How Can We Remember What We Can't Remember?

I am asked this question over and over. That is because we think of memory as cognitive output. There are very different kinds of memory that have nothing to do with words. In fact Primal memories, the ones that cure, are often just the ones that cannot be remembered … in words. Usually the damage was so early and deep that made trauma immediately repressed and shut away from top level conscious awareness. What we are left with is a feeling tone: sad, depressed, angry, fearful or hopeless. But, and this is critical, the memory is usually not verbal at the start. It is that tone which represents key early events that are unconscious, for the moment. 

 It usually expresses itself in some kind of physiologic disorder. Stomach aches and cramps, migraines, high blood pressure and on and on. It starts being largely physical with physical symptoms. They are apt to be symptoms or their precursors on deep biologic levels. Diabetes, Alzheimers, cancer, Parkinson and epilepsy. All potentially life-endangering symptoms, matching the dangerous Primal input; a carrying mother smoking or drinking, for example. These are processed on the survival level and the impairment shows up here….on all the critical physiologic processes of food/hunger, drink and thirst, Blood circulation, breathing processes, digestion and elimination. We do not remember the imprint of cellular overload and the inability to integrate the input, but their effects are deeply installed and ramified. 

 That is why Primal is often a therapy of deeply embedded memories and of deeply repressed impulses; it separates Primal from other approaches because we do not deal with verbal memory as a goal. Feelings must be our primary aim because evolution dictates it; feelings came along before we had words to describe them. “Mama, hold me, cherish me, want me” these are feelings that are curative, the unspoken, repressed feelings/needs that belie so much pain; feelings often not easily accessible to conscious awareness. In this sense, we are a therapy of the unconscious. And a therapy of full consciousness. Dialectically, we cannot have one without the other; the deeper we delve into the unconscious, the deeper is our level of conscious awareness. We cannot defy the dialectic and go directly to consciousness; it is imprisoned by the cage of repression. It can only be liberated by looking and feeling underneath to meet the pain that keeps it all hidden. That pain is the door that broadens conscious awareness. Cognitive has it backwards: trying to enhance consciousness through intellectual processes primarily. That only cloisters it and embeds feelings even more; all this to the neglect of gaining to feelings; again, we are a therapy of feeling. Because ideas, too often are used to suppress feelings. That means we can’t get there from here. We cannot get to feelings by intellectual means; only by letting go of the intellect. First, we all have to agree that feelings are our ultimate goal. Once that is done we know what road to take or at least what road not to take. 

 We also need to agree, all of us, on the law of self-determination. Each one his own life. He cannot and should not be dictated to as to what feelings he must be feeling. That is up to the patient, his evolution and his biology. His system must dictate the order of feelings, not an outsider. 

 An example. One patient, now feeling has had a memory of bouncing her ball up the stairs to her home. She had done it many times as a child but in therapy it was the tone that directed her; on the way in for her session some children were bouncing balls on the sidewalk. She began to feel that little girl going home and found that home was a place of no love. It was a vacuous place, bereft of caring and warmth, and she began to feel it. It was a devastating feeling of loneliness, no one cares, and no one loves me; there is no love in this home. It was a horrifying awareness. Intolerable and un-feelable. Far too much for a very young child to feel. In a safe milieu she could begin to feel it; it is a place that encouraged deep anguish and crying. The Primal Center. It is a place where over 50 years we have learned about feelings. For example a patient, after months of therapy, may suddenly emerge deep into something where his movements are sometimes blocked with crossed feet, (nearly always) a fetal expression, crossed arms and constant choking; this is a new kind of memory, something he never felt before. We do not interfere with it; we know where it is going. It is a first line memory with no words or tears and crying. If these expressions exist they are not Primal. They may be a mélange of levels of feeling which too often are not resolving because they are not pure; they are a slop-over from one level to another, a sign of being flooded with heavy feelings. 

 Cure means a purity of feeling exactly how it was laid down with no intrusion. Here is where the skill of the therapist enters. We do not lead the patient but follow him to make sure that an overload of feeling does not drive him onto a derivative channel. The mélange of feelings are never resolving. We must take great care. It is not that the unconscious is intruding (as Freud surmised) but that too much of it is intruding all at once. When a therapist leads the way and gives orders to the patient, chances are he is driving an overload; much too soon and too early, hence no integration and no resolution; result, no progress. We now know the signs of both good and bad therapy and how to treat it. We do not have to re-invent the wheel and make mistakes while learning on a patient. We learned from the best expert around: our patients.

Why Primal Pain Endures

New information again seems to document that pain memory lasts a long time.  (see Kings College London.  "Cells Carry Memory of Injury". See http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/news/records/2016/May/Cells-carry-memory-of-injury,-which-could-reveal-why-chronic-pain-persists.aspx).  We have known that for fifty years but new research shows us where and how. The fact remains that early injury and its suffering carries on perhaps for a lifetime. They don’t just carry on; that continuously do damage.  And the cells send information of the damage and its agony to higher levels. This was a study on persistent pain in mice. They found that damage changes epigenetic marks on some genes of immune cells to mark the spot; they carry on the memory of trauma. The investigators wanted to know why pain becomes chronic; and they are searching out the nerve pathway that carry pain along. The point is that there are neural mechanisms that make pain endure.  We don’t just get over it; it is now part of us. Certain nerve cells become much more activated. The problem is that with pain they remain in an hyperactive state.  It is not only in our minds but everywhere inside of us. And the adaptive damaged cells keep in replicating themselves.

Notice, I did not say, maladaptive cells. Because maladaptive is the way damaged cells adapt. To carry the idea forward,  we need to get to those pained cells and experience them fully so that we can now adapt normally. They point out that neurons acquire epigenetic footprints that affect key proteins.    Those pains seem to  insist that we must face the pain and react fully.  Otherwise, after a fully reliving why do cells return to their normal state?  It is a matter of unfinished business; we cannot neglect our biology and hope to be normal.

The problem is with most enduring pain we do not know where to look or how deep to go.  So instead of doing what we should, feel it fully, we push it back and hide it until it comes out in a different form: cancer?  Same pain, different expression.  Same epigene, different phenotype.  It is not always helpful to look for different causes for different afflictions; they may be the same.

I have noted that Primal memories are not inert.  They do not lie here waiting to be discovered.  They agitate and gnaw away.  Recently in a Ted Talk there is a report on nanoparticles “trained” to enter the body, search out developing cancer cells  and kill them, all in microscopic space (see https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_hammond_a_new_superweapon_in_the_fight_against_cancer).  These particles know what their job is and they don’t forget.  Our own immune cells clearly have the same kind of memory; they try to do their job but imprinted pain overwhelms them and prevents them from discharging their “daily rounds.”  How do I know?  When we reduce the pain in the system through one year of Primal Therapy the natural killer cells increase; the same kind of cell as those nanoparticles I wrote about.  Deep pain prevents us from being normal and acting normal and having our biology behave normally.