Neurosis is a Brain Disease... What????

Who said that?  A great many booga booga aficionados plus someone else:  the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health.   How could that be?  Let me explain… and try not to interrupt.
First of all, what does that mean---brain disease? Does it mean that the brain is really diseased?   If so, where and how?  I mean is it a real affliction, a hit in the head, or a slow moving virus?  Is there any proof of that?  Not that I have seen.  Maybe we are looking through the wrong lens.  We are looking from outside and guessing what may lie inside; we are not sure so we give it a name—brain disease.  Does it really mean a disease?  If so where does it lie?

I have an idea; let’s look inside. How do we do that without serious surgery?  We look at humans and their lives and their brains.  It seems to me that is what is missing…..the human and his history.  I mean the brain does not live in a vacuum.   It lives in an environment; and maybe in that world lies answers to what we are looking for.  Would we ever search for answers to liver disease without seeing what its environment is?  Was it constantly bathed in alcohol?  Would not that help us find an answer? How about if we find that the brain is constantly bathed in pain with all of its concomitant nefarious effects?   And there was a chronically high cortisol level indicating enduring stress.  And maybe that is the disease---imprinted pain that never leaves.   And it is largely a pain that begins before we can say, “I am in pain?” So no wonder no one knows about that it

Well how come I am so smug and think I have all the answers?  Well for one thing I don’t think I have all of the answers; just some important ones.  I have lived that pain, something that freezes my mouth closed so that no ordinary act of will can force it open. And I have several thousand patients over almost fifty years who have gone through similar experiences; and then we have done double blind studies in England and France to measure our observations and our results; and when we perform double-blind research, we find major changes in many biologic parameters as discussed in scientific journals.  And then the patients report significant improvement in many of their former diseases. As just recently someone who had grand mal seizures for years and now no longer has them.  His whole life has turned around. We shall be filming him to see how and why that happened. We will see the actual disease and no longer concoct “brain disease” to explain the psychological mysteries.   They are not mysteries; they simply are unobserved realities and therefore not found.
They are now.
We have found a way to wind back the evolutionary clock and take a close look at our personal histories, and meanwhile, the history of the species.  It seems that the old truths that we can never go backwards in life is another myth.  We can and do travel backwards in time, and above all, can reverse what happened to us in those past times.  It is the essence of our work. It is now called “de-methylation”. There are so many research results that confirm our hypotheses.  And maybe we need to look into the effects of imprinted Primal pain and see what it does, and how it lies behind so many serious afflictions.   And then maybe others will pick up their therapeutic cudgels and look at what we are doing.  We have found a way to go deep into the brain in a natural way: evolution in reverse and see for ourselves what the truth is. Above all, we need to find ways to look deep in neuroscience.

I never started out with an a priori, an “idée fixe”, an idea of what I wanted to find in my research.   I started not from knowing what I want but only from “wanting to know,” and therefore had no stake in the results, which were often a surprise.  Now current research helps to confirm so much of our work and our theories.   I have confidence that we are on the right track, and that maybe others in the field should look into it.  We have spent nearly all of our profits in wanting to know more.  Why?  For the good of patients and their health, and also for the good of the profession and particularly science so that we do not use vague terms such as “brain science” which leads nowhere and helps no one.  Unless of course we really know what disease of the brain we are talking about. That disease, as it turns out, is so deep in the brain and brainstem as to be unbelievable; and therefore is ignored.   The one disease that is so monumental in its far-reaching consequences, is exactly what has been neglected.   They have apotheosized the neo-cortex and thereby have gone terribly wrong.  I want to shout, “It’s the brainstem!”  But it is also the limbic system; we need to look down, not up.

Warped thinking did not make the world go wrong; it is because of a devastating early life that became imprinted which then steered the cortex askew.   Our salvation lies in reorienting that cortex toward its normal functions; then there may be hope.  Think of it this way: we give medicine for a disease over and over, holding back the symptom.  And why “over and over?” Because we are treating the wrong disease.  So of course it is never a cure.
When we start to cure the right disease we no longer need medication over and over ad nauseam.  “Brain disease,” won’t do it.   A specific primal imprint at gestation and at birth will.  How do we know that? The imprint leaves a trace. For example, a mother overdoses on anesthetics during birth producing a baby who cannot breathe easily.   And who in reliving that trauma in therapy seems to be suffocating. You mean suffocating now?  Yes, because the trauma is an imprint that dogs us throughout life and will not let us go until it is addressed and relived.  We have had many cases where it was not relived with damaging results.  That imprint leaves a trace on the gene; it is measureable and we hope to see it reversible in our forthcoming research.

The trauma is an experience that must be lived, finally.  It must come to life and be experienced and resolved.   It then is no longer an extraneous force, but becomes organic and part of us.  The only reason we say “brain disease” is because we have no idea what lies in the antipodes of the brain; we are forced to guess and make a vague statement about what might be inside.
The real disease has so many ramifications that it seems like many diseases.  It affects brain function (hence brain disease), but also the immune system, where we have done research, as well as the circulatory\blood systems, and just about everywhere else.
The former chief mental health officer, Dr. Insel, is someone I do respect but he is at a loss, for the same reason so many other professionals are; they do not know what lies hidden inside.   Without Primal techniques I fail to see how anyone can really know.  It requires a descent into the cerebral underground, something that took us decades to figure out.   It is not a secret; it is open to all.  And indeed a Primal Legacy (90 videos) by Dr. France Janov,  is coming out within a few weeks that shows the process of Primal Therapy, and it shows professionals some of what must to done to help others.  It has been five years in the making.  We want no monopoly but we know how dangerous it can be to explore the deep brain without knowing exactly what you are doing.
We have seen over and over again the harm to patients who have done Rebirthing Therapy, skipping evolutionary steps, abutting up against very early and very forceful imprints for which the patient is not ready.  The result is a confused and jumbled mind.
Dr. Insel has more to say: (in August 22,  2015. New Scientist).  He believes that “schizophrenia and depression are brain diseases”. They are an outgrowth of physiologic changes. (See https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730353-000-psychiatry-is-reinventing-itself-thanks-to-advances-in-biology/) Yes, OK but what makes those changes?    Imprints lying low down that alter the biochemistry; when we relive them the “symptoms” diminish.   The cart is pulling the horse here.  Can’t get anywhere that way. Insel believes we need to fold psychotherapy into neurology to make things more precise.  He sort of denigrates psychology.  But neurology has not done much better in the field of emotions, which he assumes, should be thought of as disorders in brain circuitry.  Is there a human anywhere inside there?  He looks for markers in the brain but does he consider markers in the environment in which we start life, starting with parents and birth doctors?  He believes it is nearly always an underlying disorder of brain circuits. I guess that emotions are too vague and aleatory to be pinned down scientifically.   And the result of all this is now that psychiatrists are using neurology to merge Freudian analysis with it and help make it a science.  So let’s see; they want to take a 100 year old therapy with a missing validity, and construct neurology around it.  Will that make Freudian theory more scientific?  How?   Putting a dress on dung doesn’t not make it pretty or acceptable.  How about renewing our theories and aligning them with neurology?  Neurology cannot be the last word; human experience is. Neurology must try to align itself with human experience, and not maintain an exalted position.

Dr. Insel says that they have found depression to be one of several diseases.  I doubt that.  It has been one disease with many manifestations that make it seem like many diseases.   When we deal with the deep pain as the therapy goes on, we see how it spreads all over the system.   It can affect breathing and heart rate, yet it is still one disease. And those levels diminish as an ensemble with the reliving; finally making the pain organic.

Having said all this, neuroscience can be a great help and must be included in the scientific armamentarium.  We use it all of the time to confirm our findings, but it is not meant to englobe or take the place of other key functions such as emotions and feelings.
We can not suss out the cause of neurosis by profound observation of neurons.  Dr. Insel wants to build on neuroscience to help find answers but they will not be there.  They will be in our early lives and how the brain and nervous system was imprinted with those experiences. And how those imprints radically change the trajectory of our lives.

First, we need to know where to look in the patient; then, how to look: with an MRI? Then we need to know what we are seeing, and finally we need to know what it means.   Is a very low body temp in a depressive a good or bad sign?  Without a proper theory we will never know. And when the body temperature rises to “normal” levels is that a good sign?  We need to be fully armed with a theory and an experience behind it.  We need to stop guessing.

The Mysteries of Some Behaviors

One of the great MYSTERIES escapes most of us:  why is this child so anxious and out of control, so incapable of doing school work, and mostly hangs out with the wrong people?  Gets in trouble all the time,  several auto accidents,  takes drugs and cannot be counted on.   Recognize him?  He is you neighbor, the guy down the street or the person who works next to you.   He is unstable  and cannot do anything , any project or task, for any length of time.  He is anxious and skittish and very unreliable.   He, and less often he, flits around and cannot be pinned down.  Often leaves a trail of destruction everywhere he goes.    He can be charming on the surface but when it gets deeper he is a mess.   Cannot keep a relationship for any length of time.  Never count on him; cause his word means nothing.

