Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition: The Simple Truth is Revolutionary

PRIMAL THERAPY EMPTYING THE PAIN TUB - DR. FRANCE JANOV | Being Human

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 16:04:00 +0000

Government as Cult or The Cult of Trust

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 05:16:00 +0000

(Originally published September 18, 2008)

The United States is becoming unified. People are thinking more like their leaders and our leaders are thinking more like the people. It looks like unity but it has its dangers. We are becoming welded together into a specious form of homogeneity where leaders exhort us to trust in them; the experts then poll us and find that we do; and the government issues statements that they are carrying out the will of the people.

While this might appear as democracy at work, I submit that what results from this Cult of Trust could be a highly anti-democratic situation. In every democratic country the elected officials eventually reflect the populace. They are, in a single person, the condensed symbol of what the masses are supposedly thinking. The danger is that a mergence of the attitudes and beliefs of the people with those of their leaders becomes a locked-in consensus, with each side afraid of being out of step with the other. This political lock-step seems to be strength but in actuality it is too often no more than a fear of being disloyal. Hesitation, doubt, distrust, dissent and disloyalty have become synonyms in the current American patois.

In the name of unity democracy finds itself submerged beneath the philosophy of "my country right or wrong". If we look at history; of the Hitlerian and Stalin era we see what blind trust can lead to. The Germans and the Russians wanted to be good, loyal citizens. There, too, it was, "my country right or wrong, "and the result was mass destruction, starvation and death. What their leaders asked for was complete trust. What they meant was that the people should abjure all critical ability and passively agree to whatever the leaders decided. Even now in the Soviet Union the leaders are asking for complete trust based on their distrust of past leaders. "Trust me, because I'm not like the rest." And we are very aware of the trust the Iraqis have in Saddam Hussein.

At a time when the functions of democracy are enhanced we seem less inclined to use them lest we be accused of shattering American unity. The cult of trust is supplanting independent thought, and we are moving towards a democracy by indirection wherein the people's will is polled rather than meaningfully voted. The poll is king and when it indicates that the time is ripe for a vote, democracy becomes official. We can see objectively what trust did in other countries, particularly Iraq, where they are en route to having their country demolished. What we can't see so easily is our own devotion to trust. Don't trust trust too much.

Government by survey is becoming the mode, and judging by a recent survey we are all in trouble. Though Americans are reluctant about a ground war in Iraq they are nevertheless willing to go along with the judgment of our leaders. In a recent poll the people agreed with the generals that they shouldn't be given too much information. When information lacks, trust makes its entry.

On the CBS "News Special" in the 1960's Eric Sevareid indicated that, in terms of the course the war had taken, none of the government experts has guessed right. And now the news seems to be highly managed by a series of press briefings.

The cult of trust seems to grow in inverse proportion to the amount of information received. The less information the government offers, the more we need, obviously, to rely on trust. We are told that some information must be withheld because of the "national interest." What I am suggesting is that too much trust based on too little information is truly against the national interest because the people don't really know what is going on and cannot make informed opinions.

A situation is occurring wherein those who want to know more, who hesitate or question, who are restless because we are not given the facts, are considered out of line and castigated for giving "aid and comfort to the enemy." In Germany in the early 1940's anyone who thought Germany might be losing the war was termed, most pejoratively, a "defeatest." That kind of label could bring about a stiff prison term and even death. Germany's leaders demanded trust even while the country was being decimated.

The problem is that preservation of democracy becomes secondary to the preservation of a united face before the world. This is not necessarily a conscious plot by secret conspirators but the culmination of a situation in which the people and leaders unconsciously manipulate each other to preserve a mystical strength. We are caught in the "consensus bag" and no one seems free to inject new ideas or new moves. The danger is that America's historic dialogue may be coming to an end - replaced by an executive monologue orchestrating a consensus and sowing suspicions against those out of tune with the jingoistic melody.

THE SUPER PATRIOT

Years ago I published psychological "Portrait of the Cold Warrior" (The Minority of One, April 1963). It was an analysis of thirty related research studies from which a composite of the super-patriot was drawn. It presented a hypothetical man, found on the far right, who stresses violence as a solution to complex problems and who emphasizes power in both interpersonal and international relations. The portrait was thus summarized: "The Cold Warrior is neither bright nor imaginative. No matter how much protection he has, he can never have enough to quell his inner insecurity. He is an impatient man who disdains talk in favor of action; who wants immediate and single solutions to problems. He sees the world in terms of black and white and distrusts his fellow man. He cannot see cooperative solutions to problems, and sees all relationships in terms of power- of dominance or submission. Any attempt by others to gain equal status is seen as a threat. He believes in power first, last and foremost. He relies on violence to solve personal and social problems. He is cynical, suspicious and misinterprets most moves by others as belligerent. He is a hostile person who rationalizes his hostility as justified by the continued existence of an aggressive enemy. He is so torn by conflict that he does not know peace and harmony when they're upon him. He lives by the slogans. . He is rigidly inflexible, emotionally isolated and lacks both personal and social insight. He decries critical introspection; has few ideals and less hope. He sees only the daily practicalities and dismisses theoreticians as fuzzy idealists. He is anti-science because he cannot imagine an orderly and predictable world, shorn of chaos. He is dedicated only to his own survival and believes that all those not for him are against him, and all those not over him are under him. He sees those who fear war as weak, neurotic, oddball agitators and believes that to find conciliatory possibilities in an opponent is traitorous."

In the period since this portrait was drawn, what were the psychological properties of busybodies on the penumbra of the political spectrum have been ever more completely absorbed into our national ideology. Perhaps in time of war these characteristics are national necessities. Perhaps our leaders are correct in contending that we must kill to save lives. But what if they are not correct? It doesn't hurt to ponder that possibility for a moment.

We seems to be caught in the vortex of a synergistic process wherein each increasing physical commitment of troops and guns brings with it an increased implicit demand for psychological commitment as well. Each category of these commitment potentiates the other - a process that augurs ill. Indeed, the Gallup Poll, in two survey taken three months apart, found a thirteen per cent increase in those favoring a greater military commitment in Vietnam. (Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1965.) This psychological shift paralleled the great increase in the actual commitment of troops during that same period. In addition, there was a two percent drop in those willing to negotiate for peace.

One danger in this synergism is that one does not shut off internalized attitudes and beliefs as readily as one might cease bombing villages (as those who fear German rearmament know all too well). The Zeitgeist outlasts the environment in which it was begotten and prepares the soil for future wars.

An interesting study by sociology professor Seeman of the University of California in Los Angeles helps clarify our dilemma. Emotionally alienated persons were investigated and it was found that there is a relationship between emotional alienation (social detachment) and powerlessness. With the feeling of powerlessness goes lower political interest, lower political knowledge and a lack of motivation to learn more about politics. One of the questions asked was whether "the basic decisions on political and social questions should be made by experts." Not surprisingly, those who felt powerless tended to answer affirmatively. When people feel powerless they prefer government by experts over government by the people. In short, they prefer to continue their powerlessness.

The majority of us are perhaps unaware of our growing powerlessness. We have been encouraged to believe that we live in a democracy which rests on the strength of the people. All too many are oblivious to the fact that their growing trust in leaders is but a manifestation of their own powerlessness. Such "trust" offers a way for eschewing personal responsibility in matters of government. And what democracy is about, it seems to me, is just that matter of the ability to judge and evaluate what our leaders are doing.

The Seeman study found that those who placed a higher value on political control by experts were less interested in knowing more; more willing to follow the dictates of others- in short, they tended to shift from democracy to autocracy. It is this shift that allows people to abdicate personal decision, to avoid a search for information and most important, to abjure a personal morality. As shown in the study, the shift inspires a deepening unresponsiveness to new information. Reflected in this attitude is the loss of control over one's destiny. Not only is this control lost in the cult of trust, but the individual hardly aspires to develop control, for with it would go responsibility and decision-making -tasks that cannot be welcomed by those who want others to make all the decisions for them.

In this frame of mind comes reliance on fate and chance. What happens to us we believe to be in the hands of a higher power, whether deity or government. When we defer to external regulation of our own lives and minimize the value of personal efforts in affecting problems, the result is government by the cognoscenti, rule by a knowing elite that knows best what is best for us. War itself is then left by us to fate....and to the elite.

But what is good for us is not merely a matter of facts known to experts. It is a matter of morality. It is the matter of differing viewpoints. What differentiates us from our Government is not merely the respective quantities of facts at our disposal, but a different frame of reference for approaching and assessing these facts. The difference is between humanism and power politics.

When a government gets a people to think in terms of power politics instead of human needs, the people have been had. Yet, through clever use of the mass media, we have become "expert" on foreign dictatorships but benighted children when it comes to the ways of our own government. When my barber tells me, "We cannot afford losing Southeast Asia to the Communists," is it really that he thinks himself to possess a proprietary interest in a country he has never seen, and which until a few years ago, he had probably never heard of? When he comes home to his $85,000 tract house, is it really the first order of business that he tells his wife that they must not "lose" Asia, when she is worried about not losing the house.

TRUST BY ORDER

Our existence can be in danger precisely because of the inflexible idea that our existence is continuously in danger. So war has become necessary to prevent war : bombing necessary to save lives; and death an unfortunate by-product of the fight for life.

Given the baseline that our existence is in danger, much must logically follow. Thus, peaceniks and their ideas becomes dangerous, while agitating for death—"death to the enemy," means that one's sanity presumably has been vindicated. It is a strange equation—death and sanity, killing and mental health, bombing and democracy.

"Kill" seems to be "in" in a nation huddled together in its patriotism and righteousness and fearing most of all to sow disunity. Three university professors were put to death by the Ky Government during the Vietnam war for circulating a petition demanding a cease-fire. The leaders had made the leap from a request for trust to a demand for it.

GOVERNMENT BY CRISES AND MONSTERS

From a psychological point of view, the ability to wage war revolves around the concept of trust. And that is not only a bad thing, but a necessary one to make any government viable. The rationale for the need to trust out leader is that in time of crisis we must act as one. When your ship is sinking there is no time for hesitation, debate, or going in separate ways; it is time for united action. More than anyone before him. Hitler mastered government by crisis.

Crisis has a number of psychological functions that help keep a people in line. Crisis galvanizes, mobilizes and, most importantly, legitimizes excitement. Violence toward the "enemy" (whether internal or external) becomes acceptable because "we are in a crisis." All means become acceptable.

By embroiling his country in continuous conflict and war there was always a crisis, always a need for the savior and always a justification for the suppression of those who disagreed. The German people trusted their leaders, and the German leaders trusted their leader. What enabled them to feel guilty with a clear conscience was that their leaders must knew what they were doing while they themselves were only carrying out orders. There was "unity." But it is just such unity that one must fear most. This is not to say that we should never have confidence in the leadership; after all, we elected them. It is just that healthy doubt is always important.

This is the same kind of psychological mechanism that gets people hooked on horror movies. In a horror film, one is placed in a situation of mounting tension and terror, but in the back of one's mind one knows that really there is nothing to fear. The monster on the screen mobilize our indigenous fear. In the end, the monster is killed and we feel relieved, for nothing inside us was wrong; the monster was the source of our fear.

The "monster" today keeps changing. It used to be the Chinese. Now they are sort of friends.It used to be the Japanese and Germans. Now they are our closest allies and we worry when they hesitate to go into war. Not exactly the worry we used to have about them. We become convinced that when our enemy is exterminated we will be able to breathe freely again. The problem is that our enemy keeps changing. During the Iraq-Iran war, Iraq was our friend whom we armed. That wasn't very long ago.

We have a problem in Iraq because we've got a man who doesn't do things rationally. Albert Camus said it a long time ago, "A man with whom you cannot reason is a man to fear." Those who might try to reason with him take their life in their hands. He demands trust. He doesn't even demand it; he expects it. There is no will of the people. The progression seems to be to asking for trust, getting it, demanding more until all decisions are left in the hands of the leader; and that is the danger to democracy. Too much trust in "them" means not enough trust in ourselves. If the leaders then do things that we don't like; if like in Iraq they are intent on destroying their own country, it is because the people implicity trust their leaders. They are willing to die for whatever decision is made by them. They too say, "We've got a job to do and we are going to do it.". Killing the enemy becomes a "job to do". Killing is not done in anger, which is, one thinks, the logical result of fury. Rather, killing is done, sang froid, as another task that must be accomplished. Anger has been removed from the killing process; cold calculation has taken its place.

THE MONSTER BEGETS HEROES

One searches in vain for something to say other than "kill" and "war" that would not be considered as giving aid and comfort of the enemy. No matter how aesthetically articulated by our State Department or Rand Corporation academicians, the message is the same - our fellow Americans have every right to protest, but what they are doing amounts to treason. They are considered as lacking in trust and as sowing the seeds of disunity. Somehow we believe that Iraqi soldiers in the sand will read The New York Times, assume wrongly that Americans are for peace, take heart and fight all the more -ergo, more American boys will have to die fighting and increasingly stubborn enemy. The fact that Hussein took Kuwait without the aid of The New York Times, is somehow overlooked.

No one doubts that Hussein has acted monstruously. Monsters have to be fought. But the idea of a monster helps detract people from the fears of daily life. To combat him offers us surcease from the humdrum of routinized existence and presents a chance for what Aldous Huxley called "individual nobility." All of us want to feel noble; that we belong, share the major view, and that we are not set apart. We want to be the best kind of citizen. Loyal and devoted. Like in the movie, the monster is at the source of our fears; stamp him out and ease will return. And most importantly, trust your leader to know how to handle the monster. But fighting the monster also helps us find our place and meaning in this complicated society. It is something in which we can all share. We are united in our sacrifices and misery, and this seems far better than to suffer from personal problems and private agonies individually. Suddenly death has a meaning in a nation of senseless automobile deaths. We can die for a cause, rather than from pollution—a rather ignominious way to go. Death has meaning even when life does not. It is a time when one of the necessities of life is death. To question this necessity becomes disloyal.

Iraq has become a nation in search of treason instead of reason. We have to take care that we don't fall into that trap. Whatever our personal view of the war, remember that we are fighting for democracy, and the hallmark of democracy is dissent, to have a differing view.

What is needed is a new atmosphere wherein the real enemy is war. Only then will efforts toward peace not be considered treasonous. When the enemy is war, peace is in the national interest.

What is needed today is a cult of mistrust and skepticism. Let us heed the warning of Andre Gide, "beware the man who has found the truth; follow the one who still searches."

On Drugs And Tranquilizers

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 05:50:00 +0000

(Originally published September 10, 2008)

The choice of tranquilizers or pain-killing drugs depends on very early life experience, even during womb-life. It is this fact that makes a cure so difficult to achieve; yet without delving down into the antipodes of the brain we cannot resolve the need for any kind of drugs, from cigarettes to alcohol to illicit drugs.

No one takes drugs chronically if there isn’t some lack in the physical system. An addiction, first of all, is not to alcohol or drugs; it is to need. (either trying to fulfill it or repressing it). We are addicted to fulfillment but because the critical period is past when need could have been fulfilled; we become addicted to substitutes. We are forced into seeking symbolic substitutes so long as the real need is heavily suppressed. And the urgency of the drug seeking is the same as that of the original need. The person is not only suppressing current pain but also the past pain which he or she may not be aware of. That is what makes addiction look like—addiction. The original need is sequestered and unreachable.

Drug or alcohol taking is overt, something obvious, a behavior we can treat by redirecting behavior through, not so oddly, Behavior Therapy. It is something we can see and measure; so many months off booze and drugs equals a successful treatment, in their approach. The success is measured in terms of external behavior, not internal processes. Yet it is those internal processes that count the most in the use of drugs. Addiction most often results from very early painful imprints, even during womb-life. It is this fact that makes a cure so difficult to achieve; yet without delving down into the antipodes of the brain we cannot resolve the need for any kind of drugs, from cigarettes to alcohol to illicit drugs because, again, it is not the need for alcohol, it is THE NEED.

Since we needed love early on to stabilize the system, we must make up for its lack by taking something that does what early love would have done: with alcohol or drugs we feel warm, relaxed, untroubled and energetic. And, important, they are immediately available. All of these are temporary solutions; the only permanent solution is to have been loved very early on, or to feel the need and pain from that lack. That re-balances the system. Love in the present won’t do it, but feeling unloved in the past will.

Our former speed (amphetamine) addicts cannot imagine taking speed when their systems are normal. Perhaps one may consider this a simplistic approach but behind these statements are many decades of experience and much new research that clarifies our position. For a bit more detailed explanation I am indebted to Myron Michael Goldenberg for his description of drug action.

("Pharmacology for the Psychotherapist."Accelerated Development Inc. 1990).

We need to understand what addiction is and how it works. We need to know what we mean when we say that a drug binds to a receptor, which is how it may work to calm us.

For primal pain to be acknowledged it must arrive at conscious-awareness. If the message never arrives, if it is blocked by any one of the neuro-inhibitors we produce in our brains, we may feel a vague uneasiness, a tension or amorphous suffering, but we will not know what it is specifically. And we will go on suffering. The central aim of those inhibitors is to block too much information, too strong an emotional message from rising to conscious-awareness. When some of the message gets through there is active anxiety, symptoms and impulse-driven behavior. How does that happen?

Receptors and Receptor Theory

Several theories exist on how drugs actually act in the brain and body. These are by (1) attaching to cells called receptors, (2) interacting with cellular enzyme systems, or (3) affecting the chemical properties of the outer cell membranes. (Goldenberg. Pages 36 & 37)

Many drugs are believed to combine with chemical groups within the cell or on the cell wall. These drugs combine with specific agents known as receptors. The theory is that these receptors actually attract the drug by having a molecular shape that fits with the drug. This is sometimes known as the "lock and key" theory. Think of the shape of a key that will only fit into a certain lock. When the correct shaped key and lock are matched up then the lock can be opened. The receptor theory is much the same. A certain shaped drug molecule is attracted by a receptor site on the cell wall. When the two shapes fit or line up together, the drug acts the same way as a natural body chemical does to set off a chain of events. The key here is that the drugs mimic what our body should have done if we were loved as infants or even before. What almost any drug does is somehow mimic what we should produce naturally. For example, the naturally occurring body chemical acetylcholine combines with receptors in the membranes of muscle and nerve cells that are chemically specialized to receive it. Certain synthetic drug agents can duplicate the action of acetylcholine by combining at the cell wall. These drugs are sometimes referred to as agonists. They boost the action of the cell. The antagonist, in this case atropine, competes for the receptor site which normally accepts acetylcholine. It says, “get out of the way. I will now take your place for the moment.” It will block or dislocate the normal physiological function. Why dislocate? Because the energy and its tendency still exist but must be diverted somewhere. It noses around finding another vulnerable place. The person acts out by overeating, is made calm by drugs, and then suffers from high blood pressure. Sometimes the attack site is not apparent until years later.

