More on Disease and Loving it Away

I want to go on about compounding from last blog. I stated that we can pretty much tell the depth of neurosis and addiction by noting how the basis of addiction can begin in the first months of gestation which then gets compounded by trauma and lack of love as the child develops. Imagine now, that if a therapist does not focus on gestational life how on earth is she going to cure addiction or even know about its depth? She won’t. The same is true for both neurosis and psychosis.

But there are several new studies that state that we can pretty much love away pain; and that is true. Even reverse it, which is also true. But there is more to this story.

One study was of babies who had amniocentesis at age 17 weeks in the womb. And then they were measured with cognitive tests at 17 months after birth. Those babies who were high on stress hormones during gestation did least well later on, not so surprising. “Children showing ‘insecure attachment’ to their mothers had high cortisol/stress levels in the womb. In other words, the babies were already preprogrammed to be afraid, not outgoing and also not social even before they were born. WOW! Oh la la, as they say in France, my adopted country. So you see how early it all starts. What went along with this was ADD a shorter attention span, and in my view, anxiety states, all before life on earth had a chance to intervene.

Now here comes a good mother months and years later to give the child lots of love. And that love can reverse a lot of these deleterious symptoms and behaviors. So you can love neurosis away? Not so fast. What we can do is love the child enough to bring the stress level down below its manifestation level. That is, bring down the inner latent stress below where symptoms begin showing. This can begin to reverse some of the effects of trauma in the womb and afterward. But we cannot erase memory entirely because it has been registered all over the system not just in the brain and not just in the stress hormones. It is an organic, systemic event imprinted in the blood, bones, muscles and nerves. But still it is very important to lower the overall load, but we don’t want to be bereft of our history; to be history-less.

Children with love do improve in their concentration, memory and attention span. But let us not equate that with reversing the imprint. It is still there, a stealthy enemy always waiting to pounce the minute there is more stress that brings one over the symptom level producing overt problems. Certainly, we cannot be memory-less. Otherwise we would be robots living only in the present. But when we are talking about cancer it is very important to get this straight. That is one reason when cancer appears later in life and is well treated, the patient still has to wait five years to see if it returns.

Symptoms in my scheme are the result of overload; too many powerful feelings to integrate, and they slop over into headaches, high blood pressure, diabetes and ultimately, when the imprint is powerful and early enough, into cancer. The deeper the imprints the more devastating the results when they start to come up, which is why we must follow evolution closely and not let the patient drop into heavy feelings too soon. We can avoid it; we have the techniques. But when a childhood trauma comes up there can be a transient headache which soon passes, but if first line, loss of oxygen at birth comes up too soon there can be terrible migraines which do not pass away soon. What has been triggered are powerful imprints way too early. One way to measure all this is what the study cited above did; they measured stress hormone levels. This can be downloaded from the mother’s placenta or can be manufactured by the baby all by himself. The result is high stress levels and a propensity and vulnerability to serious symptoms later on. Medical doctors and shrinks need to pay attention to all this and begin to focus on generating sources of behavior and symptoms. In short, to stop only tinkering with symptoms to the neglect of causes. Yes symptoms must be addressed and treated, but it is a never-ending process. And unfortunately that is the practice of therapy today. We have to know that there deep imprints and that there are ways to access them.

In our therapy we see every day patients who has had bad therapy previous to their coming to us, with a history of overload and symptoms. Feelings need to be titrated; otherwise they can dredge up first line powerhouse feelings that arise prematurely and cannot possibly be integrated. Hence symptoms, transient, but if it goes on month after month and year after year I am not surprised if it results in cancer something we rarely see in our therapy.

There is just so much the body can do to absorb and integrate feelngs; and after that it gets sick, and then treatment is a bitch and very difficult. It is no longer, preventive, our work, but post symptomatic, others’ work. Bad therapy, therefore is dangerous, and some mock therapists, in the absence of science in their work are warm and kind to their patients, thinking they can love neurosis away, while taking away the curative part, “ I need to have a kind father who can love me.” It is the imprint that saves lives and prevents cancer in therapy, not love, strange as that seems. So let us get this straight. Love can ameliorate the effects of trauma but cannot totally erase memory. Love from parents in childhood is crucial but not the whole story. Love in therapy is too late; we have to feel that it was not thre early in our lives. Pain is imprinted and leaves an enduring memory and its by-products--symptoms. Pain is where hope lies; it lies in the feeling of hopelessness, not in giving false hope to patients. You can get sick from false hope. It is not real and you end up not dealing with your inner reality.