Yet he had stable loving parents who blame themselves.

So what is wrong?  He suffers from ineffable damage so early as to be unimaginable.   His mind is a cesspool of inputs that drive him hither and yon.  What inputs?  The damage inflicted by an unsuspecting mother who drinks many cups of coffee a day, or is highly anxious, keeps on an unhealthy diet, drinks alcohol, etc.   Each piece of damage is imprinted and sends its message through the system that there is impairment there.   It keeps the mind busy dealing with all that information, which is ultimately distracting and plays into ADD, attention deficit disorder.  It is like a phone operator sending the top level brain unending messages which overwhelm its  possibilities for integration.

He is often labeled a psychopath because on the way in the womb towards life on the planet, his limbic/feeling system has been damaged and he no long can feel for others nor empathize.  The imprint impairs the limbic/feeling system from keeping feelings alive and expressive because it too is flooded with damage information.   It keeps him from being stable and being able to maintain a long-term emotional relationship.   The damaged limbic system won’t allow long-term emotional commitment.   And the developing brain begins to lose its adaptability and plasticity in infancy so that the earlier damage cannot be changed.  Any intervention to be effective at all must occur during the brain’s most dynamic growth, just after a trauma occurs.  After that not much can change.

Even with his parents, who soon learn that they have little influence on him or his emotions .  We may blame his parents as they may blame themselves but the damage is done before he was born, and they could even touch him. He is behaving as though his parents made him suffer constantly, which they did, only inadvertently.  They certainly did not mean to but their own pain made them act in deleterious ways toward the baby; taking drugs, or drinking or smoking.  And it happened during the critical period when the damage from an anxious mother, or one who smokes and drinks or fights with her spouse, is deeply embedded, inaccessible and practically irreversible.…..the imprint.  Therein lies the mystery; an arcane memory lying in the antipodes of the mind out of reach and out of touch, so it is a mystery.

So we therapists have been taught to reassure our patient that it is not her fault. Relieving her of any blame but maybe it is; maybe it is by default; not in her control, at least not in her awareness.  It happened when the baby could not scream, or complain, just silent suffering which shows up in force later on when he can behave. And he does.   Do not try to control him because he is not in control, or rather, he is controlled by powerful forces sending out messages of constant pain.  It continues to drive him in every direction possible.  He cannot pay attention.  What do we do?  We drug him, not for what we think is wrong but to cool the imprint which has gone awry.   What is controlling him is far more powerful than any control by teachers or parents, who complain that he is out of control.  We drug his neuro-biologic reactions to calm him down. Sometimes it works for a short time, but not for long.

My God!  What is the solution?   To attack the origins of it all; I know of nothing else to do but to relive the trauma fully, as painful as it might be.  To relive in small feel-able bits over many months.  That, for me, is the only solution.  Otherwise,  we have to keep pushing it back, an endless affair.  And we cannot just approach the imprint quickly; we have to feel many other feel-able  memories first, and over months before we can approach the deep imprint.  There is where the deep pain lies, we have measured it in many ways, much higher blood pressure and heart rate and changes in brain frequency and amplitude.   That level of pain won’t let us attack it directly; we need to approach it with great caution.   If we don’t we will get the effects of rebirthing: greater damage and more irreversible pain.   This happens because we dredge up great pain which arises out of sequence and is overwhelming and can never be properly integrated.    The unconscious is no place for charlatans who decide they know to do and they don’t.    

On Evolution and its Role in Therapy

I am reading a book by Sean Carroll on evolution (Evo-Devo).   He points out that in a survey of many countries, the U.S. came out  last in the understanding of evolution: worse it was last in the agreement with evolutionary principles.   Do we come from earlier species?  Answer, “no”.  This led me to thinking that it also applies to the field of psychotherapy; even though we are clearly the evolutionary result of those who have gone before.   So how can we understand who we humans are without any understanding of who we were? We are then ahistorical beings; and indeed we may as well have come along in full force out of what?  Zeus?  No evolution to explain it, even though key scientists all over the world consider Darwin’s discovery the most important in the history of science.   So the bias toward the present leaves us confined away from history. It may be because of the predominance of anti-evolutionary beliefs in this country.

When evolution is by-passed there is no way to do a proper psychotherapy when our origins are left behind, we cannot acknowledge or know that we are the result of who we were early on; above all, how our early months and years shaped us and changed our evolution. Should I say that again?  Our early lives shape our personalities and help determine who we become.

That is why our therapy is so heavily evolutionary.  It allows us to see personal history in the light of brain evolution; something that cannot be ignored. Yet ignored it is by the majority of therapists who never even mention evolution in their books and papers. We are now a cult of the here-and-now. And we present our findings and results within the context of the here and now.

There is a new study on migraine headaches discussed in the NY Times (Dec. 12) where the newest therapy involves monoclonal antibodies, enhancing immune cells to attack the enemy.  I will not go into its intricacies except to say again that in their work, there is no search for origins, no focus on probable causes.  No use of history to search out answers.  It is as true in research as it is in psychotherapy.  “Don’t bother me with the facts” just get on with it.

I want to go on with this aspect because over decades of doing primal therapy and observing patients about to drop into deep brain imprints I noticed something critical.  It points out the difference between statistical conclusions and observation/clinical ones.  As longer term patients arrive at brainstem memories they sometimes start with the onset of a migraine headache, quite severe.  It comes on suddenly with the patient having no idea what is happening; it often is the harbinger of something totally unexpected, although some have had migraine attacks previously for which they took new painkillers that were transiently effective.

As they get deeper into the pain, and it is often very hurtful, they begin to have breathing problems and cannot catch their breath. As this went on, the headache  pain exacerbates until they  drop into the heart of it all:   the actual memory of the depletion of oxygen when the mother was given a  powerful  anesthesia which blocked some of her pain but also shut down oxygen supplies to the baby; the newborn.

What the patient then knows is that there is not enough oxygen and she can figure it out as she goes along in therapy.   It is quite common and leads us to believe that this is primary and primal cause for the affliction. This was the template for the years to follow:  slight stress, trouble catching one’s breath, and the depletion of oxygen, leading to severe migraine headaches.   If there is no focus on very early life and its imprints, there will be no way to know what is behind the symptoms, or why one needs pain killers for life, after that.  And now begins million dollar research into causes, looking for them in biochemistry, neurology, etc. And yes, they sometimes find correlates or concomitants that help to explain processes in the blood flow or in brain dysfunction, but rarely causes. We must always beware of the difference between the two—correlated or causes.   That changes everything.

And what is often a helpful therapy for them?  A correlated: oxygen therapy.  Of course, there are many other options, the most prescribed of which are painkilling drugs which are somewhat effective for a time.   And it is no surprise that whatever helps constrict the blood vessels, like coffee, helps conserve oxygen and lessens the pain. Let us make sure we are not just treating a correlate.  It helps ease the pain, and that is a good thing but not a good substitute for the real thing.

More important, I have discovered, along with methylation and epigenetic scientists that the earliest months of our lives alter the trajectory  of our development,   it determines  who we become;  what diseases we will suffer and how long we will live.  Also the form we take, physically and mentally.  Carroll says macroevolution is microevolution writ large.  Our trajectory is made up of small changes over time, which turn into major evolutionary changes.

Among some of my patients we see bone growth after they touch on deep levels of consciousness.  I have seen it in my wife whose fingers and feet grew.  This is for now anecdotal.  I have no corroborating information, no scientific studies.  But I have seen it in patients, enough of them to impress me with its veracity.   Why is this important?   Because we seem in some respects to alter the trajectory of their personal evolution, including how they grow.  (Yes, I have seen general growth of patients). We also normalize a number of factors, including heart action, blood pressure and kidney function; to say nothing of epilepsy.  We change evolution. What this means is that we change some of the results in their evolution; one thing we do, for example, is change their susceptibility to diseases. We help increase their natural killer cells levels, which when normal, seek out and destroy early cancer developing cells.  When impaired they cannot do their job and cannot prevent serious disease from happening. We have rare appearances of cancer among our longer-term patients.

If due to primal damage very early on they are destined for serious disease later on, we may abort that fatal destiny by reducing or eliminating the trajectory of primal pain that would have led to serious disease.  We shall test this out in the month and years to come in our research on epigenetics and methylation. Above all, by liberating or cutting short those who previously had a bad developmental trajectory, they can become who they were supposed to be. That is why we see breast growth in some women after we reverse serious repression (most often in flat-chested women); the repression that does not permit normal evolution to take place. When all that pressure is removed from the system the body returns to its genetic destiny; and for some women it means breast growth.  For others, heredity has its say and no breast growth appears.  It seems that we work with evolution in some ways. By liberating its normal processes.