There are drugs that can block the receptor site and interrupt its effect. If there is too much stimulation and we feel that we are about to jump out of our skin there are medications that can stop that stimulation. The pressure is so much from inside that we literally feel that we need to get out of our skin. It is the message lodged deep the nervous system that is doing it, mostly of not being loved or early trauma, a chronically depressed mother both while carrying and afterward, for example. Not being loved has always to do with not having needs fulfilled—from lack of oxygen at birth to lack of touch right after birth. There is a timetable of needs that form a critical window when they must be fulfilled. Once past that window needs can only be fulfilled symbolically. Feeling unloved cannot be eradicated in adulthood by more love.

One way to rid of the feeling of being so anxious and agitated is to slow down or stop the transmission of messages between neurons (nerve cells) so that the message of pain (which stimulates) does not reach higher levels. We then feel calm even though a grand tumult is going on in lower brain centers. We never change the pain, only the appreciation of it. That is why we can take tranquilizers and pain-killers and feel good, but damage is still going on. No matter what we think or what we think we feel, it is an unreal state. In cognitive/insight therapy they change the way patients think they feel, not the way they really feel. To change the way they really feel means pain. If there is no pain there is no addiction or need for a drug that is calming.

The aim of therapy must be to establish fluid lines of communication among the levels of consciousness. This communication is a given when we have positive experiences from conception on. But when noxious stimuli--pain--intrudes, gating intercedes and blocks information between the levels. Communication is halted or misdirected, and one level doesn't know what's going on in the other levels. The true meaning of "holistic" is when all levels speak a common language and contribute their share to a single feeling. To make a patient whole is a desired goal so long as we know what that means in the brain. This is, grosso modo, the overall scheme, the goal of our efforts.

To be human means to be feeling. Inordinate, noxious input very early on provokes repression and blocks an aspect of feeling. Fully feeling beings are not blocked off from any aspect of themselves, that is, there is no massive gating that has sealed away major portions of brain function from access. Thus, each level of consciousness is able to contribute its share to an experience. This means being able to feel great joy as well as sadness. It means to sympathize and empathize. When a depressive tells us that he is not getting anything out of life, no interests, no joy, we know that he is carrying a load of repression and that repression is the underpinning of depression.

So what’s wrong with taking tranquilizers and pain-killers? Their primary job is to gate emotional pain. It keeps feelings unconscious. The result is that the cortex cannot signal emergency; thus keeping reactivity within bounds. The key here is that with pain-killers reactivity is blunted in order to save the system from massive over-reactivity (or occasionally, under-reacitivty). That reactivity, when enormous, can threaten one's life. This is what we see in our therapy when defenses are dismantled. Vital signs mounting to the danger area. Feelings are responding realistically to some unknown hidden force. If we do not acknowledge that force we are helpless before it. If we measure lower brain activity we will understand immediately; there is tumult going on below decks that we never dreamed existed. The ship is sinking; there is water below decks and we carry on as if nothing were happening.

Quelling the deeper centers with drugs eases the so-called "thought" disorders. As our patients ease their defenses in a session, and great pain begins its march to prefrontal areas thinking centers, their cortex will ruminate about this danger or that until they actually lock into the feeling. In short, there is an anxiety attack as the system tries to stave off the approaching pain. Great terror pressing against cortical centers creates paroxysms of obsessive thoughts: "There's no space for me." "I am stuck and no one is helping." These often are birth statements. But because the actual feeling is so well buried, the person is left only with a vague anxiety. She will manufacture things to be afraid of but it is all a rationale.

In the hierarchy of the nervous system the comparative force of imprints on the different levels diminishes as we move up the scale of evolution. Thus, something that happens at two months can alter the brain structure permanently, whereas if that same trauma, lack of touch, happens at age ten it will not produce serious brain impairment. There is clearly a timetable of imprints depending on the critical period; what characterizes the critical period is its irreversibility. Once the cortex is diminished it is not going to flower in adulthood. And the brainscans bear this out. There is less activity in the prefrontal area in certain impulse states.

In our Attention Deficit Disorder research, hyperactive patients we have seen had elevated cortisol or stress hormone levels. (Our research in salivary cortisol, St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London) After reliving very early trauma, including the birth trauma, there is a normalization of cortisol levels. So dampening of pain is no longer necessary because the pain is gone—shorn of its original power it is now but a memory.

Based on our own research, we can find no other explanation for chronically high cortisol levels other than the imprint. There is also a normalized brain system with a better balanced right and left hemispheres.

We are all of one piece; part of an organic whole. Thus, we cannot isolate one factor, serotonin, or another factor, time off drugs, to make definitive statements about addiction. No can we attack only one aspect, lack of serotonin level, to achieve our goals. We need to attack the central organizing principle, and then the rest will take care of itself. The brain can no longer be considered an isolated organ encased in the cranium but must be considered part of an entire physiologic system. Thus, when the body is in distress, that distress can be found not only in the brain but in hormones and in the blood system.

It is our hypothesis that drug addiction is made up largely of early pain, i.e., lack of love, and that pain sets in motion its countervailing forces, namely repression. When repression is in place but faulty or failing, when the serotonin-endorphin systems are inadequate to the task, there is suffering and the need for outside help in the form of drugs to dampen that suffering.

Often the outside drugs utilized mimic the exact biochemicals we should produce internally, and that is what makes it so addicting; drugs are normalizing the system. We need them. We will go to any lengths to get them, even risking jail. The strength of internal imprinted pain can often be measured by its opposing forces--the repressive system. It is the dialectic again. Pain provokes its opposite and turns feelings into numbness. Then the person feels like she is in a bubble and cannot reach out of real life. It is all grey and dull. That is the price we pay for tranquilizers. Feeling no pain equals no life.

Turning Back Evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 05:14:00 +0000

(Originally published September 4, 2008)

Primal Therapy is based on evolution. Further, it is also based on devolution. Are we nothing more than a time machine where we can visit our history in a precise way/ turning back the clock to a previously neutral non-neurotic state. Is that really possible? Scientists are now learning how to wind back the developmental clock—taking a skin cell, for example, and treating it so that it returns to a previously neutral uncommitted state. Once that is done it can be reprogrammed to become yet another kind of cell.

It is not such a big leap to apply that to humans, who after all, are but complex accumulation of microscopic cells. What may happen in our therapy is having patients go back and relive events that preceded and caused a neurotic deviation; going back to relive the great traumas, resulting in a return to a neutral state of internal harmony.Going back down the chain of pain to a physiologic memory of wellness and internal balance. It is evolution in reverse. We start out as a collection of uncommitted cells, finally resulting in a collection of different organs and brain neurons that have distinct and separate functions. In our therapy we go back and become our old shark/salamander selves (basic brainstem and limbic behavior). And then become our old Bonobo/chimp organism with its feeling brain, finally arriving at our late developing human selves. Those ancient brains still exist in all of us, performing different kinds of functions that finally add up to us humans. If we do not understand that we are made up historically of all those brains and focus only on the human thinking brain in psychotherapy, we can only get “well” in the thinking brain, excluding a vast treasure of lower brain experiences. In this way getting well on all levels of brain functioning is impossible. For example, we have found that high blood pressure and migraines often have pre-birth origins, imprints set down before we make our lives on this planet. If we do not address the brain that mediated life in the womb we cannot hope to make a profound change in these maladies.

If we want to eliminate ulcers and colitis we need to know where in the brain those responses are organized and return to that brain for cure. What we want to do is reprogram a neurotic brain system into a purer normal one. We want to lower brainwave amplitude and frequency to slower and lower levels, which we have done in our therapy. We cannot do that by making the thinking brain more active; the task is to make it less reactive while the feeling brain becomes more active. And now we know that the hyperactive prefrontal cortex can often be used to suppress the limbic/feeling output. So a busy intellectual brain can be seduced into thinking one is well, when all that has happened is self-delusion; a distanciation from feeling centers of the brain, and a flight to the thinking structures. In a psychotherapy based on language the most that can be expected is to run along superficial ideational tracks leading to other ideas, i.e., insights. The lower brains do indeed “speak” another language; and we must learn that language if we are to make deep, profound change. And obviously, we must not couch “cure” or “improvement’ simply in verbal language terms; we need to see what the body says about improvement. We need to measure the lower brain/physiological language, as well. It speaks in slower heart rate, in more natural killer immune cells and higher levels of serotonin. It speaks from experience; from experience mediated mainly by our non-human ancestors.

Not so oddly, new research is showing that as we search for an emotional memory our brains come to resemble the state it was originally. In other words, we go back to the brain originally involved in laying down the experience. We cannot do that so long as a therapist’s brain along with your brain is engaged in a badinage regarding present day events. We need a therapeutic setting that encourages reflection and introspection.

So what does devolution in therapy entail? It means, first and foremost, not to skip evolutionary steps. It means beginning in therapy with the most recent traumas and letting the vehicle of feeling carry us back in history to related earlier events. It means that in therapy we begin with the late brain neocortex and work back over time to preverbal life. It means not getting to infancy and pre-birth events until far into therapy. There are those who are re-birthers who help patients down into birth traumas long before the system can integrate them. The result is abreaction, going through the emotions of feeling without its full emotional content. It means descending down the chain of pain slowly and in ordered fashion, integrating feelings on each level. It means a basic understanding of neurophysiology so that therapists know what to expect on each level visited by the patient, and do not provoke a patient to verbally express a non-verbal feeling. It means knowing when a patient is ready for the experience of a deep early feeling, and when she is not ready. And above all, it means recognizing what a birth imprint looks like and what reliving it looks like. It means carefully titrating vital signs and seeing how they are affecting the whole organism.Finally it means not pushing patients to go somewhere when they are not ready.Reliving birth trauma and pre-birth trauma is not arrived at until late in therapy. For example, deeply depressed patients usually begin therapy in deep hopelessness and very low body temperature. We need to understand how to normalize that state and what kind of feelings the patient can accept. There is hopelessness on all levels commensurate with different brain systems. We may need to avoid deep level hopelessness until later in therapy.

When we finally arrive at birth events late in therapy we become more and more able to live in the present. That is what is meant by revisiting and reliving the past to insure the present. The deeper we go in history the less it has its grip on our current life—a pure dialectic. Therapies that focus on the present only insure that the past will remain entrenched. That is the meaning of freedom—to be liberated from our history.

On Appearances and Essences

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 05:25:00 +0000

(Originally published September 4, 2008)

Another way of looking at the difference between awareness and consciousness is that of appearances versus essences—of phenotype (appearance) versus genotype (generating sources). An approach of appearances is always individual while that of essences is universal, generating universal laws. Essence is stable while appearances are transient. Essence is historic; appearances are ahistoric. Essences are few; appearances are multitudinous – meaning an endless therapeutic search down the most complex, labyrinthine behaviors. Essences lead to consciousness, the confluence of lower centers with frontal cortical structures. Appearances lead to awareness without consciousness. Essences necessarily mean the understanding of concrete contradictions between the forces of pain and those of repression because that is the essence of the problem of neurosis. Essences mean dealing with quantities of hurt leading to new qualities of being. It means dealing holistically and systemically. Appearances mean fragmentation of the patient, isolation of her symptom from herself; treating the apparent. Progress in psychotherapy is couched in terms of appearances instead of essences; and therein lies the rub.

The reason the Freudians and other insight theorists do not generate universal laws is because they focus on appearances and not essences, on fragments not systems. I should say that sometimes they do posit general hypotheses but invariably they cannot be tested and verified because they have no scientific base. It is very difficult to compose a universal psychologic law from individual, idiosyncratic behavior that applies to one person only, or from an id or dark forces that no one can see or verify. Cognitive approaches seem to superimpose psychologic laws on humans—on (their) nature. By contrast, we believe that through careful observation we can discover the laws of nature and apply them to humans; after all, they derive from humans. Biologic truths are of the essence.

In Primal Therapy, we make every attempt to meld our observations and our own research and current neuro-biologic research. We do this by not having too many preconceived ideas about the patient, and maintaining an empirical attitude. We do not treat each symptom as an isolated entity to be eradicated. Rather, we know that there is an ensemble of symptoms tied together by something that links them. That “something” is what we must get at in therapy; it is of the essence. Thus, we need to see the whole, not fragments of behavior. To see the whole we need to investigate history which is the context for its understanding. We need to look beyond a phobia of elevators and see historic events (put into an incubator at birth, perhaps) that gave rise to it. The minute we are bereft of history we are devoid of generating causes, and therefore essences. We remain in the dark.

The Freudians claim to have a deep dynamic therapy but they stop at plunging the patient into old, infantile brains where solutions lie. They too rely on the here-and-now, on current ideas about the past. Reliving the past and having an idea about the past are not the same thing. One is curative; the other is not. One involves awareness, the other, consciousness. Even tears in psychoanalysis are derivative. There is crying about in their therapy: the adult looking back on her life and crying. But it is not the baby crying as that baby, needing as that baby, something deep that is beyond description that can go on for an hour or more. In “crying about,” there is never the infant cries that we hear so often in our patients—a sign of a different brain at work, a different brain system solving its problems in its own way. The patient in the here-and-now, ego-oriented therapies is walking around in his history while the therapist is focusing on the present. He may be physically present but his emotions are in the past.

What we discover about the cognitive/insight therapists and especially the televangelist psychologists is that they embrace old homilies, morality, and religious ideals that are in the zeitgeist, mix them into some kind of psychological jargon, and deliver them with a folksy air of, “I know what you need.” Too often it all amounts to: Get Over It! And we all shout, Yeah! For we too think others should just get down to business and stop whining. That is the George S. Patton syndrome. Develop a positive attitude and you won’t feel like such a loser. But it’s hard to feel that you are capable and can succeed when you have spent a lifetime with parents who reminded of what a failure you are.

Every insight therapy has the implicit base that awareness causes improvement. It is founded on the notion that once we are aware, we can make necessary changes in our behavior. Awareness can make us aware, and that is a positive step. But it cannot change personality, which is organic, and it can never make us conscious. We can be aware that we are too critical of our spouse. Maybe with effort we can stop that behavior. But if we understand the concept of the imprint, then we know that anything that doesn’t directly attack the imprinted memory cannot make a permanent change. We can be aware that we are working too hard and neglecting our family, but when there is a motor inside driving us relentlessly, that awareness is useless. Ideas are never a match for the strength of the brainstem/limbic forces, which, I remind the reader, have everything to do with survival. There is always a rationale for our behavior: “I have to be gone and work hard to support my family properly.” We have applauded this kind of neurosis in our culture, which adores hard work, ambition, and relentless effort. Being driven is about the most widespread of neurotic forms. If only we knew how to finish the equation: being driven by . . . (Answer: need). Translation: I was not loved in my infancy and I am in pain, which drives me incessantly. And besides, I can’t stop because my imprint at birth was that to stop was to die. I have to keep going to keep from feeling helpless, that there is nothing I can do. Those are the truths we find when we feel our imprints—the truths that when felt will stop our drive and allow us finally to relax.

Why is cognitive therapy so widespread today? To a large extent because it is far easier and quicker (and cheaper) to change an idea than a feeling. Insight and cognitive approaches tend to appeal to those in their “head”; this applies to both patient and therapist. Neither the patient nor the therapist is likely to realize the amount of history we are carrying around and how that affects our thinking. How else could we possibly ignore the horrendous things that happen to our patients in their childhood? Nowhere in the cognitive literature have I seen a discussion of basic need as central to personality development, of why the person cannot put the brakes on impulsive behavior. As I have mentioned, the ascending fibers from down below, starting from the brainstem and the associated limbic networks, alert the cortex to danger; they are more numerous and stronger and faster acting than the descending inhibitory fibers, which as we know come later in evolution. Here in purely neurologic terms do we see how feelings are stronger than ideas.

An early lack of love means that there is an even further degradation of these descending inhibitory systems, not only because of cortical weakness, but also because the limbic-amygdala forces holding the imprint are enormously powerful and are importuning the cortex to accept the message. The engorged amygdala is figuratively bursting at the seams to unleash its load of feeling. The dominant direction it can go is determined by evolution—upward and outward, impacting the frontal cortex. There is only one direction that repression can travel—and that is downward, to hold those feelings back. Ideas can help in that job just as tranquilizers can. I suspect that therapists who practice therapies that deny history, and deny imprints and biology, are drawn to such therapies, ironically, as a function of their own history. So long as the connection is poor and access impaired, the therapist is open to any kind of ideas that appeal to him intellectually. And what appeals to him intellectually is what is dictated by his unconscious. And that means that he might choose a therapy that operates on denial, such as the cognitive, because he operates on denial. He makes therapeutic choices that obey this dictum.

If a therapist, unconsciously, has a need for power, he is apt to dictate to the patient; it may be directions for living, relationships, choices, and, above all, insights. He will impose his ideas, his interpretation of the patient’s behavior. What he says will become the most important in his therapy instead of what the patient feels.

If the therapist has the need to be helpful and get “love” from the patient, he can act this out in therapy. I remember feeling my need to become a therapist and be helpful, trying symbolically to help my mentally ill mother to get well and be a real mother. No one is exempt from symbolic behavior. And it is certainly more comfortable for a patient to act out his needs and get them fulfilled (symbolically) in therapy, and imagine he is getting somewhere, than to feel the pain of lack of fulfillment. It is understandable that the idea of lying on a matted floor crying and screaming doesn’t appeal to some. Pain is not always an enticing prospect. Thus, the cognitive/ insight therapist can be similarly deceived and entangled in the same delusion as his patient: both getting love for being smart. It is a mutually deceptive unconscious pact.

Any time we are not anchored in our feelings we are up for grabs; any idea will do. It is good that the left frontal cortex is malleable, but bad because it is too malleable. It is the difference between having an open mind, and a mind that is so open as to be a sieve. The difference is having a left frontal cortex open to the right brain versus a mind too open to others and their suggestions precisely because it is not open to its better half. That is why a scientist can understand a great deal about neurology but practice a therapy that has nothing to do with the brain, which I have seen time and again—the bifurcation of consciousness. What he or she knows scientifically does not translate to the other side of the head because of disconnection or dissociation. He/she may be utterly aware and utterly unconscious.

In appearances, the therapy remains pretty much the same no matter what is wrong. The Freudians have a certain take on development and pathology. They will follow that irrespective of what is wrong with the patient, and it all adds up to insights and more insights. Other therapies specialize in dream analysis. They go on doing that without any proof of its efficacy other than patient reports. There are no physiological measurements. They neglect the fact that experience is laid down neuro-physiologically, not just as an idea; they neglect essences.

Think of this as magic: Take a tranquilizer and we can sleep better, avoid sleep problems, hold down acting-out, stop feeling anxious, be less aggressive, less depressed, stop bedwetting and premature ejaculation, and stop using alcohol and taking drugs. One specific pain pill can accomplish this universal task. Why? Because the essence, pain, is behind all of those disparate symptoms.

