Epigenetics and Primal Therapy

Arthur Janov, Ph.D

________________________________________________

Editors: Agustin Gurza and Bruce Wilson

Sometimes I realize I am getting science-heavy but what is happening

today is so exciting, especially since it supports what I have been writing about
for almost 50 years. Almost every week, it seems, scientists announce new
research confirming much of the primal position. This is especially true in the
burgeoning field of epigenetics, the study of how experience changes an
individual’s genetic code, previously considered inalterable. An article recapping
the groundbreaking work by pioneering researchers from McGill University in
Montreal proclaimed that “the emerging field of epigenetics is revolutionizing the
1
study of mental health – and challenging the belief that DNA is destiny” .
Moreover, in terms of the history of science, the new developments augur the
convergence of previously distinct fields, psychology and biology. In one report
regarding research that shows a link between early-life adversity and changes in a
person’s genetic make-up, the Canadian researchers come to this sweeping

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1
McDevitt, N. (2006, Fall). The nurture of things. Headway. Retrieved from
[Link]

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conclusion: “Epigenetics could serve as a bridge between the social sciences and
the biological sciences, allowing a truly integrated understanding of human health
and behavior.” (McGowan & Szyf, 2010, p. 71)

In short, there is a growing understanding that mental illness has a crucial

physical component, which has been a basic tenet of Primal Theory from the start.
We have always maintained that neurosis is a disturbance of mind and body. And
in our treatment, both mind and body must be involved for a cure. Now, science
is showing us how that is possible at a cellular level. Unlike genetic mutations,
the researchers state, “epigenetic alterations are potentially reversible”
(McGowan & Szyf, 2010, p. 66). And that is the most promising finding of all.

I have discussed epigenetics in my blog and my books, about how

adversity early on changes the switches for key genes that then serves to
compound repression or inhibition. These switches turn the gene on or off, and
thus help set in what seem like genetic changes. In Primal terms, it is the
mechanism of closing the gates of feeling or opening them. And there are
different chemicals that accompany the epigenetic events, methyl and acetyl
groups, for example. The critical work in this field shows how imprints can be
passed down through generations – from parent to child and grandchild –
primarily through the biochemical processes known as methylation and
acetylation. We need to differentiate, however, between healthy and unhealthy
methylation. Under normal conditions, methylation is a necessary and naturally
occurring process that helps regulate the expression of an individual’s genetic
make-up. But excess

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methylation becomes pathological and leads to disease. The process goes awry
when the individual suffers physical or psychological trauma, especially in the
womb and in infancy. It seems that for each and every pain we endure during
gestation and at birth there is a change in the chemicals that enhance the
repression of pain. When the pain or adversity is prolonged, the system is
overtaxed and we now have the mechanism of leaky gates; that is, repression
begins to falter due to an overload of chronic pain.It is the consistency of the pain
that causes the overload. There is a limit that the brain can handle. Beyond that,
the gates become vulnerable and do not do well. It takes very little trauma after
that to produce a symptom such as ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder.

The chemical methyl group is recruited when there is a traumatic event,

and helps embed that memory. It seems that when there is a surge of methylation
part of it attaches to cytosine, one of the four nucleobases of DNA. The imprint of
the pain is now part of the DNA and blocks the expression of various genes.
Concurrently, methyl and acetyl groups attached to the histones (protein
structures which allow the DNA to coil up) may interfere with the timely coiling
or uncoiling of the DNA. This disrupts the proper expression of certain hormones
and other neurochemical processes.

That is part of the reason it is so easy to confuse genetics with epigenetics:

our moods and personalities are shaped early on, so we believe psychological
disorders are passed down through the bloodlines. After all, if both the parents
have blue eyes, it is not a mystery that their child also has blue eyes.

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But when it comes to behavior and feelings, it is another matter. Controlled by the
epigenome, genetic expression can be restricted through experiences the fetus
undergoes while in the womb. And it is here that some of the mystery of cancer
may be uncovered; for it may be that cancerous cells would evolve as normal
cells if not for the physiologic force of repression provoked by maternal stress.
This creates lifelong chronic stress in the offspring. It may be that as benign cells
surge forward along preordained pathways, they are blocked from their
destinations. They are then “crushed” or deviated and can no longer be
themselves; they lose their identity and become lethal. As they are changed, we
are changed. (More on cancer in a moment.) What all this means is that by
examining our womb-life in detail we can often predict our future: our sexual
problems, the possibility of later cancer, psychosis, heart problems, Alzheimer’s
disease, and a whole host of afflictions (Johnstone & Baylin, 2010)

One study suggests that the biological underpinnings of bipolar affective

disorder are not primarily genetic, but are epigenetic (Rutten & Mill, 2009). Even
an individual’s tendency toward violence, once thought to be a brain disorder, is
being shown to have epigenetic roots. In research with rats, investigators at
Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne found that animals
subjected to trauma in childhood showed changes in two parts of the brain – the
orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala (Márquez et al., 2013). Those changes
taken together combined to lower the threshold of aggressive impulses and
weaken the ability to control them. (A report summarizing the findings was also
released by the Swiss research university under the title, “Childhood Trauma

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 2
Leaves its Mark on the Brain.” ) The results were surprisingly similar to changes
found in the human brains of traumatized children who grew up to be violent
adults. In addition, the scientists also measured changes in genes known to be
associated with aggressive behavior. Here, they found that the psychological
stress experienced by the rats caused an alteration in the way these genes were
expressed, specifically an increase in the level of MAOA gene expression in the
prefrontal cortex, according to Prof. Carmen Sandi, head of the Swiss school’s
Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics and director of the Brain-Mind Institute.
Researchers were able to reduce the levels of aggression with antidepressants,
specifically an MAOA gene inhibitor. In short, childhood stress produced
epigenetic changes that heightened violent tendencies. Drug treatment later
tamped down the violence, reversing the long-term impact of early trauma. In our
own work, we have found that the deeper patients descend down the levels of
consciousness the more likely there can be rage and violence.

Until recently, the role of epigenetic mechanisms in transmitting trauma

across generations has been demonstrated in animals but not in humans. A new
study, involving Holocaust survivors and their children, shows for the first time
how the epigenetic impact of stress, the cellular changes, can also be passed down
among humans, from one generation to the next (Yehuda et al., 2015).
Researchers found that children of Holocaust survivors frequently gave birth to
anxious children. At first, they thought it was because the parents told horrible

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2
Childhood trauma leaves its mark on the brain. (2013, January 15). Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne. Retrieved from
[Link]

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stories to the children, but later they discovered that the anxiety came down through the
genetic chain, as we shall see in more detail shortly. The point is that the genetic effect
of wartime stress had descended from the mother’s physiology through epigenetics.
(More on this study in a moment.)

I will discuss the clinical implications of the research in the second half of this
article. Suffice to say for now that pharmacological treatment may not be the most
efficacious way to reverse epigenetic changes. We propose that the effects of
methylation – as an agent of repression – can be reversed during Primal Therapy, which
revisits and resolves the traumatic events that triggered the repressive chemical process
to begin with. Epigenetics modifies genetics. De-methylation undoes epigenetics. What
is left is a slightly modified gene. Being neurotic from a very young age shaped our
behavior in unhealthy directions. When we go back and re-live those imprints we do not
erase history, but we empty out the driving force that shaped and warped our early
behavior. In other words, life experience, neurotic though it may be, is still experience
that formed us. We can never go back and be pure again because neurosis has taken its
seat at the table. The real revolution lies in the possibility that people no longer have to
live with their genetic inheritance nor their epigenetic dictates, but can actually take
charge and change it through Primal Therapy. We believe we may have the method for
reversing the long-term deleterious effects of epigenetics, and we are undertaking new
research to study that point. If it is life experience that caused changes in the
biochemistry and neuronal circuitry, then it is not a fixed entity. It can be altered; the
way this is done is by retrieving and reliving key imprints, as I will explain. Heredity is
irreversible, but epigenetics is not. It is reversible, which is something I propose we
have been doing for almost 50 years.

Heredity Turned on its Head.

Let’s make sure we understand this notion of epigenetics because in the

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coming years it will likely be one of most important areas of scientific research.
As I’ve mentioned, one reason for its preeminence is that many of the serious
diseases we think are genetic are actually epigenetic and, therefore,
environmentally caused, and possibly treatable. That is now an established fact in
human development. However, early discoveries in the field a short decade ago
were so startling that they even surprised the scientific world.

The power of epigenetics was demonstrated early on in an experiment at

Duke University. That study showed that when female mice were fed a diet rich
in methyl it completely altered the fur pigment of the offspring; in other words, it
acted like a genetic inheritance when it was not. It was the result of experience,
something totally unexpected in the field of genetics until then. As a result of this
study, two leading scientists from Canada, Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf,
thought: if that is true why shouldn’t it be true of other experiences such as bad
3
mothering or negligent parenting? Well, it was, and epigenetics research
exploded. Think of that: traumatic events in very early childhood leave a mark or
tag on a gene that affects us just about forever. That is what I refer to as the
imprint, the psychological stamp engraved by harmful events during gestation and
early infancy, and burned into the system for life. We now understand that the
imprint is aided and abetted by the process of methylation, in which the chemical
methyl group is added to the genome to either increase or restrict its expression.
In other words, the imprint is laid down, in part, by a change in the cell, as certain

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3
Hoag, H. (2011, Summer). Are your genes your destiny? (Not if your mom has anything to
say about it). Retrieved from [Link]
genes-your-destiny-not-if- your-mom-has-anything-to-say-about-it/

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chemical reactions are taking place — hydrogen removal, methyl infusion, and so
on. Methylation leaves a heritable imprint, one that can be passed down even
from grandparents to their grandchildren, as research has shown. So what we
always thought was genetic may well be the result of very early experience
diverting the genetic legacy. In short, the experiences of our forbearers can
endure and be passed down the epigenetic chain – the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. This is something science thought impossible not long ago.

In another key experiment, the McGill genetics researchers compared two

groups of rats: one group consisted of the offspring of normal mothers who
frequently licked their babies but had subjected the offspring to stress during
pregnancy, with a second group of pups who were also under stress but
experienced no licking (Meaney, Aitken, Bodnoff, Iny, & Sapolsky, 1985). Not
surprisingly, those babies who were heavily licked turned out to be the most
normal and well adjusted. What is a surprise, however, is how much womb-life
counts; what the scientists found is that the right amount of licking and grooming
early on, left offspring less responsive to stress hormones as adults. It is what we
all know: that early love makes us stronger and less anxious. But it turns out that
if the mothers were licked and groomed early on in their lives, that experience
could be passed on too; the stress hormone genes of their offspring could be
modified by the methyl group (and also other chemicals) in a beneficial way.
Good history in the mother, good childhood for the children. The more loving by
the mother, the less methylation in the child. As we will see shortly, loving in the
womb means receiving proper nutrients, being calm and not

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furiously running here and there, avoiding dangerous or unhealthy situations. I
know of someone who did extreme heat/massage therapy while pregnant, never
realizing the possible harm to the baby.

Almost every animal form that is loved and licked has grown up pretty
healthy with no serious disease; and in my therapeutic experience, those children
who had bad and traumatic births with unhealthy gestations are the ones who
suffer the most as adults. Too often, catastrophic early life equals catastrophic
disease later in life.

To make sure that these changes in the rat pups resulted from experience
and not heredity, the researchers let normally stable rat pups raised by attentive
mothers be raised by neurotic negligent mothers. And the result was still the same
– unstressed babies. These babies had birth mothers who had normal amounts of
methylation in their genomes. Thus rats raised by loving mothers could pass it
onto offspring even when the adopted mother was not loving. The genes for stress
hormone output had minimal methylation; in other words love was passed down
the genetic chain. So normal babies raised by negligent and inattentive mothers
still had low methyl levels in their hippocampus. The babies started life one leg
up; a good start in life despite a bad childhood.

