Ken Rose on "Life Before Birth". Part 4/6

KR: Yeah… Would you talk a little bit about anxiety?

JL: Yes, Dr. Janov has really fascinating things to say about anxiety. To begin with that anxiety is not a normal feeling. He talks about how we would see signs of anxiety in somebody who maybe stays on the phone for a really long time, and talks and talks but doesn’t listen, you try to talk back to them and they’re not hearing you. Or you make a grocery list and give it to somebody who has extreme anxiety and they’ll go to the grocery store and sort of forget everything that was on the list. Basically the way he explains this is through an idea called “gating.” What he’s saying is that in the brain, if it develops in the way it should and things are healthy, there’s sort of like a hierarchy and there is the cortical areas, the sort of upper level brain is able to repress certain things or certain lower level pains from constantly shooting up, but for somebody with high anxiety the barriers between different brain levels are too defused, so that pain is constantly shooting up, and it’s causing us nightmares and it’s creating difficulty sleeping and it’s creating this need to constantly release this sort of hyper energy, through talking, through constant movement. Dr. Janov refers to this as “leaky gates,” in other words you don’t have any control for this anxiety that keeps bubbling up, and that becomes very difficult.

KR: It should be said that anxiety is naked terror, and it has everything to do with the threat of death for the fetus. The felt threat of death.

JL: Right, and again, when he talks about anxiety and when he talks about depression too, all of this goes back to things that are happening in the womb. If I could just for a second read a little bit from the anxiety chapter because I think it’s helpful to what we’re talking about. “As I’ve discussed, the deepest level of brain function, rooted in the brainstem, is what I call the “first-line.” The inability to concentrate comes from massive pain input surging upwards from this region. When input is not properly gated, it disrupts the normal functioning of the neocortex. Poor gating, as I’ve said, can derive from any number of emotional and physiologic disruptions that occur during pregnancy: a carrying mother who is terribly anxious; a mother who takes drugs; a mother who does not eat enough or properly; a mother who is miserable due to the strain and hardship of a difficult life.
All of these gestational effects then emerge later on, this sort of terror that’s imprinted in the fetal system emerges later in life, and what happens is, it could be something that’s somewhat innocuous; like having to wait a long time in a restaurant for a table, but somebody who is prone to anxiety will react inordinately to something like that because these early primal imprints are surging upwards, so it’s in a way accessing the lower level pain and causing exaggerated reactions to things that are maybe stressful but shouldn’t be caused for extreme panic.

KR: Right, and these pains are always surging toward consciousness, to be consciously connected and felt, and have the energy sequence of the trauma run off. Which is why crying or deep crying is so healing. It’s the last stage of a fully conscious connection to something that was not fully conscious, and the pain is felt and expressed and finished.

JL: Exactly. Even further confirmation for some of the views of Janov, that maybe weren’t widely accepted for a time, it’s new research now being done into memory and what a lot of scientist are seeing, a lot of different studies is that memory reactivates the same neuroimpulses that were initially firing off when the event happened. So a traumatic event when you remember it, the act of remembering it is actually creating a neuromirrior of what went on initially. In a lot of ways that is what Primal Therapy is attempting to do; is to go back to that place and reconnect, or as it’s sometimes refer to, reconsolidate the brain state so that real haling can take place.

KR: Right. To bring the pain through the repression.

JL: Exactly, and that repressive lid, which he talks about a number of times is really what’s blocking a lot of people from access and Dr. Janov would talk about lifting the repressive lid, to allow those feelings to be remembered organically. And he makes an important point, when he’s talking about memory he’s not talking about recall, he’s not talking about as you would remember say; a famous poem that you would recite for class. He’s talking about very organic memory that is felt biologically. So in Primal Therapy when a patient would enter the primal zone there will be changes to their vital signs, there will be very observable changes in biologic functioning.

KR: He means literally reliving the trauma at the point that we split away from it, at the point where there was too much pain to feel at the time. So we split away from the pain. (Laughs) It’s so brilliant.

JL: Yes, because it’s essentially a matter of survival. This goes back again to the evolutionary foundation of a lot of his ideas, isn’t that we’re reacting, or that patients who are showing some of these symptoms are reacting against nature. It’s that they’re actually acting in the interest of survival at the time; they weren’t getting enough oxygen to the brain for example. A great example he talks about a well birth weight baby and how the size of their head compared to the body is disproportionate. Or the brain needs oxygen to function properly, so in the interest of survival the body will actually slow its growth, so that more of the nutrients and oxygen flow can reach the brain. Of course, that shows up as distinct physiologic changes and then by the same token if a feeling becomes too painful to bare it’ll sort of shut down and it will never get integrated and that’s what has to be corrected to make things right.