Pain will always remain pain no matter what label we pin on it or how we choose to deny it. Whether we feel ignored or humiliated or unloved, the pain is the same and processed by the same structures. The frontal cortex gives it different labels and we act out differently, but the centers of hurt treat them the same. Isn’t it strange that we use the same tranquilizer to ameliorate depression and children’s bedwetting? Maybe it is all one disease with different manifestations, and when we attack the generating source with drugs, all of the manifestations disappear for a short time. We need to learn from Prozac the most obvious lesson: It blocks all manner of symptoms. Therefore, if we, too, in a feeling therapy attack orchestrating forces, we can block and eradicate all of those different symptoms. Notice also that it is a nonverbal medication that slows down ideational obsessions. It tells us about the relationship of lower centers where there are no ideas to higher level thought processes, which deal with ideas.

In an anti-dialectic approach, which is that of appearances, there is no central motivating force. There is no struggle of opposite forces that move and direct us. It all remains on the surface—static. And because the approach does not contemplate the deep conflicting forces motivating us, there is no reason to delve into the patient’s history. It is all non-dynamic. Treatment based on dialectic principles means that there can be no ego or mystical forces that arise out of the blue, containing a mechanical, hereditary “given.” When the dynamics are left out, the therapy has no alternative but to be mechanical.

Because of an unloving, traumatic early childhood, a person cannot put the brakes on the amygdala or brainstem structures because he hasn’t the neurologic equipment; there is an impaired prefrontal cortex that does that. The cognitivist adds his frontal cortical weight to the patient so that their ideas, welded together, help control underlying forces. “You are strong. You can succeed. I will help you try. You just think you’re a loser but you are not. You are really a good person, not the evil one you think you are.” We see this in an experiment reported in a 2002 journal of Nature where electronic stimulation of the prefrontal cortex prevented rats from freezing up after they had been conditioned to do so at the sound of a tone (the one was paired with an electric shock). (FOOTNOTE: Nature (Nov. 7, 2002) When the therapist and the patient combine their thoughts in an insight session, it is no different from an electronic stimulation of that area. In short, it blocks the experience of terror and pain.

How is that psychologic notion different from the religious? The difference is that psychologists do not use the word evil; they call them negative forces. Shrunk to size, they are the same thing. And of course, the mass of current television psychologists are really televangelists in psychological clothing. They have wide appeal because they combine current religious precepts with psychologese (think Wayne Dyer). It doesn’t challenge anyone; it only confirms their prejudices. It offers cachet to them.

Then there are the drug therapies. Patients are given a variety of drugs for almost any condition. Talking to the patient is secondary. Patients are anxious—one type of drug. They are depressed—another type of drug. And, often the drugs have the same effect on the brain: killing pain. And if the drugs we give to patients do not work, we raise the dose. And if that doesn’t work we change drugs. Meanwhile there is no attempt to find out and address why they are depressed. Though we are trying desperately to find genetic causes, depression is not a necessary part of the human condition.

A recent newspaper article described a woman who is suing her psychiatrist because her husband was suicidal and his doctor kept changing his medication. She said that it made him worse. The doctors were relying on appearances, not essences, and were possibly misled. She claims that no one talked to him. Here is a case where even a little talking and some sympathy would have helped. There is a place for it. Maybe drugs weren’t the answer. This approach saves the bother of having to deal with the patient’s history and his early life. It saves the troublesome effort of talking to the patient and feeling for his anguish. Just that, feeling something for the patient, can convey empathy and can be therapeutic.

Treatment that primarily involves giving drugs considers the patient as a “case.” There is no personal interaction after a few cursory questions. “Tell me about your symptom but not about your life. Tell me about it, not about you.” I have been in that position as a patient, seeing doctors who treat me as a “case.” It is not comforting. But then there are the economics. Seeing many patients every hour makes it difficult to empathize or to even know much about the patient. After filling out a long questionnaire, we find the doctor entering the treatment room scanning the file, unable to really take in the essentials about us. History is another victim in current therapy, both medical and psychological. Today, psychiatry has become an arm of the pharmaceutical industry. They tell us what drugs work and we use them. The insurance companies won’t pay for us to delve into the patient’s history, to take our time to find out about her. They pay for immediate results. The conclusion: We develop new therapeutic theories to accommodate the idolatry of the here-and-now intellectual, drug approach. We have ceded our integrity for pay. We don’t do it consciously, but we don’t feed our families if we don’t accommodate to the new reality.

Of course, cognitive approaches are ideal. Tell the patient, in essence, “get over it” and “thank you for coming.” In the new zeitgeist, the aim of cognitive therapy is to get the patient over it, not to understand basic dynamics. What is basic in man is his reservoir of pain and how it drives him to behave. Once we neglect basic need, we are thrust into awareness because it is the beginning and end of consciousness. We cannot see the reservoir when we focus solely on awareness. Therefore we cannot see the reason so many people on are drugs, both legal and illegal. We try to stamp out the need with words, but we will lose that war because need is stronger than anyone or anything. It will not remain suppressed. No one is stronger or brighter than her need because need is inextricably intermeshed with survival, and survival reigns. If we want to stop the demand for drugs we must attend to basic childhood needs, starting with the way we perform childbirth.

The Difference Between Awareness And Consciousness

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:33:00 +0000

(Originally published September 4, 2008)

The leitmotif of every intellectual therapy is that awareness helps us make progress. I’ll grant that awareness helps; but being conscious cures. Unless we are able to achieve consciousness in psychotherapy, the most we can do is tread water, having the illusion of progress without its essence.

When it comes to measuring progress in psychotherapy, it matters whether one measures the whole system or only aspects of brain function. Awareness fits the latter. It has a specific seat in the brain— Awareness and consciousness are two different animals. “Aware” and feelings lie on different levels. Awareness is what we often use to hide the unconscious; a defense. Awareness without feeling is the enemy of consciousness. What we are after is the awareness of consciousness and the consciousness of awareness. Not the awareness of awareness. When the patient is uncomfortable during a session, therapists typically take the position that “More insights is what we need. She is not aware enough.” But it is not the content of those insights that helps; it is the fact of the insight—a belief system that aids the defense mechanisms to do their job. Yet, what lies on low levels of brain function is immune to any idea. We can be anxious and aware but not anxious and conscious.

Psychotherapy has been in the business of awareness for too long. Since the days of Freud, we have apotheosized insights. We are so used to appealing to the almighty frontal cortex, the structure that has made us the advanced human beings that we are, that we forgot our precious ancestors, their instincts and feelings. We may emphasize how our neocortex is so different from other animal forms while we disregard our mutually shared feeling apparatus. We need a therapy of consciousness, not awareness. If we believe that we have an id stewing inside of us, there is no proper treatment because the cause is an apparition—a phantom that doesn’t exist. Or worse, it is a genetic force that is immutable and therefore cannot be treated. In any case, we are the losers.

There is no powerlessness like being unconscious; running around in a quandary about what to do about this or that, about sexual problems, high blood pressure, depression, and temper outbursts. It all seems like such a mystery. The aware person or he who seeks awareness has to be told everything. He listens, obeys—and suffers. Awareness doesn’t make us sensitive, empathic, or loving. It makes us aware of why we can’t be. It’s like being aware of a virus. It’s good to know what the problem is but nothing changes. The best awareness can do is create ideas that negate need and pain.

Awareness is not healing; consciousness is. True conscious-awareness means feelings, and therefore humanity. The conscious person does not have to be told about his secret motivations. He feels them and they are no longer secret. Consciousness means thinking what we feel and feeling what we think; the end of a split, hypocritical existence. Awareness cannot do that because awareness has to change each and every time there is a new situation. That is why conventional cognitive/insight therapy is so complex. It has to follow each turn in the road. It has to battle the need for drugs and then battle the inability to hold down a job and then try to understand why relationships are falling apart. This also explains why conventional therapy takes so long; each avenue must be traversed independently. Consciousness is global; it applies to all situations, encompasses all those problems at once. The true power of consciousness is to lead a conscious life with all that that means: not being subject to uncontrolled behavior, being able to concentrate and learn, able to sit still and relax, being able to make choices that are healthy ones, to choose partners that are the healthy ones, and above all, to be able to love.

By and large, “awareness” is left brain, but that does not necessarily mean language. Conscious-awareness is right-left brain working in harmony. Incidentally, a study out by two psychologists at UCLA, Eisenberger and Liberman, found that people who experienced less discomfort had more pre-frontal cortex activity. (FOOTNOTE: N.I. Eisenberger and Matthew D. Liberman, “Hurt Feelings,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 11, 2002, page A16) Again, higher centers are able to suppress and calm the lower ones. They also found both physical pain and emotional pain use the same pathways in the brain. In brief, pain is pain no matter what the source—emotional pain is physical. It is not just in our minds; it is not just psychological and cannot be treated on the psychological level alone.

We know that when there is awareness without connection during a session—it is known as “abreaction.” The vital signs rise and fall in sporadic fashion, rarely below baseline. This is what often happens in the pseudo primal therapies where patients are told what and how to feel. Here the vital signs do not move at all. It is why we measure vital signs before and after each session. We measured a new patient who had mock primal therapy. He went through early feelings that looked real. His vital signs never changed, indicating an energy release but no connection. So long as there is no connection, nor a shift in brain processing from right to left, there will be no commensurate change in physiology.

This is not to be confused with appropriate emotions where a person is expressing anger over an injustice or grief due to the loss of a loved one. Those are appropriate feelings, not neurotic.

The right limbic brain/brainstem is responsible for a great part of our arousal, while the left-frontal brain is the calming agent. When there is hyper-arousal due to brainstem/ limbic unfulfilled needs and memories, the left orbito-frontal cortex can help dampen that arousal and produce a false sense of calm. This is one key element in cognitive therapy. Indeed, as I pointed out, one reason for the development of the left brain was to help in the repressive process; keeping enough pain at bay to allow us to function in everyday life.

It is my experience that the wider the gap between deep feeling and awareness, the greater the unreality of the belief system; the more remote the feeling, the more far-out the belief system, and the more tenacious its hold on us. We had one patient who was fixated on aliens coming from another planet to attack her. After many lesser-strength feelings, she finally felt what those aliens were—her alienated feelings; unknown terrors that she converted into attacking aliens. She needed to justify or rationalize her fears. Because they were so monumental, her beliefs soared into the bizarre area.

Consciousness is the end of anxiety. Consciousness means connection to what is driving us. Disconnected feelings are what drive us constantly to keep busy. Their energy is found in the form of ulcers or irritable bowel, in phobias and the inability to focus and concentrate. They are the ubiquitous danger, shaping a parallel self—a personality of defenses and the avoidance of pain; a self stuck in history forever. In effect, there is a parallel self, the unreal front; and the real self, the one that feels and hurts. Thus, there are parallel universes that make up the human condition; one that feels and suffers, the other that puts on a good front. The latter, the front, is what most psychotherapy deals with: the psychology of appearances versus essences. It is navigating in the wrong universe.

Awareness means dealing with only the last evolutionary neuronal development: the pre-frontal cortex. It is the difference between the top level versus the confluence of all three levels, which is consciousness. Once we are conscious, we have words to explain our feelings, but words do not eradicate them; they explain. We are deeply wounded long before words make their appearance in our brains. Words are neither the problem nor the solution. They are the last evolutionary step in processing the feeling or sensation. They are the companions of feelings.

There are types of awareness that are important for our survival. Being aware of a healthy diet is crucial even in the absence of consciousness. But a therapy of awareness versus one of consciousness has an important difference in terms of global impact. In science we are after the universal so that we can apply our knowledge to other patients. A therapy of needs can apply to many individuals (we all have similar needs); a therapy of ideas usually can only apply to a specific patient. When we try to convince the patient of different ideas (e.g., “People actually do like you”), we generate no universal laws. It is all idiosyncratic. But if we address the feelings underneath, we can generate propositions that apply generally: for instance, pain when unleashed can produce paranoid ideas or compulsions. Or, the frontal cortex can change simple needs and feelings into complex unrealities, changing them into their opposites.

One cannot be aware without an intact prefrontal cortex. By contrast, there is no seat of consciousness. As banal as it may seem, consciousness reflects our whole system—the whole brain as it interacts with the body.

Why We Over-React

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 04:55:00 +0000

(Originally published August 27, 2008)

It always seems like a mystery when we see ourselves or someone else react inordinately to some some event.. But it is not overreaction; it is that we are reacting to things we cannot see. Once we lay bare the feeling or event that caused the reaction it all makes sense; it is then reaction not overreaction.

Let me explain. When something happens in the present it triggers off related feelings or memories on lower levels of consciousness—in the unconscious. It is what I term “resonance.” (It may be that the nerve or neuronal circuits have the same frequency so that when one feels neglected or ignored it sets off memories of the parents neglecting us and we “overreact” to the slight in the present). It seems like an overreaction but it is not; what we are reacting to is just hidden from sight. That same feeling can resonate with being ignored in infancy; (no one comes when the baby is crying in the crib). What seems to be happening is that the synaptic weight of the memory is commensurate with the valence of the very early painful imprint. Each level of consciousness contributes its share to the total feeling that will coalesce to produce a unified, cohesive neuronal circuit, finally offering meaning and power to the event. It is that meaning/power that can drive one to kill when a girlfriend leaves her lover—“I feel abandoned (by mother). I can’t live without her.” Murder is clearly an overreaction but when placed in context we can at least understand it. Think of present-day trigger as a dredge that digs deeper and deeper widening access to the most powerful and remote memories. That dredge goes where the feeling leads it. It seeks out related events associated by feeling.

Although the resonance/frequency connects all the top and lower level circuits the weights of the memory are not the same. The valence of some memories is greater than others and become more powerful as we descend down the chain of feeling to the level of birth memories or even to events in the womb.

In most current psychotherapies the focus of each session is the act-out of the feeling rather than on the feeling/need itself. This analysis of the by-ways of behavior is an interminal task, skimming the surface reactions. Focusing on the deep internal imprinted reality finally makes it all have sense. The problem is that we cannot approach that deep-lying force with words. We must speak the language encased in our most primitive nervous system. It is for this reason that psychotic rage cannot be treated with conventional psychotherapy. Thus a slight misunderstanding can provoke a massive outburst of behavior. In order to make a dent in our raging behavior we need to delve deep in the brain and its unconscious where the organization of rage gets its start. We can see why it is not a good idea to plunge people in remote and painful memories in psychotherapy because the system is not ready to integrate them. The patient will tumble into overload and the result is a scattered, dysfunctional human being. lost in symbolism. It is also not a good idea to keep all focus on the present when there are icebergs of feelings lying deep ready to disrupt our forward progress. In my patois,severe overreactions are when third line current events set off first-line, brainstem reactions. The feeling may be identical on all levels of brain function but their driving force is quite different. There is no way that a here-and-now behavioral approach is going to solve deep-lying historical tendencies.

Why Most of our Lives is a Rationale For The Imprint

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 21:41:00 +0000

(Originally published August 21, 2008)

We think we are rational beings driven by rational thoughts toward rational ends, but we are basically irrational beings driven toward a rationale, and that rationale is to justify the fact that we are being driven beyond our control.

Let’s start with the imprint. There are events very early in life, even while being carried in the womb that are engraved into the total system—blood, muscle, joints, brain and nerves. They happen when certain needs must be fulfilled and are not. How we react to that event becomes a prototype and determines our reactions, in part, thereafter. The prototype is an adaptive mechanism in the service of survival. It endures because it is the first major adaptation in life and helped us live. To do that there had to be compensatory behavior, dislocations of function that also endures. The dislocations endure as a necessity for the fact that the imprint is indelibly impressed into the whole system. So, for example, the serotonin inhibitory system may be compromised, and becomes deficient. Or the thyroid secretion may be diminished. There is always a compensation and dislocation, and that occurs in the most vulnerable areas, places where genetics may play a part. The imprint prevents the physiologic system from functioning normally, all because basic need is not fulfilled. When there is insufficient oxygen in the womb or at birth it is impressed. And when all that occurs before birth the dislocation of function will endure for a lifetime; the pre-birth system is not equipped to make up for lacks. The post-birth system is.

Now the imprint, by definition is early and remains in the deep unconscious. Yet it has the force of survival. A pretty hefty force. What it does is create behavior, external (act-out) and internal, (act-in) that still attempts fulfillment of those basic needs. That is why we are driven by it. And we need to make those behaviors rational; hence we develop rationales for what we do. Remember that I wrote about an experiment where in a split brain experiment the scientist input stimuli on the right side. The left brain had no idea what had happened yet to justify his behavior he needed to develop a rationale: “I am laughing because of your funny white coat.” That is the basic paradigm I am discussing. We have input from the right brain input (the emotional brain stores many of our imprints). Then due to repression and the inability to access our feelings we need to “explain” our beliefs and behavior. Once we get access to that brain we are no longer driven by the unconscious and are finally in control of ourselves.

Example: during the birth process there is no help. The baby is drugged by the anesthesia given to the mother and cannot help out to get born. It is “all too much”---the imprint. Even when there are no words to describe it is still imprinted. Much later when we have words and concepts we will put an explanation to it; but it will always be inadequate because until we arrive there we have no real idea what the feeling is that is driving us. Later, with parents who won’t help the child, who drive her to accomplish and do, the feeling is reinforce—there is no help. The feeling is also, “I have to do it all on my own.” It seems “right” to the person not to ask for help (and therefore not to get it). Not asking for help means “doing it all on my own.” And this is due to a feeling and need that is unconscious, deeply buried out of sight of conscious/awareness. Another example: a pregnant mother is depressed and drinks coffee constantly during pregnancy. She is low on many of her hormone levels. The baby is being over-stimulated. He cannot combat this input: “nothing I can do will make a difference.” At birth being drugged by painkillers given to the mother and again, “nothing I do will make a difference,” In college he drops out because it is too much and it seems like no matter what he does it is not enough. This has been compounded by parents who never praise, always criticized, and the child cannot please no matter what he does. He gives up easily because at birth the drug stopped all efforts; later he gave up because no one cared that he tried and did good, and now he is married to a hyper-critical wife who never lets up. She calls him a “loser.” He has no idea where the base of all this is; he just keeps giving up in the face of adversity, doesn’t even try for approval because inside he is sure it will never come. In a self- fulfilling prophecy he does become a loser. He is sexually impotent because the minute there is excitement he loses his drive and his will. Nothing he will do will turn out right. Total defeatism.

Another example: a child is born after a mad struggle to get out. He has learned aggression as a key mode of behavior. His passive parents give into him because he is so assertive. He takes on chores that are very heavy and he does not recognize real obstacles in his way. He does too much and does not know when to back off. To give up is to die, in his physiologic equation. He pursues a woman who really does not want him. He cannot see that because he has learned aggression as a survival technique. He thinks the woman just needs coaxing, but he does not know when to stop.

In these cases the left prefrontal area is just a large rationale-concocting apparatus to keep behavior ego-syntonic— comfortable to the self. It also keeps the feeling unconscious and unexamined.

A child with the same birth configuration as above is left feeling all alone—no one to help. His parents are emotionally distant and he learns to be alone. Right after birth there was a sick mother so that he was not cuddled right after birth. He grows feeling alienated, keeps himself removed from others and doesn’t notice his isolation. He is acting-out “all alone.” The force comes from birth and before, the emotional focus comes from how life experiences channels him. He is slightly reserved and not cuddly, so he gets less love. He can rationalize this how he wishes but he is still victim of his imprint.

