because almost every key adverse event in the womb can be life-endangering: low oxygen, inadequate nutrition, too much agitation,  flooding by drugs or alcohol, etc.  They all affect vital organs and change the system of the baby accordingly. There is a beginning to personality development and we must not immediately ascribe it to genetics.  Epigenetics is possibly more important.  Life circumstances wrap themselves around the gene and alter who we are and what we become.

This is pertinent to the death of Robin Williams this week.  He had just finished yet another round of rehab.  It should inform us of the ineffectiveness of rehab but it doesn’t.  Rehab is big business and it goes on uninformed by strict science so that anything goes.  It is surrounded by great food and exercise programs with a bit of booga booga therapy to round it all out.  And when I hear Dr Drew pontificate on addiction’s causes it makes me worry.  Every TV specialist, and they are often pretty young shrinks, tell us how it is a brain disease for which we need to get help, and  what kind of therapy is there for brain disease? God knows.  They never say.  They are forced into the “brain disease” notion because with no understanding of the imprints they have no other place to go.

Clearly Mr. Williams had deep-lying imprints that could overwhelm any later imposed ideas such as “see or focus on the positive.”  Who can believe that events in the womb are the forerunner of later depression and/or addiction?  I mean where is the science in the rehab centers that speak of methylation and epigenetics?  Where do they speak of the necessity of demethylation; of undoing the imprint and measuring it so that we know what we are doing in addiction treatment?  And who is there in those centers that could help him understand deep and remote memories that have changed his brain?  So he could have some small handle on his malady?  No one, it seems; for first they would need to understand it themselves.  And I see no evidence for it.  If only a professional could speak with him of his deep hopelessness, and get off that nonsensical “brain disease” mantra.

It is as if he had no life before the age of six, no experience to explain changes in the brain.  In other words, when they avoid basic need, they then have nothing to fall back on to explain embedded early pain.  And then they have no means to explain the now ample research to shows how imprinted pain detours basic nerve roots and nerve tracks. So they fall back on empty lectures, calling in "experts" to explain addiction and/or depression with no reference to very early experience.  And so they go on searching and searching for areas of the brain to explain what can only be explained, not by those key areas, which only accompany experience, but by how early experience impacts the whole biologic and neurologic systems.  How does hopelessness change brain function?  Where does that hopeless/depression come from? Is it really deep in the brain? Yes it is down there but it does not start there; it begins with experience and what it does to our thinking apparatus years later.  Experience does change us; so we need to get out of our solipsism and see the world and how it affects us.  The answer lies not in the brain which is most often normal when early experience is normal, but in what a carrying mother’s anxiety and depression does to us.  And it turns out that we end up duplicating the mother’s internal life almost exactly after birth.  If she is depressed we may end up depressed, as well.  We adopt her nervous system and we do effortlessly and without any reflective thought intervening.  We merge with her inner life and continue where she left off after our birth.  We become a "downer" too.  And if she produced all the chemicals involved in depression then so do we.  She provides the template and we act on it.  We have become her neuro-physiologic slave.  Our fate is sealed.

The Memory of Hurt

There is a well known study of a population deprived of food that happened in the Netherlands.    It  showed how this deprivation was carried on to their offspring for years to come.  It was called the “Dutch Winter” which was produced by the Nazis, and devastated the population.  This was external deprivation rather than pure genetics.  But it was carried on as though it were genetic.  A current study asked the question, “how was it imprinted and what were the mechanisms by which that happened?”  (The memory of starvation is in your genes.  Science News.  Aug 1, 2014, see for ex: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731145845.htm)  And I must add that this is important because it has implications for us humans who were not starved but were deprived; i.e., starved for love, for example.  How does this affect the children who grew up with deprived parents?

My point is that the mechanisms involved may well be the same or similar; that is, as soon as there is deprivation of basic needs, dating back to the beginning of life , those mechanisms begin their work.  That deprivation sends a signal to begin to defend and compensate; to change to meet the disaster to come.  The brain begins to “borrow” some methyl to produce methylation to help dampen the pain of deprivation.  And the biochemicals, such as serotonin, also jump into action to help in the repression.  The whole system is swayed, and not just for the moment but organically.  Those changes are imprinted just as the food deprivation in the Netherlands was.  They shape us for lifetime; they determine our later illnesses and our subsequent behavior.  This and relevant studies are learning the exact mechanisms involved.

One key mechanism is known as “small RNA inheritance.’  RNA molecules are produced by the DNA templates that tell the system that needs are not being met: lack of oxygen from smoking mothers, for example.  Something is missing; something is amiss.  We are warned, and later symptoms tell us about early deprivation but we have no idea what that might be.  In migraines, for example, the vessels during the birth process where heavy anesthesia is delivered to the mother, are depriving the newborn of oxygen; the vessels contract and block blood flow, sometimes resulting in a lifelong battle against persistent migraine headaches.  And what is one key therapy for these headaches?  Oxygen.

And what is the cure for later obesity?  Deprivation again.  How diabolic:  We are starved in the womb by external circumstances or a mother on a crazy diet,  that deprivation is imprinted and makes us hungry for life. Then when we are too fat we have to deprive ourselves again.  We see how useless this all is.  Of course there will be regression toward the imprint because it was life saving early on against the memory of extreme deprivation.
We might believe it is genetic because it happened when we could not even see the hurting fetus. We just assume that it comes from some mysterious source…..genetics.  Rather, its source is epigenetics; how life experience plays on the genes.  So we spend so much of our lives unconsciously responding to memory; obeying its dictates and never even knowing we are being ordered around by our history and its imprints.

Do we have free will?  Not so long as that will is being driven by our history.  There is more and more evidence of the imprint, as there should be, because it is crucial to our understanding of the human condition.    How can we ever conduct psychotherapy without including the imprint in the mix?