Why Are We Anxious? (Part 4/6)

The concept of resonance is important in understanding anxiety because situations can resonate within us from language centers to below the level of language where the panic exists. We can be stirred up even when we don’t know with what the outside situation is resonating. Thus, in sex, a nude female body can resonate in a man with an early experience with his mother. She may have been seductive long before the child had any understanding of it. I had one white patient who had a very seductive mother; she French-kissed her son. Later, he could only have girlfriends who were Black or Asiatic—too white a girlfriend would resonate with that early seduction that scared him. Here “White” women resonated with a White mother, something to be avoided. I treated a lesbian woman who was molested sexually by her (white) stepfather. She could only have relationships with Black men. Later, any man resonated with the early stepfather. She switched to sex with woman. It seemed much safer to her. She discovered that when she was with a man in bed she had a chronic low-level apprehension. When she switched to women there was no more problem.

When there is a life-and-death struggle at birth due to lack of oxygen (anoxia), for example, the existing reactive system is activated, but because it cannot fully respond due to the complete load of pain and terror (to feel it completely would be to run a cardiac attack or at least to lose consciousness), it reacts partially within its biologic limits and then puts the excess part of the terror away for good keeping; it houses it until our system is strong enough to feel and resolve it. It lives behind our repressive gates. However, we continually respond to this stored terror with chronically high stress hormone levels, a compromised immune system, misperceptions, strange ideas, nightmares, and chronic malaise and a startle reaction. This high activation level gnaws away at the cardiovascular system so that we fall seriously ill at age 55, even though at the time we seem to be living a normal, relaxed life.

We have done systematic stress hormone cortisol studies with our patients and have found a normalization after one year of therapy. That tells us that the variable, reliving, may well be responsible for the reduction of anxiety. This drop is also associated with a drop in heart rate and blood pressure. The patient also claims to feel better. Biologic measurements are more reliable because they inform us of what the physiology is doing, irrespective of what the person thinks.

Tranquilizers seem to be obligatory to enable someone in pain to function on a daily basis. What is diabolic is that in spite of a loving childhood the person suffers. She may not have been loved on the first-line where good oxygen and nutrients were essential, which were lacking; or there may have been a mother terribly tense over losing her job in the economic crisis. From the baby’s point of view he is unloved; his needs (for calm)are not met. From the mother’s point of view she was doing the best she could and could not help her feelings.

A carrying mother who smokes and drinks is not loving her baby; her needs come first. If she takes drugs such as cocaine she is alterating the physiology of her baby. Male monkey offspring of mothers were given cocaine had poor impulse control and possibly were more likely to take drugs later on. This study went back 15 years to monkey mothers who were given cocaine. Despite the effects from womb-life, too many of us were not loved in obvious ways later in our emotional life when there was no touching or holding.

One of the ways we know where anxiety comes from is the depth and agony of the feeling of terror. There is always the fear of dying because that is what actually happened in the womb or at birth. Fear is second line, organized higher up in the brain. Anxiety is paralyzing because it is how some part of us reacts to terror. When we have chronic over-arching anxiety we are dealing with a mélange of fear and terror overwhelming the defense system; a compounding of a harsh childhood and poor gestational life. Here is resonance. Current apprehension soon turns to anxiety as the feeling triggers off low-level terror. The terror, I remind the reader, is already there. It keeps us from relaxing on the beach, pushing us into constant activity. And we rationalize, “I don’t like the sand.” What we do in the present is usually the reflection of our history. Life becomes a rationale for our imprints. If we have a therapy of current focus we are missing out on all those causes.

In order for some patients to feel the fear and its context we need to tranquilize the terror so that it does not interfere with the feelings the patient has. We offer first-line blockers. In conventional medicine and psychotherapy this is sometimes known as anti-psychotic medication. What is being blocked is the terror that often produces bizarre ideas in the patient. The tranquilized patient will no longer be overwhelmed because we have reduced the overall pain load; she can focus on a single feeling. And there is no longer an overload that caused the generation of all those strange ideas and beliefs. We see here how psychotic ideation develops. Feed in too much pain and the systemic searches for an outlet. Reduce the level of pain and the system calms down and no longer needs the ideas to rationalize what is going on inside. Those strange ideas are like an overflow valve that channels the pain away from consciousness and into awareness. He is hyper-alert.