For animal mothers, licking is tantamount to hugging and caressing in

humans. And, just as we see in the rats, a woman who is unhappy or depressed
while carrying can influence that child for a lifetime, even if she later normalizes
and feels better. I believe that changes in the genes, methylation and

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acetylation, must occur very early as the whole neuronal system is evolving. So
before we can state what causes depression or anxiety, we need to observe the
early epigenetics at work. Again, pups born to bad mothers but reared by loving
mothers still seemed to be normal and relatively un-methylated.

Here is one more reason this research is important: the scientists found that
unloving mothers of rodents caused methylation of the estrogen receptors in
female offspring. Then, when they had offspring of their own, the offspring were
deficient in estrogen, which made them less attentive and loving to their own
babies. We as yet do not know how many key chemical processes can be affected
by lack of early love, and more, we have no idea how many hormones are
changed in neurotic (heavily methylated) mothers, and how that affects myriad
adult behaviors.

Nowadays, there seem to be constant breakthroughs in epigenetics

research. As I stated at the start, researchers have established that epigenetics is at
work not just in animals but among humans as well. In the aforementioned study
of Holocaust survivors, published in August in Biological Psychiatry, an
international team of researchers led by Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry
and neuroscience at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, examined the genes
of 32 Jewish subjects who had suffered some level of trauma during World War
II. They were either held in concentration camps, tortured or forced into hiding.
Researchers also examined the genes of 22 adult children of these traumatized
survivors. The results were then compared with a control group of Jewish families
(eight parents and nine offspring) who were

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living outside of Europe during the war.

Investigators focused on a specific gene, FKBP5, which is known to

regulate the stress hormone system and determines how well a person handles
stress, according to Elisabeth Binder, director at the Max Planck Institute of
Psychiatry in Munich, who directed the molecular analyses. The study found that
the war trauma had altered the methylation levels of a specific site within that
gene (bin 3/site 6) in both the Holocaust survivors and their offspring. The
methylation levels at that site were higher in Holocaust survivors compared to the
control subjects. In the survivors’ adult offspring, paradoxically, the methylation
levels at that same site were lower, compared to controls. Still, researchers
determined that “methylation levels for exposed parents and their offspring were
significantly correlated.”

The research has quickly led to a practical, real-world application.In

August, around the same time the study was released, London’s Guardian
newspaper reported that Jewish activists in Scotland had launched an effort to
help the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors suffering from depression, anxiety,
addiction and eating disorders. The article makes note of epigenetics studies that
document “the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust” by showing that “the
atrocities altered the DNA of victims’ descendants.” Armed with that knowledge,
4
activists called for “a mental health provision to treat inherited trauma.”

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4
West, J. (2015, August 3). Holocaust survivors' grandchildren call for action over inherited
trauma. The Guardian.

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 Although critics say the number of subjects in this study is too small –
reflecting the small number of Holocaust survivors still alive – the connection is
clear. "The gene changes in the children did not appear to be mediated by
adversity experienced during their own childhood but could only be attributed to
Holocaust exposure in the parents," said Yehuda, in a statement from the Max
5
Planck Institute. "Environmental influences such as stress, smoking or diet can
affect the genes of our children.”

In other words, even before a baby is conceived, his genetic destiny is

being determined, at least in part, by the life experiences of his parents, not just
their existing genetic code. That is epigenetics in action.

The Urgency of Early Love

What is important is that we can begin to zoom in on a specific answer to

the question that eludes so many in the study of mental illness – why? Granted,
damage means heavier methylation. But what is that great damage? The answer is
simple – early lack of love. It takes many forms in humans: poor nutrition, abuse,
neglect, lack of touch (licking in animals). Methylation seems to be an important
marker for lack of early love, both in animals and in humans. The new research is
finding that so many diseases are affected by methylation, including multiple
sclerosis, diabetes and heart disease. Again, these are stress-

________________

5.  Holocaust survivors pass on trauma to their children’s genes. (2015, August 25). Retrieved
from [Link]

related and the great stressor seems to be a simple lack of love, meaning

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deprivation of basic need. Not surprising in the rat study was the fact that heavy
methylation occurred in the limbic/feeling structures such as the hippocampus
which has to do with feeling/memory. The upshot is that rat pups that are unloved
are more susceptible to later stress, while those that do get loved (licked) do much
better later in life, becoming more adventurous and curious.

Remember, when there is very early stress during womb-life, the genes can
be up-or-down-regulated, and here starts the origins of depression and anxiety. It
becomes the crucible for later disease. When we add later trauma – abuse in
infancy and childhood, given away to foster parents, a mother too sick to care for
the child, etc. – we can almost be sure that neurotic behavior and disease will
follow. That almost surely will involve ADD, lack of concentration and learning
disorders. The DNA has been chemically modified and it reroutes normal
reactions for behavior and disease. These changes are not neurotic; they are often
normal to the noxious intrusion of things like a mother’s smoking or drinking.
The fetus is trying to adapt as best she can. Neurosis is an adaptive reaction to
threat. It is in that sense, normal. So when we find a mother who is not loving we
need to know that she may be driven by her epigenes; she is a victim of those
changes. Her cortisol/stress hormone level militates against maternal instincts;
methylation shuts down a number of “natural” behaviors, including the maternal
instinct. One of the hormonal controls for love is oxytocin, which responds to our
therapy; it builds as pain descends and allows the person both to give and receive
love. Those new mothers who cannot give adequate

breast milk for their newborns are usually the ones with little love in infancy; they

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are often deficient in oxytocin. It is why I call it the hormone of love.

As it turns out, love is not as ephemeral as we might have thought. Love

means having a proper birth, without heavy anesthetics to shut down the oxygen
supply to the newborn. Most important, it means a mother fairly free of anguish
and depression; for her physiologic and emotional state is more or less the
offspring’s state, not just momentarily, but for a lifetime. In fact, when we see the
documentation we discover that how we’ve been nurtured in the womb and our
first years is at least as important, if not more so, than heredity; when love is
absent, there are enduring physical consequences. And therein lies the rub; we are
dealing with errors of omission, an absence not a presence — which is why it is
so hard to pin down.

Animal experiments have shown that separating a baby sporadically and

unpredictably from its mother causes severe stress, and the same applies to a
human baby who is not touched right after birth and in the first weeks of life, as
we find in babies raised in incubators. Another study showed that early trauma
produced heavy methylation in those children who grew up in orphanages (Drury
et al., 2011). And that process then affected much more in terms of brain and
neuronal development. The effects of this stress become heritable from the
epigenome. This imprint then affects many aspects of our biology, including the
memory system. That may mean that a condition such as Alzheimer’s disease
may get its start from birth, and not show up for another sixty years. Research by
D.K. Lahiri and B. Maloney (2010), at the Indiana University School of
Medicine,

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for instance, indicates how this all might work— first by the imprint and then,
they suggest, by the methylation that carries on the imprint. Again, the imprint
changes how heredity manifests itself. Clearly, without an understanding of the
imprint there is no way to solve the mystery of mental illness which derives from
serious imprinted experience. And, in reality, it is never just “mental” illness. It is
neurophysiologic to the core. That is why to use intellectual methods such as
Cognitive Therapy to address deep-lying memories is a contradiction in terms.

So what is the imprint? It is a memory, an ensemble of all the

circumstances surrounding a key adverse event; a memory of an early trauma
encapsulated. But it is not just a “memory” in the usual sense of recall or actively
going back to purposefully retrieve something forgotten in the past. It is an event
sealed-in biochemically and which affects us forevermore. The reason it is so
important is that it determines personality, illness, longevity and many other
facets of our lives. It drives our behavior and the kind of sickness we will suffer
from, whether Alzheimer’s disease or cancer. Once we understand the nature of
the imprint we understand that no basic change in personality can take place in
therapy without altering the imprint. But you cannot get there from here; you
cannot willfully try to retrieve the memory because “willful” is the opposite of
what is needed. One needs to let go of high-level cortical processes and descend
down the levels of consciousness where the imprint exists. And there we find that
we cannot reach out to it because it is encapsulated, surrounded by aspects of the
methyl chemical group, which helps encase it and makes it unreachable. Thus,
when an infant suffers trauma during the critical period

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before birth and at the very beginning of life, methylation leaves the mark of that
trauma on the cells. The methyl chemicals seem to cling to the gene and control
whether the genetic switch is turned on or off, and whether it is on when it should
be off, such as in serious disease. In effect, it is methylation that is heavily
responsible for the imprint and its enduring affects.

One example: when a patient relives a traumatic birth, we sometimes see

the reappearance of the doctor’s fingerprints on the arms of the newborn. We
have photographed this, as it is unmistakable to the eye. And at the same time, so
difficult to understand, until we realize that memory is far more than cerebral.
Hoping to cure by cerebral methods while ignoring the imprint is but a fantasy
that ignores reality.

Neurosis is Inherited

People exude who they are from every pore of their being. I mean that
literally. An uptight, tense mother radiates her repression. An angry father
radiates his rage. They don't have to “do” anything; just be. But it is worse than
that. When their underlying feelings show themselves, we instinctively sense we
should avoid them or be very careful around them. They distort our words, detour
our natural movements and disapprove of almost everything we do, not by words
but by those looks. And worse, when they show no emotion, we know that
feelings are what we keep to ourselves. The point is that even before we have
words a child is undergoing a lifetime of experience. And the earlier that

experience, the more impactful. It should be obvious; those early experiences that

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directly affect breathing, digestion and elimination are going to do a lot of
damage and will last a lifetime.

Our genes form the matrix of later life; that much we agree on. But our
epigenes, transformed by severe experiences, build a new “genetic” base that
changes or distorts the evolution of our genetic code. Those new altered traits
then become “inherited.” As I’ve noted, we too often confuse this with our
genetic heritage, which is largely impervious to later events. The person becomes
a meld of genes and epigenes, of genetics shaped by experience. Instead of
saying, “she looks and acts just like her mother,” we need to say, “her mother was
‘infected’ with neurosis, which got imprinted into the system of the offspring, and
now she is just as hyperactive and ADD as her distracted and hyperactive
mother.” In other words, the infant who is being carried has caught what could be
a fatal disease: neurosis, the same one lying inside the mother. The baby will
reflect the internal life of the mother and that is what will be imprinted inside him
and last a lifetime. Why? Because this is what had been learned in order to adapt
and adjust. No words, no reprimands, no social neglect, just who she is, does it
all.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, looked at what

they call emotional synchrony, the non-verbal communication between mother
and child (Waters, West & Mendes, 2014). In a phenomenon they dub “stress
contagion,” the baby is learning how to manage the incoming stress of the
mother. They did studies of several different mothers who gave a talk with a

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different audience – one approving, one neutral and one not approving. Guess
what? The 14-month old babies reflected what happened. There were differences
in heart rate and a greater stress response in those children of mothers who had
disapproval. The children “learned” through some kind of osmosis. They were
inculcated by the mother’s emotional state. As lead researcher Sara Waters stated
in an article on the website of the Association for Psychological Science, which
published the research: “Your infant may not be able to tell you that you seem
stressed or ask you what is wrong, but our work shows that, as soon as she is in
your arms, she is picking up on the bodily responses accompanying your
emotional state and immediately begins to feel in her own body your own
6
negative emotion.” Now imagine that the baby and mother are one, where the
baby lives inside the mother. The influences are far more impactful.

