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.