How to Deny Your Feelings and Die Early?

I swear I try to avoid nonsense, but when it stares me in the face, and when it appears in a scientific journal, I feel I must reply.  Scientific American published a piece on anger and anxiety by cognitive people where there is not one word about what anxiety is or how to treat it except … except through changing your mind and thinking your way to health.  (Sci. American 1-4-13).

   What the article states is that we cannot always avoid what upsets us, so we need to reframe the experience; that is, look at it differently and deny our feelings.  In short, use our prefrontal cortex to suppress our feelings.  But of course suppression does nothing to eliminate the causes of anxiety.  And therein lies the rub; the imprint lying below still continues to do its damage to our organs and behavior. No denial can change that.

  It all depends here on their experiment;  (by Dominik Mischkowski and others), where they had a group of volunteers (students), led them to believe they were waiting to start, kept them waiting, were curt with them, and later asking them to reimagine the situation.  There is more but that is essentially it.  What that has to do with real anxiety, I do not know.  It seems more like annoyance.  Their conclusion:  the next time a car zips in front of you don’t focus on the anger.  Imagine yourself looking at if from a distance, and “KEEP YOUR EMOTIONS AT ARMS LENGTH.”  Some advice.   Keep feelings at a distance…..and become robots?  Or what?  Is this science?

   What they say is that it is not hard to dwell on the bad but focusing on the good could be the difference between health and sickness.  It is quite the opposite; denying feelings makes you sick and hurries along a premature death.  I have quoted study after study to this effect in my books.  But look at the logic of it: keeping down and suppressing feelings is healthy?  I suppose you could come to that conclusion if you deny history, deny imprints and neurological science and focus only on the present, which the cognitive people do ad nauseam.  Feelings are the essence of life; why would we want to deny them?  But scientists who live in their heads can do this because they do.  So when a loved one dies we are supposed to think, how can I think about this differently?   Crying is so essential that those who cannot cry fully need to go to grieving therapy to learn to cry so as to get some relief.
Can we really think our way to health?  When over-thinking is the way to sickness.   Those who come to us who live in their head have to learn to recapture their feelings again and become human.

  And if all else fails in their approach, they say it helps to write a journal about it; another way of keeping it intellectual.  Why not feel those feelings; they are a natural response, not an aberration to be hidden and forgotten.   There is a reason that feelings exist,  otherwise, evolution would have denied and eliminated them.  They are a survival mechanism and as important as hunger and thirst.   Feelings inform us who is good for us and who isn’t.  Especially who is not is good for us and wo will not be dangerous.   Feelings predate thoughts and long before we think they inform us about life.   They are life, in essence….ecstasy, beauty and love.  When  you lose your feelings, you are dying.

  What I think happens is that advanced university graduates apotheosize the intellect and denial is their way of life which they then elevate to the level of a theory.  And then they find a therapy that accommodates this concoction (sorry, but it is a concoction out of their life style).   They  help patients get sicker in the name of psychological health.  After all, they made it through life with their intellect, why not the rest of us?

  They use phrases such as “moving past unwanted, negative feelings.”  And they dress it up with a “scientific” phrase called self’-distancing.  All that means is how to run away from feelings.  Do I sound angry?  I am, because people read science to find out how they can feel better not die earlier.    They note that denying feeling is healthy coping while suffering and feelings is unhealthy coping.

  So it is a turn on the old idea of thinking your way to health.  Why are our feelings unwanted?  They are natural reactions, not aliens.   The researchers recommend being distant from feelings.  Is that mental health or is that denial in the name of mental health?  And denial is not just an idea; it means repressing feelings and most often that is not healthy, unless you want cancer and heart disease.

Can I Hurt Your Feelings?

I have long maintained that this was impossible since feelings can hurt but cannot be hurt.   It is like an oxymoron: how can we hurt something that is already hurt?  What we usually mean is that something we said sets off something in someone else that pains them.  Then they hurt, usually only when what we said resonates with some hidden pain. If we say, “You are wrong.  You made a mistake,” it can set off years of criticism by one’s mother who demonstrated in this way that she hated us.  Therefore any criticism hurts our feelings when it sets off already hurt feeling buried inside of us.    So it is not, “I hurt her feelings;”  it is “ I said something that triggered hurt feelings inside”.

    Let’s look at this from another perspective.  We have a brain structure called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC).  It is central to our limbic system/feeling center.  When we begin to feel isolated or neglected this structure takes part and adds the “hurt” to our reaction. It becomes part of our pain network.  (see: New Scientist, 1, Dec. 2012, page 37). This structure adds the force, valence or oomph to our reactions.  But when we hurt emotionally there is another group of structures, the sensory group, (the anterior insula and others) that enter the fray and helps the emotions become physical hurt.  They become intertwined and are “one.”  Feeling neglected hurts both emotionally and physically.  Emotional hurts, in short, have bodily accouterments; which is obvious.  So when our feelings are hurt we hurt physically:  it is not simply “in our head.” And therefore “head” therapy or cognitive approaches cannot touch it.  Remember, we are in pain.