If we can change, even minutely who we are destined to be, wouldn’t that be wonderful?  Changing evolution is not easily done, and in dialectic fashion, to do that we must go back in time to recapture basic genetics, and undo some harmful epigenetics.  In short, to recapture our biologic destiny.  We may then grow to where nature intended.  And be as healthy as nature intended before methylation stepped in to abort normality from setting in. It is both genetics and epigenetics that change.  For when we undo epigenetic harm, we free genetics to be their normal selves again. When we reverse repression, the breasts can be normal again and let genetics hold sway. I know this can sound booga booga but I have observed so many times as to dissuade me from any booga booga ideas.

What does this mean for the rest of us?  That we interfere with evolution in some ways. And liberate its normal processes,  and if we can change, even minutely who we are destined to be ,wouldn’t that be amazing?  Changing evolution is not easily done, and in dialectic fashion, to do that we must go back in time to recapture basic genetics, and undo some epigenetics.  In short, to recapture our biologic destiny.  

If we confine our search to only the correlates involved in the development of migraines it can be an unlimited task. We will certainly find reduce blood flow and start with circulation enhancers.   Or we will find excessive salt intake; and it will go on and on; those answers may be partially right, as associates of the key primal imprint:  they are proximate causes: but they are not and cannot be the ultimate causes. Until then, every therapy we try will be temporary, something we need to do over and over again.   It can be nothing else because the imprint has the force of survival, of a lifesaving memory and must endure until the life-endangering imprint is finally fully felt and resolved.  Clearly this applies to many problems, from high blood pressure to asthma and allergies.   That is why it is urgent that we re-focus on the real problem and avoid at all costs, those therapies that remain blindly and snuggly in the present.
Aside from the admonition not to forget about evolution in the practice of psychotherapy there is one more admonition: don’t forget the dialectic:  the interpenetration of opposites:  how one structure or process can turn into its opposite. Thus, basic feeling at a certain valence loses its identity and  becomes amorphous pain. When that pain is forceful enough it becomes repression, so that feeling becomes no feeling. And when pain is relived,  the repression diminishes and becomes a specific feeling again.  When feeling is experienced over time it is integrated and becomes a normal part of us.  Until it becomes a specific feeling, it cannot be dealt nor integrated. The dialectic has come full circle which means cure.  There is no cure with simple happy or positive thoughts.  Cure must grow out of the reality that exists in us...pain. Then negative turns into positive and can lead to positive thoughts. History and the dialectic can be our twin saviors.  Let us not denigrate them in favor of a safer present.

More on Depression

Depression seems to be rampant today throughout the world so I thought I would discuss it a bit more.  What I have found after treating many people who claim that they are depressed is they have a typical imprint that drives it.  I should say depression is underlined by many imprints that all tell the same story……. I am about to die.

Before I do go further I want to note something that I found in many depressives that led me to my conclusions.  I did measurements during their Primals and found one key reaction:  the deeper they got into the kernel of their depression the lower their body temperature. Sometimes lower by 3 degrees. It would seem dangerous but it was not.  But why that drop?   And more important why did they usually soon come back to the so-called normal range after the session?

It would seem that these patients were headed toward body fail as though they were dying; and the vital signs followed suit.  But why that?  Were they near death lying in my padded therapy room?  Yes and no.   In their memory imprint, they were certainly dying. And when into the feeling they were again dying.   But this time with a different ending; they were coming alive and out of their depression as they were immersed into the feeling:  “I am dying, suffocating, can’t breathe and can’t move“. Yet so many do die or kill themselves as that feeling has a stranglehold on their systems and wreaks damage when they are not in a therapy that can resolve it.

This is a strange dialectic: dying to come alive.  But if you do not feel dying you cannot be liberated and come alive.  Why?   The imprint/memory dominates.  It actually happened and it is an embedded memory.  Until you eliminate what is dragging you down, you cannot overcome it.  This is an iron primal/biologic law. The imprinted memory has to be totally relived even if it takes months to feel it.  It cannot be done in a day or a week.  It is so powerful that it makes a person depressed.  And what is depression?   Hopelessness and helplessness.    So, it is not strictly depression: it is hopelessness called depression.   So we cannot say you are depressed therefore you feel hopeless. No. Hopeless is another name for depression.  I have seen patients descend deep in the brain and their “depression” becomes hopelessness as they touch the real imprint: “ I am dying and there is nothing I can do.”

That is what the memory is suppressing and that suppression makes it such a mystery.  Our system is suppressing the memory of approaching death and its terror. When my patients start to feel deep depression; what I call first-line brainstem depression, because its origins are so deep and remote, the body accommodates to this approaching disaster and slows down to conserve oxygen and energy. It says: “Hold back, do nothing vigorous or your life will be endangered. Don’t breathe deeply.”  These are the elements of depression that trail us throughout life.  We don’t want to do anything,  go anywhere and begin any chore even though it is urgent.  They feel energy-less, without motivation.  It can never be as urgent as the imprint of near death.  It is so importuning that the depressive considers suicide without fully knowing what the true feeling is.  It just feels terrible and unbearable. And he does not know how to stop it. He thinks that only death will stop it: strange, to kill oneself over the possibility of feeling death approaching.   I know how to get out it: feel it, get into it, but first you need to know what to feel and that takes a while in therapy because it is so recondite as to be unbelievable.  And at first it is a distant and foggy element.  Not recognized for what it is.   And there is no one to tell you what it is or when to feel it.  It is a memory waiting its biologic turn to be experienced.  It is above all, not just some idea concocted by a therapist where he admonishes the patient to change his ideas to get out of the depression.  It is not just a mental affair; it is neuro-biologic.   The person feels “down”  and wonders why?  I know.  He was seriously drugged very early on and he feels it all the time as an imprinted memory.   He drugs himself or runs from it because he does not know what “it” is.  How could he know that he has to feel it again, only this time alongside a professional who will help and who will not allow anything untoward to happen to the patient.

Remember, that what happens to us outside, even during life in the womb, changes the DNA methylation and makes it internal.  The memory is now inside and stays there.   There is a kind of merger, if you will, so that experience and heredity become one.  Suffocation is now a fixed memory.  I see it in patients on the verge of early feelings who cannot stand the doors or windows closed without becoming anxious and terror filled, the same feeling imprinted deep in the brain.

Otherwise he gets into a feeling and experiences low body temperature and it mystifies him.  And the doctor, perplexed, offers drugs to help him out.  He should be helping him “in”.  Hold on:  I assume that it is a trained primal therapist who knows the danger signs.

Meanwhile the depressives often get into serious drugs to keep the imprint at bay.   It is always there and raging down below.  Of course the depressive is a downer because not exerting himself was life saving.  It is not that the depressive feels hopeless:  it is that depression is hopelessness.   That is why he deals with all of the time.

You mean to get rid of something you have to go into it again?   That makes no sense; except it makes all the sense because the feeling was far too much to be accepted and integrated when it happened. It could have led to death.   And what is that memory?  A mother drinking or smoking; unavoidable and inescapable for the baby.  Or anesthetics at birth, which almost completely shut down the baby’s whole system and his breathing included.  A hundred thirty pound mother allowing drugs into a 5-pound infant.  What may be perfect for her is almost lethal for a young body.  That is why as an adult patient the pain can only be felt a small bit at a time until it is totally integrated.  The defense system is now mature enough to titrate the input and keep it manageable.
A mother taking even mild tranquilizers can produce the same effect.  I guess it all boils down to recognizing the imprint and its enduring and painful content.  It is life endangering for two reasons; the pain will eventually lead to serious afflictions such as heart attacks.  Or, it will lead to suicide attempts in an effort to stop the agony.  Choose your weapons: feel it or ??

Primo Levi

Yesterday was December 7, the anniversary of the start of WWII.    And now I have good friends who are German scientists. Before they might have designed bombs to kill Americans; now they are working on the cure for cancer.  My how life gets changed. And how enemies have changed, but watch out because we can turn anyone into an enemy; whether blacks or muslims or foreigners.   We just need a little encouragement.    And it will take hold if we live in our brain and do not have much of ourselves and are not based in our feelings.

Primo Levi the great Italian writer who was in a concentration camp for a long time wrote: “to create and maintain a war you first need to demonize the other side; make them “the  enemy”  the attackers, etc, so that they are bereft of any humanity”.  Then we can do inhuman acts to them and not feel anything.   That is the basic capacity of humans.  Not only to humans but animals and babies too where so many doctors previously felt that they never felt pain.
The first job of war is to dehumanize the “enemy”.  It is called “brainwashing” for good reason.  We have extracted the brain and left the body behind that might together with is feelings, indicate to us the truth.  And we see wild rejoicing in the ”booga booga” therapies because they imagine that they have been liberated just like those who have “mastered” their breathing in mindfulness, which I call “mindlessness”.  In France this is called “nonmbrilisme”*.  We no longer live in a social world; we inhabit a solipsistic one where only we exist. Ayayay.  Then we are satisfied to have access only to our thoughts and not to our feelings.   We continue what our unfeeling parents believed; that feelings are an anathema to be discouraged and disparaged.   That is how Hitler convinced the Germans that the Jews had to be destroyed.  And how we convince patients that feelings have to be either destroyed or ignored.  They become the enemy.  We don’t have to say it; we just ignore it and that sends the message; feelings do not count.

