Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 16/20)

(After a long pause, I will be publishing the remaining articles about Epigenetics and Primal Therapy over the next few days.)

How Early Is Too Early?

In the scientific community, the question has always been, “How early is too early?” And this is where epigenetics is relevant to our discussion. A group at Washington State University led by Matthew Amway found that gestational experience in animals that sways the genetic unfolding can show effects for three generations. They found that exposing pregnant adult rats with defective sperm could engender many diseases, including cancer, in adult animals. Females avoided mating with other rats that were also exposed during gestation. And this went on, not only for the life of the adult, but for the life of their offspring, as well. It seems that the system knows how to behave given certain biologic deficiencies, and it does so according to what is best for heredity, what gives us the best shot of succeeding in life. So when we cannot explain some trait in adults by heredity we may have to reach back several generations to find the answer we’re looking for. This gives us a new perspective on so-called psychological problems in adults. When we do an intake interview of prospective patients, it has to be thorough enough to include the prenatal life of the patient, as well as their parents and sometimes the grandparents, as well.

Without clinical evaluation we can only guess as to what traumas may have occurred in the life of a pregnant mother, and what adaptations continue to show their effects in her children and grandchildren. Of course, it isn’t just that a mother underwent trauma, but that the trauma has altered her basic physiology and produced lifelong changes in her and her offspring. Did the pregnancy occur in wartime? Were the parents fighting all the time? Was the child’s grandmother depressed? Was she a heavy smoker or drinker during her pregnancy? These are all questions we should be asking.
And in truth the distinction between heredity and epigenetic “heredity” must be made, if we are ever to reverse disease. When a mark is made on certain anxiety-regulating cells, for instance, we may be stressed until that mark is revisited and relived. As I have noted, the process of methylation also can be chemically reversed by demethylation agents, for example. That leads us to believe that certain regions of the brain altered by drugs are the same areas that may be affected by reliving gestational events.

What is most important is that stress in the mother compromises the repressive system in the fetus, so that later it will be difficult to mitigate surging feelings. Low-level imprints from womb-life burst through the repressive barrier, overloading the system, and — in the absence of a cohesive cortex — result in difficulty focusing and concentrating, and problems learning. The prefrontal cortex becomes overwhelmed as it is pressed into service to counteract and hold down painful feelings.

Why are those early imprints so critical? Because almost every key adverse event in the womb can be life-endangering: low oxygen, inadequate nutrition, too much agitation, flooding by drugs or alcohol, etc. they all affect vital organs and change the system of the baby accordingly. I will never omit smoking, which is deadly to the maturation of the baby. Imagine being in the womb while a mother ingests all kinds of toxins hour after hour, every day of the year. Who can survive that?

There is a beginning to personality development and we must not immediately ascribe it to genetics. Epigenetics is possibly more important. Life circumstances wrap themselves around the gene, and alter who we are and what we become. It is those days in the womb that form the crucible for personality type; they all accommodate life circumstance. They pivot around the imprint; and when we take patients down deep we find the little nugget, the key imprints that forced all that accommodation. And when those early imprints are relived and all the vital signs move as an ensemble down lower, we know we have struck gold. We have found Nirvana, the core of the pain. Remember, there is no suffering in the pure state of Nirvana.