The imprint endures for a lifetime. It is stuck in the need— unfulfilled mode. It can only be undone when it is no longer useful. What does that mean? It means that so long as the load of pain is inordinate and needs repression the imprint goes on. But when we feel the original need in context with all of its emotional force it no longer serves any purpose and is done with. To get there we need to take a slow, orderly descent down to origins; but not before we have felt the top level portion of it. We need, in short, to feel and integrate the least noxious part of the feeling first. Third-line (current) pains are rarely if ever life-threatening. As we descend down the brain we come to pains, such as a lack of oxygen at birth, that are life endangering. If we go below that top level part and plunge into the lower level pains it will all be too much to integrate. Suppose we have a level ten childhood/infancy pain lying below a level ten adult-level pain. The level twenty is too much to integrate. But if we have felt the top level pain first and then go lower the overall level will not be too overwhelming. Whenever we try to relive very early pains without seeing what lies on top we are bound to fail. Our gating system is masterful; it allows us to feel just enough and not so much as to be shattering.

Our act-out is just as unconscious as the feeling living inside of us. We are driven by the imprint until we are free from it. Then we are in the driver’s seat. It is the difference between being driven and driving. We will no longer be passengers on our worldly peregrinations.

A New Paradigm for Psychology: Revolution in Psychotherapy

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 20:40:00 +0000

(Originally published August 15, 2008)

In over one hundred years of psychotherapy very little has changed, except cosmetically. It is still the fifty-minute hour, the sit-up face-to-face-talk with a plethora of insights swaddled in the gentle and dulcet tones of a concerned therapist. There is still the evasion of the unconscious as a place of ill-defined demons—something to be avoided at all costs. No one says it, but it is implied in the careful steering the patient into the present and away from the past. The Freudians now call it ego-psychology but it is still psychoanalysis with a slightly different focus; an habiliment—antique get-up with a modern facade. Sadly, in the name of progress they have moved away from the past into a more present approach. The same is true for all of the cognitive/behavior therapies. There is an apotheosis of the present, of the here-and-now, and a move away from the one thing that is curative--history. We are historic beings, imprinted neuro-physiologically with our past. Any proper treatment must address that history.

Thus far, we have been talking to the wrong brain! Unfortunately, that brain doesn’t talk, doesn’t understand English and, as a matter of fact, doesn’t understand words. The correct brain is one that contains our history, our pain; the lower brain that processes our deep feelings that can finally liberate us. It does understand feelings; we need to speak that language—one without words. No one can be cured until we understand the profound underpinnings of emotional and mental illness. Words are the province of the top-level neocortex, evolved much later than the feeling brain. There is a lifetime of experience buried below that top level that governs our behavior and the development of symptoms. Therein lies the rub. For it means flouting the warning about plunging patients into the deep unconscious, an unconscious, they implore, that will irrevocably disturb the psyche. And it is this caveat, among many equally wrong, that have kept the practice of psychotherapy in the dark ages, literally, believing there are dark forces that propel us here and there beyond our control.

Psychotherapists often bow to history but only as a token. Yet history, the patient’s past, is medicine, and it is the only medicine that is curative. The past is a duty for the therapist; without it we are again in the old psychotherapy of the early 1900’s. Can we imagine any other branch of medicine still in the grips of the science of 1920? Freud wrote his major, “Interpretation of Dreams,” at the beginning of the last century. Surely there is a bit of progress since then.

Once we have a firm grasp of history and its evolution we will know that addressing mental illness is not a matter of just understanding it but being immersed in it; submerged in our history, in its feelings, ceding to its power until words (our top-level brain) will no longer suffice; only feelings can. Words will simply not do it; in fact, words are the antithesis of cure, inimical to any therapeutic progress, as odd as that sounds, because they are too often used for a defense. As a matter of fact, in many situations the more the intellectual brain is active the more suppressed the feeling centers are.

I practiced Freudian-oriented psychotherapy for many years. One key reason was that there was relatively nothing else for the practice of dynamic psychotherapy. At least Freud posited an unconscious, and were he alive today I am sure he would not be a Freudian.

Let me start with my first important observation in therapy. A young man in conventional group therapy was recounting a visit he made in New York to see Raphael Ortiz in the theater of the absurd. He said that Ortiz was marching up and down the stage shouting mama! And inviting the audience to do the same. When they did many people in the audience began to cry and scream. I encouraged this young man to do the same. He refused but I insisted. Finally he began to scream mama!, fell off the chair and was writhing in pain on the floor. It went on for a half hour, something I had never seen before. When he came out of it he touched the carpet and said, “I can feel!” He felt different. I taped this session and for years afterward I listened to it to see what secrets this held. I also tried this again on other patients with very much the same result. I knew that I saw something that therapists practically never see but I did not know what it meant. I finally figured out what it meant only years later. I tried to see what these patients had in common. It was feelings—access to feelings that made the difference. It would take another twenty five years to figure out what was going on inside the person and her brain; but there was some basic truth I had uncovered. The result, I believe, is a new paradigm in psychotherapy; and it is not just a belief.

Obviously, if we allow patients to go deeply into their past without any intellectual interference we can learn so much. There lies a sequestered reality undreamed of in our field. And there lies the cure. By “cure” I mean arriving at ultimate causes. If we see time after time that those with migraine often relive oxygen deprivation at birth we begin to realize that perhaps oxygen deprivation may be one “cause” of later migraine. Particularly when those migraine begin to disappear after many relivings. This without a fixed theoretical mind-set. The same is true of many symptoms. Until we see in therapy the relationship between high blood pressure and traumatic events around birth we cannot alter it significantly. “Cure” means addressing and reliving the ultimate cause of our behavior and physical problems. We cannot do that until we acknowledge that very early events, even before birth, are imprinted and endure for a lifetime; that in order to eradicate serious even life-threatening symptoms we need to go back and relive those suffering aspects of an imprint that could not be experienced originally due to their load of pain. In my book, Primal Healing, I document the many, many studies that confirm the enduring power of early imprints.

There is no Jungian unconscious or shadow forces to blind us to the patient’s reality, no id nor other mystical notions. We can observe and later, we may draw some conclusions. Those conclusions would follow our observations. The problem is the need to absorb current observations within some kind of pre-established theory in order to make sense out of it. Some of the past trauma makes no “sense” in the ordinary scheme of things. there are no words nor scenes to put to it. I saw birth reliving for months and told my patients this was absolute nonsense because a local university neurologic department said that it was not possible. But they continued on and I had to reorient my thinking. Not only is it possible but we have seen it now with hundreds of patients from many countries of the world including those individuals who never read about it in my books. It is a measurable event. And we have researched it at the UCLA Pulmonary Laboratory as well in several brainwave studies.

Thomas Kuhn wrote that in the evolution of science there are periodic shifts or jumps that represent major changes in the direction of a particular scientific discipline. He labeled these jumps Paradigm Shifts. In our view, Primal Therapy and Primal Theory represent a major paradigm shift in the science of psychology. And in the course of this new perspective I want to demonstrate how a brain system designed to allow us to function under stress is in fact at the root of our mental problems. It is the story of the evolution of the brain and feelings. And evolution cannot be ignored in the therapy of human beings. Let’s take the case of deep depression. There are now modern techniques to ameliorate it—from tranquilizers and pain killers to drilling holes in the brain and probing deep down. The reason that we have had to used drugs and surgery is because there is no therapy extant that can go deep enough to affect the areas specifically involved in processing emotional pain. We can and we do. It is why we can use the word “cure.”

We in the profession and as patients may have a hard time embracing a feeling approach that seems to contradict what we think is correct. Namely, the value of ideas, insights and beliefs in assessing progress in psychotherapy. Therapists take the patient’s word for it. That should be the last thing we should be doing; for the left-brain intellectual side can imagine all sorts of cures and epiphanies while the subtext, the unconscious, is riddled with agonies. Neurosis is not due to a lack of insights nor cured by them. What is curative is an experiential therapy not a cognitive one.

If all we do in psychotherapy is no better than a religious epiphany, we have not gained much. In religious states the person often does feel much better, is more optimistic and ready to function. At least our field has made some important progress in understanding the life-long impact of early non-verbal or pre-verbal events on adult behavior. And we need to measure those pre-verbal events with non-verbal methods; those machines and blood tests that tell us what is lodged in the deep recesses of the brain.

Each week brings new confirmation of our position: a study of newborn rats who received just a small series of pain pricks showed greater preference for alcohol as adults. None of this is a mystery any more. The question remains, what to do about it? “It” is the imprint. What to do is to understand that the suffering component of early pre-verbal pain has never been felt and integrated; rather, it was coded and stored waiting for its chance to meet up with prefrontal brain cells for integration. We must go back slowly in therapy, neurosis in reverse, to events that carry such a load of pain that only pieces of it can be experienced at any one time; that is what is necessary. As I mentioned, it is neurosis in reverse, a reverse where we must not skip steps in retracing evolution. We cannot go back immediately to the birth trauma.

What seems to have happened early on was that the pain of birth or being left alone for hours right birth or not being touched in the first months of life caused great pain. The suffering component of this pain is sheared off and placed in storage while the precise memory of it may be stored elsewhere. That is why a patient can recall in detail an event, “They gave my dog away,” and yet take months to feel the pain of it. What we do is recapture the hidden pain, the part that was sheared off, and help the patient experience it over time. Never in one session, but in many sessions over months and months. Anything else defies evolution and the understanding of the valence of pain that resides on the deepest levels of the unconscious.

A study by Finnish scientists M. Huttunen and P. Niskanen investigated children whose fathers died either while the mother was carrying or during the first year of the child’s life. The offspring were examined over a thirty-five year period using documentary evidence. Only those who lost their father while the child was in the womb were at increased risk of mental diseases, alcoholism/addiction, or criminal behavior. Clearly, the emotional state of the mother was affected and that possibly had lifelong deleterious affects on the child. The results of this study suggest that the emotional state of the pregnant mother has more long-term effects on the child than the emotional state of the mother during the years following birth. And when we are investigating addiction we must pay attention to womb-life.

Until there is a science of psychotherapy, one that coalesces with modern neuroscience, there will be human suffering with no real chance at relief and cure. Depressions, anxiety, phobias and obsessions will go on ad infinitum. We need a new orientation to what we are doing, to open up our frame of reference. We need to get away from the perspective that views man as some kind of decorticate brain bereft of a body and its hormones. We need to merge psychology with neurology and biology so that man is not dissected into small pieces for study. And once dissected each aspect becomes a subject for statistical analysis which does not seem to advance psychotherapy as a science. We need a radically new paradigm in psychology and psychotherapy; one that is based on evolution, feelings and imprinted memory. Everywhere we have looked, with thousands of patients from some twenty countries we have found pain at the bottom of it all.

The question is how do we get rid of the pain? Up until now our only recourse was to squelch it with tranquilizers or talk it to death with myriad insights. We know now that the task is not to avoid that unconscious pain, but to be awash in it. First we must go back and relive the past memory in sequential order, a bit at a time, as it was laid down. We need to be submerged in old painful feelings, let them control us for a moment, and dialectically, we can then control them; no longer the unconscious force driving our behavior and symptoms. There is a way to be rid of the unconscious forces that give us nightmares, high blood pressure and a myriad of act-outs, not the least of which are sexual. We need to let that unconscious rise to the surface, shake us, makes us cry and scream amid waves of pain and then, lo and behold, we are free! And that freedom, that ability to feel, is ineffable. We can (and have) measured it in the blood, in saliva and in the brain. And finally, it is evident in the comportment of the patient. But the testimony of patients is only one aspect of what we look at.

If we feel unloved by our parents to the depths of our soul we open the channels finally to accept love—because we can feel. Until that time the imprint will lock-in defenses and block feelings from getting out or in. If we can feel hidden pain, and its context—its origins--we give patients back their feelings, the most important gift any therapist can offer them. This cannot happen if we think the unconscious is some immutable power lurking in the dark antipodes of the mind waiting to destroy us; some unthinking malevolent force of evil. After all, when the disguise is ripped away from this so-called theory, it is just another mystical notion devoid of any reality. Patients will never get well based on mysticism.

I have taken my patients as deep and as remote in their past as possible and I have never found a demon or dark, evil force. All I have ever seen is sequestered pain. All that is there is pure need left over from infancy when those needs should have been fulfilled. They are here now because they were never fulfilled and resolved back then. They drive us now as a reminder of a true lack of fulfillment early on. We act-out now trying to find fulfillment but all we can ever find is symbolic, hollow fulfillment that does nothing about the real need. We must go back and feel that need in its original context and original form; only then will we be free of it. We will have transformed the “need for” (drugs, food, sex) into pure early need for love when it was a matter of life itself.

How can we fight an enemy if we never know what it looks like? Are feelings an enemy? Their force is. They remain an alien power because they could not be integrated at the time; their valence was far too strong. We are older and stronger now and can manage to face it.

I do use the word “cure,” which is not to be treated with opprobrium, but rather a state to be sought after assiduously. If we are able to travel back and down to the earliest days of life and undo and redo imprinted history we can then use the term “cure.” We have arrived at ultimate causes. If we do not travel back to the far reaches of the unconscious we cannot use the term “cure.” We are but skimming the surface, leaving a massive dark force intact. We need to insist on the goal of cure and the avenues that get us there. Insights in therapy will never get us there. Neurosis isn’t caused by a lack of insights and cured by proferring them. It is not enough to state that we want a cure for our patients; we need to see the proof, not just in their statements but in the various changes in hormones, in other biologic changes and in the brain function. In short, we must not leave the body out of the equation, which too often happens in modern day psychotherapy.

So what is it about reliving that is so important, indeed, the sine qua non of any effective psychotherapy? It means acknowledging the evolution of the brain. It means taking into consideration the role of feelings in therapy. If it is done in a systematic fashion over many months it is not at all dangerous. But then the problem is that the the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious is a turn on the old religious notion of the 1800s—dark and demonic forces (also known as the id or shadow forces) marauding on levels beyond our reach. That is one reason they stay away from it. But if they were ever to disregard that warning, bypass that intellectual, insightful brain, and let patients slip into their past they would see what lies in the unconscious. What they would find is nothing more than our history, laid out in order from the present to the most remote including birth and womb-life. And it would not be approximate; it would be precise; memories lying in storage waiting their turn to be connected to conscious awareness We need to understand that the suffering component of early pre-verbal pain has never been felt and integrated; rather, it was coded and stored waiting for its chance to meet up with prefrontal brain cells for integration. We must go back slowly in therapy, neurosis and evolution in reverse, to events that carry such a load of pain that only pieces of it can be experienced at any one time; that is what is necessary. That is what cures.

The UCLA Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 06:57:00 +0000

(Originally published August 15, 2008)

At UCLA Pulmonary Laboratory, my staff and I filmed two patients in slow motion moving exactly like a salamander (in a birth reliving that was spontaneous and unexpected) for over an hour and a half each. They were reliving anoxia at birth due to the heavy anesthesia given to the mother which affected their respiratory system. Drugs given to a 130-pound mother enters a system of a six-pound neonate and shuts down many systems. They were reliving this anoxia with the most primitive nervous system, hence the salamander-like movements. It was evident that no person, not even themselves at a later point, could duplicate their movements nor their deep breathing voluntarily, and certainly not for half an hour. They would have been exhausted. These patients were not exhausted. In some of these relivings, which were filmed, the body temperature dropped to 94.8 degrees in a matter of minutes. The patient was neither cold nor suffering from it. He is reliving an event where the body temperature was exactly 94.8 degrees. And each time the patient relives this kind of event, the fall, or rise, will be the same. The individual, therefore, in his reliving does not lie; it duplicates history exactly; the history that each of us carries around every minute our lives. It is that history that often requires quelling or suppressing with tranquilizers and painkillers, particularly when there was no love or touch very early in life. When patients relive enough of their painful history, they no longer need alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and painkillers.

The research in blood gases with these patients was carried out in association with UCLA director Dr. Donald Tashkin and his associates, pulmonary scientists Dr. Eric Kleerup and M. B. Dauphinee. They were wired for, among other things, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. They were then taken through a simulated Primal, or reliving, of an early trauma. During the simulation, both patients became dizzy and had "clawed hands," within three minutes, typical of hyperventilation syndrome. This research has great significance for understanding the human psyche, for understanding access to deep brain levels and for how psychotherapy must be practiced.

We took frequent blood samples with an in-dwelling catheter during the subjects' reliving episodes (every two to three minutes for one and a half hours) and during voluntary hyperventilation. We measured blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, as well as core body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. The simulation and the reliving were quite similar in terms of strenuous physical activity and deep, rapid breathing.

During the simulation, the blood carbon dioxide and oxygen levels were what one might expect. There were clear signs of the hyperventilation syndrome after a little over two to three minutes of deep breathing, including dizziness, tingling hands, rigidity of the extremities, bluish lips, loss of energy such that the subject could barely exert himself, and great fatigue.

In the reliving of oxygen deprivation at birth, however, there was no hyperventilation syndrome. Despite 20-30 minutes of deep, rapid, locomotive breathing (it is raspy and sounds like a locomotive), there was no dizziness, puckered lips, or tingly hands. The UCLA researchers found that lactic acid in their blood compensated for the low carbonic acid level caused by their locomotive breathing, preventing the hyperventilation syndrome. In other words, their muscular exertions during the reliving were so great that their oxygen requirement exceeded the supply. Their muscles were forced into anaerobic respiration, like a sprinter in a 100-yard dash: glucose is broken down to lactic acid in the absence of oxygen. No amount of voluntary exertion during a simulated primal could equal that effort. The factor that makes the difference is imprinted memory. The musculature under the control of the imprinted brain memory is working as hard in the session as in the original trauma to try to survive. In the reliving, the brain was signaling its history; a lack of oxygen and the necessity to breathe deeply.

In the UCLA study, we had accessed, almost directly, brainstem structures, something unheard of in the psychological literature, and witnessed their awesome power. It is perhaps the Holy Grail of psychological science. The import for psychotherapy is that only total reliving and frontal cortex connection makes profound change, for it is only in a reliving that vital signs change radically.

On Curing a Symptom

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 06:22:00 +0000

(Originally published July 27, 2008)

Let us start out by saying that no all symptoms are caused by repressed emotions but a good deal of them are. The question then poses itself, “What does it take to cure the symptom?” Can counseling do it? Yes, but with reservations. You see each level of consciousness--brainstem, limbic system and neocortex, contribute its specific kind of pain to the system. And they contribute the most when survival is at stake. That is why the most pain lies deep in the neuraxis where insult can affect whether we live or die.

Now let us suppose that a migraine takes a level of 10 for it to be manifest. And we take away current stress that brings the pain level to eight. Have we cured it? No, we have taken away just that valence that originally put the system over the top and into a symptom. But we still have deeper levels of pain. We can only say we have “cured” it when we arrive at the very heavy valence pain that was at the origin of it all.