We need to extract their humanity out of them; then we are not hurting humans.  And it is very true of extracting our own humanity out of ourselves so that we can inflict pain on others with impunity; with not a drop of feeling.   As we grow up and undergo lack of love we hurt, but soon cover it over with repression; we cease to feel…..for others and above all, for ourselves.  We lack humanness.   If that could be stopped or averted we would not have a population that could hurt others, or go to hunt and kill animals and call it “sport.”  Above all, one could feel the needs of children and fulfill them.  What a world that would be.

So how do we dehumanize?  Oh wait.  I know.  We call people depressives or obsessives and now we treat a cerebral category, not a person.   Or we call our child “son” or “boy”?

These are tricks of the mind and from this we can see how a parent can inflict damage.  He is “son” or “daughter” and they are treated as such:  theirs not to question why.   Theirs but to do or die.   They are there to take orders because they are “my child.”  “Should we let children cry it out?”   We only ask that because children are no longer people. Should we cry it out?  Of course.  We ask that if we never have and were forbidden to.  And worse, we stop our children from expressing any feeling strongly.  We dehumanize.

It is the neocortex that can dehumanize ourselves and we then enter a therapy that is basically inhuman…..the property of a brain that thinks but does not feel.  And where do we get well?  In our head; the body is left out of the equation.  We become dehumanized and “think” we are so much better when all we have done is shift around the thinking cortex to adjust to our unconscious pain.  The feelings remain but are deeply hidden, and so is our humanity.

*Literally “navel-gazing”

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 15/20)

The Brain’s Hemispheres

A natural cure must coincide with our knowledge of the way the brain is structured. First, we know that the brain has two sides, one more feeling and the other (left side) more thinking, grosso modo. Also, we know that the right side develops earlier than the left and absorbs so much early trauma long before we can understand it and give it a name. We are driven by those right-side imprints so that by the time we are born we are allergic, nervous, restless, colicky and choleric (bad tempered), and so on. So we are taken to the doctor who is mystified. We do know that it is the right brain that is active when we retrieve old memories and when we relive those memories, and it is only through that brain that we can get to those memories, very early ones, that were registered on the right. Otherwise, no matter how much we dig down, when we leave those memories intact,they will continue to drive us.(19) But eventually we will need to dig down with the help of the deep-right, orbito-frontal brain which functions as a dredge to lift up instinct/feeling memories to the fore. And we don’t even have to do it; the brain itself, when given the chance, will perform its proper function. And if we don’t force it, the brain will find the right time to do it, and not process it prematurely. We need to take great care about dredging up traumas too early. We can get flooding and being overwhelmed, rather than connected.

To retrieve the memory we need to “live” on the level of its existence for a time, use the right brain to lift it toward conscious/awareness, and bit by small bit integrate parts of the memory into the brain and the entire system. Thus, we need to de-methylate the memory. Until we do that there can be no profound change in anyone despite all claims to the contrary. Not meditation, not cognitive therapy, not mindfulness or hundreds of other nonsense approaches that ignore neurobiology. No one can make real change when two-thirds of our brains are unacknowledged. We have the tail and the feet but we still don’t know what it is. How can we treat it?

(19)  See all of Wilder Penfield.

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 14/20)

Another Look at Reliving

We need to make sure that reliving is important in the therapy for all kinds of neuroses. Neurosis means that there is an early traumatic input that alters function and behavior; not one or the other but both. That is, there is pain and denial of need that overwhelms normal functioning and causes a diversion. We are no longer normal; things go wrong neurologically, biochemically and behaviorally. To cure we need to normalize the whole system, not just behavior or biochemistry. Otherwise we are condemned to treating behavior and physiology as two distinct problems when they are inextricably related.

That in a tiny nutshell is the story of neurosis. We are no longer ourselves; we are re-routed in function. To get back to ourselves we have to re-establish function in every aspect. Not just behavior. And when we are diverted and rerouted, there are marks that leave their traces; epigenetic marks. Being loved minimizes the marks on the genes. Being unloved increases them. For example, if we are loved and hugged and touched a lot there are changes in the brain where methylation patterns are changed so that we respond normally to stress. When there is trauma, the part of the brain that controls the stress response is tagged by methyl groups and produces alterations in how genes are expressed or repressed; shut down or opened up. And this changes us in profound ways. Our personality becomes different; we can be more open or closed off; more depressed or anxious depending on what genes do what.

So now we have those marks, methylation, which foretells of a life to come and how it will be lived. How do we change all that? We need to revisit those early experiences, those without words, go back and redo them. Change history and its chemical traces. We need to undo the damage and that means slowly demethylizing, in my model. One experience at a time; or one experience over many times. We need to find how the system was detoured and put it back on track, literally. This happened because pain installed itself and forced change. And this can be measured; the amount of methylation can be observed and changed. That is meaningful progress. It informs us about altering neuroses. In a way, the levels of methylation can be a marker for having been loved early on, or not having been loved. We could tell more than the statements by the person who claims he was loved in his childhood if he were indeed not loved. How much denial is there? We see how “under-funded” the notion of cognitive therapy is when it deals mostly with words and ideas; something that did not exist during the times of key imprints.

Neurochemistry may be a more reliable indicator because it has no reason to lie, or rather, no way to lie. It can be a marker for post-traumatic stress or how much repression exists in ADD, or how much pain/repression there is in Alzheimer’s disease. We already have some information in this regard because autopsies on depressive/suicides found them to have been heavily methylated in the hippocampal (feeling=memory) area. The more abuse as a child in these cases the more methylation is produced. When we add this to our future research on telomeres and cortisol we will begin to have precise measures of the pain in us. And we will know when a drug is too dangerous for us, particularly the drugs like marijuana that tend to open us to ourselves, to our feelings and pain. Finally we will have a marker for the efficacy of certain psychotherapies. Does the therapy undo the past? Does it help relieve repression and therefore depression? Is there great first line pain in anxiety states? I already can answer that in the affirmative, having treated person after person with anxiety.

The best way to reverse the imprint is through the slow, methodical process of therapy where the least pains can be integrated first, finally descending to the great early traumas and then measuring the results. In other words, we need to trust nature and all its processes; chemical reversal alone, without regard to total neuro-biologic state is far too general and non-specific to each trauma. It is a shotgun when we need a scoped rifle. It seems to me the natural way provides far less possibility for collateral damage to the system. We need nature as a reference. It is when we leave nature behind that we need the reference of statistics; never as good as nature itself.

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 13/20)

The Miracle of Memory

I was looking around at some people I know and at least one third of them had the malady of needing to move constantly: organizing trips, making reasons to go here and there, and in general, keeping on the move. Does all that constant going and coming lead to strokes and heart attacks? I do think so. Why? Because below all that movement is a giant, silent scream, born of ferocious suffering, suffocation and being stuck; first in the womb with a mother who smokes and takes drugs (unavoidable for the baby), and followed by a birth process where again he is stuck and cannot get out easily. Hence now the need to keep moving. If I tell the average person this, they think I am delusional. But I assure you, I am not.

I have seen thousands of patients relive all kinds of traumas: one key one that is widespread is being trapped in the womb, suffocating and unable to get out. Trapped, suffocating, unable to move; those are the key feelings involved. They could not scream then and they cannot scream now, but once they as adults are in the feeling they can first grunt and try to move and feel then, later, at birth... scream. It is not the screaming that is liberating. It is the reliving of the true feeling – being stuck – and then the scream to express the agony of all that. Now we can actually observe the pain. Reliving changes the imprint, reduces it and begins the resolution process – demethylation. Screaming alone is not what we are after; it is the total agony of the reliving, and then the reaction – screaming. Reactions alone cannot do it. And that is what is wrong with all those early scream clubs in universities that began with the publication of the Primal Scream. Yes, screaming relieves the pressure involved in the reaction but does nothing to the imprint. Let us never believe that relieving is reliving. One is amelioration; the other, cure.

In reliving birth, we vividly see the tremendous pressure in the build-up after the traumatic event early on; not only the birth trauma but also many other traumas where the mother is taking drugs or smoking and drinking and the fetus/baby cannot escape. He can turn his head away as if to escape but, alas, he is trapped. And that feeling impressed into a vulnerable body remains there as an engraved memory and will drive her behavior thereafter: “I have to move. I have to get out of here.” That is the leitmotif of his or her life. And it never, ever leaves! The person is literally trapped in the memory, a trap that has chemicals stronger than steel to bind them forever. It is a chemical conspiracy to make sure we never, ever feel liberated. Even though the inner feeling is feeling bound, they cannot feel it. They are too busy trying to get unbound, acting out trying to get liberated.

