Why Painful Memories Continue to Do Harm

In Primal Therapy our patients go back and experience damage from decades before.  That implies that the hurt is a long-term, almost never-ending hurt.  I have written about this earlier; it is part of a survival mechanism.  We retain the memory of menace and pain which stays "alive" until we can experience  it fully.  Enter the imprint:  a neuro-chemical event that "marks the spot and the time" of the damage, and when Primal Therapy is done correctly will lead us to the center of the imprint in order to bring it back into conscious/aware where we can start to feel it; often in small bits at a time in order avoid overload and abreaction.  That means feeling just enough so it can be absorbed and integrated.  It then becomes part of us, and is no longer ego dystonic (a bow to Dr. Freud).

When we begin a past feeling we reawaken both the genes and epigenes.  They begin to change in order to accomodate the noxious input the baby suffers.  The trauma rides piggyback on the gene and causes even a slight detour; that means we detour in our development, not just the cells.  And the experience either weakens or strengthens the genes and their connection to other brain cells. What happens is that the imprint changes the on/off switches in the brain, and again we are affected.  What all this means that the trauma, a mother seriously depressed during pregnancy affects the epigenetic methylation process where the cells are marked with a trace.  That trace is a reminder, a very serious reminder of psychologic work to be done to address the memory.  It is just a small tag with an enormous punch.  It changes so much about us:  how we breathe, move, our energy level, interests, how we learn and how much we can feel.  Above all, when the imprint is overwhelming it will help determine how deeply we can feel and how introspective we can be.  In short, we are changed as human beings; and to change all that there is a way: to go back and feel what the key imprinted memory is, fully.  It means undoing damaging experience and reversing history.  Think of that:  reversing history to stop our personal trajectory toward serious afflictions later in life.  If early trauma is ever-present, even though well sequestered, and we can stop its damaging effects and help normalize an individual.

Methylation is basically a marker and an aide to long term memory, and so long as there are changes on the genes the memory and its damage will persist.  Basically, it means we are no longer what our genes meant us to be.  That is why we see bone growth in our patients as the genetic destiny is finally unleashed.  Not being ourselves has multiple meaning which includes the neurons and the biochemistry.  It means recapturing our growth potential,  not in every case but often enough to make believers out of skeptics.  In the reliving it has to be all-encompassing just as it was when the trauma was set down.  The whole memory and all of its aspects are waiting for their chance to be liberated.  We cannot leave any part of the experience unfelt because that will mean only a partial improvement.  All of us suffered initially, and all of us must suffer again: that very same pain that we never fully experience at the beginning. 

 Originally, the pain was far too much to integrate so now we can go back as adults and experience it over time.  It can be done. We have done it over decades now and have verified the results.  We see it in the disappearance of life-long discomfort and of enduring symptoms.  In the Primal world getting yourself back is a literal notion, not a New Age mantra.  The problem is that biology will not tolerate any cheating nor any short-cuts.  The reliving takes time and it takes feeling.  There is nothing I can do about that;  embrace it and realize it is the path to wellness.

The Complexity of Primal Therapy

To some it seems that Primal Therapy is simple and all you need to do is help people scream; about as far away from the truth as possible.   It is quite complex because there are elements, not only of neurology and biochemistry, but of the dynamics of psychology.   We need to know how those elements are interwoven and how they evolve in the human system.

The therapy’s complexity matches that of the human species, in general.  We need to know about how evolution developed over the millennia and how that affects how we understand the unraveling of the various levels of consciousness.    We need to know about this evolutionary process so that when certain psychologic or physical signs show themselves we know what it means.  We know at what level of consciousness the imprint lies.  We must know the steps in the brain’s evolution so that we don’t force patients to trespass too deep in the brain during the first stages of therapy.  We cannot do therapy apart from evolution; rather, we need to follow its dictates precisely.  It is when that does not happen that we can harm the patient who may be face with imprinted pain that he cannot integrate.  We grew up following evolution; we did not have a thinking brain until some time after birth.  Nor could we walk at 6 months.  Evolution leads the way and we remain its obedient servants.  This is no less true of our emotional development.