In depression there are levels of hopelessness that finally result in overt depression. But until we arrive at the intrauterine trauma of a heavily drugged mother, for example, we cannot be said to have cured the problem.

What too much of current psychotherapy does is manipulate the current burden, leaving the heavy-duty pains untouched. But that manipulation may have been enough to keep the symptom from manifesting itself (biofeedback, hypnosis, cognitive therapy, etc.). That might lead to the false notion that this method of manipulation is curative of such and such symptom. It is the same as in alcoholism. Enough support and warmth in the present can take just enough of the pain load away to snuff the habit. The reason that there is always a tendency toward the illness is that the underlying pain waits in its cage. When the system is weak and vulnerable again the symptom may spring forth. Cure is always tied to original causes. When the symptom is matched through feeling to its advent we have succeeded.

The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics: Epigenetics

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 21:46:00 +0000

(Originally published July 27, 2008)

In the early nineteenth century a French scientist named Jean Baptiste Lamarck decided that we acquired characteristics from experiences that our parents underwent. Russian communists applied this to agriculture but, no matter, it was a widely discredited theory…..until recently. Now this avowed Marxist position may have been resurrected a bit. There is a new field called epigenetics that states pretty much what Lamarck believed. So what is the evidence? And what exactly is it? What Lamarck said was that individuals acquire characteristics as a result of their environment, and now, these characteristics can be passed on to the offspring.

Much of the work in epigenetics has to do with diet; a mother’s diet influences the offspring’s physiology. Epigenetics has to do with how genes are regulated and influenced by the experience of the baby. I believe it has more to do with the fetus who resides in the womb; that his experience is influenced forevermore by the mother’s diet but also by her moods, her anxiety and depression. Has the genetic switch been delayed or was it premature? This can happen without making a radical change in the gene itself but rather in how it is expressed, whether it is shut off or on. What we are discussing is how a mother’s interaction with her environment can pass this on to her offspring. I think we need to understand that a fetus in the womb is always trying to adapt to his environment and that how genes will evolve and be expressed depends on that adaptation. For example, a mother who is anxious and who has depleted much of her serotonin supplies cannot fulfill the young fetal need for his own serotonin supplies. He may well grow up deficient in inhibitory or repressive capacity and be an anxiety case forevermore; this evolves into attention deficit in his youth and his continued inability to have a cohesive cognitive ability. I think it is extremely important that all this occurs while the fetal brain is rapidly developing and needs proper input to evolve normally. An anxious mother is so agitated that the neuronal input into the baby she is carrying is so extreme that he cannot adapt and integrate this input. Thereafter, this is the kind of person who cannot accept too much stimulation because the internal input is so great that anything from the outside, just two terms papers, can be overwhelming.

I have discussed the work of Michael Meaney of McGill University who has worked with mice and found that very early neglect by the mother results in lifelong alterations. In thirteen men who had committed suicide, all of whom suffered from child abuse, there were epigenetic effects. Abuse has many forms but to me those most deleterious is the abuse of a mother who smokes, drinks or takes drugs during pregnancy. Abuse means adversely affect a child’s development. Meaney found the same changes in thirty five people who suffered from schizophrenia. Here, several of the genes involved with the unfurling of key neurotransmitters (which ordinarily help to repress pain or noxious stimuli) where affected. New work has related epigenetics to the occurrence of cancer. What has been called the effects on epigenetic settings I call changing the set-points of many biologic states; this includes the set-points of the neurotransmitters that w
Ill later make us chronically comfortable or uncomfortable. Not feeling good in our skin is one way to state it. What is very new is that experiences of the mother affects the sperm of the offspring, and that may affect how the grandchildren develop. It may be that smoking or drug taking in while the embryo is just forming can later affect sperm production. The meaning of all this is that what happens in the womb while the organism is getting organized can affect the baby for a lifetime. It is so important that we not neglect this period when we attempt to understand and treat those with emotional problems. The more remote the imprint the more widespread the later effects, in my opinion. When a carrying mother is under stress her stress hormone level is high. When the levels remain high for a long time the immune system is compromised, and that might well affect the immune status of the offspring. And as I note elsewhere, a strong immune system (natural killer cells) is needed to stay on the lookout for newly developing cancer cells. It is not that a deficient immune system can lead to cancer, it is that a weak maternal immune system does not impart a strong immune capability to the baby; and the same dislocated physiology of the mother can also affect the fetus, setting the stage for later catastrophic disease. Womb-life has largely been neglected in the psychological literature. It is time to reorient ourselves.

SMALL FEET AND SMALL BREASTS: CANCER?

Are small feet and small breasts desirable? Is it good or bad? It’s more serious than that. It is neither good nor bad but whether that size has arrived at its genetic destination. That is, due to heredity has the size fulfilled the genetic intention? If not, there can be serious repercussions. What it means to me, and now we leave the arena of strict science, is that repression has interceded to slow down or inhibit growth. How do I know? Some of my patients have reported foot growth, chest growth, breast growth and other kinds of growth after about a year of therapy. (We have a letter of a former patient who reported foot growth of several sizes after therapy). All that has happened in my therapy is lifting repression and liberating pain. If we reason backward we might say that repression prohibited proper growth from taking place. That means to me constant pressure in key sites against growth; against genetic destinations. And that again can mean the possibility of serious illness, possibly cancer. Pressure on the cells to stop this unfolding can be enormous. Until one has seen the liberation of pain it is difficult to comprehend.

So we can only say that one’s breasts are too small when we see if they grow as a result of this liberation. And I believe that will only happen when the patient arrives at deeply implanted pain, at birth and before, when so many hormones are affected; where so many set-points are dislocated and fixed. I think that, in this sense, the therapy may have an anti-cancer effect. Can you imagine the pressure our biology exerts to fulfill its genetic promise? That pressure continues against a constant pressure to hold it back. The result too often can be disease as the cells become deformed and dislocated. It is not only the obvious breasts and feet, which are, after all, measurable, but there my be so effects we cannot measure; for example, the kidneys, heart or liver. We see that wherever we have looked, (serotonin/impramine: natural killer cells) there are significant changes. We would expect the same with key organ systems. In other words, pain and repression are laid down as total experience, which means that just about every system is involved in the imprint of the memory. So we would expect that all key organ systems would be affected. That remains to be studied. But we would also expect that those systems, which are inherently weak and vulnerable, would be seriously affected by that repression. The answer? Have a good gestation and birth and infancy. Failing that, relive the key pains set down and undo the massive repression.

There are effects we cannot measure; for example, the kidneys, heart or liver. We see that wherever we have looked, (serotonin/impramine: natural killer cells) there are significant changes. We would expect the same with key organ systems. In other words, pain and repression are laid down as total experience, which means that just about every system is involved in the imprint of the memory. So we would expect that all key organ systems would be affected. That remains to be studied. But we would also expect that those systems, which are inherently weak and vulnerable, would be seriously affected by that repression. The answer? Have a good gestation and birth and infancy. Failing that, relive the key pains set down and undo the massive repression.

In writing about the imprint, I will note again that one way we know that very early imprinted pain endures is that many entering patients have high stress hormone levels which normalize after one year of the therapy. What this may mean is that the imprint endures, is a constant danger, and must be fought against. That danger is signaled by the high cortisol (stress hormone) levels. Why is it, then, that the levels come down to normal after a time? Because the imprint is no longer a force; It is now simply a memory. The force of the pain has been felt and integrated. It is not as though there is a reliving of the memory and then we find changes in the imprint; it is that the way the memory is held and engraved is through these various changes such as in stress hormone levels. The danger is no longer in evidence; the system can relax. The battle is over. As all systems normalize it means that there is no longer an irrevocable memory to deal with. The imprint as a total physiologic event no longer exists. Can we become neurotic again? Not in the same way because the harmful memory is gone. What we often cannot change are the secondary changes already in evidence due to the damage inflicted beforehand.

On Reliving

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 21:28:00 +0000

(Originally published July 15, 2008)

Primal therapy involves a careful procedure – paced by the patient – toward bringing sensations and feelings from trauma in one's early history safely into a conscious experience. The apex of this procedure is total reliving of a traumatic experience. Primal therapy avoids distracting or interrupting the patient in this process. We seek to draw attention to sensations and feelings, and allow the patient, when he and his body is ready, to go into the pain, and fully relive it. This time, in contrast to the time of the original trauma, the patient can finally experience the feelings, and finally be relieved of their neurotogenic energy.

The reliving that occurs in primal therapy may be hard to imagine by those who have not seen it. In reliving incest, for example, not only are the vital signs exceptionally high, often into near-lethal levels, but the physical posture reflects what happened in the original event, the wrists bound together behind the back, for example. Why, one would question, do we allow these dangerous levels to exist in therapy? The patient, on the lip of feeling a great trauma, runs a fever. One hundred three degrees is not unusual. We don’t desire it except that without it there is no healing. Secondly, these elevated levels were the reason for the repression, in the first place. Sustained blood pressure in hypertensive regions would have killed the newborn. What the neuroinhibitors such as serotonin/endorphin do is keep reactivity within survival bounds and thereby save one’s life; a key function of repression. Now as an adult the individual is stronger, and may begin to relive the trauma, if only in small titrated doses.

Post session vital signs indicate some degree of integration and resolution after a reliving episode (known as a “primal”). They usually drop below baseline after the session. If they move either up or down sporadically we are dealing with abreaction—the discharge of the energy of a trauma without proper connection. This is never curative.

Reliving yields insights and cognitive changes automatically. Reliving never being touched as a child makes immediately clear the reason for one’s nymphomania. It puts the need for touch in the past so that it is no longer acted-out in the present. The patient does not need to be told how to appreciate the trauma; everything is understood within the feeling, provided it is a full reliving.

Discussing the past trauma is, by and large, a cortical operation that remains in the area of thought. It is the inordinate pain portion that is stored in the brain's limbic system and brainstem that is the culprit to be relived. And that is what constitutes the unconscious. It is that portion of pain that must be relived. If one could see the amount of pain engendered in a primal she would understand right away how important reliving is to the therapeutic process.

Primal Therapy differs from most other therapies extant in approach of reliving past traumas rather than discussing them. The patient seems to be in the grip of an ancient brain during the reliving which results in an integration of the feeling. In the reliving, the whole system will be engaged as it was when the memory was registered. This is why in our research we found an average 24-point drop in systolic readings in our high blood pressure (hypertensive) patients after six months of therapy. It is why in a parasympathetic dominant patient (often, a depressive) who enters a session with a radically lowered body temperature, we will see rises of two or three degrees after the session, as feelings normalize the system. Normalizing blood pressure is very important if we want to avoid cerebral strokes later on. We can “normalize” with medication but the force is still inside doing its damage elsewhere. There is a major difference between normalizing the symptom and normalizing the system. The latter has great import for longevity. If we normalize one aspect of the system, the rest of the body must compensate, and that is the danger with medication. It achieves apparent results, but not profound effects. So long as the generating source of the problem stays active it is forever a threat...a stroke is not the least of the consequences. Again, if we try to “cure” high blood pressure with pills we are depriving the patient of one aspect of the memory; and she needs the totality of response to the memory in order to fully relive and get better. That is, if we suppress part of the memory there can never be a full reliving because the whole memory is not completed.

Why We Must Relive As A Total Experience

A reliving of preverbal imprints will evoke the exact same reactions as at the time of the original trauma. In the absence of a reliving, the reactions or fragments of the memory will persist, such as a fast heart rate or high blood pressure. When we relive a complete early birth memory of which a high blood pressure was a part, then in the total reliving, that fragment of the memory will also be included, and the patient should consequently see relief from the intrusive symptoms. If aspects of the original reaction are missing the reliving is not complete and therefore not curative. When patients relive enough of their painful history, they no longer need alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, or painkillers. Less pain, less pain-killers

When a patient relives early terror, then ceases to compulsively check the locks on his doors twenty times a day, he has solved a key mystery. This, without any prolonged discussion of the obsession. He felt unsafe, profoundly unsafe early on; the obsessions controlled the terror that he didn’t even know he had. The left frontal cortex was saying, “I’d better check the locks. It makes me feel more comfortable.” Since the terror is there he never can feel safe for long, the obsessions go on. The feeling of being unsafe was seeping up in small increments from the right brain. It was immediately staved off by the obsession on the left. “I’ll be safe if the house is locked.” If we were to prevent the obsession we would see terror, which is what we do in our therapy. But it must be done in a safe, controlled atmosphere. In order to feel deeply unsafe one has to feel totally safe in the present. That safety, dialectically, turns into its opposite.

Reliving means to be in the grip of the child’s or infant’s brain; it is different from discussing childhood pain with the adult brain. It means to be immersed totally in an old traumatic memory; it also involves connection of lower forces to top level brain tissue, as well as right brain feeling information to the left prefrontal cortex. There should be brain changes as a result of connection, which is what we want to discover.

Womblife and Serotonin. The Origins of Mental Illness

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 06:01:00 +0000

(Originally published July 9, 2008)

Let’s begin with the poor lonely mouse. Regarding its womb-life: it is only after several months of gestation that the fetus produces adequate amounts of inhibitory/repressive chemicals such as serotonin. A mouse fetus does not make its own serotonin until close to the third trimester. It seems like the mother supplies what is needed until the baby can take over. But when the mother is low on supplies, she cannot fulfill what the developing baby lacks. Now if we extrapolate a bit to human mothers. But first a caveat: it seems to me that the principles or laws of biology apply pretty much across many species so that what is true in the physiologic evolution of mice might also be true in our own biologic evolution, as well, and as the following discussion indicates, it is true; the lag between the ability to experience pain and the ability to repress it can be considerable.

Whereas the beginnings of serotonin production in mice are sometime in the third trimester, in humans it seems to begin slightly earlier. Research on a fetus seems to indicate that it can experience pain after thirteen weeks from conception but that it really fully experiences pain after 20-24 weeks of gestation--bout five months of life in utero. It is fully sensitive to adverse events at this time. (see Paul Ranalli, “The Emerging Reality of Fetal Pain in Late Abortion.” www.nrlc.org) My guess is that it begins even earlier. What is critical here is there is a time during gestation when the fetus can not produce repressive/ inhibitory chemicals and must “ask” for help physiologically from his mother. When the fetus does begin manufacturing is own neuro- chemicals it sends some of it to the mother. It says, “I can soothe myself now. Thanks for the help.” Above all, serotonin is a soother.

Allthough the pain-killing aspects of serotonin are well known, less is known about its role in affecting appetite, gastric symptoms and heart function. In short, it has a role in normal development and evolution. In particular, new evidence points to its role in actually shaping some brain structures early in fetal life. (see Cote. F. et al. “Maternal Serotonin is Crucial for Murine Embryonic Development.” 2006 National Academy of Science.) Traumas very early on, before the secretion of serotonin is evident in the fetus, impact later serotonin output and can change who and what we are significantly. One reason we see serious mental illness arising during adolescence is that the hormonal turmoil going on and the weakening of defenses permits some of the fetal pain to rise and affect thought processes. Hence delusions and hallucinations.

Interestingly, in its early secretory life serotonin functions to control and shape anatomic structure. Later on, it carries on as a pain controller. It too evolves and changes. Thus, we as humans may have a significant delay in secreting serotonin during gestation. And we rely on our mother to pitch in before we start making our own. She needs to have an adequate supply for both herself and her baby. If she is chronically depressed she is apt to have low levels of serotonin, used up in the fight against her pain. In this way the mother cannot fulfill the fetal needs for a way to blunt the impact of adverse events; i.e,. of pain. Thus, the fetus has developed a residue of unblocked, free floating pain and terror early in his gestation. This makes him much more vulnerable to trauma at birth and in infancy. He is defective in coping mechanisms. Any later trauma can have double the impact on the relatively undefended system.

The low serotonin output is an imprint that remains pretty much the same throughout our life, making us not up the task of everyday living. That is why we so desperately need serotonin enhancing medication later in life. (Prozac. Zoloft) The medication is blocking pain that happened before we set foot on this planet.

We know from current research that an imprint during gestation remains pristine pure for all of our lives, whereas an imprint from after birth can produce compensating secretions that blunt the impact of trauma during infancy. My very notion of the imprint means events that they create irreversible dislocations of function in the neurobiologic sysems. The only way it can change is if we return to the origin of the dislocation and right the ship. It needs a push from below not a cry from above.

It seems to be another biologic law that whatever happens during gestation can alter basic physiologic set points, which is rarely the case after birth where there can be compensatory mechanisms to make up for the dislocation of function associated with the original trauma.

So we have a developing fetus who has no effective repressive mechanisms trying to borrow some of mother’s serotonin to help out, but to no avail. A completely naïve physical system has no frame of reference that tells it that basic physiologic processes are deviated. During gestation the system deviates and then considers that deviation as normal. So the baby is born with inadequate serotonin/gating capacity, and that deficiency follows him throughout life. But it is an already wounded organism, a wound that almost no one can see or even imagine. He will grow up chronically anxious, unable to concentrate or focus. He may well be ADD and be unable to sit still because the activation goes on incessantly. It shows itself in the panic attacks that happens when the system is vulnerable and gating weak; the imprint from gestation rises to the top and shouts out its message which almost no one can decipher. It is such a mystery because its origins are so arcane.

An example: a girl is born in wartime to a mother who is chronically anxious because her husband has been sent to war and left her all alone. The anxious mother transmits some of that to her baby who is then considerably weakened. He cannot fully repress to hold down pain. By the time infancy happens there is already a weak, vulnerable baby who is chronically agitated. This may be the beginnings of serious mental illness. It is not obvious to the human eye but the damage is done.

Too often this is ascribed to heredity because no one can imagine what has already happened in the womb. It is kind of a free- floating anxiety that seems to have no specific time of origin. Remember, this is a purely physiologic reaction originated at a time when there was no higher brain centers to process the event. To recapture it we must retreat to that primitive brain.

What we may see many decades later are panic and anxiety attacks, and then much later a cerebral stroke. This imprint would militate against cancer because for cancer to develop we often need massive repression; and for that we need massive secretions of neurojuices such as serotonin. What would exacerbate the risk of cancer is events later in infancy and childhood with unloving, stern parents. The result is a person who never had outlets for his pain. What further shuts down the person is growing up with a violent father or mother, a strict religious household, and no one to turn to. The force of the imprint may well affect the brain when the person is in his sixties. How on earth can we access such remote experiences, a time when there were no ideas to help out?

We do know that each high level of brain function can incorporate the previous lower level. That is, early memories become elaborated on higher levels of brain function and are incorporated into those levels. So when we relive a non-verbal pain or trauma in infancy we are at the same time reliving the residue from earlier in womb-life. The events are united under a resonance factor that makes a higher level of brain function trigger off a deeper and more remote feeling. To put it differently, each early preverbal imprint is ramified on higher levels so that feeling fully on the higher level automatically has us feeling the earlier aspects of the feeling. Because of this we can over-react to events in adult life. As we see in our therapy, it may be one cause of erectile dysfunction—the feeling of being overwhelmed because of even slight pressure to function in the present. Or the inability to get going at work.