I find it astounding that the real feeling is not felt immediately when it occurs; alas, it is too painful for the moment when an infant’s whole being is so vulnerable. The price we pay is never knowing our feelings or where they come from. Can you imagine someone saying to himself, “Wow, I am bound by a feeling in the womb!” In that womb, there are obviously no words or concepts or scenes. Only a physical feeling – no air, strangling, feeling crushed and suffocating. So how can there be a memory? There is no memory as we think of remembering, but the body remembers exactly. It remembers feeling trapped and suffocating because in the Primal that is what comes up and what we see. And in everyday life we lug those feelings around as a weight, as if carrying a ten-pound steel bar around constantly. We are carrying around those devilish chemicals that trap us.

And what changes those chemicals? If screaming won’t do it, what will? How about dampening drugs, such as SSRI’s, the serotonin enhancers? They shush the scream but never, never change the memory, the imprint. The memory is not designed to be changed. It remains in order to be experienced and liberated. That is the miracle of memory. We have the mechanism for our own liberation inside of us, if we only knew it. And how about using drugs to slow us down so we don’t move so much? That just helps the build-up of pressure. It exacerbates the problem and aggravates the need to move. And if we cannot act-out enough then the original Primal imprint will burrow in and seriously damage key body and brain cells. The genes may be transformed into oncogenes, and serious disease gets its start.

So when we see the constant motion we understand, but we never see the agony. Why no agony? Because it is busy being acted-out to relieve the agony before it is fully felt. So we cannot possibly see it, and the person in motion cannot feel it. That is the idea: that it disappear before it is evident. Now we know why psychotherapy is at such a loss. And now we know what could be behind high blood pressure and migraines. I had one patient who was sexually never satisfied. When she could not have sex her blood pressure rose to dangerous heights. Drugs could not help her. What could? Discharging the pressure permanently by feeling the need – a Primal. That helped and... cured. Relieving the pressure is not what cured; it was reliving the feelings that created the pressure. There is no comprehension in relieving; lots of comprehension in reliving. And this is the crucial point: There are no insights following relieving, yet many insights following reliving. It is one among many ways we suss out true feelings.

Why cure? Because it dealt with the origin of it all – the original methylation and imprint. Primals change the chemical composition – less methylation, decreased serotonin – and diminish the memory so that we can really change our behavior and our proclivity toward disease. How on earth can we understand anorexia without knowing about the link between research on early trauma and later eating disorders? The research states that it is largely due to key epigenetic changes that take place very early in our lives that alter fetal programming and the evolution of the fetus/baby. So now we see why starvation or reduced calories in the womb can lead to later over-eating. He is eating for now and eating out of memory. It is no different from the desperate need for warmth and love after a birth trauma where the child was abandoned right away by a sick birth mother. He entered a cold world with no succor; no kisses or hugs. That desperate need begins here and is stamped in. Early deprivation means overcoming it by doubling the efforts to be loved. Depending on other factors, once repression and gating sets in, there is the shutting out of any love due to a defense system that won’t allow it in because it reawakens old pain.

Let us not forget the critical sensory window where those events are engraved for a lifetime. That is where we therapists must go, to that window where trauma was impressed into the brain and the whole system. We must look into it seriously. If we do not, then we cannot understand anxiety states in our patients or ADD, which detours focus and concentration. It is not here-and-now; it is there-and-then that must be our focus because there-and-then determines here-and-now, to a great extent. If we exclude there-and-then we would never know that my patient’s need for sex took root in a first-line imprint, an early trauma, which was so strong on the physical level but had no words, nor screams. Beware the ides of here-and-now. The brainstem, almost fully developed at the time, absorbed all that trauma and is therefore heavily methylated. We never will see that until we bring patients down to that level; yet that could take months and then we need to know what to look for. That is why it took me decades to figure it out. It is not evident.

So if people are in deep pain, why aren’t they all walking down the street screaming? Because it’s not accepted social behavior and could lead to arrest or commitment to a mental hospital. But what they can do is scream out the agony via a migraine or heart constriction (angina). And we rush in to treat the heart condition or migraine or high blood pressure. That is where it is obvious but that is not where the problem lies. It lies hidden in the memory embedded in the lungs and surroundings, in the arching back and the constant movement. We see what we see – the obvious – and miss what we cannot see. It would be ideal to be searching for what we cannot see: a lens that magnifies Primal Pain. Alas, not likely.

My War Years

This is a dialogue about my war years:

Art: There was a guy called Larry Allred and the dangerous part of war was what I didn't realize until the last week, was he and I were on a troop ship with 500 troops going to war and going to Europe and  German submarines were everywhere shooting down and torpedoing our boats, but he and I never talked about it, we never even were afraid. And he was a tough guy, a very tough guy. So I got off the ship, I went to a commando center, in the south of France, and he became the Admiral's driver, in London. So I went to visit him and while I was there, I, it was just before and after the blitz, there were bombs everywhere and rubble everywhere. Anyway, he and I and his girlfriend slept together; we didn't make anything of it, it was just like, this was war and we were all just pals, you know.  It was a very different atmosphere. So I lost touch with him for a long time and one day, twenty years later I called, and I said, how are you doing Larry Alread? And I said, Larry, how are you doing? He said, Fine, da da da, and I said listen, I've got to go back to work now, but I'll leave you my number and you can call me. He said, I can't. I said, Why can't you? He's a tough guy now don't forget. He says, I'm blind. And instead of saying to him, why are you blind, was it the war, what happened? I just hung up I was so shocked.  And then I read his obit, two days ago, and that he had Alzheimer's, he died of Alzheimer's, but it didn't say he was blind and I don't even know if he came out of it or what. But he was my war pal, and we were, in all the battles that I was in, the worst was being chased by German submarines because they were after us night and day and we had warning signals, they had destroyers around us at all times, circling us, going this way while we were going that way, and you know, it was harrowing because they had blown up a million troop ships, you know, they were circling cause we were the guys that were going to fight them, so, and eventually I got ready to fight them with the Rhine crossing, we crossed the Rhine and  went into Germany to fight em, anyway, that's another story. So I lost Larry, and I never followed up, and a lifetime passed, and I never knew what happened to him or why, I mean, except that he died of Alzheimer's and then I don't know what happened in the war, we lived in, he lived in, he had an office at a very luxurious hotel in London because he was the Admiral's driver. But then we had a little place just outside of London, I forgot the name of it, but I used to live there, I forgot the name of it, and he had a gorgeous girlfriend, and they had sex, while I was sleeping, but nothing was ever made of anything, there was no morality, no moral stuff, it was just life is what it was.

David: You were trying to get through the war.

Art: Yeah, that was just my life with Larry, and here he's dead, most of my guys on my ship are dead and I'm still here, but life is short, man, and that's the sum total.

Art: Now Dwight Eisenhower, he used to say, he wasn't very bright, but about these things he was very bright, and he said you can never recapture the atmosphere of war, never recapture the atmosphere of war.  And it's so true because everything during the war was so different, so different, and everything had an urgency about it, you know, and I mean, I was in many many battles, and I never even knew I was going to die, I mean, until a guy who came aboard my ship to driver food and chocolate. , I was in the Aleutians where it was like 50 below, and we were chased by Japanese submarines, again would you believe, this time Japanese not German, and they would wait, we had iron gates on the battleship, we had iron gates in front of us so that Japanese submarines could not get at us. And then we had to wait for our dash time, so we could get out of there and try and come back to Japanese torpedoes and we had destroyers to help us pave the way and get us out of there, and then we chased the Japanese fleet all the way back to Japan. But before we did that we had two battles, one in Kiska and one in Attu, and I remember the one in Attu, the fog was so thick you could maybe see three or four inches before your nose but that was it. But we'd hear a bang and they were setting off canons, and then we'd hear a splash, but we never knew where it was coming from or where it was going. So the terror of waiting for each of their big bombs, you know, and not knowing where they were going, was very very disconcerting, to say the least. And then we got up there and they forgot to send us foul weather here, would you believe, so we're 50 below zero, I'm wearing towels to keep myself warm. And then what happened after that? We had two sea battles, oh we chased  the Japanese fleet and that night we came back and went straight down to the Pacific for a bunch of other battles we had. The worst one was Tarawa. That was a very famous one, we were the first ship in, and they wiped out a whole platoon of US soldiers because they were hiding behind certain barriers that we couldn't see, and then they opened up on the soldiers and hundreds of em died, and they were floating in the water, and stuff, you know, it was just terrible. But I wasn't old enough, I wasn't human enough, to understand where it all ends.