So what gets transmitted? Odor, facial expression, lack of feeling, body

movements and on and on. All of the parent is transmitted to the child. Even food
preferences can be imprinted in the womb and passed on through generations. If
you love sweets and cannot resist, it could be due to womb-life. In other words,
the mother’s compulsion becomes your destiny. This can explain a good
percentage of obesity in children. Bad eating habits begin in the womb, as do so
many other compulsions. For the most part, people only see the visible
manifestation of these hidden forces. So they ask, for example, “Why does this

________________

6
For Infants, Stress May be Caught, Not Taught. (2014, February 3). Association for
Psychological Science. Retrieved from
[Link]

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caught- [Link]

person eat so much?” We know that it is not current culture that is the sole cause;
it could also be because the mother was indulgent and ate compulsively. While in
the womb the baby is learning about his world and what to expect from it; hence
lots of food is to be expected from a mother who indulges. More evidence is
piling up to show how this early start can predict the early onset of disease and a
7
shortened lifespan. The fetus is not only aware of certain tastes and smells in the
mother while she is carrying, but those memories can last a lifetime, and can
affect so much of our interests later on. Mothers ingesting carrot juice during
pregnancy, for example, had children who preferred it.
Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, found that even the
memory of a specific smell can be inherited (Dias & Ressler, 2013).The scientists
trained male mice to associate the smell of cherry blossom with an electric shock,
making them fearful of it. They then impregnated females with the sperm of these
mice and found that the pups were also fearful of the cherry blossom aroma. Even
the grand-pups inherited the fear of that specific smell. How did this olfactory
trait get passed down through generations? Researchers attribute it to epigenetics,
noting that DNA from the grandfather mice and their pups revealed epigenetic
marks on the gene encoding the receptor for that specific smell, known as M71.
In other words, this inheritance came through experience, not just genes. Like
their traumatized grandfathers, the grand-pups

_________________

7.  See the work of Keith Godfrey, Professor of Epidemiology and Human Development, and
others at the University of Southampton in England.
[Link]

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y_r esearch_group.page

were more sensitive to the aroma of cherry blossom because their receptors were also
acutely attuned to it, more than control mice. The research “provides some of the best
evidence yet that memories or developed traits can be inherited,” according to a report
8
on the experiment published in New Scientist.”

"Knowing how the experiences of parents influence their descendants helps us to

understand psychiatric disorders that may have a trans-generational basis, and possibly
to design therapeutic strategies," says senior author Kerry Ressler, MD, PhD, professor
9
of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory School of Medicine. In 2013, Ressler,
who is also an investigator at Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center,
delivered a Stockholm Psychiatry Lecture on the biology of fear at the Karolinska
Institutet in Stockholm. Entitled "Neural circuits mediating fear, risk and resilience:
10
from Pavlov to PTSD," the hour lecture can be viewed online.
So are we born fearful? Could be. We can be jumpy, nervous and erratic, all due
to epigenetics. It seems so early as to be genetic, but it is more likely to be epigenetic,
the condition of the mother (and father) while carrying. So you say to yourself, “Did I
inherit my mother’s craziness?” The answer could be, yes... but not in the usual sense of
inheritance. Rather, who she was while carrying – hyperactive or depressed and down –
left you with a neurotic inheritance that

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8
Geddes, L. (2013). Fear of a smell can be passed down several generations. New Scientist,
220(2946), 10. doi:10.1016/s0262-4079(13)62827-4

9
Mice can inherit learned sensitivity to a smell. (2013, December 2). Retrieved from
[Link]

10
[Link]

  20  
still shaped your life. This should teach us something about memory; for
memories while being carried can last decades and drive and/or channel behavior.
We do not simply “grow out of it.”

Study after study has shown that a carrying mother’s stress can have long-
lasting effects on how the genes unravel and are expressed in the offspring, which
is the essence of epigenetics. Those brought up in abusive and unloving homes –
under condition of famine, violence, war, divorce, etc. – had lifelong changes in
their development, including chronically high levels of cortisol. Women who
were abused by their husbands had children with excessive methylation of their
gene. And this alteration was passed on to the baby just as if it were inherited. In
this way, and in many others, the anxiety and depression of the carrying mother
get translated into the baby. In short, he is born stressed. Later on, he will over-
react to tense events with higher stress levels.

This is the definition of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And the

point is that many of us carry around this latent high stress level for a lifetime.
(We tested many of our entering patients for cortisol levels, and they were
universally high to begin with, but dropped significantly after one year of
therapy.) If we later add an unloving home and other stress factors, the latent
levels become inordinately elevated. So then, a man enters combat and later
suffers PTSD; we think that combat did it. Combat only exacerbated the reaction
and made it manifest; it became an overt symptom. He was already PTSD, only
latent. There is a recent study that proves the point, showing that those who had
combat fatigue generally had more trauma growing up (Berntsen et al., 2012).

  21  
 In that study, a team of Danish and American researchers interviewed a
group of 746 Danish soldiers before, during and after their deployment to
Afghanistan. The investigators, led by Dorthe Berntsen of Denmark’s Aarhus
University, wanted to trace the causes of PTSD and find out why some soldiers
developed the disorder while others did not. They found that the vast majority of
subject soldiers handled the war experience with little or no psychological harm.
Surprisingly, for those men who did develop serious stress symptoms, the cause
was not found to be connected to battlefield trauma. Instead, the strongest
predictor of PTSD was extreme childhood abuse, not combat experience.
Researchers found that the PTSD sufferers were more likely to have been victims
of severe beatings, burns and broken bones, or to have witnessed family violence
as children. In addition, these soldiers had past experiences that they were unable,
or unwilling, to talk about with the investigators.

However, in an unexpected twist on conventional wisdom, researchers

found that some of the already stressed soldiers, about 13 percent, actually felt
better after being sent to the battlefield. These were men who exhibited stress
symptoms, such as major anxiety and frequent nightmares, before their
deployment. But once in the war zone, their stress temporarily improved, only to
reappear once they were safely back home. The question is: Why would they feel
better when suddenly plunged into an unfamiliar and threatening situation? The
answer, as this study suggests, is that being sent away to war allowed them to
briefly escape their own private battlefield – the family.

“In other words, they showed improvement as soldiers only because they

  22  
were in such poor psychological condition in civilian life,” concludes an article
about the research published in Scientific American. “Army life – even combat—
offered them more in the way of social support and life satisfaction than they had
ever had at home. These soldiers were probably benefiting emotionally from
being valued as individuals for the first time ever and from their first authentic
camaraderie – mental health benefits that diminished after they once again
11
returned to civilian life.”

To cure the affliction of PTSD we need to deal with the trauma of combat
and also the adversity from childhood that set the stage for it. In other words,
there were antecedents for this affliction. Cure occurs when all the current and
antecedent factors are addressed and relived. So a soldier can be aware of his
combat trauma and unconscious of the traumas underlying it. It is what we can’t
see that does so much damage. Moreover, the most deleterious traumas are those
that occurred during the early critical period, when need is greatest and pain is at
its asymptote. It means that the sealed-in imprint is almost irreversible in its
effects (excluding Primal Therapy). War is such a powerful force that its effects
can be engraved just as during a critical period in childhood, when the brain is so
vulnerable. There is, therefore, a confluence of two traumas: one that is obvious
and the other that we cannot see. We must not only treat what is obvious if we
want to make sure that the PTSD does not linger on and on. To leave the basic
primeval imprint intact and untouched means always that we

_______________

11. Herbert, W. (2012). Embattled Childhood: The Real Trauma in PTSD. Scientific American
Mind Sci Am Mind, 23(5), 74-75. doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind1112-74

  23  
must do something each day to handle the symptoms which never seem to go
away.
That is why we must always include the concept of the imprint in any
attempt to understand human behavior, whether it be PTSD or ADD or any
number of ailments. It may seem like one abuse cannot be that bad as to cause
such lasting damage; but it is one abuse among many, a series of traumas that are
encapsulated and imprinted with a force that lasts a lifetime. A mother who fights
with her spouse over time is setting up future behavior in the offspring. It not only
upsets the mother but it also upsets the baby for life by changing his genetic
inheritance. We have treated such cases and they are often punctuated by frequent
trips to the emergency room for allergy and asthma attacks.

When a baby or fetus is traumatized he is more sensitive to later stress. His

immune system is affected and he is more vulnerable to such things as Epstein-
Barr disease or the herpes virus. In other words, when there is a virus around he
will be more likely to fall ill, especially if he were unloved even in the womb (i.e.
did not have his basic needs fulfilled) (Fagundes, Glaser, Malarkey & Kiecolt-
Glaser, 2013). These afflictions are not considered mental illness, but they are
often due to the same imprints involved in serious mental ailments. Here there is
dysregulation of immune function, but it can have other effects, as well. Do we
want to alleviate that immune problem or cure it? To cure it, we must find the
imprints. They are there and when the patient is given access he will get there.
Memories will come to greet him. Yes, we must treat the allergies, etc., but that
only deals with manifestations, not cure.

  24  
 In order to suffer “mental illness” we need a “mental” component, the
cognitive apparatus that allows for mental deviation. Until that evolutionary step
in brain development, we will suffer physically from that same imprint.
Sometimes it is not different diseases we are dealing with, but different
evolutionary stages of our growing up; our ontology. It is not possible to develop
an “attention deficit” until we develop the cognitive capacity to pay attention and
concentrate. And then it is the impact of multiple imprints or one very strong
imprint that sends constant messages to the top level brain, the neo-cortex, trying
to inform it of the problems on deeper levels, and thus interrupting normal
thought. Those messages are importuning and unrelenting, and keep us from any
long-term focus. They are trying to inform us of priorities; what is urgently in
need of being dealt with.

Epigenetics and Brain Development

Although the study of epigenetics can get fairly complex, one of the keys to
proper understanding lies in accounting how the brain develops during the fetal
period. The thalamo-cortical (thinking/feeling) circuits are established very late in
gestation. Only after they have developed and the amygdala-cortical circuits are
in place is it possible for us to have a mental appreciation of the pain we are in.
Before then, we can experience pain without acknowledging it. Thus, pain is laid
down unconsciously, without words to explain or clarify it. There was a study
reported in the British journal Nature, (Garcia, Vouimba,

  25  
Beaudry & Thompson, 1999) in which the investigators noted that when babies
are under threat the amygdala sends a signal to the prefrontal cortex, triggering
the expression of fear in behavior. The cortex becomes the “decider,” as it were,
planning for action. As part of the study, the researchers trained mice to associate
a tone with an accompanying shock delivered whenever the tone was issued. Each
time the mice heard the tone, there was commensurate brain activity in the
prefrontal area, signaling a threat. But when the amygdala was surgically
removed there was no longer any prefrontal activity; the former could no longer
signal fear to the top level. The same is true when we drug that structure or
tranquilize it: we thereby diminish the force that mounts in the prefrontal area. As
we learned earlier, gating problems in the amygdala may be part of the reason so
many of us have trouble either falling asleep, staying asleep, or even
concentrating. Lower level imprints thrusting upwards and forward keep us from
traveling to a lower level of brain function by jolting us into a hyper-vigilant state
whenever we lie down to relax. There is simply too much activity in that deeper
level to permit sleep.

The primordial Primal Imprint involves the brainstem. Phylo-genetically,

this is an ancient brain system that we share with sharks. It makes us hyperaware
and hyper-reactive. It is the source of basic biological impulses, fight or flight.
And research points to this key structure as where anxiety emanates from,
something I have seen and written about for many decades. Imprints here
adversely affect the serotonin system, which should help dampen panic, but it
cannot. So what do we do years later for panic? We offer serotonin pills in the

  26  
form of SSRI’s, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. And what does that do?
Make up for what was depleted during brainstem dominance.

What is most important from my perspective is that when the brain is

marked by trauma, serotonin supplies are depleted; and when that happens, we
have what I call “leaky gates’ for a lifetime. We are then less effective in our
efforts to repress. Pain roils the brain. We are disturbed and cannot concentrate or
learn. And later in life, we are more susceptible to mental illness. This was found
by researchers in Quebec, Canada, who measured the serotonin synthesis capacity
of 26 healthy adult males, recruited from a 27-year longitudinal study. The results
were then correlated with reported birth trauma, especially a delivery where the
fetus showed signs of physiological distress (Booij et al., 2012). The study
concluded that “perinatal stressors may contribute to increased vulnerability for
psychiatric disorders in which serotonin plays a major role.”

Recently, researchers have found that children with OCD, Obsessive-

Compulsive Disorder, are much more likely to have suffered a birth trauma than
controls (Geller et al., 2008). And the question is, why does this reaction get
imprinted and last so long? Because it is essential for survival that we remember
what is dangerous and how to react to it. We need to have the capacity to feel
terror and get galvanized to react immediately. Part of this is that the secretion of
noradrenaline affects the amygdala and elements of the brainstem, which are
mobilized. We become hyper-alert and ready for action, and this alertness
interacts with the memory system to direct our efforts.

