Turning Back Evolution

(Originally published September 4, 2008)

Primal Therapy is based on evolution. Further, it is also based on devolution. Are we nothing more than a time machine where we can visit our history in a precise way/ turning back the clock to a previously neutral non-neurotic state. Is that really possible? Scientists are now learning how to wind back the developmental clock—taking a skin cell, for example, and treating it so that it returns to a previously neutral uncommitted state. Once that is done it can be reprogrammed to become yet another kind of cell.

It is not such a big leap to apply that to humans, who after all, are but complex accumulation of microscopic cells. What may happen in our therapy is having patients go back and relive events that preceded and caused a neurotic deviation; going back to relive the great traumas, resulting in a return to a neutral state of internal harmony.Going back down the chain of pain to a physiologic memory of wellness and internal balance. It is evolution in reverse. We start out as a collection of uncommitted cells, finally resulting in a collection of different organs and brain neurons that have distinct and separate functions. In our therapy we go back and become our old shark/salamander selves (basic brainstem and limbic behavior). And then become our old Bonobo/chimp organism with its feeling brain, finally arriving at our late developing human selves. Those ancient brains still exist in all of us, performing different kinds of functions that finally add up to us humans. If we do not understand that we are made up historically of all those brains and focus only on the human thinking brain in psychotherapy, we can only get “well” in the thinking brain, excluding a vast treasure of lower brain experiences. In this way getting well on all levels of brain functioning is impossible. For example, we have found that high blood pressure and migraines often have pre-birth origins, imprints set down before we make our lives on this planet. If we do not address the brain that mediated life in the womb we cannot hope to make a profound change in these maladies.

If we want to eliminate ulcers and colitis we need to know where in the brain those responses are organized and return to that brain for cure. What we want to do is reprogram a neurotic brain system into a purer normal one. We want to lower brainwave amplitude and frequency to slower and lower levels, which we have done in our therapy. We cannot do that by making the thinking brain more active; the task is to make it less reactive while the feeling brain becomes more active. And now we know that the hyperactive prefrontal cortex can often be used to suppress the limbic/feeling output. So a busy intellectual brain can be seduced into thinking one is well, when all that has happened is self-delusion; a distanciation from feeling centers of the brain, and a flight to the thinking structures. In a psychotherapy based on language the most that can be expected is to run along superficial ideational tracks leading to other ideas, i.e., insights. The lower brains do indeed “speak” another language; and we must learn that language if we are to make deep, profound change. And obviously, we must not couch “cure” or “improvement’ simply in verbal language terms; we need to see what the body says about improvement. We need to measure the lower brain/physiological language, as well. It speaks in slower heart rate, in more natural killer immune cells and higher levels of serotonin. It speaks from experience; from experience mediated mainly by our non-human ancestors.

Not so oddly, new research is showing that as we search for an emotional memory our brains come to resemble the state it was originally. In other words, we go back to the brain originally involved in laying down the experience. We cannot do that so long as a therapist’s brain along with your brain is engaged in a badinage regarding present day events. We need a therapeutic setting that encourages reflection and introspection.

So what does devolution in therapy entail? It means, first and foremost, not to skip evolutionary steps. It means beginning in therapy with the most recent traumas and letting the vehicle of feeling carry us back in history to related earlier events. It means that in therapy we begin with the late brain neocortex and work back over time to preverbal life. It means not getting to infancy and pre-birth events until far into therapy. There are those who are re-birthers who help patients down into birth traumas long before the system can integrate them. The result is abreaction, going through the emotions of feeling without its full emotional content. It means descending down the chain of pain slowly and in ordered fashion, integrating feelings on each level. It means a basic understanding of neurophysiology so that therapists know what to expect on each level visited by the patient, and do not provoke a patient to verbally express a non-verbal feeling. It means knowing when a patient is ready for the experience of a deep early feeling, and when she is not ready. And above all, it means recognizing what a birth imprint looks like and what reliving it looks like. It means carefully titrating vital signs and seeing how they are affecting the whole organism.Finally it means not pushing patients to go somewhere when they are not ready.Reliving birth trauma and pre-birth trauma is not arrived at until late in therapy. For example, deeply depressed patients usually begin therapy in deep hopelessness and very low body temperature. We need to understand how to normalize that state and what kind of feelings the patient can accept. There is hopelessness on all levels commensurate with different brain systems. We may need to avoid deep level hopelessness until later in therapy.

When we finally arrive at birth events late in therapy we become more and more able to live in the present. That is what is meant by revisiting and reliving the past to insure the present. The deeper we go in history the less it has its grip on our current life—a pure dialectic. Therapies that focus on the present only insure that the past will remain entrenched. That is the meaning of freedom—to be liberated from our history.