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 12/20)

On the Breakdown of Our Adaptive Capacity

Some time ago I wrote about how it is the unrelenting input of pain that taxes our ability to adjust and adapt, causing a breakdown of this capacity. The result is a scrambling of our brain cells and a collapse of our ability to cope. It can lead to early psychosis or mental insufficiency. What does this mean?

For the answer, we must look not only to our clinical experience but also to the latest in brain science. In a recent study, entitled “Epigenetic changes in the developing brain: Effects on behavior,” researchers from Rockefeller University in New York and the University of Cambridge in England looked at how methylation works to stamp in painful memory and imprint it (Keverne, Pfaff & Tabansky, 2015). When you block methylation you prevent the nerve cells from adapting to changes in their environment. It becomes maladaptive. New learning cannot take place without successful epigenetic programming. And this makes me wonder about the insidious effects of this process when so many orphan children cannot learn well, suffer from dyslexia and are slow to form sentences. When there is day-in day-out neglect, indifference and lack of love, deep damage occurs and the ability to adapt falters.

The researchers noted that there are adverse effects on the feeling/hippocampus areas. In short, chronic unrelenting pain overtaxes the native ability to adjust, and we see the results. On the feeling level the person claims, it is all too much. He gives up easily and cannot try hard to succeed. The schizophrenic does not explain it verbally but he lives it. He needs help to navigate his daily life. He cannot adapt to new circumstances. This is the extreme breakdown of adaptation. This is because the adaptation mechanisms help us evolve and deal with different circumstances. They are crucial for our evolution. We can take minor setbacks, such as being left alone for a day or two, but being isolated for long periods damages our ability to adapt.
If we look for confirmation of all this in hard science, it is there. Researchers from The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston discuss cancer in terms of methylation. Their surprising findings are described in an article entitled “Disorder in gene-control system is a defining characteristic of cancer,” posted on the website of the Dana-Farber teaching and research center affiliated with Harvard Medical School(18). Their conclusion: “The behavior of a cancer cell is dictated not only by genetics – by the particular set of mutated genes within it – but also by epigenetics, the system for controlling the expression of genes,” states Catherine Wu, M.D., a lead author of the study.

Scientists know that cancerous tumors are made up of a variety of genetic mutations within many different subgroups of cells. In this study, Wu explained, researchers wanted to find out if cancer’s inherent genetic diversity was matched by a corresponding epigenetic diversity. At first, the scientists expected to find a systematic match between the genetic and epigenetic changes; in other words, they thought the genetic diversity in the tumor would be mirrored in the range of methylation patterns. Instead, researchers were surprised to find methylation patterns with a great deal of random disarray. “
In fact, disorderly methylation pervades the entire tumor," stated Alexander Meissner of the Broad Institute who joined the research team.

The findings, published online in the journal Cancer Cell, revealed that this disarray in methylation is one of the defining characteristics of cancer (Landau et al., 2014). And counter-intuitively, rather than presenting a problem for the disease, researchers theorize that the random disruption of methylation might help tumors survive and even thrive by increasing their ability to adapt to changing circumstances. "Cancer survives through some wildly inventive ways,” Wu concludes. “Methylation disorder is one of the ways it creates the conditions that enable it to adapt."

What I am positing is that Primal imprints are heavily responsible for this epigenetic tumult and disarray, since the entire adaptation process has broken down. Under normal conditions, as I have noted, methylation is part of the natural order of things; it is a key adaptive mechanism. And what I believe is that, in some ways, it gets scrambled and can no longer do its job. It has lost its cohesion. Further, I think the origins of so many catastrophic diseases arise from this disorganization, which is why it is so difficult to treat. The Boston researchers found, for example, that certain leukemia patients had shorter remissions if their tumor tissue showed signs of highly disorganized methylation, which actually benefits the tumors by rendering them less vulnerable to anti- cancer drugs. In other words, the random derangement of the methylation process can make the disease harder to treat.

One final note on this important research. The researcher from the Broad Institute, which is associated with both Harvard University and MIT, helped develop the technique to measure this deregulation, using a process known as bisulfite sequencing to track the presence or absence of methyl groups at specific rungs on the DNA ladder. He and his colleagues also devised a simple measure they call, PDR (Percent Discordant Reads), to quantify deranged methylation. I consider this a major step in epigenetic research, which suggests that soon we may be able to quantify the degree of physical and emotional damage to a human being, and ultimately, the degree of resolution we achieve in a feeling therapy. We are rapidly getting the tools to achieve our aims.

In my opinion, the dangerous time for unceasing pain that threatens the adaptation process is in the womb during gestation. Here, the chronic smoking, drinking or pill-taking of the mother, or her continuous depression or anxiety states, become inescapable from the fetus and he suffers. It is ultimately imprinted and endures throughout life. It is as if he lived in a straight jacket for nine, agonizing months and could find no way to stop the input. He goes to a doctor and the doctor asks, “Any stress lately?” Yes, there is stress, but decades before anyone, including the patient, can even remember it. So he shakes his head and says, “Everything has been OK for some time now.” Those imprints are shouting in the only way they can, through the physical system – migraines, asthma, anxiety, depression, and on and on. He just cannot get comfortable in his skin, because just below that skin is a mountain of hurt and agitation that won’t let him relax. Why agitation? Because the pain is sending a message to awareness that there is serious trouble down below. Alas, there is no one to listen. And even if they could, they could not translate that message because – and this is all-important– it is not in English. It is in a wholly different brain language where words do not exist. We have to travel with the patient to the inner depths and see for ourselves. And there it is, the agony is right before our eyes: The suffocation, the shortness of breath, the misery on the face. All finally observable signs that answer the question, “What is wrong with me?"

Epigenetic science can help explain all this. Methylation is the agent for repression, which in turn prevents the person from putting away the pain and moving on. Certain switches turn on and off to accommodate the painful intrusion; when it gets to a certain level there is a breakdown of its efforts and “normal” adaptation is no longer possible. The result: abnormality in physical development and psychological adjustment. The person can no longer be neurotically normal. There is now serious pathology which endures. The imprint literally lasts a lifetime with the person all the while trying to get normal, in and out of mental hospitals, seeing this doctor or that psychiatrist, and all to no avail. They will not respond to current treatment efforts because that is not where the damage lies. It is locked up with the epigenetic switches that were overwhelmed early on and no longer function properly. They almost don’t know what to turn on or off. They are as helpless as the patient because they are far out of reach of understanding. Alas, he is condemned.

But there is a way out. If he can travel back in time with us toward the buried vestiges of the imprinted pain and connect with the Primal feeling we can commute the sentence. Because then the epigenetic switches can be reversed and a salubrious state can be achieved. What does this mean? That soon, we will be able to go back down the feeling chain from current to past imprints, observe how deep the pain is by its methyl traces and know where to go for the least dangerous pains first. That feeling those painful buried feelings in sequential order from current to remote past so as to finally resettle the methylation process; that is, to normalize the biochemistry and allow the genetic switches to normalize so that they can do their job of adaptation.


18 "Disorder in Gene-control System Is a Defining Characteristic of Cancer, Study Finds." Dana-Farber Cancer Institute | Boston, MA. December 8, 2014. http://www.dana-farber.org/Newsroom/News-Releases/Disorder-in- gene-control-system-is-a-defining-characteristic-of-cancer-study-finds.aspx.

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 11/20)

And how is this possible? Luckily, each new harmful experience that remains un-integrated at lower levels is later re-represented in a higher level of the nervous system, where it is coded as the outsider or enemy. Lower level imprints send references higher up in the nervous system. These higher-level memories are wired together with their origins down below. They form a neural circuit, a pathway. And when circuits are wired together they tend to fire together; hence resonance. When a trauma exists later on, it may resonate with earlier imprints and set off the whole memory intact. It is here that there may be inordinate responses to the most banal of events. We are winding down again to the originating sources, the base of the feeling. That is how we relive purely physiologic brainstem responses without ever acknowledging them. It is how we get to preverbal events automatically. When the Primal imprint sends its message higher up, feelings are added to the impulse, and then later ideas and comprehension are included. Together these form a complete feeling. All are necessary, eventually, in reliving. That is how something in the present, a rejection, can set off such catastrophic feelings. It is an organic process and needs to happen in a precise order, with the original feelings preserved. It may be that specific brain frequencies tie these events together. Figuratively, what is going on is much like the stone thrown into the pond: a ripple effect in the way the neurons connect to each other in mirrored progression. When there are certain kinds of triggers, the brain conjures up its related history, intact, kindling like-minded feelings and their physiology together.

Recent research, both with Primal patients and in neuroscience labs, is showing that being unconscious of pain is a survival mechanism, a protection against overwhelming input. But the imprinted memory stays and continues to do its damage over a lifetime. In short, it is not inert. It has a force that threatens our ability to adapt, as I explain in detail shortly. The deeper we go down in the brain the more powerful the force of memory. Hence the more unconscious it has to be... for protection. When the trauma is too great or too prolonged, the ability to adapt becomes more feeble and less flexible. This is especially true of long-term neglect and abuse. Here the memories seem to dig in and solidify, impervious to change. And as conscious/awareness lessens, the harm begins, both mental and physical. We are then partially unconscious and are unaware of the damage. Fear-memories are joined by multiple pathways and then are engraved.