  27  
 If we had the ability to employ words at birth we would say, “Oh My, such
terror”. But we wait years to have those words, and then we call it anxiety. Why?
Because we lost the connection to the origin of it. Now it seems like a different
disease with no known cause. It is the same old imprint with a new title. Yet it is
a powerhouse, and when we begin our study into the development of cancer later
in life we expect to see strong correlations. Remember, terror – now called
anxiety – has a purpose: it is essential for memory to alert us to danger from
inside and out. We try to do away with anxiety with pills when it is a life-saving
mechanism and needs to be available.

Terror is mobilized so deep in the brain that an individual is often unaware

of its onset. Thus, people who suffer panic attacks often say they seem to come
out of nowhere, even though their bodies are trying to send early warning signals.
In one experiment, scientists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas attached
mobile monitors to panic sufferers and recorded round-the-clock readings of vital
signs (Meuret et al., 2011). What they found was that subjects were completely
unaware of physiological symptoms that could have signaled an impending panic
episode, the biological precursors to manifest symptoms such as chest pain,
dizziness, trembling or hot flashes. Patients were oblivious to these “waves of
physiological instability” for at least an hour after the symptoms had started.
Suddenly, as if on a time-delay, the patient becomes aware that he is having a
full-blown panic attack. It is as though the pain/terror is on the rise and we are not
aware of it until it engulfs our consciousness. (The experiment is also explained
in a YouTube video posted online and featuring the

  28  
study’s lead researcher, Alicia Meuret, Associate Professor Of Psychology and
12
Director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU. ) Because the
terror is set down so early, in the beginning months of gestation, and imprinted so
deep in the brain, we have no idea where it comes from. Terror surely begins its
life in the brainstem and in archaic parts of the limbic system (amygdala). It is
only when the gates falter and the terror bursts through that we become aware of
it. Attention Deficit Disorder means that the gates have let through scattered pain
and terror, distracting our focus and attention. This means that we pay too much
to a multitude of inputs. It is not a deficit; our attentional processes are
overwhelmed. And what is the message it is trying to unravel? It is not one
message but a myriad of them, all shouting “I hurt.”

A key point in all of this is that physiologic reactions are the basis upon
which feelings are constructed. Thus, what distorts physiologic responses will
distort psychological reactions, as well. If the system is highly activated due to
early trauma, chances are we will find, later on, a hyperactive individual who will
search out projects to keep himself active and busy. If dopamine and other
alerting chemicals are in short supply, we may have someone, instead, who is
passive and phlegmatic, who concocts reasons for not doing anything, for not
following through. It is not a one-to-one relationship, but physiology does direct
our psychology, only after psychology has its say.

Neuroscientists in Italy did a complete literature search of many

_________________

12. Meuret, A., Ph.D. (2011, July 26). SMU: Out-of-the-blue panic attacks aren't without
warning. Retrieved from [Link]

databases for panic disorders (Perna, Guerriero, Brambilla & Caldirola, 2014).

  29  
Yes, the brainstem was involved. The brainstem, which registers very early
trauma and sets the tone for how we respond to it later in life. So mother’s drug-
taking and later birth anesthesia sets up a panic reaction to lack of oxygen. Later
in life, closed doors or windows become a threat and can set up a panic attack.
Their summary was as follows: “Panic patients tend to have abnormal brainstem
activation to emotional stimuli when compared with healthy controls.” Let’s be
wary of concentrating on the brainstem without acknowledging the milieu it lives
in. The brainstem is the mechanism for the process of translating terror, but where
does the terror come from? We will never find that out by a detailed examination
of the brain cells. We will find out through knowing the terror that the mother has
undergone while pregnant. I saw a patient recently whose mother underwent a
severe auto crash with baby in the car. This child had a lifelong anxiety state. Her
brainstem was constantly reacting to the imprint.
Here are my questions for researchers: where does that state come from?
What causes that brainstem reaction? Or does the brainstem just go off and do its
own special thing? What is the exact relationship between certain experiences and
brainstem activation? Those are the answers that will lead to proper therapies, but
they cannot be answered by research alone. Above all, why is the brainstem so
involved? Maybe the damage is registered there because it dominates during the
first weeks or days of life in the womb. And the brainstem becomes methylated
early on. And as I say, it is the earliest imprints that are the

most damaging. There is where therapy needs to begin. It is clear that if we want

  30  
cure, we need to descend to the lower depths, the zone of the interior to read the
notes from the underground. Those notes have a most painful message, one which
can only be read a bit at a time. If you do not believe in imprints then all is lost
and you will never arrive at the generating sources of an affliction or symptom.

When can a fetus begin to feel pain? A better question might be this: when
can the fetus signify pain? Research from K. J. S. Anand, a professor of pediatrics
and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee, suggests this happens once the
neural circuits are in place (Anand & Hickey, 1987). When Anand placed a
needle into a fetus (in a process known as amniocentesis), the fetus grimaced in
pain and its stress hormone levels rose dramatically. Not only did the baby suffer
but, from our point of view, that suffering can be coded and registered in the
memory system, thereafter awaiting connection. This is what we in feeling
therapy are about — connection— restoring the missing links in the circuitry.
Some serious diseases have been considered only in the domain of inheritance,
muscular dystrophy being one of many. The cures for these afflictions have been
slow in coming, in my view, because our emphasis has been on inherited factors
rather than in-utero experience. If we don’t regard gestation as critical, our
diagnoses and treatments are bound to be flawed.

Beyond gestation and birth, early childhood is important, as well, when

attempting to identify the origins of later life problems, as evidence of imprinting
can be seen in the experiences of very young children. There is a study by a

Canadian group from the Douglas Mental Health University in Montreal that

  31  
found when child abuse exists there is a change in the gene NR3C1
(glucocorticoid receptor gene) that affects how the child will deal with the abuse
(McGowan et al., 2009). Measures of the gene’s function were much lower in
abuse victims who eventually took their own lives. It appears that childhood
abuse had changed the gene’s structure, making the gene less active. And these
modifications endured throughout the children’s lives. Epigenetics had affected
the function of the stress apparatus, what is called the hypothalamic- pituitary-
adrenal axis (HPA), a complex part of the neuroendocrine system that controls
reactions to stress and regulates many body processes, including digestion, the
immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality and energy storage and
expenditure.

Patrick McGowan, one of the study’s principal researchers, implies that the
changes are more or less permanent; they alter the gene’s activity, leading to later
illness and suicidal tendencies. When the NR3C1 gene is ineffective, it cannot
produce the kind of alerting, galvanizing chemicals that help one fight through
things. (Clearly, such trauma also diminishes an individual’s adaptive capacity, as
I discuss below.) As a result, the body behaves as though it were constantly under
stress. Moreover, what this research group believes is that mothers can affect the
fate of their children even before they are born. Epigenetic changes passed on
during gestation may contribute to depression and suicidal thoughts later on. So
what looks like genetics, in reality, is a much more complex interaction between
biological and environmental factors, an

  32  
intricate “if-then” sequence which spans generations.

What this may mean is that my notion of the imprint has to be wound way
back. A more accurate framework holds that the experience of the parent leaves
an imprint on the sperm and egg. One experiment by researchers at the University
of New South Wales was done with male rats that were fed a high-fat diet (Ng et
al., 2010). Their sperm seemed to change — that is, many of their babies had
adult-onset disease, even though the mothers were normal. The children had a
greater frequency for deviated insulin and glucose resistance, hence a propensity
for diabetes, even though the fathers had no previous history of the disease. So
what looks like pure heredity is actually a molecular memory of the experiential
effects on that heredity. These research animals had defects with their on/off
switches. This imprint endures and affects our physiology for perhaps a lifetime,
sowing the seeds for later adverse effects on the kidney, liver, or heart. For
humans, this may mean the tendency to be fat derives, in part, from what a father
ate before conception. If that father over-ate as a child, his offspring have a much
greater chance of being fat and developing diabetes.

Clearly, we need to change our focus in order to understand who we are.

Our idea of what is heredity is rapidly changing. There are all kinds of intriguing
possibilities. In one recent experiment, some animals that were raised in an
enriched environment and appeared smarter had offspring who seemed to inherit
that intelligence (finding their way through mazes more easily) even though they
were not raised in an enriched milieu. Let’s be clear: when the parent had a
chance to develop intellectually his offspring had a better shot at being

  33  
smart. Somewhere, there are indelible and permanent marks on the sperm and
egg.

Womb-life and the Mystery of Twins

On my desk is a scientific paper concerning how early life affects

adulthood. Chris Murgatroyd and Dietmar Spengler (2010), molecular biologists
at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, have shown rather conclusively that life
events can induce long-lasting changes in our brain, physiology, and behavior.
Early life stress can cause over-secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, which in
turn weakens our ability to remember things clearly and cope with stress. (For the
more scientifically minded, the article includes a detailed explanation of the long-
duration effects of methylation.) In their study of mice, the researchers and their
colleagues found that periodic infant-mother separation just after birth was a
major cause of anxiety. And it is my view, as I’ve noted, that when it comes to
humans, the earlier the separation occurs, the more likely the anxiety will result in
a shortened life span. The published results from the study end with a rather bleak
assessment: “Adverse events in early life can leave persistent marks on specific
genes that may prime susceptibility to neuroendocrine and behavioral
dysfunction.” Yet further evidence that early events have a profound effect on
later life.

One of those behavioral dysfunctions may be ADD, so commonly

diagnosed in children nowadays. There is a good deal of evidence that a

mother’s hyperactivity, frequently the result of drugs such as cocaine and

methamphetamine taken during pregnancy, can leave an imprint that affects the

  34  
offspring for a lifetime. Just that early exposure is enough to set up a child to be
revved up and jumpy for life. Of course this may stem from more than just drugs,
as we saw with the study of Holocaust survivors. I say that a better approach for
understanding and treating Attention Deficit Disorder is to trace its origins, back
to womb-life, as well as an individual’s ancestral history.
These critical experiences are left out of the usual psychotherapy, but they
are key motivations for how we behave, how we learn and how and if we make
love. It also plays a part in whether the offspring can have children or will be
sterile. It can also help determine if we become obese, to say nothing of mental
illness. In this period when the body and brain are rapidly developing, it is not a
surprise that adversity affects so much of us – body and brain.

In addition to altering metabolic function and reshaping our personality,

traumatic experiences in the first years of life may weaken the disease-fighting
ability of the immune system. A report from researchers at the University of
Wisconsin demonstrated how children who had had an abusive early life or had
spent time in an orphanage showed a compromised ability to defend against
disease (Shirtcliff, Coe & Pollak, 2009). Even after the children were removed
from the adverse environment, damage was still apparent. The scientists point out
that though the immune cells are ready at birth, how they develop and become a
dependable cohesive system depends on experience. As part of the study, the
investigators used the body’s ability to control latent herpes viruses as

a measure of immune competence. People with an intact immune system can

usually keep these viruses under control. Those who are neglected and unloved

  35  
cannot. Thus, such afflictions as the herpes virus, which often lie latent, are more
likely to be activated in those who have poor immune control. In this case,
traumatized patients had higher levels of herpes antibodies, indicating their
immune systems were compromised against the herpes virus. Those later living in
a stable environment still showed higher levels of herpes antibodies.

