On the Absent Mother

There is an article today about stressed out babies who get anxious even when mother is absent for two minutes.(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1305892/Six-month-old-babies-stressed-ignored-minutes-mothers.html Their effects last until the next day. Levels of stress hormones soar. Conclusion: babies need their mothers. Oh wait! Maybe it is more than that. Yes, we need mother and father love but what happens when the absenteeism goes on and on?

There is just so much stress we can take and then what happens? Primal Pain. That is, the system has reached its asymptote and shuts down. Repression begins its life. So what? We now have a secret life; that is, there are pains and all of their concomitants, stress hormones, less or more thyroid, less natural killer cells; go on agitating and aggravating the physical system. And when pain gets compounded time after time, neglect, abandonment, violence, the underground life begins to wear the system down, attacking the most vulnerable organs. It is not one pain but pain piled on top of more pain, the daily threats, ignoring, left alone, and you can add your own life here. What is bad is that we do not often know we are in pain but the body knows. It speaks volumes, screaming through higher brain amplitude, faster brain frequency, higher cortisol, and so on. That is why we not only take the word of patients but measure them every day before and after sessions. The patient does not necessarily lie but she is often contradicted by her measurements.

I never knew that my frenetic and constant movements as a kid, the going and going, was the result of pain; I never felt it. I acted it out. But if one had looked at cortisol levels we would have understood. I doubt in my day we could have even measured cortisol. I just got my high-school records for my biography. Note after note says about me, “nervous.”

Isn’t it wonderful that the human system has a governor that shuts down many functions so we can survive? We become unconscious to survive. That is the miracle. So we have a hyperactive brain; is that so terrible.? Only if you don’t mind dying of Alzheimers or a stroke. That hyperactive brain is not normal. It is a reaction, a survival tactic to keep us unconscious so we can navigate in the world. It is super active due to repression. How do we know? There are major changes in the brain when patients have done this therapy. We have done four different brain studies (UCLA, Copenhagen, Rutgers, and in-house). The results are consistent. Moreover, we see great changes just after a session when the body temp, blood pressure and brain activity diminish. The body and brain are all of a piece. They are related, so when we measure just one aspect, say, blood pressure, we are missing out on the relationships to other aspects.

What is important about the above is that we mistake the deviations occasioned by the imprinted pain as bad and unhealthy. So then we have the biofeedbackers trying to correct the person’s brainwaves when they should be what they are. Or we do other measures to break down blood pressure, or we do EMDR to change anxiety states without once asking why are they deviated? Why is that heart racing? It is trying to survive against the onslaught of pain. It should race.

I was being slight facetious about dying of a brain disease but not entirely. When you see, as I have, month after month, year after year, patients reliving enormous early pains, you realize how the brain has to cave in eventually. No organ can withstand that pressure forever. Reliving and feeling is life saving.

More on Addiction

So many of us are addicted that I want to write a bit more on it. First of all, we are addicted to need; the lack of fulfillment of need. The depth of the neglect of the need determines how seriously addicted one is. We choose our addiction due to many reasons. But basically, how early the trauma or lack of love there is may be one factor. Then the compounding of the very early neglect, say, the lack of touch dating back to right after birth and on into infancy, is another component. So the continual lack of fulfillment exacerbates the pain. Never been touched, held or soothed makes matters worse. It all wraps around need. If there were a grandma who caressed the child a bit then the need is less severe.

Those needs start in the womb, which is a massive kick-start to addiction. If the mother drank to ease her pain then perhaps the offspring will sense physiologically that alcohol can soothe pain; the beginnings of addiction. If the pain goes on due to constant neglect by the parents, becoming severely debilitating, a devastating addiction is on its way. If the mother takes drugs during pregnancy then a pill taker is coming soon. And usually, the pills will be the opposite of what mother took. If she was on cokes, cocaine, speed, coffee, hyping up the baby in her womb, then we may have an adult who is addicted to tranquilizers and painkillers in order to calm his hyped-up system. The needs are at first life-saving so that lack of fulfillment generates great pain. As we mature the needs are important but not as life-saving. Needs before birth are much stronger than later on. They deal with survival. Once we survive well physiologically we can move on to social needs: to be listened to be looked at, understood, helped, guided, etc.

I cannot emphasize this enough: We are addicted to need. The earlier the need the more powerful its neglect. That is why Hollywood doesn’t destroy people; they are already destroyed by events that may antedate birth. The neglect may drive one to Hollywood because it is basically the land of the seriously damaged. It is the goal for those who are underappreciated and never paid attention to. The size of the pain leads to neurotic solutions commensurate with that force; now we need the whole world’s approval. How better than in the cinema.?

We don’t want to ignore genetics but in my opinion genetics is minimal; but life in the womb is critical. And so what is the addict doing? Fulfilling the need from that time; that is, trying to equalize or normalize the chemistry that was warped from very early on. He takes more serotonin (Prozac) to calm him. He would have had enough all through his life if his levels were not dislocated by trauma in the womb or at birth. He is trying to get himself back; get the parts that were missing from the start. That is why drugs make us feel like “ourselves” again. They make up for the deficit.

The choice of drug may be any number of things; food for Jewish families who put such importance on it. Wine for the French; you get the idea. But the force and strength of the addiction is not cultural. It is biologic, much the same the world over. If we just think, the need for (drugs, food alcohol) is first of all and most importantly, the need”. Period. If we make the mistake of treating the “need for” as the problem instead of the need itself we will never cure anyone of anything. That is, if we neglect history and address only the apparent problems we are bound to fail. Those few words, “Need for,” and “need,” must be clearly differentiated. One is the need direct; (pain/history/primal therapy) the other is “need for” (calming agent/kill pain/cognitive therapy).

The latter is what the cerebral therapies address, believing that is the problem. No. the problem is real need which drives the “need for” How deprived the real need is how overpowering the addiction. So many parents wonder what they did wrong because their child was and is addicted. Maybe they did nothing wrong because the root of heavy addiction goes back to long before they had a chance to mistreat the child. Never forget life in the womb. My book on this will be out in five months.

The reason that both addiction and psychosis have been so hard to treat in conventional therapy is that the origins lay back before we set foot on earth. Damage during this period is most often the origin of later addiction/psychosis; but there is no therapy extant, other than primal that can go so deep.