Feeling overwhelmed happens when something in present resonates with terror, and the combined force is overwhelming. “It is all too much.” We cannot follow orders because there are a string of orders from the past inside that command us; they take precedence.

What is diabolic about anxiety is that many of us suffer from chronic low levels of anxiety, barely perceptible, acted-out constantly. The person is rarely aware of it yet it drives her to go and do all of the time: cannot read a book without that agitated feeling. Cannot focus for long, cannot listen to a long lecture, cannot listen to the children’s stories and above all that agitation catches up with her at bed-time when she cannot fall asleep. We cannot be a loving parent when we don’t have the patience to listen to our children and their stories. It is not that the parent is bad person or unloving in his intentions, but that he suffers and cannot help himself. He rationalizes that he must keep busy to feed his children. We know otherwise. He has to keep busy to discharge all of that energy. If he cannot he suffers.

The low level anxious person can rarely listen; that takes too much patience and the person can’t wait. This individual cannot listen to complicated instructions (how to assemble this table or how he must turn right at a certain intersection); he bows out and glazes over very quickly. If he is given a chore of what to buy at the supermarket, as soon as it gets to three choices he is gone. “I know she said to buy low-fat but low-fat what?”

Sleep is problematic when the low level mobilization (against the early pain) is now active as the third line diminishes its hold a bit. Don’t forget, the higher-level neo-cortex is often pressed into service to control our lower level feelings. It is an escape hatch. As we need to let go of that top-level control in order to sleep we become more vulnerable. We have to release control. Enter a ruminating mind. A very busy, unceasing mind that cannot stop itself long enough to fall asleep. As we get closer to the deep brain in deep sleep we approach those primal feelings. They agitate and move upward to make the thinking brain work very hard. Even in sleep when we begin to suffer from the uprising of first-line terror the brain rushes in to cap it with a nightmare. The nightmare attempts to encapsulate the feeling so that it never becomes conscious. It is not a willful act, that nightmare. It is a built-in survival mechanism that ensures that our conscious/awareness will not be impaired by overwhelming input. The story in the nightmare does not count for much, but the feeling in it counts a great deal. That feeling can give us a way in; the royal road to the unconscious.

The imprint of a memory is really an ensemble of reactions that is impressed simultaneously into the whole system when there is inordinate danger, a smoking mother, for example. It is a total experience, unlike recall, which is largely mental, meaning a left prefrontal cortex operation. We may not be able to recall an imprint. We can only remember it with our entire system: with our muscles, viscera, and blood system, because all of us was involved in the original experience; therefore, it must be relived with all systems involved originally when it was set down. Not only that, but it must be relived with the same intensity in which it was impressed, which is why it has rarely been seen in conventional or cognitive therapy where the emotional level is rather subdued. A few tears is not exactly deep wailing that we see in our therapy.

Let us not confuse recall with memory. Deep preverbal pains can only be recalled with the entire biologic system. Verbal recall is another animal (literally) altogether. It is systemic, organic, physiologic memory that cures; verbal recall does not. When we suffer high blood pressure, for example, we may be suffering from a lingering residue of an overall trauma very early in our lives--in the womb. The high blood pressure has been stripped from the generating memory and lives its life apart. It is trying to tell us something about where it came from; but alas, we drug it unmercifully so that it never volunteers its origin. Same for heart rate. We are forever putting those memories to sleep.

So there are at least two main avenues to provoke anxiety and repression; one, the meaning of a certain look by the parent, (or any negative reaction of theirs) which means I am not loved nor will I ever be. Two, something is happening that is an immediate threat to my life. In either case there is a disruption in the evolution of the organism.