There is little question now that stress and chronic anxiety of the mother
affects the baby’s HPA axis, as we have seen. Thus, stress sets the stage for later
anxiety in the offspring, partly accomplished by methylation. It heightens cortisol
levels, and chronically high stress hormones affect so many functions later in life,
not the least of which is thinking and memory (Radtke et al., 2011). Much further
down the road it may affect the development of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
disease. What is important here is that in-utero trauma sets the program for adult
behavior, especially afflictions such as heroin addiction. The person is trying to
calm something inside but has no idea it exists or what it is. Years later there may
be panic attacks that seem to come out of nowhere. But they come out of
somewhere; it is our job to find out where. If we ignore early womb-life
experience we will never discover origins, and we will keep looking into the
current environment for answers. What is clear now is that some get addicted to
heavy drugs to keep panic attacks from happening. That is, it may be the same
imprint involved in both the panic attack and the addiction, only the drug user has
found a way to block it. Addiction may be forever a mystery

because it comes from archaic imprints that share common cause with sharks.
How can anyone find that ancient cause? There is a way. Allow the patient, after

  36  
a time in our therapy, to descend to deep-lying imprints organized millions of
years earlier. Patients are not led there nor are they forced there; the process of
resonance will accomplish it (which I explain more fully below in connection
with new research about how traumas get embedded in the system). To repeat: as
we evolve there are more and more neurons that take part. They evolve out of
earlier neuronal processes and are related to them. Thus there is an
interconnectedness so that they form a neuronal circuit. Each different level of
brain function has a link to yet other higher levels. It is what I call the chain of
pain. When we start with a patient about his current life, eventually, over months
he will descend automatically to lower connected levels. Until after at least a year
of therapy he may touch on brainstem imprints. Here lies the deepest and most
remote memories, also the most devastating in terms of the force of the imprinted
pain. It is later the most disruptive of imprints. It is ineluctably the neuronal chain
that will lead the patient there. When we look at mental illness and severe
physiologic afflictions we need to focus on these early memories. Here may lie
the origins of our mysterious maladies.

The study of twins provides fertile ground for demonstrating the far-
reaching impact of womb-life on who we turn out to be and what we suffer from
years later. In one study, researchers investigated the perplexing case of identical
twin girls born with vastly different physical conditions. One girl was normal
while the other had severe birth defects, born with two vaginas, two

colons and a spinal cord that split in two towards the bottom of her back. “So how
could twins who shared the same genes be so different?” asked the author of a

  37  
report on the epigenetic research, “The Third Factor: Beyond Nature and
13
Nurture,” in New Scientist.

We have long known of epigenetic marks – chemical labels added to DNA

that alters the activity of genes without altering the sequence. In particular, if a
stretch of DNA has lots of added methyl groups, the activity of nearby genes is
suppressed. So the team took a closer look at the Axin gene in blood cells from
the twins. Sure enough, the girl with the split spine had unusually high levels of
methylation. So while other causes cannot yet be ruled out, the researchers think
the most likely explanation is that in one twin something pushed methylation
levels high enough to shut the gene down. Mystery solved? Far from it. What
pushed methylation levels above a critical threshold in one twin but not in the
other? ''That's the million-dollar question,'' says team member Nick Martin, of the
Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia.

In another study at New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private,

not-for-profit research center specializing in molecular biology and genetics,
researchers also found great differences in the methylation patterns even between
identical twins (Gordon et al., 2012). Investigators looked at umbilicord tissue,
cord blood and the placentas of newborn twins and found differences that play an
important role in individual development. And here is their important conclusion:
“This must be due to events that happened (in the womb) to one

_________________

13. Pilcher, H. (2013). The third factor: Beyond nature and nurture. New Scientist, 219(2932),
44-47. doi:10.1016/s0262-4079(13)62149-1

twin and not the other,” said senior author Dr. Jeffrey Craig of Australia’s
Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, in a press announcement from the research

  38  
 14
laboratory. So although twins share a womb, what happens to each of them can
be quite different. The study, published online in Genome Research, has “for the
first time shown that the environment experienced in the womb defines the
15
newborn epigenetic profile.” And, no surprise, the authors believe that womb-
life events may have a more profound effect than previously thought. They claim
that this discovery is a powerful tool for managing future health and modifying
risk.
The lead author believes we can modify risk through dietary intervention
and other environmental approaches. He does not say what is crucial: how about
we intervene during womb-life and make it salubrious and salutary? How about
we make womb-life a great place to be? We can do it through education and we
can also do it by reliving those adverse womb events and reversing their
deleterious effects.

Reversing Methylation through Reliving

 Can we reverse or undo methylation? Can the imprint of trauma be

__________________

14
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "Differences between human twins at birth highlight
importance of intrauterine environment." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 July 2012.
[Link]/releases/2012/07/[Link].

15
Differences between human twins at birth highlight importance of intrauterine environment.
(2012, July 16). Retrieved from [Link]

removed at a cellular level? The good news seems to be that, unlike pure genetics,
methylation can be reversed, at least through chemical means (Cheishvili,

  39  
Boureau & Szyf, 2015). Thus, epigenetic-caused disease may be normalized at
last. What we are planning to do soon is study the imprint and how to reverse it
through Primal Therapy; that is the ultimate reduction of stress. We want to see if
we can reverse history through reliving traumas. For if we can do that, we may
well help patients to avoid serious disease later on. We will measure the
methylation process by which traumas are stamped into the brain. We will reverse
history. Think of that: stopping an imprint from going on to cause damage. Yes, it
can be undone biochemically. Investigations into using methionine to reverse the
effects of methylation are bearing fruit, and other drugs, including some
tranquilizers, are helping to accomplish it. But I believe, the harmful effects of
epigenetics can be reversed, more surely, effectively and thoroughly through
therapy. Reliving early experience in a Primal may partially undo methylation
and help to normalize the whole system.

The question is,“How do we do that?” How do we get to those early

driving needs that preceded our first steps in a new world? They may seem so
“far-out” as to be unbelievable, but many thousands of patients have gone through
my therapy, reporting what they went through even when I was unprepared to
believe them. At last, new research is confirming what they told me.

The research informs us that damaged rats that had been raised by unloving
mothers did not show any signs of damage after being infused with

trichostatin, as though the trauma never occurred. This drug removes methyl from
the system. It did, in brief, undo history. This is what I think may be happening

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with our patients. In the reliving there must be a change in methylation so as to
reverse history, which is the hypothesis we plan to test. I think we can reverse
methylation; at least we can remove some of its embedded trauma. That, in my
opinion, is what reliving key traumas does, and that is why we can prevent future
diseases or at least modify their harm. We can unlock the trauma from its hiding
place and liberate its energy so it does no more harm. Remember, in the imprint
there is the memory and also the pain. We are able to remove the pain while
leaving the memory intact. Our job is not to produce robots without memory. But
we don’t want the memory to be awash in suffering.
As we saw earlier, Michael Meaney and his research team found that
deprived animals, when later raised by a more loving mother, experience a partial
recovery as higher-level brain processes override some of the effects of early
imprints (Meaney et al., 1985). The neo-cortex can provide compensations for the
pain, masking the imprint, but cannot eradicate it. Meaney’s rats, deprived and
damaged early on by a disappearing mother, were later put into an enriched
environment where they seemed happier and played well together. But their stress
hormone level was still high; they still suffered, as do humans under similar
conditions. Masking the pain is not the same as resolving it, and we may die
prematurely from that masking. You might call it a devil’s bargain: if we mask
the pain we may die early, but if we don’t we suffer. However there is a third
possibility: relive and integrate the pain, and thus be done with it. There seems to

be a window of opportunity before methylation sets in when the imprint can be partially
16
reversed. But it is a narrow, short-lived window. After that the imprint remains for a

  41  
very long time.

Our human imprint, I propose, is found in every fiber and cell of our being and
retains a precise memory of its past. It cannot be pinpointed to any particular location in
the system since it is everywhere, from our hormonal balance to our neurology. The
imprint says, “this is what happened to me and this is who I am;” and because the
imprint is everywhere, when we relive it there may be changes throughout the system.
That is why we need to relive experiences: to reset the set points and, in so doing,
exercise a profoundly new approach to medicine and psychiatry. We need to
“remember” with our entire physiology and being, not just the neo-cortex. Above all,
we need doctors to stop asking, “Have you been in any unusual stress recently?” They
need to ask the right questions if they want the right answers. Since we cannot ask the
fetus about his stress we need to do the next best thing and sniff out biologic damage,
descend down the chain of pain, following resonance to reach the fetal level and see
what we find. Most often we find anoxia in almost lethal states. Resonance ineluctably
leads to the beginning of life. Each new key memory finds its partner on lower levels;
all we need to do is access the first top level in slow, methodical steps until we arrive at
the first station.

Let us take off our blinders and look at the whole brain. And above all, the

________________

16
In our forthcoming research on demethylation, with Dr. Justin Feinstein of the Laureate
Institute for Brain Research, we hope to find more answers. Our hypothesis is that if we take a
certain sample (lymphoblasts) from the bone marrow and see how it grows into white blood
cells, we can measure demethylation. It is a preliminary theory, but there may be a way, in the
near future, to see what effects our therapy or other chemicals may have on methylation.

whole person. Yes, one chemical therapy can affect memory and the imprint, but
it is doubtful that all of the accouterments of that memory will be reversed, as

  42  
well.

How Traumas Get Embedded

A recent report from Northwestern University notes that some traumatic

memories, such as chronic child abuse, are so painful that they get buried deep in
the brain and become difficult to access (Jovasevic et al., 2015). Those memories
were created in a certain mood/feeling or state of arousal and “can best be
retrieved when the brain is back in that state.” This new brain research provides
support for my concept of resonance, which posits that specific feelings on all
three levels are inter-connected via related frequencies. In Primal Therapy, as the
patient goes back in time in his sessions, he will connect with feelings stored
deeper in the brain which resonate with the same mood, as one level of the
memory is linked to lower levels. The mood or feeling belongs to a hierarchy of
imprints/feelings, where each level gives way to deeper more remote levels, all
related in tone and emotional meaning. The links are not only due to similar
feelings but reflect historical processes; each link carries us further back in our
ontology until we surpass memory as we think of it. We go back in archaic times
as well, where there are no words or even feelings, just instincts. For that reason,
when a patient uses words while appearing to relive such archaic events, we know
it is abreaction, a false memory. When a patient is back in an accent brain, there
are no words in the reliving because no words

exist at that level. Let me be clear: the reliving is literal, as the patient is
submerged in history and lives for a time on that lower level only.

  43  
 In the Northwestern experiment, scientists infused the hippocampus of
mice with gaboxadol, a drug that stimulates extra-synaptic GABA receptors.
Researchers describe as getting the subjects “a little inebriated.” Then the mice
were put in a box and given a brief, mild electric shock. When the mice were
returned to the same box the next day, they showed no signs of fear and moved
about freely, leading researchers to conclude they didn’t remember the shock
from the day before. However, when the mice were given the same drug before
going back to the box, they froze, as if fearfully anticipating another shock.

Researchers concluded that the drug changed the way the memory was
originally encoded, so the mice remembered the stressful experience of the shock
only when they were returned to the same brain state created by the drug. In other
words, they believe that the brain, when drugged, “used completely different
molecular pathways and neuronal circuits to store the memory.” And then the
authors make this Primal statement: “The best way to access these memories is to
return the brain to the same state.” Seems like a quote from my work, but it is no
more than arriving at the same reality by different methods. The question is, how
do we get the patient back in that state?

I repeat, the means of getting to those old memories needs to follow

evolution; that is devolution or evolution-in-reverse. We need to begin at the last
or latest link of memory and then use resonance to travel back in time to where
key imprints lie. We don’t decide this; it is done by the patient who is often upset

by something in the present, and once locked-in will slide effortlessly back in

  44  
history following the feeling links. His devolution is not random; it is guided
ineluctably by resonance.

So is Primal Therapy nothing more than a time machine, a means to revisit

our history, to turn back the clock to previously neutral, non-neurotic states? It
may sound far-fetched, but more and more evidence suggests it’s true. Scientists
are now learning how to wind back the developmental clock on the microscopic
level — taking a current skin cell, for example, and treating it so that it returns to
a previously neutral, uncommitted state, an embryonic state. Once that is done,
the cell can be reprogrammed to become another kind of cell. During this critical
window certain needs must be fulfilled and, if they are not, cells may become
imprinted in adverse ways.

Here’s another way to put it: once a mark is made on the cell we are
psychologically and physiologically affected for life, until, and only until, the
inciting event is revisited and relived. And it can be relived unconsciously,
through the process of resonance. That is, a trauma that took place in-utero can be
re-experienced without a specific awareness of it, by virtue of being part of the
chain of pain, once we are locked into the memory circuit. In Primal Therapy,
when we explore these ramified events and begin to relive them, we are
connecting three levels of consciousness – the present, our past childhood and our
infancy/gestation – by descending through three levels of brain development.