What the new research shows is what I’ve been saying all along: that one needs to go back to the mood when the memory was imprinted. But doing so artificially can make matters worse. Far better to arrive there slowly on an evolutionary time-scale. In their studies with mice, the Northwestern researchers made an important observation which applies to our human patients: It is difficult for therapists to access these memories because the patients themselves cannot remember the traumatic experiences that are the root cause of their symptoms. Which is exactly why we need to go slowly down the chain of pain, and let the patient decide how fast he can go. The team noted that the brain functions in different states like a radio, switching from AM to FM. “It’s as if the brain is normally tuned to FM stations to access memories, but needs to be tuned to AM stations to access subconscious memories,” stated the lead investigator, Dr. Jelena Radulovic, Dunbar Professor in Bipolar Disease at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.(17) In short, certain kinds of severe memories need to be tuned properly to receive painful messages. I would put it differently, but we agree that traumatic memories are stored in the brain, where they remain and cause damage.

What the research team and I agree on is that we need to turn on the exact frequency of the feeling. In other words, we need to go back in time to the imprinted pain, and no byways allowed. We cannot skirt around the feeling. The safeguard here is that we allow the patient to go back there in a precise manner so that any detours, the byways of feeling, are avoided. And in our own research we found that there were specific frequencies that align with feelings. They were never fast, which meant being over the Primal Zone. We watched as we slowed the frequency (with lights) when feelings began to intrude. They insist, as do I, that the brain needs to go back to the proper frequency and target a specific feeling. My observation now for almost fifty years is that the natural evolutionary way is the proper path to follow. Nature is the sine qua non.

(17) Paul, M. (2015, August 18). News. Retrieved from http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2015/08/traumatic-memories-hide-retrieve-them.html

Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 10/20)

How Traumas Get Embedded

A recent report from Northwestern University notes that some traumatic memories, such as chronic child abuse, are so painful that they get buried deep in the brain and become difficult to access (Jovasevic et al., 2015). Those memories were created in a certain mood/feeling or state of arousal and “can best be retrieved when the brain is back in that state.” This new brain research provides support for my concept of resonance, which posits that specific feelings on all three levels are inter-connected via related frequencies. In Primal Therapy, as the patient goes back in time in his sessions, he will connect with feelings stored deeper in the brain which resonate with the same mood, as one level of the memory is linked to lower levels. The mood or feeling belongs to a hierarchy of imprints/feelings, where each level gives way to deeper more remote levels, all related in tone and emotional meaning. The links are not only due to similar feelings but reflect historical processes; each link carries us further back in our ontology until we surpass memory as we think of it. We go back in archaic times as well, where there are no words or even feelings, just instincts. For that reason, when a patient uses words while appearing to relive such archaic events, we know it is abreaction, a false memory. When a patient is back in an accent brain, there are no words in the reliving because no words exist at that level. Let me be clear: the reliving is literal, as the patient is submerged in history and lives for a time on that lower level only.

In the Northwestern experiment, scientists infused the hippocampus of mice with gaboxadol, a drug that stimulates extra-synaptic GABA receptors. Researchers describe as getting the subjects “a little inebriated.” Then the mice were put in a box and given a brief, mild electric shock. When the mice were returned to the same box the next day, they showed no signs of fear and moved about freely, leading researchers to conclude they didn’t remember the shock from the day before. However, when the mice were given the same drug before going back to the box, they froze, as if fearfully anticipating another shock.

Researchers concluded that the drug changed the way the memory was originally encoded, so the mice remembered the stressful experience of the shock only when they were returned to the same brain state created by the drug. In other words, they believe that the brain, when drugged, “used completely different molecular pathways and neuronal circuits to store the memory.” And then the authors make this Primal statement: “The best way to access these memories is to return the brain to the same state.” Seems like a quote from my work, but it is no more than arriving at the same reality by different methods. The question is, how do we get the patient back in that state?

I repeat, the means of getting to those old memories needs to follow evolution; that is devolution or evolution-in-reverse. We need to begin at the last or latest link of memory and then use resonance to travel back in time to where key imprints lie. We don’t decide this; it is done by the patient who is often upset by something in the present, and once locked-in will slide effortlessly back in history following the feeling links. His devolution is not random; it is guided ineluctably by resonance.

So is Primal Therapy nothing more than a time machine, a means to revisit our history, to turn back the clock to previously neutral, non-neurotic states? It may sound far-fetched, but more and more evidence suggests it’s true. Scientists are now learning how to wind back the developmental clock on the microscopic level — taking a current skin cell, for example, and treating it so that it returns to a previously neutral, uncommitted state, an embryonic state. Once that is done, the cell can be reprogrammed to become another kind of cell. During this critical window certain needs must be fulfilled and, if they are not, cells may become imprinted in adverse ways.

Here’s another way to put it: once a mark is made on the cell we are psychologically and physiologically affected for life, until, and only until, the inciting event is revisited and relived. And it can be relived unconsciously, through the process of resonance. That is, a trauma that took place in-utero can be re-experienced without a specific awareness of it, by virtue of being part of the chain of pain, once we are locked into the memory circuit. In Primal Therapy, when we explore these ramified events and begin to relive them, we are connecting three levels of consciousness – the present, our past childhood and our infancy/gestation – by descending through three levels of brain development.

On the Beliefs that Kill

Yes, beliefs do kill. They create a zeitgeist for murder.  If there were no zeitgeist for murder in the Middle East it may well be that the murder rate would be far less.  How else to explain how 150 militants decide together to penetrate a children’s school and slaughter over 100 innocent children?  What was in their minds but pure unadulterated murder.   What were they thinking?  They weren’t.   What were they feeling?  Killing, mayhem, massacre.  Why?  Because those children were offspring of military people.  And, as the killers said, “They grow up to be adults who kill us.” This is exactly what the Nazis said when they killed children.  They kill now for possible crimes twenty years hence.

First the zeitgeist that it is OK to kill women who do not wear veils, cartoonists who do not defer to Allah, those who do not dress according to their standards, and on and on.  The point is to kill; to release all that hate.  And where does that hate come from?  Now the facile answer; lack of love.  No loved child could possibly travel miles to slaughter young children.  Why?  Because when you are loved you feel with and for others.  When you are shut down and your feelings are revenge, it permeates all thinking as deeper brain levels overtake higher levels and replace any semblance of humanity.    What is the revenge about?  Ostensibly for blasphemy against Allah.  In reality for a total lack of love and an atmosphere of death for the infidels.  That is why civilized societies all over the world are eschewing the death penalty.   They do not want to lose their humanity.

As we see from Al Queda and ISIS we can always find reasons to kill.  But to think about what we are doing and to reject murder because it is murder is the step toward humanness.

I am not an expert on the Middle East, nor their politics or religions but I have treated killers, not mass killers, but those filled with rage and I know where it comes from and how it gets its start.  For mass killing we need the words of social psychologists who specialize in such matters. But I have experience with individual development into murder and can write on that.

But in my practice I have seen patients rip up pillows and smash the walls until there are deep holes in them.  I have seen pure fury.  How could that be?   I let it happen under controlled circumstances.  And for almost 50 years of our therapy I have never seen an untoward incident.  On the contrary, expressing rage releases that urge and softens our patients.  But to let it happen means going against the whole background of psychiatry and psychology:  we were warned in our studies about letting feelings get out of control.  And so we suppressed them rather than do what is logical; which is to let feelings out.

I see the progression of feelings daily in my work with patients.  First they come in mad at this and mad at that. Then get into deep feelings after weeks or months of therapy and are furious with their parents for their indifference and lack of feelings; and then the hard part—begging them for love.  It doesn’t matter that they cannot give it; it is their need for it that counts,  their need that removes the pain and becomes liberating, and above all, removes the fury. This is not a theory I concocted.   It is the progression of feelings in so many patients.  Lacking this primal context there can be pure rage;  a sensation that lives down in the brainstem that has no words and no feelings. As it comes up, and given the right context, those deep feelings can channel his rage against those who blaspheme Allah.  He now has a target far from the real source;  his lack of love.  And worse, that target is accepted by those around him.   They now have congealed feelings and a target.  They will kill, not for Allah, but for lack of love under the sobriquet of Allah.   Meanwhile, the killers in Paris shouted as they killed, “To avenge the Prophet Muhammad.”  Unless they had some word from Muhammad, who told them to do that?