Originally, suffocation during birth provoked repression to order to keep the system on equilibrium and to keep the baby from dying. Two of my patients were later told by a doctor that they had what seemed like a heart attack at birth. Later on, as the feeling was compounded by additional pain and terror it provoked even more shut down. In both cases there is danger. It will be crippling anxiety and not plain old fear (terror-light) when the lower brain centers are actively involved.

When the resonance travels down the chain of pain and reaches low levels of the neuraxis, terror then appears. It is not something new; not something to try to reach. It is an old friend (or enemy). In fact willfully trying to reach a lower level feeling is an oxymoron; the more we use top level will, the less we can descend to where we have to go. The more we let go of the present the more access we will have. The person in terror will suffer anxiety because the body is preparing for extreme reactions in order to survive. You cannot be slow to react if there is a lion coming toward you.

There is usually the gloom and doom aspect of the anxious feeling, “I feel like I am going to die.” Since no one manufactures a feeling that has no basis in reality, we must seek out origins. If we want to successfully treat any of the so-called psychosomatic (migraine, high blood pressure) symptoms we must find the generating sources. Here the feeling needs to meet its maker, and there is a maker. What happens is that a current situation, giving a speech; through the process of resonance, a mild fear and apprehension has set off the original terror deep down in the brain so that the person is not just sort of fearful, but suffers a full-fledged anxiety attack, feeling she is going to die. The feeling is correct! We don’t understand her reactions because it is just giving a speech to fifteen people. Yet she feels overwhelmed. Or someone is criticized and goes into an anxiety state. Why? Because it can mean, “I am not loved if I make a mistake.” Or “catastrophe happens if I make a wrong move.” And no doubt this person in her childhood was not loved when she made a mistake.

Why Are We Anxious? (Part 3/6)

A reliving of pre-birth and birth imprint will evoke the exact same reactions as at the time of the original trauma. But in the absence of a reliving, the reactions or fragments of the memory will persist, such as a fast heart rate or high blood pressure. There will be a racing mind; racing because it is being mobilized by deep level imprints. There will also be the inability to think clealy; confusion. We are dealing with imprints before we had organized thoughts, so not thinking clearly is understandable. There will be difficulty sleeping, especially falling asleep.

When we relive a complete early pre-birth memory of which a high blood pressure was a part, then in the total reliving that fragment of the memory will also be included, and the patient should consequently see relief from the intrusive symptoms. If aspects of the original reaction are missing, the reliving is not complete and therefore not curative. If we medicate blood pressure and keep the high level reaction under wraps the complete reliving is not possible. That is one danger of taking tranquilizers. We feel better but in generally we will live a shorter life.

Any deep symptoms such as a constant low-grade fever or chronically elevated body temperature all point the way to the brainstem and some parts of the limbic brain. That is, they point to perhaps a pre-birth experience; pointing out the route the patient ultimately will have to travel. We may not see the problem for decades and therefore cannot imagine how early someone’s heart problem began. The way out for the anxiety case is usually stroke or heart attack. Realistically, the real way out needs to be the way in; feeling the anxiety untrammeled, naked and bare for what it is and was—pure terror; it is panic in the face of the threat of death—at birth.

Most of the current problems in neurosis can be traced to anxiety which is the most primitive reaction we have in common with many primitive animals such as the lizard. We need terror to alert us to danger. Strange to say that we need terror but it is true; and a nation of pill takers are voiding any chance at real health by suppressing the warning signs. It would be like suppressing the forerunners of a heart attack (angina) just to feel comfortable. I know how necessary this can be; it is not a moral position but one of survival.

Take obsessions. Patients will be openly anxious if they cannot carry out their rituals, the same if we are not allowed to act-out any of our neuroses. Sexual rituals are another example. The rituals, in short, attempt to bind the anxiety. The content of the ritual may have little to do with the base but is a channel for first-line reactions. As are many phobias, as well.