And how is this possible? Luckily, each new harmful experience that

  45  
remains un-integrated at lower levels is later re-represented in a higher level of
the nervous system, where it is coded as the outsider or enemy. Lower level
imprints send references higher up in the nervous system. These higher-level
memories are wired together with their origins down below. They form a neural
circuit, a pathway. And when circuits are wired together they tend to fire together;
hence resonance. When a trauma exists later on, it may resonate with earlier
imprints and set off the whole memory intact. It is here that there may be
inordinate responses to the most banal of events. We are winding down again to
the originating sources, the base of the feeling. That is how we relive purely
physiologic brainstem responses without ever acknowledging them. It is how we
get to preverbal events automatically. When the Primal imprint sends its message
higher up, feelings are added to the impulse, and then later ideas and
comprehension are included. Together these form a complete feeling. All are
necessary, eventually, in reliving. That is how something in the present, a
rejection, can set off such catastrophic feelings. It is an organic process and needs
to happen in a precise order, with the original feelings preserved. It may be that
specific brain frequencies tie these events together. Figuratively, what is going on
is much like the stone thrown into the pond: a ripple effect in the way the neurons
connect to each other in mirrored progression. When there are certain kinds of
triggers, the brain conjures up its related history, intact, kindling like-minded
feelings and their physiology together.

Recent research, both with Primal patients and in neuroscience labs, is

showing that being unconscious of pain is a survival mechanism, a protection

  46  
against overwhelming input. But the imprinted memory stays and continues to do
its damage over a lifetime. In short, it is not inert. It has a force that threatens our
ability to adapt, as I explain in detail shortly. The deeper we go down in the brain
the more powerful the force of memory. Hence the more unconscious it has to
be... for protection. When the trauma is too great or too prolonged, the ability to
adapt becomes more feeble and less flexible. This is especially true of long-term
neglect and abuse. Here the memories seem to dig in and solidify, impervious to
change. And as conscious/awareness lessens, the harm begins, both mental and
physical. We are then partially unconscious and are unaware of the damage. Fear-
memories are joined by multiple pathways and then are engraved.

What the new research shows is what I’ve been saying all along: that one
needs to go back to the mood when the memory was imprinted. But doing so
artificially can make matters worse. Far better to arrive there slowly on an
evolutionary time-scale. In their studies with mice, the Northwestern researchers
made an important observation which applies to our human patients: It is difficult
for therapists to access these memories because the patients themselves cannot
remember the traumatic experiences that are the root cause of their symptoms.
Which is exactly why we need to go slowly down the chain of pain, and let the
patient decide how fast he can go. The team noted that the brain functions in
different states like a radio, switching from AM to FM. “It’s as if the brain is
normally tuned to FM stations to access memories, but needs to be tuned to AM
stations to access subconscious memories,” stated the lead

investigator, Dr. Jelena Radulovic, Dunbar Professor in Bipolar Disease at

  47  
 17
Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. In short, certain kinds of severe
memories need to be tuned properly to receive painful messages. I would put it
differently, but we agree that traumatic memories are stored in the brain, where
they remain and cause damage.

What the research team and I agree on is that we need to turn on the exact
frequency of the feeling. In other words, we need to go back in time to the
imprinted pain, and no byways allowed. We cannot skirt around the feeling. The
safeguard here is that we allow the patient to go back there in a precise manner so
that any detours, the byways of feeling, are avoided. And in our own research we
found that there were specific frequencies that align with feelings. They were
never fast, which meant being over the Primal Zone. We watched as we slowed
the frequency (with lights) when feelings began to intrude. They insist, as do I,
that the brain needs to go back to the proper frequency and target a specific
feeling. My observation now for almost fifty years is that the natural evolutionary
way is the proper path to follow. Nature is the sine qua non.

On the Breakdown of Our Adaptive Capacity

Some time ago I wrote about how it is the unrelenting input of pain that
taxes our ability to adjust and adapt, causing a breakdown of this capacity. The

______________

17
Paul, M. (2015, August 18). News. Retrieved from
[Link]
[Link]

result is a scrambling of our brain cells and a collapse of our ability to cope. It can

  48  
lead to early psychosis or mental insufficiency. What does this mean?

For the answer, we must look not only to our clinical experience but also to
the latest in brain science. In a recent study, entitled “Epigenetic changes in the
developing brain: Effects on behavior,” researchers from Rockefeller University
in New York and the University of Cambridge in England looked at how
methylation works to stamp in painful memory and imprint it (Keverne, Pfaff &
Tabansky, 2015). When you block methylation you prevent the nerve cells from
adapting to changes in their environment. It becomes maladaptive. New learning
cannot take place without successful epigenetic programming. And this makes me
wonder about the insidious effects of this process when so many orphan children
cannot learn well, suffer from dyslexia and are slow to form sentences. When
there is day-in day-out neglect, indifference and lack of love, deep damage occurs
and the ability to adapt falters.

The researchers noted that there are adverse effects on the

feeling/hippocampus areas. In short, chronic unrelenting pain overtaxes the native
ability to adjust, and we see the results. On the feeling level the person claims, it
is all too much. He gives up easily and cannot try hard to succeed. The
schizophrenic does not explain it verbally but he lives it. He needs help to
navigate his daily life. He cannot adapt to new circumstances. This is the extreme
breakdown of adaptation. This is because the adaptation mechanisms help us
evolve and deal with different circumstances. They are crucial for our

evolution. We can take minor setbacks, such as being left alone for a day or two, but

  49  
being isolated for long periods damages our ability to adapt.

If we look for confirmation of all this in hard science, it is there. Researchers

from The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston discuss cancer in terms of
methylation. Their surprising findings are described in an article entitled “Disorder in
gene-control system is a defining characteristic of cancer,” posted on the website of the
18
Dana-Farber teaching and research center affiliated with Harvard Medical School
Their conclusion: “The behavior of a cancer cell is dictated not only by genetics – by
the particular set of mutated genes within it – but also by epigenetics, the system for
controlling the expression of genes,” states Catherine Wu, M.D., a lead author of the
study.

Scientists know that cancerous tumors are made up of a variety of genetic

mutations within many different subgroups of cells. In this study, Wu explained,
researchers wanted to find out if cancer’s inherent genetic diversity was matched by a
corresponding epigenetic diversity. At first, the scientists expected to find a systematic
match between the genetic and epigenetic changes; in other words, they thought the
genetic diversity in the tumor would be mirrored in the range of methylation patterns.
Instead, researchers were surprised to find methylation patterns with a great deal of
random disarray. “In fact, disorderly methylation pervades the entire tumor," stated
Alexander Meissner of the Broad Institute who joined the research team.

_______________

18
"Disorder in Gene-control System Is a Defining Characteristic of Cancer, Study Finds."
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute | Boston, MA. December 8, 2014. [Link]
[Link]/Newsroom/News-Releases/Disorder-in- gene-control-system-is-a-defining-
[Link].

  50  
 The findings, published online in the journal Cancer Cell, revealed that this
disarray in methylation is one of the defining characteristics of cancer (Landau et
al., 2014). And counter-intuitively, rather than presenting a problem for the
disease, researchers theorize that the random disruption of methylation might help
tumors survive and even thrive by increasing their ability to adapt to changing
circumstances. "Cancer survives through some wildly inventive ways,” Wu
concludes. “Methylation disorder is one of the ways it creates the conditions that
enable it to adapt."

What I am positing is that Primal imprints are heavily responsible for this
epigenetic tumult and disarray, since the entire adaptation process has broken
down. Under normal conditions, as I have noted, methylation is part of the natural
order of things; it is a key adaptive mechanism. And what I believe is that, in
some ways, it gets scrambled and can no longer do its job. It has lost its cohesion.
Further, I think the origins of so many catastrophic diseases arise from this
disorganization, which is why it is so difficult to treat. The Boston researchers
found, for example, that certain leukemia patients had shorter remissions if their
tumor tissue showed signs of highly disorganized methylation, which actually
benefits the tumors by rendering them less vulnerable to anti- cancer drugs. In
other words, the random derangement of the methylation process can make the
disease harder to treat.

One final note on this important research. The researcher from the Broad
Institute, which is associated with both Harvard University and MIT, helped
develop the technique to measure this deregulation, using a process known as

bisulfite sequencing to track the presence or absence of methyl groups at specific

  51  
rungs on the DNA ladder. He and his colleagues also devised a simple measure
they call, PDR (Percent Discordant Reads), to quantify deranged methylation. I
consider this a major step in epigenetic research, which suggests that soon we
may be able to quantify the degree of physical and emotional damage to a human
being, and ultimately, the degree of resolution we achieve in a feeling therapy.
We are rapidly getting the tools to achieve our aims.

In my opinion, the dangerous time for unceasing pain that threatens the
adaptation process is in the womb during gestation. Here, the chronic smoking,
drinking or pill-taking of the mother, or her continuous depression or anxiety
states, become inescapable from the fetus and he suffers. It is ultimately
imprinted and endures throughout life. It is as if he lived in a straight jacket for
nine, agonizing months and could find no way to stop the input. He goes to a
doctor and the doctor asks, “Any stress lately?” Yes, there is stress, but decades
before anyone, including the patient, can even remember it. So he shakes his head
and says, “Everything has been OK for some time now.” Those imprints are
shouting in the only way they can, through the physical system – migraines,
asthma, anxiety, depression, and on and on. He just cannot get comfortable in his
skin, because just below that skin is a mountain of hurt and agitation that won’t
let him relax. Why agitation? Because the pain is sending a message to awareness
that there is serious trouble down below. Alas, there is no one to listen. And even
if they could, they could not translate that message because – and this is all-
important– it is not in English. It is in a wholly different

brain language where words do not exist. We have to travel with the patient to the

  52  
inner depths and see for ourselves. And there it is, the agony is right before our
eyes: The suffocation, the shortness of breath, the misery on the face. All finally
observable signs that answer the question, “What is wrong with me?

Epigenetic science can help explain all this. Methylation is the agent for
repression, which in turn prevents the person from putting away the pain and
moving on. Certain switches turn on and off to accommodate the painful
intrusion; when it gets to a certain level there is a breakdown of its efforts and
“normal” adaptation is no longer possible. The result: abnormality in physical
development and psychological adjustment. The person can no longer be
neurotically normal. There is now serious pathology which endures. The imprint
literally lasts a lifetime with the person all the while trying to get normal, in and
out of mental hospitals, seeing this doctor or that psychiatrist, and all to no avail.
They will not respond to current treatment efforts because that is not where the
damage lies. It is locked up with the epigenetic switches that were overwhelmed
early on and no longer function properly. They almost don’t know what to turn on
or off. They are as helpless as the patient because they are far out of reach of
understanding. Alas, he is condemned.

But there is a way out. If he can travel back in time with us toward the
buried vestiges of the imprinted pain and connect with the Primal feeling we can
commute the sentence. Because then the epigenetic switches can be reversed and
a salubrious state can be achieved. What does this mean? That soon, we will be
able to go back down the feeling chain from current to past imprints,

  53  
observe how deep the pain is by its methyl traces and know where to go for the
least dangerous pains first. That feeling those painful buried feelings in sequential
order from current to remote past so as to finally resettle the methylation process;
that is, to normalize the biochemistry and allow the genetic switches to normalize
so that they can do their job of adaptation.

The Miracle of Memory

I was looking around at some people I know and at least one third of them
had the malady of needing to move constantly: organizing trips, making reasons
to go here and there, and in general, keeping on the move. Does all that constant
going and coming lead to strokes and heart attacks? I do think so. Why? Because
below all that movement is a giant, silent scream, born of ferocious suffering,
suffocation and being stuck; first in the womb with a mother who smokes and
takes drugs (unavoidable for the baby), and followed by a birth process where
again he is stuck and cannot get out easily. Hence now the need to keep moving.
If I tell the average person this, they think I am delusional. But I assure you, I am
not.