So to summarize: there seems to be a time in gestation when pain or noxious stimuli impinge, but we are not yet able to produce our own gating chemicals, such as serotonin and endorphin, resulting in un- gated pain. When I refer to gating, I refer to electrochemical process that blocks the transmission of the pain message across the synapse. This residue will continue and may lead to bouts of anxiety later on in life. It becomes free-floating, unbound fear or terror. It can then be focused on elevators and a phobia is born. This is not due to heredity but rather to experience in the womb. Part of our in-utero life, therefore, takes on hurt at a time when the system can do nothing about it; nevertheless, it affects all later development. At 30, we may suffer from panic attacks that began its life in the very early months of our mother’s pregnancy. It is pristine, ready to spring forth whenever we are vulnerable. No talk therapy can make a dent in it because it involves a vegetative primitive nervous system which was adequate to register pain and terror during womb-life. This is a nervous system impervious to words; it doesn’t understand them and does not respond to them. So insights leave it absolutely indifferent. The womb experience leaves us fragile for a lifetime so that any insult or lack of love in infancy and childhood weakens us all the more. That is why we need drugs that work on lower brain centers below the intellectual in order to suppress these imprints for a time.

So much severe mental illness has its causes so early in our lives; and then nature later provides us with useless intellectual tools to address them. When all we have to do is let the primitive nervous system take charge and lead the way. It knows the path to liberation.

Thank you...

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:39:00 +0000

I would like to thank each and every one of you for your kind words that touched me deeply. It is comforting to see Art was able to touch so many lives.

He was indeed an extraordinary man and his development of Primal Therapy is one of the most important discovery in psychology as it is the only treatment that addresses pain from all stages of life, starting at birth, helping and allowing the patients to feel that pain, freeing them forever from its lifelong consequences.

Some of you have expressed curiosity as to what will happen to the blog. Unfortunately it will not go on as Art was the only one to write articles, but it will remain online so that people can go back to the old posts. You may not be aware that Dr. Janov started the blog in 2008 and you may not have read all the posts! We will be bringing older articles back up in the current blog.

My best,

Dr. France Janov

The Passing of A Great Man

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 01:13:00 +0000

It is with great regret and deep sorrow that we write to you of Dr. Arthur Janov's passing today. He died peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by his loved ones. He was 93.

I Promise I Will Be Faithful: No You Won’t

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 01:17:00 +0000

Now why can’t some men and women keep that promise? Well there are many reasons but if we ignore the imprint then we are forced to look at the present for all the answers; whereas the current situation may provide only a few elements.

So what does that mean, the imprint? It means, say, for a man, that he needed love from his mother but all he got was indifference. That lack is imprinted, sealed by the unfulfilled need permanently. It lies on a lower strata so that no matter how loving the girlfriend is, he needs more. Why? Because the nagging, “I am not loved” lies below, agitating him to go elsewhere. And he will become known as a womanizer because he needs to seduce many women, all for the same ending, more infidelity. That, “I am not loved,” drives him every day.

With a woman who was never wanted by her father; that is, who left her feeling unwanted because he was so bound up in his own pain, she is a “sucker” for anyone who really shows he wants her. That need, “I am not wanted,” drives her and makes her give in immediately when a man looks at her and says he finds her beautiful. And yet, no matter how much a man wants her, she needs to seek out other men because “I am not wanted” continually drives her. She needs constant reassurance and assuaging.

A promise is a top level cortical expression; never a match for a deep-lying survival force. How do we know? Because when patients feel that need in all of its agony, they no longer have to promise anything; their body will do it for them. And when we see the huge amount of pain/force involved in experiencing the feeling we know how big a motivator it is.

None of this is conscious. The old need remains pristine pure but the person is never aware of it. The “promise to be faithful” sits on top of, “I can’t be faithful until my mother loves me.” After a sexual encounter, there is that nagging feeling of malaise, not being satisfied. And the person won’t be until he or she feels the real need in its exact early context. Every so-called fulfillment, every affair, after the time of the critical emotional window when need had to be fulfilled is, by definition, a symbolic fulfillment. That is why it is not really satisfying. Remember, that need in the first months of life meant survival as an intact human being. It had to be gated and repressed. Meanwhile, the feeling/need circulates in a sort of reverberating circuit seeking connection and never making it. If it were not symbolic, then one love affair should be satisfying.

That is why all compulsive behavior has to be repeated time and again. It doesn’t matter if its food, pain-killers or sex. Need dominates. It is a way of papering over pain. And because it is a temporary palliative, like a tranquilizer, it has to be done ad infinitum. Of course there are any number of other reasons. But many marital guide books cover those. It is just the imprint that is missing.

Can I Find a Partner?

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 16 May 2017 16:27:00 +0000

It occurred to me that there are ways to find out if we can fall in love, whether we can sustain a relationship and how close we can be to others. We can enter into our physiology for answers to these questions; for in that physiology lies our history, our emotional past that can help predict the future. We can slice into the problem from many different perspectives but for now I will choose only one: oxytocin. I call it the hormone of love. When we make love our oxytocin levels mount; if we rub an animal’s belly levels rise. Making love tells us the importance of oxytocin since that act is the origin of life.

Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone that is a key hormone of love. When the level of oxytocin is low there is less emotional attachment, less interest in social engagement, less caring and bonding, and less touch ... in short, less love. "Less love" has a physical base. Less love early in our lives can be found in an imprint, which affects many systems. These effects are measurable. In some respects, love is a measurable entity. The imprint affects sexuality, particularly how key brain structures such as the amygdala and hippocampus translate pain into sexual behavior.

Oxytocin is found only in mammals. When it is high, one experiences a sense of relaxation, rest, and growth, repair and healing, loving behavior and emotional-attachment. Love and nurturing early in our lives are necessary for optimum health, and healthy brain development cannot take place without it. It isn’t just that low oxytocin levels are an indicator of early neglect and lack of touching, it also indicates a dysfunction of the entire system, and serves as a prognosticator of our later mental and physical health. Its presence says, "I was loved and could develop normally,” its lack says, “I was unloved and my system is skewed.” It is one of the key indices of how much love we received in infancy and around birth.

In the same way that we may increase sexual drive in males with testosterone injections, it may well be that we can "inject love" into people, or at least inject a hormone that encourages it – give people a shot of love, so to speak. This shot may help us attach to others and bond with partners, allows us to feel close to someone else, to feel and empathize with their feelings and pain. Bonding is a strong emotional attachment that helps us want to be with one another, to help and protect one another, and to touch and become sexual with one another. High levels of oxytocin encourage and strengthen bonding. Because early trauma and lack of love affect the output of this hormone, the ability to relate and have good sex later is determined even before birth and just after.

Someone can swear she is full of love, only to find herself very low in the essential hormone of love – oxytocin. It is actually good news that "less love" has a physical base, for there may be something we can do chemically to alter that state, and there is certainly something we can do psychologically to change it, as well. At sometime in the future we may be able to determine what proper love from a parent to a child is through the measurements of various hormones, not the least of which is oxytocin, which, as I state, has been in wide use to help birth along, affecting contractions in the mother. (Pitocin).
Early parental love is a permanent painkiller. Rats who were able to self-administer painkillers by pressing a lever did not do so when given oxytocin. Oxytocin (OT) inhibits the development of a tolerance to drugs such as morphine, and also decreases the painful withdrawal symptoms that occur when one is taken off these drugs. The degree of addiction can be measured by the severity of one’s withdrawal, yet oxytocin reduces the severity of these symptoms. Love will do the same thing; early love calibrates the system for life. A current shot of love, such as someone hugging and kissing us, may well change the levels temporarily. If we rub the belly of an animal the oxytocin levels will rise immediately, but once the initial critical period of the system’s development has passed, every change we can effect will be transient. Once we arrive at adulthood, oxytocin levels are fairly set. One can be given a shot of it, but it will not have a permanent effect, for once low levels of oxytocin or high levels of stress hormones are registered early in life, it is difficult to re-establish normal set points. After the critical period to receive love is over, the only way to normalize the system is to neuro-chemically relive the early events that dislocated the set points. The “critical period” is the time when a need must be fulfilled. It can never be recaptured. After that period all we can do is play catch-up.

If we are to ever have any chance at normalization we must feel again "unloved." That enables us to go back to the point of deviation or dislocation and rewrite the scenario and return the body to its correct set-points. . In that way only can we right the ship and return to the original biologic settings. It is that agony with all its concomitant biochemical components, that, when fully experienced, helps normalize the system. And when I mention “normal,” it seems to me that one of the key indices of normality is the ability to give and receive love. This is what patients should expect out of a psychotherapy.

We do know that in our measurements of the salivary cortisol (the stress hormone) there was a return to normal levels after one year of Primal Therapy. (see Primal Healing for a full discussion). In various other avenues we find the same phenomenon. True of heart rate and blood pressure. We assume it will be true with oxytocin levels. We make that assumption because our patients state over and again how they finally could relate to a partner and feel comfortable in an emotional relationship after the therapy.

There are many kinds of hormones that play into love and sex; I am extracting these for discussion and to show how early experience affects adult behavior. Many years ago we studied testosterone in our male patients. We also classified those who were low on testosterone as parasympaths – those dominated by the passive, reflective, healing nervous system. Those, who were high in testosterone, tended to be sympaths, meaning they were more aggressive, goal seeking, optimistic and ambitious (looking ahead, an analogue of the birth process). After one year of Primal Therapy, those who were low on testosterone tended to rise, while those who were very high tended to come down a bit; in brief, their systems would normalize.

When it comes to love, however, oxytocin is by far the most important hormone. The question we now face is what came first: lowered oxytocin and then the inability to love and to bond, or the lack of early love, which lowered the set points of oxytocin? I would choose the latter. Because hormones are so sensitive to early trauma, we must take care not to blame high or low levels to genetic factors. We must never forget the critical nine months of life in the womb.

Bonding is the most positive aspect of human relationships. We learn how to bond emotionally in adulthood through early bonding in childhood, as simplistic as that sounds. It cannot be taught! And it certainly cannot be taught in later life. Attachment is pretty well set in our childhood. It is not something we learn; it is something we feel. It is also something biochemical. Those who did not bond very early on with their parents may well be condemned to a lifetime of broken, fragile, tenuous relationships. It may be in large part due to deficits in the hormonal wherewithal such as oxytocin. Oxytocin researcher Thomas Insel has remarked that, "Many of the affectional ties to the mother observed post-natally (after birth) could be laid down by pre-natal experience." Life in the womb may determine life outside the womb for decades to come. If the early relationship with one’s parents was distant, alienated and glacial, it may be a harbinger of the love relationships we have or don't have later in life. The earlier the alienation from one's parents, the more trouble there may be in relationships later on. I have seen it in hundreds of my patients. It approaches a biologic law – if my sampling of our patients is any index.

In certain mountain rodents such as the mountain vole, a species that lives an isolated life (as differentiated from the prairie vole, which is more social), a shot of oxytocin proved to encourage bonding and pairing between voles. After repeated injections there was a long-acting anti-stress effect, which calmed overall behavior and gave rise to a strong tendency to bond. This again indicates that early love supports calmness and serenity. Those humans who are able to bond with others have high levels of oxytocin. Love seems to be the ultimate painkiller and a permanent one. It prepares us for the challenges of life and is the ultimate survival tool.

Need a good sex life? Be loved early on by your parents. That means, inter alia, right after birth and for the few months afterward. By that I mean plenty of hugging and kisses. Touch is ne plus ultra. Suffer from perversion? It may be because early in life, you were twisted by your parents in the quest for love. Parents whose personalities made implicit demands on the child to be someone else—non-coomplaining, passive, listening never speaking.

There is enough evidence to show that a newborn's heart rate, body temperature, and respiration rate are governed by the mother; when she is loving and nurturing towards the baby she carries, there is a positive affect on the baby and the set points of heart rate and blood pressure become normal. Any neglect she inflicts changes the biochemistry of the baby, perhaps permanently. Her anxiety and depression during pregnancy may very well alter the offspring's sex hormone levels. We know, for example, that anxiety in the mother can and does alter the sex hormone level of the fetus and can feminize infant males. So what we see is that once a male is feminized he is vulnerable, more vulnerable to a lack of love during infancy and childhood. He may become homosexual as a result of a cold, distant father, while the one who is not vulnerable will remain heterosexual. We need to understand that at certain levels of vulnerability, stress, trauma or pain can produce an overload and channel them into a symptom. In this sense, homosexuality could be considered a symptom, in the sense that there is a latent tendency, a feminizing, which only becomes overt homosexual behavior due to trauma; i.e., the lack of a father’s love. If the father’s love is there, it remains a latent tendency.
The female prairie vole, when treated soon after birth with steroid/stress hormones, showed an increase in masculine behavior, such as mounting. Most of us don't have to be injected with stress hormones; stress in the womb and just after birth accomplish the same thing, and may indeed masculinize females.

Although we may think that an injection is something special, the same chemical process takes place naturally. We can inject oxytocin, or we can massage the animal, and increase oxytocin levels that way. We can create stress for a pregnant woman, or inject her with steroids – the psychological effect is precisely the same as from a needle. A mother can be kind and loving and raise the serotonin levels in her offspring so that he can better handle adversity or a doctor can inject serotonin into the offspring and produce a temporary calming effect that is no different than that created by a loving look from the mother. A mother can "inject" oxytocin into her baby through her milk, which contains high levels of the hormone. Love, or what looks like it, can be injected. When "injected" naturally and at the proper time it will produce a loving human being.

Oxytocin means "quick birth." A synthetic oxytocin known as Pitocin, is given to mothers who need stimulation for contractions. I surmise that some mothers who need oxytocin to expedite the birth process may have had a history of pain that lowered their levels so as to make giving birth difficult. Statistics indicate those mothers who give birth by cesarean have lower levels of oxytocin. Additionally, when oxytocin is given to mothers to facilitate the birth process, it also enhances the love they feel for their child; they nurse better and are more relaxed with the baby. Conversely, a chronically anxious mother may leave her offspring with low oxytocin levels, which will contribute to the child having trouble later in life with bonding and forming attachments, as well as harboring a latent tendency to addiction. Thus, lack of early love translates into inadequate chemicals with which to bond, creating a vicious cycle of misery – unhappy relationships, poor sexual function, and failed marriages with suffering, abandoned children who bear the brunt of something that had its root causes in the infancy of the mother.

Loving feelings are transmitted to the fetus through the biochemistry and oxytocin levels of the pregnant woman, and then later through physical contact, which again raises oxytocin levels. If we were not loved early on, looked at, touched, listened to, nuzzled and adored, those biological changes, subtle though they may be, follow us throughout our lives. Yet a mother who takes good care of herself, is not depressed or anxious, does not take drugs, and eats properly, will produce a loving child.

If the traumas of birth, pre-birth and early childhood are inundating the system there will be an eventual overload and breakdown of the neuro-inhibiting, suppressing systems – serotonin, as well as oxytocin. There are many chemicals that live in the gaps between nerve cells, neurons; some push back and while others facilitate the message of pain. They are either information blockers or enhancers. Supplies of neuro-inhibitors will be used up over time in the fight to keep pain down. These supplies are not inexhaustible. It is the very earliest pains that have the highest valence and require the greatest amount of inhibition. These biochemicals will be used in the battle against emotional deprivation. The system will eventually be less sexual as the hormones of love become transmuted into the job of holding down pain.

A therapist can ask us, "Were you loved?," and we may insist, "Absolutely," yet we are betrayed by our oxytocin levels, which are far too low, and by our stress hormone levels, which are far too high, and also by our hormone levels which may be quite deviated. They speak too. The body and its physiology do not lie. Indeed, we may have been loved after birth, but suffered severe traumas in the womb of which we remain completely unaware. Our physiology will tell us the truth.

The Difference Between Romantic Love and Sex

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Mon, 08 May 2017 20:56:00 +0000

Romantic love exists. Emotional attachment exists. Yet they involve different brain structures and different biochemistry than what drives pure, lustful sex. Once there is attachment or love, a separation can cause pain. Oxytocin helps to quiet this pain and can function very much like other neurotransmitters and inhibit suffering. To listen to my patients is to understand the terrible pain of a child separated from his parent; the cry of separation is an attempt to bring that parent back close again; it is true in nearly all animal forms.

There is a structure within the brain known as the cingulate cortex, which is responsible for that cry. This cortex is like an arc overlaying the limbic/feeling area and also deals with aspects of emotion. This area plays a role in maternal care and loving. The cingulated cortex is responsible for making the chemicals of comfort, and is also involved in inducing a sense of empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling.

The cingulate cortex is endowed with endorphins, internally produced painkillers. When animals cry (as a result of separation from their mothers), these painkillers surge forth to ease the pain. When such a separation is abrupt and goes on for a long time, the baby’s pain becomes imprinted in the brain and remains. It is more pain than what a young body can tolerate.

Mother Nature knows that a baby needs two parents to care for him. Pair bonding is the result of two adults becoming attached, having sex, having a child, and loving that child. With the love these parents themselves received early in their own childhoods, they have the oxytocin and vasopressin that enables them to love their own child. Love is the foundation, therefore, for survival because when it is lacking, the child does not get the love he needs and he suffers, and the system becomes skewed and dislocated. Later, there may be disease and premature death as a deviated system is forever out of whack. A baby needs to be caressed and feel the sense of touch, which is the baseline of love. Without it, the brain changes and is less adaptive.

Alterations inside a pregnant woman, who does not want her baby, can affect the brain development in the womb so that the frontal cortex of the fetus becomes impaired. This has implications for later learning and adaptation. The mother's attitude, if not loving, adversely affects her fetus. It is one reason that we cannot be taught to love later on, though we can be taught to behave in a sociable manner. Love is not something to be taught. It is something we learn through our experience.

When the stimulating hormone, dopamine, and the repressive hormone, serotonin, are both at proper levels, there can be feeling and love. When serotonin is too high, there is too much repression and the ability to love is less. When dopamine is too high there is too much agitation and not enough cuddliness to allow love. A proper balance is needed among all the hormone systems. This is particularly true with oxytocin in females and vasopressin in males. After sexual orgasm, both of these levels rise by hundreds of percent in both parties, as if to say that attachment and closeness are part of sex or perhaps "should be," according to nature. It's nature's way of saying that sex should be taken seriously and is part of the syndrome of romance.

Constant random sex has nothing to do with love and is more or less a release of tension. It actually contradicts nature. However, there are two different brain/biochemical systems involved – one for pure sex and the other for attachment. We can be attached to someone and still have sex with someone else without love. There is evidence that in the latter case – sport-sex – the oxytocin and vasopressin levels are lower.

What are we to make of all this? That love exists and it is has physical effects. It can sculpt our brains early on. It is an intimate part of sex, and it ensures healthy development, both physically and mentally. Love is not an ethereal entity, but something we can measure. It may be a more accurate gauge of our state of being than all the protestations of love we might make. Love really does make the world go round.