So again, what is it, this anxiety, and where does it come from? The way I found out is simply going to work every day and observing patients. In a session, as a patient is near the deep feeling of hopelessness or helplessness she often runs an anxiety attack. She has shortness of breath, butterflies in the stomach, pressure on the chest, high agitation and a feeling of near-death. She feels totally agitated and wound up and has no idea how to stop it. And it goes on until those feelings are connected and resolved. The person has no idea what is going on, it is incomprehensible, which aggravates the anxiety state.

This is not an idiosyncratic happenstance. Anxiety appears in nearly all of our patients at one point in a session as they approach the first-line. These feelings were so shattering when the baby was an infant that it was immediately repressed in the interest of survival and also in the interest of maintaining a functioning neo-cortex. It is an automatic process that keeps us from being overwhelmed. It allows us to survive in the most drastic circumstances. Can we imagine how the fetus or baby feels in the face of this terror? That fragility is still there inside. Overwhelmed can mean non-functioning, yet most of us have children, have to go to work, do the shopping etc. There is no time for dysfunction. Enter tranquilizers.

The reason it is called anxiety and not terror, even though it is the very same feeling, is that sufferer never knows where anxiety comes from and don’t know what it really is. We therefore treat them as separate entities. Anxiety began its life so early that it can seem totally unrelated to what is going on twenty years later. Because of the disconnection, anxiety seems to hang in space with no specific antecedent. Once the patient feels a trauma at birth gasping for oxygen the anxiety becomes the terror and the fight for life that it is and was. It now has a home—and an owner.

So again, where does it come from? A high level of anxiety in the mother will contribute to stress (and later anxiety) for the fetus. There have been many studies bearing this out (cited in later chapters). An anxious, pregnant mother, responding to her outer world—is stirring up the metabolism of her fetus, who is also responding to his environment. If mother’s anxiety goes on long enough, it will become a permanent state in the fetus, and change him for life. It so looks like genetics that we easily mistake it for heredity; after all, the baby seems to be born unable to sit still or learn in school.

The mother’s anxiety will over-stimulate the fetus and impair her nervous system, creating a child with an imprint of a high level of stimulation; she may feel overwhelmed by every little thing that happens throughout life. As an adult she might respond to her husband asking her to bring the salt to the table. He is met with an angry, “Do you really expect me to do everything? Get it yourself.” Everything becomes too much because it was during womb-life. Everything that was too much, then, is laid down as a substrate, and all new demands work against that substrate. So one little new request made of her as an adult has a magnified impact. And if by chance she made an error on something she would immediately turn it around to make the accuser wrong. She cannot be wrong and immediately transfers terrible feelings of having made a mistake so that the other person feels wrong. He ends up defending himself. Again, it is not so much that she has done something wrong, but that small error has resonated with something very important in her that may mean I am not loved.

If now this person suffers panic attacks it means that the basic terror is close to the surface; hence the chronic feeling of being overwhelmed (overwhelmed by feelings). We see an example of this in the monkey study discussed in a later chapter. Mothers were given cocaine which stirred up and agitated them, not unlike a maternal anxiety attack, and we saw the result; impulsive offspring more likely to take drugs as adults. Anxious monkeys take to alcohol as do we. And what makes them anxious? Sporadic and unpredictable separation from the mother; lack of steady love.

Let us suppose those fears were channeled into elevators, a fear of being enclosed as the object of terror. The terror is deep brain; the focus is higher brain. Psychotherapy cannot cure a deep brain terror by a discussion with the higher brain; it is not where the wound lies. There can be circumstances in life that could create such a phobia, such as being stuck in an elevator or another enclosed space as a young child, but real terror—a life-and death event, only rarely derives from happenings in late childhood. The imprint is the origin, terror becomes the reaction, and phobia becomes the focus. We need to separate each so we understand the problem, and then address the imprint with its reaction. The imprint generates all of the rest.