I have seen thousands of patients relive all kinds of traumas: one key one
that is widespread is being trapped in the womb, suffocating and unable to get
out. Trapped, suffocating, unable to move; those are the key feelings involved.
They could not scream then and they cannot scream now, but once they as adults
are in the feeling they can first grunt and try to move and feel then, later,

  54  
at birth... scream. It is not the screaming that is liberating. It is the reliving of the
true feeling – being stuck – and then the scream to express the agony of all that.
Now we can actually observe the pain. Reliving changes the imprint, reduces it
and begins the resolution process – demethylation. Screaming alone is not what
we are after; it is the total agony of the reliving, and then the reaction –
screaming. Reactions alone cannot do it. And that is what is wrong with all those
early scream clubs in universities that began with the publication of the Primal
Scream. Yes, screaming relieves the pressure involved in the reaction but does
nothing to the imprint. Let us never believe that relieving is reliving. One is
amelioration; the other, cure.

In reliving birth, we vividly see the tremendous pressure in the build-up

after the traumatic event early on; not only the birth trauma but also many other
traumas where the mother is taking drugs or smoking and drinking and the
fetus/baby cannot escape. He can turn his head away as if to escape but, alas, he is
trapped. And that feeling impressed into a vulnerable body remains there as an
engraved memory and will drive her behavior thereafter: “I have to move. I have
to get out of here.” That is the leitmotif of his or her life. And it never, ever
leaves! The person is literally trapped in the memory, a trap that has chemicals
stronger than steel to bind them forever. It is a chemical conspiracy to make sure
we never, ever feel liberated. Even though the inner feeling is feeling bound, they
cannot feel it. They are too busy trying to get unbound, acting out trying to get
liberated.

I find it astounding that the real feeling is not felt immediately when it

  55  
occurs; alas, it is too painful for the moment when an infant’s whole being is so
vulnerable. The price we pay is never knowing our feelings or where they come
from. Can you imagine someone saying to himself, “Wow, I am bound by a
feeling in the womb!” In that womb, there are obviously no words or concepts or
scenes. Only a physical feeling – no air, strangling, feeling crushed and
suffocating. So how can there be a memory? There is no memory as we think of
remembering, but the body remembers exactly. It remembers feeling trapped and
suffocating because in the Primal that is what comes up and what we see. And in
everyday life we lug those feelings around as a weight, as if carrying a ten-pound
steel bar around constantly. We are carrying around those devilish chemicals that
trap us.

And what changes those chemicals? If screaming won’t do it, what will?
How about dampening drugs, such as SSRI’s, the serotonin enhancers? They
shush the scream but never, never change the memory, the imprint. The memory
is not designed to be changed. It remains in order to be experienced and liberated.
That is the miracle of memory. We have the mechanism for our own liberation
inside of us, if we only knew it. And how about using drugs to slow us down so
we don’t move so much? That just helps the build-up of pressure. It exacerbates
the problem and aggravates the need to move. And if we cannot act-out enough
then the original Primal imprint will burrow in and seriously damage key body
and brain cells. The genes may be transformed into oncogenes, and serious
disease gets its start.

So when we see the constant motion we understand, but we never see the

  56  
agony. Why no agony? Because it is busy being acted-out to relieve the agony
before it is fully felt. So we cannot possibly see it, and the person in motion
cannot feel it. That is the idea: that it disappear before it is evident. Now we know
why psychotherapy is at such a loss. And now we know what could be behind
high blood pressure and migraines. I had one patient who was sexually never
satisfied. When she could not have sex her blood pressure rose to dangerous
heights. Drugs could not help her. What could? Discharging the pressure
permanently by feeling the need – a Primal. That helped and... cured. Relieving
the pressure is not what cured; it was reliving the feelings that created the
pressure. There is no comprehension in relieving; lots of comprehension in
reliving. And this is the crucial point: There are no insights following relieving,
yet many insights following reliving. It is one among many ways we suss out true
feelings.

Why cure? Because it dealt with the origin of it all – the original
methylation and imprint. Primals change the chemical composition – less
methylation, decreased serotonin – and diminish the memory so that we can really
change our behavior and our proclivity toward disease. How on earth can we
understand anorexia without knowing about the link between research on early
trauma and later eating disorders? The research states that it is largely due to key
epigenetic changes that take place very early in our lives that alter fetal
programming and the evolution of the fetus/baby. So now we see why starvation
or reduced calories in the womb can lead to later over-eating. He is eating for
now and eating out of memory. It is no different from the desperate need for

  57  
warmth and love after a birth trauma where the child was abandoned right away
by a sick birth mother. He entered a cold world with no succor; no kisses or hugs.
That desperate need begins here and is stamped in. Early deprivation means
overcoming it by doubling the efforts to be loved. Depending on other factors,
once repression and gating sets in, there is the shutting out of any love due to a
defense system that won’t allow it in because it reawakens old pain.

Let us not forget the critical sensory window where those events are
engraved for a lifetime. That is where we therapists must go, to that window
where trauma was impressed into the brain and the whole system. We must look
into it seriously. If we do not, then we cannot understand anxiety states in our
patients or ADD, which detours focus and concentration. It is not here-and-now;
it is there-and-then that must be our focus because there-and-then determines
here-and-now, to a great extent. If we exclude there-and-then we would never
know that my patient’s need for sex took root in a first-line imprint, an early
trauma, which was so strong on the physical level but had no words, nor screams.
Beware the ides of here-and-now. The brainstem, almost fully developed at the
time, absorbed all that trauma and is therefore heavily methylated. We never will
see that until we bring patients down to that level; yet that could take months and
then we need to know what to look for. That is why it took me decades to figure it
out. It is not evident.

So if people are in deep pain, why aren’t they all walking down the street
screaming? Because it’s not accepted social behavior and could lead to arrest or
commitment to a mental hospital. But what they can do is scream out the

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agony via a migraine or heart constriction (angina). And we rush in to treat the
heart condition or migraine or high blood pressure. That is where it is obvious but
that is not where the problem lies. It lies hidden in the memory embedded in the
lungs and surroundings, in the arching back and the constant movement. We see
what we see – the obvious – and miss what we cannot see. It would be ideal to be
searching for what we cannot see: a lens that magnifies Primal Pain. Alas, not
likely.

Another Look at Reliving

We need to make sure that reliving is important in the therapy for all kinds
of neuroses. Neurosis means that there is an early traumatic input that alters
function and behavior; not one or the other but both. That is, there is pain and
denial of need that overwhelms normal functioning and causes a diversion. We
are no longer normal; things go wrong neurologically, biochemically and
behaviorally. To cure we need to normalize the whole system, not just behavior or
biochemistry. Otherwise we are condemned to treating behavior and physiology
as two distinct problems when they are inextricably related.

That in a tiny nutshell is the story of neurosis. We are no longer ourselves;

we are re-routed in function. To get back to ourselves we have to re-establish
function in every aspect. Not just behavior. And when we are diverted and
rerouted, there are marks that leave their traces; epigenetic marks. Being loved
minimizes the marks on the genes. Being unloved increases them. For example,

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if we are loved and hugged and touched a lot there are changes in the brain where
methylation patterns are changed so that we respond normally to stress. When
there is trauma, the part of the brain that controls the stress response is tagged by
methyl groups and produces alterations in how genes are expressed or repressed;
shut down or opened up. And this changes us in profound ways. Our personality
becomes different; we can be more open or closed off; more depressed or anxious
depending on what genes do what.

So now we have those marks, methylation, which foretells of a life to come

and how it will be lived. How do we change all that? We need to revisit those
early experiences, those without words, go back and redo them. Change history
and its chemical traces. We need to undo the damage and that means slowly
demethylizing, in my model. One experience at a time; or one experience over
many times. We need to find how the system was detoured and put it back on
track, literally. This happened because pain installed itself and forced change.
And this can be measured; the amount of methylation can be observed and
changed. That is meaningful progress. It informs us about altering neuroses. In a
way, the levels of methylation can be a marker for having been loved early on, or
not having been loved. We could tell more than the statements by the person who
claims he was loved in his childhood if he were indeed not loved. How much
denial is there? We see how “under-funded” the notion of cognitive therapy is
when it deals mostly with words and ideas; something that did not exist during
the times of key imprints.

Neurochemistry may be a more reliable indicator because it has no reason

  60  
to lie, or rather, no way to lie. It can be a marker for post-traumatic stress or how
much repression exists in ADD, or how much pain/repression there is in
Alzheimer’s disease. We already have some information in this regard because
autopsies on depressive/suicides found them to have been heavily methylated in
the hippocampal (feeling=memory) area. The more abuse as a child in these cases
the more methylation is produced. When we add this to our future research on
telomeres and cortisol we will begin to have precise measures of the pain in us.
And we will know when a drug is too dangerous for us, particularly the drugs like
marijuana that tend to open us to ourselves, to our feelings and pain. Finally we
will have a marker for the efficacy of certain psychotherapies. Does the therapy
undo the past? Does it help relieve repression and therefore depression? Is there
great first line pain in anxiety states? I already can answer that in the affirmative,
having treated person after person with anxiety.

The best way to reverse the imprint is through the slow, methodical process
of therapy where the least pains can be integrated first, finally descending to the
great early traumas and then measuring the results. In other words, we need to
trust nature and all its processes; chemical reversal alone, without regard to total
neuro-biologic state is far too general and non-specific to each trauma. It is a
shotgun when we need a scoped rifle. It seems to me the natural way provides far
less possibility for collateral damage to the system. We need nature as a
reference. It is when we leave nature behind that we need the reference of
statistics; never as good as nature itself.

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The Brain’s Hemispheres

A natural cure must coincide with our knowledge of the way the brain is
structured. First, we know that the brain has two sides, one more feeling and the
other (left side) more thinking, grosso modo. Also, we know that the right side
develops earlier than the left and absorbs so much early trauma long before we
can understand it and give it a name. We are driven by those right-side imprints
so that by the time we are born we are allergic, nervous, restless, colicky and
choleric (bad tempered), and so on. So we are taken to the doctor who is
mystified. We do know that it is the right brain that is active when we retrieve old
memories and when we relive those memories, and it is only through that brain
that we can get to those memories, very early ones, that were registered on the
right. Otherwise, no matter how much we dig down, when we leave those
19
memories intact, they will continue to drive us. But eventually we will need to
dig down with the help of the deep-right, orbito-frontal brain which functions as a
dredge to lift up instinct/feeling memories to the fore. And we don’t even have to
do it; the brain itself, when given the chance, will perform its proper function.
And if we don’t force it, the brain will find the right time to do it, and not process
it prematurely. We need to take great care about dredging up traumas too early.
We can get flooding and being overwhelmed, rather than connected.

To retrieve the memory we need to “live” on the level of its existence for a time,
use the right brain to lift it toward conscious/awareness, and bit by small bit

________________

19
See all of Wilder Penfield.

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integrate parts of the memory into the brain and the entire system. Thus, we need
to de-methylate the memory. Until we do that there can be no profound change in
anyone despite all claims to the contrary. Not meditation, not cognitive therapy,
not mindfulness or hundreds of other nonsense approaches that ignore
neurobiology. No one can make real change when two-thirds of our brains are
unacknowledged. We have the tail and the feet but we still don’t know what it is.
How can we treat it?

How Early Is Too Early?

In the scientific community, the question has always been, “How early is
too early?” And this is where epigenetics is relevant to our discussion. A group at
Washington State University led by Matthew Amway found that gestational
experience in animals that sways the genetic unfolding can show effects for three
generations. They found that exposing pregnant adult rats with defective sperm
could engender many diseases, including cancer, in adult animals. Females
avoided mating with other rats that were also exposed during gestation. And this
went on, not only for the life of the adult, but for the life of their offspring, as
well. It seems that the system knows how to behave given certain biologic
deficiencies, and it does so according to what is best for heredity, what gives us
the best shot of succeeding in life. So when we cannot explain some trait in adults
by heredity we may have to reach back several generations to find the answer
we’re looking for. This gives us a new

  63  
perspective on so-called psychological problems in adults. When we do an intake
interview of prospective patients, it has to be thorough enough to include the
prenatal life of the patient, as well as their parents and sometimes the
grandparents, as well.

Without clinical evaluation we can only guess as to what traumas may have
occurred in the life of a pregnant mother, and what adaptations continue to show
their effects in her children and grandchildren. Of course, it isn’t just that a
mother underwent trauma, but that the trauma has altered her basic physiology
and produced lifelong changes in her and her offspring. Did the pregnancy occur
in wartime? Were the parents fighting all the time? Was the child’s grandmother
depressed? Was she a heavy smoker or drinker during her pregnancy? These are
all questions we should be asking.