On Compounding: Cancer and Psychosis

There is a new study out about cancer and psychosis. It pretty much supports what I have been writing about for years. What they found is that a mother who smoked throughout her pregnancy has a greater chance of giving birth to someone who later develop cancer and/or psychosis at a relatively earlier age. If the mother was subject to pollutants or carcinogens while pregnant, she carried toxins in her system, those toxins found their way into the baby; and the amount was about 10% the levels the mother had. I believe that the earlier the mother smoked the greater the later chances of catastrophic disease. It is also a problem if the carrying mother does not get the proper nutrients. Because there are chemicals that help build gating very early on that contributes to the later ability to hold back pain and emotional turmoil. Think about this: the more catastrophic and earlier the imprinted trauma the more catastrophic the effects later on.

What they also found was that it was epigenetics, the effects of the baby’s life in the womb influenced directly by the mother but also later life stress that would produce cancer or psychosis. In other words, it is not only changes during womb-life that is the problem but the compounding of stress and of lack of love in childhood that made the symptoms overt and manifest. In short, if the child were completely loved, despite the changes in the effects on the changes during womb-life, he might not become schizophrenic or develop cancer. This makes total sense, and is what I called compounding. Early trauma plus the add-on of no love, neglect and indifference on the part of the parents. Of course, growing up in foster care or in an orphanage greatly exacerbates the problem. It may not show for years but chances are it will show. You can’t fool mother nature and her offspring mother nurture.

So yes, there is hope to avoid serious disease, even with a bad gestational period, but once it is manifest it is very very difficult to reverse. Once there is organ damage, and that includes the brain, it is a tough job. Once the gating system is affected all sorts of problems later occur; from impulsive acting out, to explosiveness and bad temper; from premature ejaculation to bed wetting. You fill in the blanks; but it usually involves compounding. Even growing up in poverty delivers its adverse affects on the genes—the epigenetics.

One of the clear effects in the epigenetic changes is found in later addiction. Why is there such an Aha! moment when someone takes a drug that soon makes them addicted to it? For this we are indebted to Dr. Eric Nestler whose research into cocaine addiction is crucial. But first let me say that during womb life and infancy there are chemical changes occurring that become imprinted and endure for a lifetime. When a drug comes along that makes up for the deficit it is sought after assiduously. There are changes in the chemical composition surrounding the genes that help either give permission for later expression of feelings (acetyl group) or deny permission (methyl group). In other words, the personality of repression, and laid-back, non-emotionality has its starting blocks during womb life. Then when coupled with repressive, unemotional parents there is a compounding of this kind of personality which endures. She is not being able to express herself which began with methylation during womb-life and exacerbated during childhood. For cocaine addiction it may be that the cellular permission—an opening up of the system, given by ingestion of the drug which helps expression of feelings, taking away the heavy burden of repression (engendered by a childhood of neglect and lack of touch) makes it very attractive biologically. So addiction may well begin in the womb; there is a lack of certain chemicals we needed but did not secrete enough, that made some drugs such as cocaine fill the bill. In depression we need to look seriously at how were over-methylated during womb-life. Again the starting block for later depression lies very early in life and makes for suicidal depression later on
when other adversities impact us—loss of wife or husband, loss of job and above all, loss of hope. Epigenetic mechanisms play into our childhood social life and can reinforce basic personality types. Rat pups raised by loving permissive mothers do better later on than those same pups raised in non-loving domineering mothers. And wouldn’t you know it, one of the great spreads of the methyl group finds its way into the emotional centers such as the amygdala. In any case, heavy addiction is found not only in an unloving childhood environment, but earlier when the epigenes are forming and causing biochemical deficits that have to be made-up for later on.

Here is what late research shows: mothers who smoke cause a radical increase of diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and obesity in the offspring. Then if the mother is anxious or depressed we have compounding and a greater chance for premature disease. This includes psoriasis. The point is that it is not only genes that are heritable but also the epigenes—what happened to the gene development while we lived in the womb. Genes are the notes to the music but the music depends on the epigenes. They conduct the symphony and decide who plays and who remains silent during the development of the piece.

If the mother does pot or takes serious pain-killers then there is a direct effect on the offspring’s gating system, producing serious dents and leaks in it and perhaps affecting later psychosis. What those drugs do is operate on the methylation and acetylation process affecting our ability to repress and inhibit. This results often in an out-of-control impulsive personality—womb-life has opened the gates prematurely…..acetylation. At least, it makes the gating system vulnerable to later trauma—compounding, again. Not all is lost. It has been found that later great parental loving can help reverse some of the damage. Epigenetics can be somewhat reversed, I think with our therapy where we relive and integrate very early damage or maybe later on there will be drugs that contain methionine that help reverse damage, as well.

One of the major effects of womb trauma is later pulmonary dysfunction and breathing problems, not the least of which is asthma. It looks like genetic but that isn’t the whole story. If the carrying mother is fat there is good chance that the offspring will have that tendency. How she eats while pregnant has a lot to do with the nutrients available or not to the baby. And worse, very bad nutrition affects the chemicals that go into producing good gating including methionine that we produce, along with folic acid. It is never one thing, but one childhood.