On Why We Can't Express Our Feelings

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Tue, 02 May 2017 00:53:00 +0000

Having feelings and expressing them are two different animals; and I choose those words carefully because having feelings means having access to the feeling structures of the limbic system in the brain. Expressing feelings means access to the thinking neocortex. The only time expressing feelings is important is if the state of having feelings precedes the expression of them. Then the comprehension is an evolutionary outgrowth of those feelings.

Unfortunately, when I was doing insight/psychoanalytic therapy I thought that expressing feelings in a session was tantamount to having them. Not the case. In fact, too often expressing feelings can act as a defense against experiencing them; smothering feelings in a flurry of abstract ideas. When I say “it is two different animals,” it literally is: the primate (monkey) feeling brain versus the human thinking one. Animals feel even when they have no means to expressing them.

I have been writing about this for the last forty years, and just now, new research is coming to the fore to verify this. Early on I posited the notion that one aspect of expressing feelings was the proper connection between the right and left brain hemispheres. Now it turns out that this is basically true; (see Science Daily, May 27, 2008. “Why Are Some People Unable to Express Their Emotions.”) Italian investigators have found that there is a deficit in interhemispheric transfer with those who cannot express their feelings. What that means is that the feelings lying on the right lower brain do not make the trip across the corpus callosum (where emotional information is transferred from one side to the other) to the left understanding, comprehending verbal side. Since eighty percent of all emotional information cross the corpus callosum from one side to the other, it seems logical that there is one key locus for the problem of alexithymia, or the inability to express emotions. It seems obvious now that for help in expressing true feelings one needs access to right side lower brain sites. It does not help to engage oneself in a therapy that is primarily intellectual; an interaction through the realm of ideas. Expressing feelings in words is not feeling those feelings. One can express feelings precisely but cannot necessarily feel them. What is required is a therapist who has access to her feelings and who can know when someone has access or not. So we need a therapy of feeling; one that takes feelings into account, and just as important, a psychological theory based on need.

What seems to be the problem is a dysfunctional cortical frontal-limbic circuits. In particular, the orbitofrontal area. As I have written elsewhere the right orbitofrontal area (behind the orbits of the eye) contains a map of our emotional life and emotional history. It is internally oriented. The left, on the other hand, is externally focused. It is interesting that panic attacks often accompany this condition (alexithymia). These attacks usually emanate from deep in the brain (the brain stem) and are associated with trauma in the first few months of gestation.

A new study (Brain’s Gray Cells Appear to be Changed by Trauma of Major Events. Science Daily June 4, 2008) indicates something I have maintained for decades: “ This suggests that really bad experiences may have lasting effects on the brain.” I believe that the earlier the trauma, (especially during gestation) the more widespread and long-lasting the effects. It seems that the set-points for many physiologic functions are established in gestational life. These dislocations of function remain fixed and unalterable; whereas trauma after birth can often be compensated for. In short, there is a permanent deficit in gray matter when traumas occur while we are being carried in the womb.

We can’t get well just expressing our feelings; we can only get well by experiencing them.

Why We Overeact

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 17:32:00 +0000

Let me explain. When something happens in the present it triggers off related feelings or memories on lower levels of consciousness—in the unconscious. It is what I term “resonance.” ( It may be that the nerve or neuronal circuits have the same frequency so that when one feels neglected or ignored it sets off memories of the parents neglecting us and we “overreact” to the slight in the present). It seems like an overreaction but it is not; what we are reacting to is just hidden from sight. That same feeling can resonate with being ignored in infancy; (no one comes when the baby is crying in the crib). What seems to be happening is that the synaptic weight of the memory is commensurate with the valence of the very early painful imprint. Each level of consciousness contributes its share to the total feeling that will coalesce to produce a unified, cohesive neuronal circuit, finally offering meaning and power to the event. It is that meaning/power that can drive one to kill when a girlfriend leaves her lover—“I feel abandoned (by mother). I can’t live without her.” Murder is clearly an overreaction but when placed in context we can at least understand it. Think of present-day trigger as a dredge that digs deeper and deeper widening access to the most powerful and remote memories. That dredge goes where the feeling leads it. It seeks out related events associated by feeling.
Although the resonance/frequency connects all the top and lower level circuits the weights of the memory are not the same. The valence of some memories is greater than others and become more powerful as we descend down the chain of feeling to the level of birth memories or even to events in the womb.

The deeper circuits provide the impulsive, importuning force for some of our uncontrollable behavior, forcing us to “overreact”. We will scream and yell or even punch someone. The point is that when we approach the lower levels of imprinted pain we are also approaching the shark brain with all of its possibility for murderous rage. In my experience it is very rare that events in childhood can trigger off anything more than terrible anger and tantrums. In other words, when we start off life with heavy trauma at or before birth our later criminal/psychotic tendencies are given a boost and are better understood. Since those memories are so remote and sequestered we usually have no access to them; thus our current reactions remain a mystery. So something in the present sets off a gathering of these weights on each level which ultimately merge under the rubric of a feeling. The deepest levels of brain organization engender the most heavily weighted memory; it has to be because on that deep-lying level lives our survival mechanisms. On that level lives life-and-death events that require life-and-death reactions, including rage. It is the level we can only arrive at after one has integrated smaller less life-endangering events. The need to be picked up just after birth is primordial. That thwarted—unfulfilled need can turn into rage. Or at least it can be the trampoline that adds volatile fuel to the mix later in life. We can judge from someone’s behavior how deep the memory/imprint is. If there is uncontrolled, rageful, violent behavior we can be fairly certain that very early imprints, often during gestation and around birth, are behind it. In short, anger has levels. The most recent causes would not involve murderous behavior. But when coupled with traumas on even lower levels it can adumbrate into violent tendencies. It is when a current mild event sets off exaggerated reactions that we know how deep the imprinted painful memories go back. And when I discuss behavior it can also encompass symptoms—raging or violent headaches, for example. I had a patient who suffered from migraines. She took aspirins for it, and called these pills her little bullets. It is pretty clear symbolism.

In most current psychotherapies the focus of each session is the act-out of the feeling rather than on the feeling/need itself. This analysis of the by-ways of behavior is an interminable task, skimming the surface reactions. Focusing on the deep internal imprinted reality finally makes it all have sense. The problem is that we cannot approach that deep-lying force with words. We must speak the language encased in our most primitive nervous system. It is for this reason that psychotic rage cannot be treated with conventional psychotherapy. Thus a slight misunderstanding can provoke a massive outburst of behavior. In order to make a dent in our raging behavior we need to delve deep in the brain and its unconscious where the organization of rage gets its start. We can see why it is not a good idea to plunge people in remote and painful memories in psychotherapy because the system is not ready to integrate them. The patient will tumble into overload and the result is a scattered, dysfunctional human being. lost in symbolism. It is also not a good idea to keep all focus on the present when there are icebergs of feelings lying deep ready to disrupt our forward progress. In my patois,severe overreactions are when third line current events set off first-line, brainstem reactions. The feeling may be identical on all levels of brain function but their driving force is quite different. There is no way that a here-and-now behavioral approach is going to solve deep-lying historical tendencies.

The Importance of Good Care on Child Development

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 21:39:00 +0000

From New Scientist 23 Sept 2000 page 18, "You Are What You Eat," by Claire Ainsworth: "A mother's diet in the first few days after conception could determine the health of her unborn child for life". An embryo sets its growth rate according to its environment. If a mother is malnourished the growth rate is slower as part of the adaptation for survival. This leads to low birth weight. Babies that are born small are subject to high blood pressure, diabetes and strokes in later life. This is the work of Tom Fleming of the University of Southampton England. This is an extrapolation from rat research. Source: Development (vol 127, page 4195)

Excerpt from "New Scientist" 16 December 2000 by Meredith F. Small, professor of anthropology at Cornell University. Her book, Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children, published in April 2001 by Doubleday.

Human young are dependant on their carers to help them navigate through their crucial early years. So to get the emotional and physical help they need, they must be highly sensitive to the behaviour of their carers-and that makes them particularly vulnerable to family strife. Several studies have shown that it is unpredictability that really stresses kids. British researchers found, for example, that the cortisol levels of some children are lower at school, where life is predictable and stable, and higher at home, where they believe anything can happen.

Normally, their reaction to stress helps kids cope by directing energy to parts of the body that need it most, but if stressful situations are not resolved, the damage can be far-reaching. Megan Gunnar, an expert on stress in children at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, points to a growing awareness that stress in childhood is a major mental and physical health risk.

"One reason to worry about stress in childhood is that this is the time when we learn how to manage stress-patterns that we will carry forward into our adult lives," says Gunnar. "And we don't take the hit on some of the health consequences until we are older. Increasingly, we are finding that many of those adult diseases that knock us down when we are 40 or 50- heart disease, high blood pressure and so on-are detectable in childhood, when the patterns are set."

Gunnar and others have shown that when very young children are abused, neglected or bond poorly with their carers, their cortisol levels are high even in mildly stressful situations such as play and they are unable to cope. And several recent studies of women who had been abused as children show that they are biologically vulnerable to depression and anxiety as adults because early experience permanently altered their hormonal responses, making them hypersensitive to stress.

Flinn has uncovered two abnormal patterns of cortisol production in children under continued stress from family trauma. Usually, kids have a constant low background level of cortisol, which peaks when they are under stress. But some highly stressed children have chronically high levels of cortisol. They are also shy and anxious. Another group of children has abnormally low basal cortisol levels interspersed with spikes of unnaturally high levels. They also show what Flinn calls blunted cortisol responses-their levels don't rise as they should during physical activity. Just as worrying, they are less sociable and more aggressive than kids with normal profiles.

Some of these kids have been stressed since they were conceived and they probably missed certain sensitive periods for obtaining normal cortisol profiles, though how exactly the response develops is still unknown. These children also have weakened immune responses, fall ill more frequently, are easily fatigued and don't sleep well. Looking at his record of children who are now adults, Flinn is finding that some of them seem to be permanently affected by stressful events that happened while they were in the womb, in infancy or during early childhood.

Birth Trauma and Psychosis

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 19:01:00 +0000

A report about the relationship between prolonged labor and its complications to schizophrenia has been issued by Reuters Medical News and can be found on the internet. ("Obstetric Complications Correlate with Brain Differences in Schizophrenia." http//psychiatry.medscape.com) This is a report by Dr. T.F. McNeil of the Malmo University Hospital in Sweden. (American Journal of Psychiatry. 2000, 157:203-212.)

Using the magnetic resonance technique to study aspects of the limbic system (hippocampus) in 22 pairs of twins in which only one had diagnosed schizophrenia, they found that the mentally ill twin had smaller hippocampus. There was a significant correlation between labor complications and brain shrinking. Prolonged labor was one central culprit. The authors write, "Trauma at the time of labor and delivery and especially prolonged labor appear to be of importance for brain structure anomalies associated with schizophrenia." (Reuters. 2/22/2000)

What the authors contend, something I have described for decades, is that the birth trauma has something to do with later mental illness. Further, that the feeling system is grossly affected by this trauma. This means that birth trauma affects all manner of feeling states later on, whether of suicidal tendencies or criminal proclivities. So the central questions: "Why does one twin become mentally ill and not the other?", can be partially answered by reference to the birth trauma. Not only the birth trauma, but most importantly, what happened in the womb. We must consider the background, historical effects that made the neonate vulnerable to the birth trauma.

Prenatal Life and Its Later Effects

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 21:19:00 +0000

When I first wrote about how the birth trauma and prenatal experience affect adult behavior it was considered “New Agey.” Now, there are literally hundreds of studies verifying this proposition. There seems to be little question now that the carrying mother’s mood and physiology can produce long-term effects on the offspring. That means us.

Let’s start with a simple bit of research; Dr. Daniel Schacter, psychologist of Harvard University has reported on a study where subjects watched bits of a TV series and then had their brainwaves measured. (see: Science, Sept. 2008).

They found when the subject remembered the event, the single brain cell signature was the same as in the first viewing. They reported that it seemed like a reliving; which of course, has been my position. What do you call it when a memory brings up one’s exact history with its precise early physiology. This happens to our patients every day. When there are certain triggers the brain conjures up its history, intact. That is why our behavior is so compulsive and unwavering; our history motivates us all of the time. We are largely victims of our deep unconscious brain.

In Schacter’s research on epileptic surgery patients, they threaded fine electrodes down in the brain of the subject. These electrodes could pin-point small brain storms at their origins. And they could make minute measurements during recall. The lesson? We can relive past events in their entirety, precisely as they occurred. What is very new in all of this is how early an experience can be to affect our later life. Think of the implications: that old memories reside in the same neurons (nerve cells) as were involved originally. That is why the neurotic cannot distinguish between past and present and sees reality through the prism of the past.

Let’s go back to the notion I discussed earlier of epigenetics. One genotype, a single genetic predisposition, can give rise to many phenotypes depending on what happens to those genes during gestation. So what we might imagine is genetic is genetic-plus what happens to us in the womb. So much happens to us in the womb; so much as been ignored in terms of the their long-term effects that many diseases remain a mystery because we are looking at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong tools.

What I am learning is that events in the womb explain so much about later life. If you bend an emerging twig you are bound to get a distorted tree. The question has always been, “how’/ early is early?”

An example: someone is born with all kinds of allergies from birth on. A history of emergency clinic visits for all kinds of infections, asthma, breathing problems due to allergies, and in general, a very deficient immune system. Here is where we need to push back the envelope and direct our attention to those early months in the womb. When we do, we often find out that the mother was quite anxious and/or depressed. Or often, the marriage is falling apart. Or in one case, as her belly got big the husband was turned off and sought out an affair. The mother was crestfallen, fell into a depression, and we had a baby that was impacted by all this and was born with a diminished immune system, something that got its start early on in the pregnancy. Don’t forget that the immune system, in some respects, is our first inchoate nervous system, sussing out dangers and menaces and organizing defenses against them. This includes secreting some of the pain-killing neurotransmitters we know about today. What starts out to defend us ends up hurting us. If the immune system is comprised there is a good chance that natural killers cells will be diminished and weakened.

Because the baby can be born with higher than normal stress hormone levels, and because the immune system works in see-saw fashion with cortisol (high stress—low immune function) the fetus has possibly set the stage for a lifetime of immune problems. Here is where genetics plays a role; high stress in the fetus will affect those areas with genetic vulnerabilities. After all, what is the meaning of high levels of stress hormone during fetal life? It means an input that agitates the system to be chronically alert. And when the system can longer shut off that input we have the makings of an enduring primal imprint. That input is maternally induced. So we have a newborn with a high level of agitation already set in place many weeks earlier. Here is ADDHD (attention deficit disorder) waiting to happen. Over time the deleterious results can range from impulsive tendencies to migraine and high blood pressure (to hold down the imprinted input). It is then no mystery when the child cannot concentrate or sit still. It is not enough to know that there are high levels of stress hormones in the baby, but what causes it, in the first place.

We change natural killer cells after one year of our therapy into normal levels. These cells have as a key function, watching out for cancer developing cells and pouncing on them in an effort to contain them. So a mother’s distress while pregnant can spell life-endangering effects on her baby, not the least of which is later cancer. The earlier the trauma during womb life the more disastrous the effects. That is our important secret life.

What can be done about this? Treating it first and foremost, then make sure it will not come back? How do we do the latter? Reliving the earliest womb-life events. How do we do that? Well, luckily, each new harmful or adverse experience that remains non integrated is re-represented later on a higher level of the nervous system and is noted as the outsider or enemy. It is indeed a threat to the organism. I believe that there are specific frequencies that tie these events together. When we explore these ramified events and begin to relive them we are also reliving deeper and earlier aspects of the feeling and/or pain. And that is how we relive pure physiologic brain-stem responses without ever acknowledging it.

When there are certain kinds of triggers, the brain conjures up its related history, intact. That is why our behavior is so compulsive and unwavering; our history motivates us all of the time. We are largely victims of our deep unconscious brain. We can only reach deeper into the remote past as we gain more and more access to deeper levels of brain activity. We need to have real good access to our feelings first; then very early brainstem events. That takes time but it can be done.

And what about cancer? The beginning deformity of cells can well begin in the womb with mother’s anxiety due to her own history or due to her marital circumstances. In any case, the fetal system needs to gather its resources to shut down excessive input. Here is where many cells are evolving and gathering their identity, but instead there is massive repression and, ultimately, physiologic deviation, even at the cellular level.

One patient had three siblings all “messed up” and depressed. It remained a mystery why all of them were so disturbed, her parents were indeed loving; until she had very early primals (a systematic reliving of early trauma). She learned that in South America, for many years, there was a civil war. The father left to fight, coming home occasionally to make babies. The mother was in desperate straights, had no money and no one to turn to, fearful of the constant raids into her village. The children, even in fetal life, suffered. She was a loving mother whom the children adored, but neglect womb-life, which should not be ignored. It had far-reaching effects. It therefore is an indicator of what went on during fetal life. Can we imagine a doctor learning about a stroke with her patient and then examining his fetal life?

Low birth weight is associated with slow fetal growth and lack of development of various physical systems. If the newborn is abnormal in any respect, even birth weight, we may assume that something abnormal may have happened during gestation. Babies of depressed mothers are more often of low birth weight. At least, let’s consider it. Babies with low birth rate lack muscle, something that follows her into adulthood. Here is a quote from the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study: (we) have shown that the risk for coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance is further increased in 60-to 70-year-olds who were small at birth, thin or short in infancy, but put on weight rapidly between 2 and 11 years of age.2, (55) A similar growth trajectory has been shown to predispose to type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. “

People who suffer stroke tend to be thin or short at 2 years. There is evidence that these early events can lead to hypertension later on, which is an important risk factor for both coronary heart disease and stroke. A number of mechanisms have been suggested to explain these links.

We need to study Alzheimer’s disease as it relates to gestational trauma as well as birth difficulties.

Certain height and weight problems at 2 years of age is a well accepted indicator of childhood emotional problems. Why is this so? There are a number of answers. Growth of the fetus relies heavily on adequate oxygen supplies. Because of the large brain, which uses a good deal of oxygen, there is a physiologic demand from more and more. If these supplies become limited for any number of reasons the body growth will slow down so that the brain can be left intact. Hence, lower fetal weight. Let us keep in mind that cancer can develop and live without oxygen, and maybe that adapting to lower levels of oxygen in the womb is part of an explanation for later cancer. Deprive a cell of a majority of what oxygen it requires and you have one key element in the origin of some cancers. This an only be a hypothesis.

In experimental animals it was found that anything that increased fetal stress hormone levels could result later on in elevated blood pressure, anxiety and hyperglycemia. And when we fiddle with stress hormone levels we increase the likelihood of later cardiac crises. And cortisol level is also heavily implicated in signaling the birth process to begin.

Cortisol is a stress hormone because it sets in motion the alarm signals to combat too much and too strong an input. When it goes on for a long time it accelerates again, the possibility of dementia and a whole host of other diseases. Primal imprints do exactly that; maintain a high level of cortisol for a lifetime.