But in the case of a mass zeitgeist there is a contagion effect, as the feeling gains acceptance and solidifies.   It becomes shameful not to kill those who are not respectful of a specific higher being.  All that rage lives on the deepest and most level of the brain. It becomes socially institutionalized psychosis.   There is a delusionary target; certainly no sane person can imagine that children are a menace and a danger.  And then the rage arises to prompt the killing.  I write “psychosis” advisedly, as it is a phantom enemy joined with murderous impulses with no higher level control.

Where is the sane zeitgeist?  The same place it was during the Holocaust when Marlene Dietrich’s sister could live across from a death camp.  That zeitgeist rationalizes and makes acceptable the killing of another human being.  Jews, infidels, it is all the same as long as they can release their pent-up rage.  Or if someone can offer a rationale for killing, as we do when we recommend the death penalty.   The first step in the zeitgeist is to dehumanize the ”enemy.”  It is easier to kill a subhuman than a feeling human; that is why we can hunt and kill animals, not understanding that their feeling base is as large as ours.   We don’t believe that they can feel.

This is all on the personal, individual level; how people can go crazy together and do horrendous things.  Are they thinking? No, they are feeling from deep down in the brain where the shark brain lies in wait. It doesn’t differentiate among targets so long as they look like food.  What are the sharks and the shark brain thinking?  They are not. They act on untrammeled instinct.

So,  as to make my point real, I wrote this at the same time as a group of terrorists in France attacked the offices of a magazine that makes fun of all the great religions and ideologies and killed 12 writers/cartoonists.  Their shouts were “Praise Allah.”   Their pal who also was radicalized in prison with them, went on another killing spree nearby and killed another four people.
How come he traveled to a Jewish delicatessen to kill?  Because in certain zeitgeists the Jews were already considered sub-human.  We need to be very careful about joining in on the maladaptive zeitgeist which overall makes it easier to discriminate and ultimately to kill.  That is the danger of even the most miniscule insult to any race or belief.  It adds to the background noise of hate.  And the hate accumulates til violence shows its ugly head.  The person; Jew, homosexual,
Arab,  are the targets to discharge the hate.  And where should that hate go if anywhere?  Toward their early life, parents who never loved and a family life filled chaos and violence.  That is what built the hate and need to release; rather, to find a target where they can release.  They killed those who answered back against idolatry; who refused to praise and serve a higher authority.  They killed those who would not share their beliefs.  Was it just beliefs?  No.  Beliefs without the urging of feelings never take on that violent aspect.


After the terrorists were killed by the police, 3 million Frenchmen took to the streets to protest.  The terrorists seemed to know they were on a death march and did not care. They did their job; releasing rage and rationalizing under the authority of Allah.  And above all,  they felt they belonged.  They shared the hate with others.  Let us not minimalize this since those followers of a leader in Waco, Texas  when faced with fleeing and escaping, went back into the building which was on fire.  They chose death instead of feeling there was nowhere for them.   If there is no close family, the need to belong is primordial.

I have seen it in treating Mexican gang members. They come here not knowing the language, the fathers are struggling to make a living, neglecting the kids and they join a gang to be able to talk to others, to feel that they belong and are wanted.  The price of entry is sometimes killing someone else; often someone from the block down the street.  These kids are family to each other; they need a family and someone who cares about them.  And they fabricate enemies; across the tracks, a different neighborhood.  It doesn’t matter as they need a target, someone they can blame and pin their woes on.  And they do find them.  It is a common enemy that provides cohesion for the group.    That enemy makes the gang or group closer and more bonded.  When there is no enemy they provide them;  manufacture an enemy who is the danger, even those who live 2 blocks away.   What do they have in common?   The enemy.   Take away the enemy and there is less cohesion.  In these situations you are not safe if you are different.


I have seen several articles on the French massacre and some claim they are not psychotic.   I am not sure what is psychotic if you go to kill a hundred children who have done nothing at all to harm anyone.   These are psychologists writing.  The claim of the terrorists is that they perceive they are victims of injustice.  Maybe true, but one does not slaughter someone who has nothing to do with that injustice.   OK, so they think that there has to be delusions for psychosis to exist.  Isn’t what those killers believed? Pure delusions?  That their God was insulted and that he is the last word for truth? That one has to kill if others disagree with their delusions?  That it is all done in the name of a God or deity.  And that the deity approves of this slaughter and actually insists on it:  the Fatwa.  So “God” does not ask them to love and honor others;  it wants them to be murdered.  Ayayay!  They do not celebrate life; they celebrate death and often ask to be killed.  They give up their life happily to be known as a “martyr.”  For that word they are willing to die.   Imagine, the most precious gift anyone of us have is life.  To throw that away for a word is indeed psychotic.

So who gets killed? Those who deviate from the zeitgeist.  And who makes the zeitgeist?  All of us. But first those who profit from it.   Capitalists who can make money if we acquiesce. Or those in power who are willing to kill us to remain in power.
In Cambodia they killed those who wore glasses because they thought it was that only the Vietnamese who wear glasses so they can read and have thoughts.  They were the danger.  In fascist societies, the college people are the danger because they might think.  Intellectuals often become the target, even those who read French; hence freedom fries, rather than French fries.

The powers who reign do not want us to think; they want us to believe, to be engaged in endless studies of the official scripts so as to be further inculcated and more easily led.  It looks like thinking but it actually replaces thought. The spread of ideation has cast a large intellectual net over us so that the powers simply twist and turn the ideation and we follow.  We continue to follow until it envelopes us and we do its bidding without any further reflection.   Their control is now internal; we just follow its dictates.   That is the ticket; impregnate ideas until they become part of us, and then we follow them without question.  It is a true principle in advertising: “ Buy this truck and you will be strong.”  It is not said, it is implied.    We fill in the blanks with our deprived needs.


         Let me explain. When we hurt early on — and that means in utero, in infancy and most importantly in early childhood— we have a defense system that hurries to contain the pain. For every major trauma there seems to be an equal and opposite defensive force to contain the pain. I call this defense system the gating system. Those familiar with my writing understand that defenses are abetted by biochemical means through which neurotransmitters are secreted by the brain into the gap between cells so that the message of pain cannot travel to high centers, enabling us to remain unconscious. We humans usually manage to hold down our most painful feelings by a neurologic system that was built for it, to keep our mental system functioning. It is in the first weeks of life in the womb that life-threatening events occur. The mother is depressed or anxious, takes drugs or drinks alcohol and is not careful with her diet. As her life goes on, there may be a compounding of pain for the developing infant due to her own parental neglect and indifference. Her gates do not function well and she goes on taking drugs to quell her pain. The chemicals that accompany these states spill into the placenta and affect the fetus.
      Sometimes life deals such harsh blows that the gates crack or weaken; the result is that there aren’t enough repressive chemicals such as serotonin in the synapse to keep repression going, and we have a carrying mother in turmoil. Deep in that turmoil lies rage which is sucked up into various targets, rarely parents.  But it can be Socialists, Unitarians, Vegetarians and so on.  Or the unions which we rally against.  Or Wall Street, as another target; choose your poison but the real poison is the deep-lying pain that drives so much of us.  That does not negate the reality of the target but it helps to explain the violent reaction; as those who wear glasses.

Of course, not every unloved child grows up to be a killer. Some lose love, go into despair and then find God. They have been saved, saved by the idea of God, unless we really think He comes down from out of wherever He is and literally lends a hand. But the reaching out for God represents the hope of being loved, albeit this time only in fantasy. Others may start to feel the pain and reach for the bottle. Still others may reach for the neck of the departing lover and strangle her. But what they all have in common, what makes the act-out obligatory, is the reawakening of early deprivation by a current situation. Amorous rejection is the trigger; parental rejection gives it power.

Think about this.  The terrorist feels he is loved once he does his terrible deed; life in reverse.   He does it all in the name of God and since many of us have different Gods the permutations are enormous.

When we follow evolution as I see in my patients there are deep feelings, sometimes overwhelming that force their way up in the idea/belief area of the brain (neo-cortex),  and the belief becomes as obdurate as the feeling itself.  We need to address not only the beliefs but the underlying force behind them.  And indeed, when we get patients to relive very deep feelings the beliefs seem to evaporate, especially the belief in the devil.   With ISIS or Al Queda the force pushing ideas is inordinate; we must not underestimate it.  Those ideas do not make one kill; it is the rage that drive them

One thing I fail to understand is that after the killing, the remaining journalist put out another massive issue, stating in effect, on the cover, all is forgiven.    I don’t get it.  Are the religious precepts so strong as to override rational feeling?  What bothers me is the majesty of it all; “when I forgive I am above all that.  I have the power to forgive those lesser beings.”  “I am the great forgiver.”

Have you noticed?  Terrorists always do their deeds for love.   Mohammad loves me…….and wants me to blow myself up for the cause. Still the need for love dominates.  The recipe is if I kill I will be loved. Still the same need, only taking a lethal turn.

When hundreds all believe the same thing there is danger.  It becomes unassailable.   The contagion factor gives it more power.  What is the answer?  Love.