   When we say that “breaks my heart,” it is literally true, and  it can kill as readily as a gunshot.  I have on film a woman I treated who was feeling deeply and who cried out, “my heart, my heart.”  When she came out of it she felt her childhood heartbreak (sent to a foster home)  and how much it affected her heart. Normally, repression keeps that from happening, except that repression  does not erase it; it only drives it underground.  It is repressed feelings that can kill us; for they do affect our organs, especially our heart.  There is no escape; either we feel or we suffer.  Pills can sometimes take care of parts of our hurt but they only suppress the conscious/awareness of the hurt, not the hurt itself nor its provenance.

  Very early trauma can affect (mutate) a gene that helps construct opiate receptors that should dampen pain.  And that can therefore exacerbate our reactions to hurt early on.  (receptors are very dense in the dACC).  We become more “sensitive” as human beings.  It becomes part of our personality.  These people need more opiates later on to make up for what was and is missing.  They may be  the “over-reactors.”  And then we can add the epigenetic factors, traumas that occur while we live in the womb and just after, which compounds the problem. We then suffer, compounded, chronic pain; it may not show itself as such, but it can manifest itself in chronic allergies, which was my case.  I had a runny nose that lasted years after I was sent away to a foster home when I was five.  I knew nothing about pain. We see patients all of the time who claim never to have been in pain or feeling unloved; at least at first.

  So we have genetic mutations coupled with epigenetic factors that compound the problem and produce highly sensitive beings.  They were known by Freud as “hysterics.”   The memories are imprinted and stay for a lifetime because we are then structurally different.  So lack of love in the womb (a carrying mother who diets, smokes and drinks and who is chronically anxious), remains as a new part of us with a different brain and biochemistry.  Not only is the anterior cingulate active in the anxious, carrying mother but no doubt the fetus is in the same physiologic state.  I have written about this in my Life Before Birth, where the fetus’s biochemistry reflects the mother’s.  And this is why we think it is due to heredity, and in a sense it is, and in a another sense, it is not.   But this can produce chronic inflammation and associated diseases.  The inflammation response is getting the body ready to combat intrusion, except that here the intrusion is from the pain trespassing into our system and our brains.  It is a lethal trespasser that alters our neuro-physical being for a lifetime.  It is not just our ideas that changes; it is our physical being that long predates the development of ideas.  And we carry that hurt around all of the time.  It first changes our bodies and then we when we have the capacity for  ideas it changes them too.  Here the lower level imprints send their messages upward and forward diverting ideas.

  We begin to see how complicated all this is because when we want to find out what causes severe addiction we need to be able to look way back and far earlier than we imagined.  There is a controversy as to how much of homosexuality could be genetic or epigenetic.   Many homosexuals I know and have treated insist that it is genetic; but after seeing all this new research we see how early deviations begin both in the brain and physical system. So it is hard to know how much is genetic and how much isn’t.  I still opt for epigenetics as  a major influence.  This may be added to genetic mutations very early on.  Then there is more trauma and  environmental influences are dominant.  This is very true in the addictions I have seen.  The earlier the trauma the more enduring and heavier the addiction, in my opinion, and in my experience.  So when we use Behavioral therapy to treat all this we are far from the target.  And years away from it and many millions of years distant in phylogenetic time.

    There can be all kinds of mutations of genes early on, we are discovering that form the matrix  for personality.  For example, there is the cholinergic gene that when affected can alter how we learn later on. It again affects reactivity and how sensitive we become.  This is the “mother” of the production of acetylcholine.  It affects our ability to pay attention.  The more the release the less ability to modulate and restrain our behavior.   The greater the release the lower the threshold for nerve firing; in brief, the greater our reactivity and lower restraint and control.  All this is heavily compounded by trauma during our life in the womb. So we have these very early settings for later personality; whether we are impulsive  or over-restrained.   Whether we speak our mind or hold everything in.  Whether we are normally sexual or we are frigid; do we suffer premature ejaculation or have delayed orgasm.

   There is something I left out: not only does the mother’s cells affect the baby, her emotional state and her moods but the contrary is true; the fetal cells affect the mother.  A piece in Scientific American (December 2012) found that fetal cells in animals migrate into the mother and can act very much like stem cells; they can migrate in the mother to where there is injury and help the healing process. So it is a two-way street.  The baby is a great help to the mother.  Let’s watch the developing research on this.

   So we note that very early experience changes brain structure and affects the developing neurons that already almost complete in the womb. When we want to understand the causes of allergies, migraines, asthma and high blood pressure we need to look in the right place and in the right epoch.  We must not forget that epigenetic factors, life in the womb, can turn on and off key genes; this causes further transformation of our biology.   So yes we are products of our genes and what happens to those genes along the way.  The question is:  are we only products of genes and epigenes?  Is there free will?   Not much.