In nearly every study of prenatal life there is the implication that high stress hormone levels in the carrying mother can result in hypertension and cardiac problems later on in the offspring. Infants of mothers who were diagnosed as anxious before pregnancy had significantly higher stress hormone levels. What neuro-psychologist Paula Thompson has explained: “prenatal stress responses are dependent on mother’s stress level. But how babies show it is through a limited physiologic vocabulary.” She believes that the fetal stress response is already skewed and, given later stress, the earlier stress response does not change. It can be blocked, diverted, covered over, but it remains pristine clear.

She believes that stress states in the pre-nate and neonate can be recognized by elevated heart rate, greater activity levels (gross body, single and multiple limb-higher reflex activation (Field et al. 2006). The pre-nate and neonate may show mistimed diffuse movement and overt grimacing. Will be rather clumsy and has a lack coordination. All this can be a predictor of later heart disease. That is only if we look at the problem in a gestalt overview.
Thompson: “One overarching goal of this article is to help clinicians understand the potential deleterious effects of prenatal stress. (See Thompson. “Down Will Come Baby.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. Vol. 8(3) 2007) She adds: it is hoped that increased knowledge of prenatal stress will inform psychotherapeutic treatment protocols, especially when treating severely traumatized and dissociated patients who may themselves have suffered early pre-nate stress. Further, when these patients become pregnant, appropriate treatment for the mother may benefit the offspring. When clinicians provide therapeutic intervention to a pregnant woman the pre-nate may also be affected”(Field, 2001; Ponirakis, Susman & Stifer, 1998. (My emphasis)

Let us not forget that (Thompson): one of the most dramatic changes occurs in the first moment of conception. The primitive cell carries the blueprint for an individual who has never existed before and will never exist again. While in the womb he is having the most important experiences in his life, because nearly all of it is of life-and-death significance. This is what Freud should have meant when he was developing his theory of psychoanalysis. Here lies the deep unconscious; a dark place with no exit and no words. Biologic responses dominate. In order to relive we have to include all of our physiologic processes, not just cerebral memory. The first step is to acknowledge these facts; a much more difficult step is to fashion a therapy for them. I think we have done that.

One of the key factors in high levels of maternal cortisol is the increase in the chances of a lost baby; or at the least some kind of prematurity. Again, those levels descend into the fetal system and change the baby in ways we are still learning about. Babies born to depressed mothers have higher levels of cortisol than normal. Here was what Lauren Kaplan and colleagues have to say about this: “in utero environment sculpts the uniquely plastic fetal brain resulting in long-term maladaptive patterns of behavior and physiology.” (Lauren Kaplan, et al, “Effects of Mother’s Prenatal Psychiatric Status and Postnatal Caregiving on Infant Bio-behavioral Regulation.” Early Human Dev. 2008 April; 84 (4) 249-256)

What researchers are now saying over and over again is that womb-life can unalterably affect the lifetime of the offspring. And, it is not only behavior that is altered but the physiology, as well. Does this mean a change in Primal Theory? Absolutely, it pushes the envelope much earlier for when imprints start and for their widespread enduring effects. It means that how the birth trauma is played out and reacted to depends on earlier life circumstances.

I want to reiterate my point about serotonin production in the fetus. For the first few months of gestation the fetus must “borrow” serotonin from momma; that is, if she (mother) has adequate levels. If she doesn’t, the fetus can’t go to the pharmacy bank and make a loan. She can be low in stock if she already has a chronic depression that depletes supplies. What is stamped in is a lack of adequate repression by the fetus and the beginning of a free-floating panic or anxiety, which only becomes evident years later as the defense system is under constant attack. This terror cannot be fully contained because of inadequate supplies of serotonin. Then we have panic attacks that are originated far earlier than we have ever imagined. But also these low levels of serotonin affect and retard development. It is as essential as food; it is food for the fetus.

We now know that a difficult birth can deplete the baby of adequate serotonin/inhibition levels. Later, all kinds of impulse neurotics—criminals—addicts, are low in serotonin, and obviously, low in inhibition. I don’t think we need to stop at birth for adverse effects on serotonin. It can happen as serotonin begins to function adequately, even in the last few months of pregnancy. Again, many of my patients are low in serotonin at the start of therapy but normalize after a year; therefore, it is a reversible phenomenon. (see a full discussion of this in my Primal Healing). It isn’t only serotonin; there is ample research now to show that the neocortical inhibitory prefrontal neurons are low in number due to a trauma at or before birth. These are poor inhibitors from the time of birth on. These individuals cannot wait, lose patience, have attention deficit disorder lash out with little provocation and want what they want NOW! They will interrupt because they cannot wait their turn to speak. All this means that we can be born with a tendency to Attention Deficit Disorder. It is not heredity but the experiences during womb-life that impacted that heredity. It seems like we are born with it but mostly we are not.

Now let’s push the envelope even further back. In a recent experiment, a scientist raised some rats after knocking out some of the building blocks for serotonin (the key element in Prozac), which is key for gating or repression. He then let the females mature, get pregnant and have babies. Of the 43 mouse embryos tested, 37 displayed abnormalities and brain malfunction. This indicates that the animal mother’s state affects the development of the baby’s brain. Her levels of serotonin can determine how her offspring mature. So, when a pregnant woman is chronically depressed, and hence low on serotonin, the baby’s entire life may be adversely affected. And the changes in her as a result of “heredity” will determine what kind of mother the offspring will be. Later childhood environment does count a lot but not as much as when the baby’s brain is rapidly evolving. In gestation, it is essential that the mother be normal in every way possible. Otherwise, she cannot fulfill the needs of her baby in the womb. And one definition of love is helping to fulfill the needs of the child. No fulfilling needs—no love.

What is very important for us to realize was that a mouse fetus does not make her own serotonin until the third trimester. It seems like the mother supplies what is needed until the baby can take over. But when the mother is low on supplies, she cannot fulfill what the developing baby lacks. Therefore, the baby carries around a load of pain. Now if we apply that to humans, there seems to be a time in gestation when pain or noxious stimuli impinge, but we are not yet able to produce enough of our own gating chemicals, leading to ungated pain. This residue will continue and may lead to bouts of anxiety later on in life. It becomes free-floating fear or terror. This is not due to heredity but rather to experience in the womb. This is why we should never neglect womb-life when addressing neurosis. Part of our in utero life, therefore, takes on hurt at a time when our system can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, it affects all later development. At thirty we may suffer from panic attacks (as excessive agitation) that began its life in the very early months of our mother’s pregnancy. It is pristine and free-floating, ready to spring forth whenever we are vulnerable or our defenses are weak. No talk therapy can make a dent in it. It leaves us fragile for a lifetime so that any insult in infancy and childhood weakens us all the more. Demanding and/or aloof parents can easily compound an allergic tendency, for example.

Catherine Monk and her associates studied anxiety in pregnant mothers. (Monk, C. et al.“Effects of Women’s Stress-elicited Physiological Activity and Chronic anxiety on Fetal Heart Rate.” Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 2003. Lippincott publishers. Their conclusion was: “women’s emotion based physiological activity can affect the fetus and may be important to fetal development.” To think that there is a significant physiologic change but no later psychologic one would be to ignore the human brain.

Now as to the enduring effects of pre-birth and birth trauma. Alyx Taylor has shown that the baby’s stress response to an inoculation at eight weeks was largely determined by the “mode of delivery” of the newborn. Those who reacted the most were birthed by assisted delivery. Cesarean showed the least response. The central finding is that the stress response circuits (HPA circuit) in the brain help determine how a baby will response to future stress.

I am not going to cite any number of relevant studies but one such article is of a review if many related ones. Nicole Talge and her colleagues reviewed the data on what happens to the babies of stressed mothers. (“Antenatal Maternal Stress and Long-term effects on Child Neuro-development. How and Why.” J. of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 48:3/4 4 (2007) pp 245-261)

Nearly all studies claim an effect of the mother on the fetus. I suppose the real question is, “what can we do about it.” Years later it seems an impossible task, but it is not. Once there is an imprinted trauma during womb-life, the brain system closes down on the pain through inhibition/gating. Thereafter the effects are life-long. What we must do is go back to the originating source and undo the trauma. The way we do that is to relive the trauma and open the gates. It can be done, as I have explained elsewhere, is by reliving emotional trauma during childhood, which has at its roots the pre-birth event. When we fully relive the childhood event it incorporates the earlier trauma; each new related trauma is re-represented on higher levels. And when these later traumas are relived we see the disappearance (or reduction in the severity) of the symptom, as for example, high blood pressure. That is because the earlier trauma may only be expressed through specific physiologic reactions such as blood pressure or heart rate. To relive the physiologic responses can be enough given other variables. If we latch onto the related childhood feeling in our therapy it automatically (given deeper access) includes the earlier physiologic component of the feeling. I want to reiterate that there is a timetable of needs that must be fulfilled at that time and no other. Once the fetus has been impacted due to a high level of stress hormones that is it; the system gates it as best as it can, and no other mode of treatment except reliving can change it.

This is a change in our paradigm. It means that trauma that has life-long effects can occur during womb-life, and thereafter has profound effects on our later behavior and symptoms. How, therefore, can we possibly attack allergies, migraine and high blood pressure without an acknowledgment of the deep and remote origins of the problem? I have been writing about this for decades. The difference is that research has now caught up and begins to confirm our theory. And now we see why after one year of our therapy there is a normalization of natural killer cells; as I pointed out, these are cells on the lookout for newly forming cancer cells, and attack them. So we might say that one way to help forestall cancer is to make sure that our immune system is intact and strong.

One may rightly question how anyone can relive events in the womb with no scenes or words. Luckily, that part of the imprint is totally physiological. We don’t need verbal acknowledgment. That deep brainstem is also a very important part of our central nervous system and gives the oomph or push to a feeling. A single feeling will encompass all three levels of brain function. Again, there is no exit here except entering into the most profound of unconscious states as possible.

On Evolution and Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Janov) — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:32:00 +0000

When scientists were polled recently about the greatest discovery in science, the majority chose Darwin’s Evolution. It explained so much in so many fields of scientific endeavor. That includes psychotherapy. In my opinion evolution is essential in the treatment of emotional problems. To put it differently, no one can make significant progress in psychotherapy when evolution is not central to its process. The brain developed in three major cycles, first described by Paul MacLean. I describe them as instinct/energy, feeling and then thinking. Each evolved and has many connections to higher levels. If we do a therapy with only the last evolved; that is, cognitive/insight therapy, we have neglected a great deal of our evolution. It is tantamount to neglecting most of our ancient history and, of course, most of our early personal history. When we ignore two thirds of our brain how can we possibly get well? I think that the thinkers (the cognitive/insight therapists) “cure” their patients so that they think they are better. This leaves out physiology and feeling.
Therefore, we need to systematically measure physiologic changes in our psychotherapy. Otherwise, we can have great new attitudes but our bodies may be degenerating.

I have often called my therapy, “evolution in reverse.” It includes evolution as its kernel. And it is that sense of evolution that makes it revolutionary. Because it overturns most current thinking about the value of thinking, particularly in terms of measuring progress in psychotherapy. What we feel is what we feel no matter what exhortations take place. And those often buried feelings determine our actions. Feelings can be deviated but there is always a home for them in the brain. They cannot be changed; though we can change our thinking about them, denying or projecting them.

Thoughts, bereft of feelings are, in essence, homeless; they have no roots. So any proper psychotherapy must adhere to the laws of biology and evolution; we need to find our roots, the basis of some many of our thoughts and beliefs. The history of mankind is found in us today, and the history of man/us is found in us, as well. When we follow our history in reverse it again must adhere to the natural order of things. In therapy if we do rebirthing it defies evolutionary principles by attacking the most remote and early imprints first. We must start in the present, give ourselves a good foundation in regard to our current lives and associated feelings and then finally arrive at the reptilian/instinctive brain a long time later. These are biologic laws that cannot be disregarded. Thus it is clear that rebirthing cannot ever work; indeed it most likely creates damage; and I have seen and treated the damage it does.

Any ploy or mechanism by a therapist that defies evolution will end in failure because evolution is merciless and unrelenting; it is how we survived. It will not allow us to cheat on its principles. If evolution is neglected it will perforce end in abreaction; the release of feeling without connection and resolution. Bioenergetics, focusing the body and muscles violates that law. Focusing on bodily release (the Gestalt Therapy, “act like an ape!” is inadequate). LSD and hallucinogens completely disregard the neurologic order of the nervous system, and spray feelings everywhere with no possible connection. A Primal will teach us evolution because it will follow the neuraxis precisely and tell us where and how evolution took place.

The Brain's Evolution and Therapy

Do you ever wonder why it is that we fall asleep in reverse order of evolution? And why we come out of it in correct order. In means, first of all, that we are prisoners of the brain’s evolution; and when we start to become consciously/aware we move to the highest level of the brain. We come out of antiquity into modern life as though we have gone through the centuries or the millennia in proper order each day in order to achieve consciousness. We do the same thing in Primal Therapy; and in doing so we must strictly obey evolutionary edicts. We can no more change that order than do so in our sleep. And when we trump that order in sleep, psychosis lurks. If we do not have enough dream (second-line limbic consciousness) sleep we suffer. And we develop physical and mental symptoms. Now what is crucial here is if we trump that order in Primal Therapy we suffer from those very same symptoms. That is why re-birthing is so dangerous; it trumps evolution. That is why cognitive therapy cannot work; it trumps the feeling areas of the brain and ignores evolution.

As with dream sleep, Primal Therapy enters the deep unconscious, slowly in ordered progression. Down on that deep level lies so many of our remote and life-and-death pains. It shows itself in our nightmares which are associated with terrible terror/anxiety states, and it is demonstrated in deep Primals where heavy pains reside. Until we have access to those imprints we can never know about life-endangering memories, nor include them in a therapeutic process. What this tells us is that we are evolutionary beings who biologically must adhere to the history of mankind; there is an order to the universe of which we are part. I cannot stress this enough. We do not take patients into birth traumas in the first weeks of therapy anymore than in dream sleep we go directly into deep sleep. Evolution is an ordered affair. We must not superimpose our ideas, our theory or our techniques on patients. The rule is that it is not up to us to decide for the patient, as for example, that she needs dream analysis, or neuro-feedback or rebirthing. It is always the patient and her readiness that dictates our approach.

Each new brain level in evolution helps out with survival, otherwise it would not be there. The brainstem and early limbic system have everything to do with survival—breathing, blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature. Evolution continues with its survival strategies finishing up with the neocortex. What this structure can do is detect enemies not only without but within—our feelings. And when it does it helps us survive by disconnecting us from the source of the pain; a self we will never meet again until we have access to deep brain structures. That may be never; and that may kill us prematurely.
As we travel through evolutionary time to the neocortex each adds its physiologic contribution. The reason that ideas cannot trump feelings is that feelings are integral to survival. They are a survival system. The neo-cortex is also very important to survival but in a different way. When we are in a coma without any neo-cortex really working our survival functions (heart rate, blood pressure, etc), are still operational. Animals survive very well without a complex neo-cortex. They won’t survive if the brainstem is damaged. We have to breathe no matter what.

Each lower level of brain function is designed to keep us alive. We can use lower levels to modify higher ones but it does not work in reverse. Imagine if the higher level neocortex could permanently modify brainstem functions? We survive because it cannot. Thus feelings can certainly sway ideas but ideas can only suppress feelings, not eradicate them. We see in our therapy how physiology and limbic feelings directly affect ideas and beliefs. A very rapid heart rate can push someone to go and do, yet no matter how hard we try we often cannot permanently alter the heart rate, especially the rate that is accompanied by anxiety. That is why we cannot “will” a slower heart rate over time. Ideas are hundreds of millions years away from physiological and emotional functions.

We know that the amygdala is pretty well mature at the time of birth so that we can code and register inchoate feelings. But the hippocampus is not yet fully developed for several years so that precision regarding the time and place and scene or origin is beyond its capacity. So we can dredge up feeling on the experiential level but not on the verbal one. So for those who claim to practice rebirthing we have to ask if there are any words to go along with the event. If there are, it is not a true event. We cannot overlook brain evolution in our therapy and perform what amounts to magic.

A patient who never wants to discuss her life but sinks immediately into her past will abreact and not get well. And when we observe a person’s history, we are also witnessing ancient history at the same time. A patient who cries like a newborn can never duplicate that sound after a Primal. One way we know this is in observing a patient make motions during reliving birth, and cannot duplicate that movement later on, no matter how hard she tries. Too often we see abreaction in patients who start in the present, begin a feeling and then immediately skip steps and goes to some kind of birth trauma. That kind of reliving becomes a defense. It interrupts and does not enhance connection.

In dialectical fashion we descend to deep unconscious levels and immediately become conscious on that level. The unconscious is transformed into consciousness. This means that we will no longer be driven by those specific unconscious forces. We have access to our inner states. We thereafter will not suffer from such things as a bleeding ulcer or colitis without being aware of it. Chances are, however, that we won’t suffer from such afflictions.

Each lower level of brain function is designed to keep us alive. We can use lower levels to modify higher ones but it does not work in reverse. Imagine if that were possible; the higher level neocortex could permanently modify brainstem functions?
But we survive because it cannot. Thus feelings can certainly sway ideas but ideas can only suppress feelings, not eradicate them. We see in our therapy how physiology and limbic feelings directly affect ideas and beliefs. A very rapid heart rate can push someone to go and do, yet no matter how hard we try we often cannot alter the heart rate, especially the rate that is accompanied by anxiety. That is why we cannot “will” a slower heart rate over time or consciously drive away anxiety. Ideas are hundreds of millions years away from physiological and emotional functions.

I remember seeing a patient who had just started therapy who told me that since he forgave his parents he feels much better; proof that ideas can trump feeling. Yet when he was measured his stress hormone levels (cortisol) never changed. Thus the neo-cortex can trump what we think are feelings without ever touching feelings, per se. The neo-cortex is most adept at deceiving itself. It can produce the thought of being well without really being well. Ideas here function as anesthetics. In therapy we certainly don’t want to being anesthetized in order to get well.

The brain is a complex proposition and to stay on any one level in therapy to the exclusion of the others means that any progress made in therapy is partial. To do reprogramming of the brain to achieve so-called “normal brainwaves” (biofeedback) is deficient and cannot lead to cure.

When we wonder if we should call a therapy scientific we have only to ask, “does it elucidate and clarify the properties of nature?” We do not ask if it works because that is subjective and not always accurate. It is the difference between asking a scientific question and one that requires a moral perspective alone. Do we know more about humanity in this therapy or are we only after some sort of pragmatic, mechanical solution? Are we doing deep breathing or matching brainwaves to some ideal? Here the focus is on the technique, not the patient nor evolution; a major difference. When we focus on how the patient evolves we learn; when we decide on how we treat her beforehand we don’t. In short, can we learn from this therapy how to treat other human beings in psychotherapy? It is not a matter of defying evolution, but of harnessing it for the good of mankind. That is Darwin’s legacy.