For a fetus, the mother’s womb is the external world. A womb environment that keeps the fetus in an alert state eventually becomes part of the baby who will be a more aggressive, hyperactive child who cannot focus or concentrate in class. He will grow up hyper-vigilant. This may be useful if he becomes an undercover cop but is bad for his longevity. Conversely, if the carrying mother is depressed for a lengthy period of time, her baby may go into “down” mode, perhaps for life as a personality characteristic. He may love cocaine later in life. Or even better, methamphetamine, which puts the body in an “up” position.

Anxiety is often manifested by choking or smothering sensations, dizziness and a feeling of impending doom. And quite soon the patient will cough and choke in a session that is a harbinger of a birth pain that is breaking through. During a reliving of the birth trauma later on, when immersed in the experience there will often be coughing and bringing up sputum in large amounts. There is now the context.

Actually, doing that (coughing and choking) in exaggerated fashion while anxious will help a person feel better. And we recommend it to our patients when they do not have deeper access for the moment. It is simply the discharge of the some of the energy of the feeling. None of these need a cortex or higher level brain function. That is one very important reason that words cannot cure it. It is basically visceral and sub-cortical. These manifestations are (coughing, suffocating, drowning) telling us that they emanate from a very primitive brain organization and from a time when there was only an inchoate cerebral structure (lacking a fully developed neo-cortex) to handle trauma. There is no insight that can treat it because it began its life long before we had words. First-line knows no words or screams (patients never scream when in the birth sequence), there are only grunts and moans. If there are childhood cries or words or screams it indicates higher brain levels are involved and therefore not a true reliving. We simply cannot fool the lower brain. The higher one? Yes. Otherwise, how on earth would we elect psychopaths to office? When we do not have lower level access we are not anchored into feelings so we cannot judge the veracity of what others are saying. We fail to see nuance or subtleties (because we cannot feel it). We just don’t get it. We should get it because otherwise we can be fooled or tricked.
Terror is what we see in lower animals who are frightened by another animal. Their reactions seem like pure panic. We see this in some individuals who undergo MRIs. The minute they are enclosed in a steel and cement sheath panic surges forth. It is approximating what happened originally. It takes the confines of such a machine to reawaken the primitive feeling. The patient may believe it is the machine that is producing anxiety, but it is the primal panic from the confined, enclosed space; the womb in which he tried to exit for life. What the MRI does is stimulate a resonating memory; not a memory in the way we usually think of it, but it sets off a bodily reaction. If we do have this kind of anxiety having an MRI exam, we can be fairly sure that we endured a difficult birth or pre-birth. It is, in short, a differential diagnostic tool to separate out those with healthy births from those with traumatic births. We can teach the technicians who perform MRIs to tap the leg or foot of the person at irregular intervals so that one cannot organize a full-fledged anxiety reaction. Or offer an eye mask so that the person stays unaware of his surroundings. When this distraction fails there might be an anxiety attack.
So now we have one good reason not to use words when treating those with many first-line symptoms. We are dealing with a non-verbal animal rummaging around in the lower reaches of our nervous system. It is basically visceral as our insides feel as though they are exploding. The hysteric is a good example; someone with barely any control, unable to concentrate, scattered, all over the place, explosive, overreacting, seemingly overcome with feelings at all times. This is someone with first-line (lower brain) damage, deprivation during womb-life, at birth or just after. Words are not going to slow this person down who seems like she is in a rush all of the time, including a rush to get the session over with. She wants to get better now! She needs to be allowed to go to those remote places that drive her; driven by very early deprivation of need. This is far below the verbal level. Or if the person is not able to access the deep brain we can give painkillers that will suppress its force for a time until she can feel her feelings.
Too often, the therapist or physician sees their job as eliminating the symptom, because it is considered a sort of a mystery that is unfathomable. And of course the symptom is uncomfortable and could be life-endangering. And when we just attack the symptom there is the tacit assumption that it is there for no good reason; otherwise why not attack the source? Battling symptoms is usually a vain exercise. There is no end to it.