I will offer one small example to embellish my point.   I saw a patient recently who had been in therapy for quite a while.  She was feeling how her parents ruined all their children due to their unyielding ideas about they should grow and learn.  It was tempting to sympathize with her and to say “Yes, I understand your feelings.”  That was it, and there we see a major mistake.  We can empathize with a patient but not when we sense that she is descending down the levels of consciousness to deeper and more arcane pains. She may be traveling down the neuronal paths to the antipodes of the brain and we must not put her into the present, talking to the therapist when she needs to go deeply into herself to retrieve part of her history. And why is that a mistake?  Because even a word of understanding and empathy ,“I get it,” takes her out of her descent and blocks the therapy. She cannot go where she needs to go because there is an outside input she must deal with, when she needs to lose most of her conscious-awareness of the   outside world and let herself be engulfed by her early pains, roiling the deepest level of brain function. So when a neophyte therapist wants to show kindness to the patient, he is hurting her; and this comes from an incomplete understanding of evolution and neurology.  And of course, a lack of key feelings about where the patient is at any time in the session.  We need to master the patient’s history, a first prerequisite of Primal therapy. And in some cognitive behavior therapies it is the last to be considered, as a-historic approaches seem to be the mode.  As if behavior had no historic anchoring points and simply sprung out of the ether. And the very nature of current focus-therapy militates against searching or finding deep-lying forces.   And the serious imprints are found on deep brain levels; by ignoring them the patient is being robbed of key transmuting experiences.

For example, there are key pathognomonic (sure) signs  when the patient approaches first –line brainstem levels.  We need to know what they are and whether the patient is ready to feel such deep-lying imprints.  If she is not and we encourage her to descend we will get overload and a lack of integration.  It sometimes is flattering for the therapist to see the patient reacting so vociferously but it may well be premature.

On the contrary, there are times when a patient gets lost and wavers from his evolutionary trajectory, and needs help to keep him on track.  The body is pulling the patient toward the pain while the defenses step in to block the experience. The therapist must know when that happens and what to do.  Here help is critical, but…but.  The therapist must suss out,  and sense, when to make a move and when not to.  The therapist must know the key signs of readiness for a feeling and then help guide him. So two different ploys depending on the biologic system of the patient and what level he may be ready for.  Janov Law means we do not  talk to the patient who just had a feeling until she talks to you. Because Primals begin to engender a host of notions, insights and elucidations that go on for some time.  They must not be interrupted because the therapist needs to act smart and offer insights.  Insights follow evolution: feelings first and later ideas and insights; not the reverse. The insights help  explain the feelings which were experienced; and because of how the brain evolved, cannot precede them.

So many mock Primal Therapists urge the patient into anger. It seems like primal but it is not. Do we know whether anger precedes tears?  Does crying come naturally after anger?  We need to know that before we do helter-skelter therapy on unsuspecting patients. There is an order to feelings; some come later than others; each feeling in its time. In therapy when we guide the patient into feelings that should come later there will be no integration nor resolution. Fully experiencing means resolution, allowing the imprint to become organic-an integral part of us.  To borrow from Freud; it needs to become ego-syntonic. That is what being oneself means.

When to touch the patient?  Of course she needs love and holding but first she must feel the old, deep unloved. “I am not loved and never will be.”  Only that will open the channels of feeling and maintain an openness in the patient so that later she can feel loved. In short feeling unloved is a feeling too. We were unloved long before we were loved; we must take the feelings in sequence. If we “love” our patients they will never get there.  After a feeling when the Primal imprint has been experienced we can hold and hug the patient but never when we replace the needed “unloved” with being cuddled. Again, patients do not need love; they need unloved first. Evolution first.

When to touch, when to hug, when to talk to a patient, when to show empathy, all have a specific place in therapy and there has to be the neurologic sequence that the therapist understands to guide the therapist.  I am often tempted to provide an insight for the patient; it is so obvious but not to her. When we help out with insights we rob the patient of her insights and critical discoveries that are often so liberating. But it must come on the evolutionary timetable:  feelings always come before the higher understanding/insight of the neo-cortex at work. The insight now tells us what the Primal feelings meant and how they affected behavior.

Let us not rob the patient of his sadness, his need to cry and scream, his need to show fury; let us not rob him of his key discoveries about himself.  We therapists, purveyors of wise insights, too often are not smart enough to stop acting smart.  Professionals are used to knowing so much; yet acting stupid sometimes is a very smart thing to do.