And in truth the distinction between heredity and epigenetic “heredity”

must be made, if we are ever to reverse disease. When a mark is made on certain
anxiety-regulating cells, for instance, we may be stressed until that mark is
revisited and relived. As I have noted, the process of methylation also can be
chemically reversed by demethylation agents, for example. That leads us to
believe that certain regions of the brain altered by drugs are the same areas that
may be affected by reliving gestational events.

What is most important is that stress in the mother compromises the

repressive system in the fetus, so that later it will be difficult to mitigate surging
feelings. Low-level imprints from womb-life burst through the repressive barrier,
overloading the system, and — in the absence of a cohesive cortex — result in

  64  
difficulty focusing and concentrating, and problems learning. The prefrontal
cortex becomes overwhelmed as it is pressed into service to counteract and hold
down painful feelings.

Why are those early imprints so critical? Because almost every key adverse
event in the womb can be life-endangering: low oxygen, inadequate nutrition, too
much agitation, flooding by drugs or alcohol, etc. they all affect vital organs and
change the system of the baby accordingly. I will never omit smoking, which is
deadly to the maturation of the baby. Imagine being in the womb while a mother
ingests all kinds of toxins hour after hour, every day of the year. Who can survive
that?

There is a beginning to personality development and we must not

immediately ascribe it to genetics. Epigenetics is possibly more important. Life
circumstances wrap themselves around the gene, and alter who we are and what
we become. It is those days in the womb that form the crucible for personality
type; they all accommodate life circumstance. They pivot around the imprint; and
when we take patients down deep we find the little nugget, the key imprints that
forced all that accommodation. And when those early imprints are relived and all
the vital signs move as an ensemble down lower, we know we have struck gold.
We have found Nirvana, the core of the pain. Remember, there is no suffering in
the pure state of Nirvana.

The Cause of Some Cancers: Not What You Think

  65  
 Our theory is not just something “nice or interesting or amusing.” It is life-
saving. It means reversing serious mental illness. We see this all of the time.
Many of us think that good diet will prolong life, and it is true. But few are aware
that repression makes us sick and can kill us prematurely. Repression kills
because it distorts basic physiology and detours brain development. And
repression forces the kind of unhealthy eating habit that makes us sick early on.
Repression kills because, unconsciously, it forces us to deal with imprinted pain
every minute of our lives. It forces us to find ways to act out feelings or suppress
them. The wonder is how we all manage to keep deep pain stored away, never
once acknowledging it. The body does, however, and gets sick. And it makes us
sick on the deep cellular level, the level where the early imprints lie. All the
pressure to keep pain stored puts the cellular development at risk; eventually we
find serious illness, which should not be a mystery but a foregone conclusion.

Consider the research on twins done by scientists from London’s Institute

of Cancer Research who found that the origins of leukemia are prenatal (Ma et
al., 2013). The researchers there delved deeper into the disease process by looking
at cases where both twins had developed acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer
of the white blood cells. They studied the DNA inherited from both parents,
completing a full genome study on their subjects. They found that womb-life was
a culprit in the development of the disease. They believe that the mutations
accounting for it must have come from the womb. Other mutations may have
come after birth. The results prompted another British biologist, Dr. Julie Sharp
of Cancer Research UK, to suggest that further study could lead to

  66  
better cancer treatment. Quoted by the BBC News, Sharp said, “Studies like this
could reveal new ways to target the very roots of cancer and help us better
understand how the disease develops over time. Survival rates have increased
significantly over the past decades thanks to research, but there is still more to do
20
to make treatments better with fewer side-effects."

Now I must ask the question: how about finding out what happened in the
womb that forced these mutations? That seems to be overlooked as mission
impossible. But it is not; we can find fairly closely what happened during womb-
life to produce mutations. They are looking to alter those mutations by examining
the mutation itself. But the basis of all this is that something goes wrong in the
womb while the mother is carrying. It can be external forces such as war or more
personal events such as a husband who leaves home, leaving the mother
chronically anxious or depressed. The permutations are myriad, but the result is
an imprint that causes a deviation and ramification of many functions, from brain
circuitry to vital organs.

I will hypothesize that Primal Therapy can help prevent cancer if we have
the time to go deep enough. I am not stating that in every case, but we have little
cancer among our patients and we believe that Primal Therapy can be a factor. In
short, I think cancer originates deep in the brain often during womb-life, and that
is exactly what we treat. We do not treat this or that bit; we treat the central
organizing factor of the whole system.

________________
20
Scientists track leukaemia's origins 'back to the womb' (2013, April 9). Retrieved from
[Link]

  67  
 Years ago, we did research showing that after one year of Primal Therapy
our patients had enhanced production of natural killer cells (NK cells). These
immune cells look out for developing cancer cells, then attack and devour them. I
assume this means better control of cancer among our patients. But why would
reliving those early imprints increase production of NK cells?

Here I have to make an assumption: when we have traumas during womb-

life there is a deregulation of many bio-chemicals, hormones and
neurotransmitters. The whole system, in short, changes to accommodate the input;
and what that does is alter set points. How do we know that? Because in all of our
studies we have found that set points seem to change after therapy and
“normalize.” thus, for example, NK cells seem to change set points and come
back to normal after one year of our therapy, as do levels of the stress hormone,
cortisol.

There are many existing studies that correlate parental abuse with later
cancer. One study from Purdue University found that adults who were
emotionally and physically abused as children had a much greater likelihood of
cancer as adults (Morton, Schafer, & Ferraro, 2012). The more intense the abuse,
the more likely the cancer. Imagine now if we have left out of the mix one of the
greatest risks of all: constant abuse while in the womb – a drugged or depressed
mother, or one who is chronically anxious or tense and angry. Add that to it all
and you have one of the great causes of later cancer.

So once we go back to those generating sources, those early imprints, the

system appears to re-regulate itself back to what it should have been before the

  68  
trauma intruded itself. Our therapy seems to “erase” the input and allow the cells
to normalize. It is as if the trauma never happened; which is why I maintain that
we can go back and undo and redo our early lives. The mechanism for this may
well be the pattern of methylation that “seals in” the trauma – cancer is
characterized by “methylation imbalance” (Baylln, Herman, Graff, Vertino &
Issa, 1997). For example, depressives who relive deep and remote imprints will
find their normal body temperature go from 96 degrees to 98 degrees. They
normalize, which means that they do not go from 96 to 101; that is abnormal.
That has no part in normalizing. The body system seeks out its own limits. Here
again we see that there is no need to work on body temp, as such. We work on
central factors and the system adjusts all on its own. There are other factors, as
well, which are being sussed out anew each and every day by biochemists and
other specialists. We will leave that to those experts. But it seems as though we
are reversing those early changes that caused a detour of biochemical set points.
Along with this was a rerouting of brain circuits as well. The neurotic system
changed.

So what happens when the NK cells are increased? We have a stronger

army to fight cancer, an army that was weakened by trauma occurring during our
womb-life (and also possibly during the birth process). The system has a normal
amount now and can amass a greater force to fight cellular anomaly. The cells
seem to know when something is amiss and rush to correct it in the same way that
repair cells rush in to stem the flow of blood and help in healing when we cut
ourselves. We are a naturally healing system when given the chance; and what is

  69  
wonderful is that we always have the chance in our lives to go back and re-
stabilize the system. That is why when NK cells are extracted from tumor cells,
processed and reintroduced to the system there is an increase in cancer fighting
ability.

Here is the good news: when the NK army is bolstered there is less cancer,
and when there are even metastasized cells the NK cells can fight each and every
appearance of abnormal cells, no matter where they are, and stop them in their
tracks. It is not like chemotherapy, a poison that destroys the malignant cells and
also healthy cells along with them. Here, it is but a matter of increasing the health
of the cells in order to combat the intruders: a much healthier way to go; in other
words, the system now has a normal amount of NK cells, which it should have
had early on but did not. And the same trauma that may have lowered the set
points of NK cells could have also increased the likelihood of cancer. What may
well happen is epigenetic changes can affect the tumor- suppression genes,
leaving the system open to later cancer. The problem is that the distance between
the early trauma and the appearance of cancer at forty is so vast as to be
incomprehensible. It is only when we allow patients to go back and relive early
trauma that we see the connection. And for now, it still has to be an assumption.
But what we do see is how completely systemic are the effects of early imprinted
pain; when terror and pains are relived, the healing effects are widespread.

Conclusion

  70  
 Without a theory of pain, how could we ever get to the bottom of cancer,
heart disease, migraines and high blood pressure? If we have no theory of
brainstem trauma, we will never understand it. And if we have no such theory,
then we are not keeping up with psychologic/brain science.
I believe we can reverse some of it in our therapy, but I also believe that
the earlier and stronger the imprint the more difficult time we will have to reverse
it. Once cells take on their imprint, they often cannot be changed readily; their
identity remains unshakeable. That’s because the imprint is rock solid, engraved
even into microscopic cells that do not shed their identity easily. The evolution of
the genes has been rerouted. Epigenetics reigns. That is crucial; experience cannot
change it. That is why we cannot love neurosis away or exhort it to change, or
plead and beg for it does something “healthy.” There is no way out of the biologic
fact of the critical period, the time and space where love must be received or
forever more becomes an imprint.

I have written about the irreversibility of early trauma, gestation and birth.
The worst-case scenario is a traumatic birth followed by a loveless childhood
later on. That compounding can be a person’s undoing. It sets up insurmountable
emotional problems that create damaged individuals. But having said that there is
some hope. A certain level of trauma in-utero and at birth can be ameliorated by
mitigating factors, namely plenty of early love. It never erases those traumatic
imprints, but it does hold them at bay. I think that part of a good childhood can
block the effects of first line early pain. Damage to the kidneys

  71  
during gestation will not be reversed by later love but it may not flower into
serious symptoms. Very early traumas are never altered or diluted by later love,
never mitigated by hugs and kisses, but they do not have the reach, the upper
level access, they would have had without all that infancy love. To be clear; love
during or near the imprinting time of the sensory window (when needs are
importuning) can alleviate pain. For example, after a terrible birth, hugging and
kissing a lot can minimize the damage. The same hugs six years later will not
have that effect. That is why a father who leaves home for years and comes back
needing acceptance will not get it. The pain is installed and working in the child.
The child wants to love but the pain is blocking him.

As we have seen, a nervous mother leaves a predisposition to fear in the

offspring, just as a depressed mother leaves a base of depression in her baby.
Whether it becomes overt depends on those later events and traumas. I personally
believe that lots of love and healthy living in the very young child can abate these
deleterious effects. In fact, premature babies who were hugged and caressed a lot
went home earlier than those babies not touched as much. Those early kisses
count a lot and help shape personality, a loving and warm person versus a
standoffish one. This is especially true for those babies who were taken from
institutions. They are greatly in need of love and reassurance early on. If they
don’t get it, it can be somewhat irreversible; that is, there may be a point where
love can no longer make a great difference. The damage is done and it is pretty
well fixed. This is the research we will embark on in the near future. Is there a
point in time when love cannot reverse previous damage?

  72  
When is that point?

We cannot change personality so long as the imprint remains to drive us;

and the little love we get later on may not be enough to allow us to change
direction. And more, the shutoff that occurs with gestation and birth trauma may
be so great that we are helpless before it. We no longer can let love in; we first
have to feel agonizingly unloved by our parents. We cannot purposefully open up
because we are then open to great pain. The pain has to be out of the way first.

Why do we have to feel unloved first? Because it is a memory sealed in

and engraved thanks to the process of methylation. That chemical helps to make
sure the memory lives on in our memory bank. Once we address the imprinted
memory and help to undo the methylation process, the system opens up all on its
own. We need to undo repression so that we can feel again. When we "feel"
unloved we begin to feel once again. If we open up first to any feeling we will be
overwhelmed with pain. If we gain access slowly over time to lesser hurts we will
not. We will be on the road to fully feeling.

An article in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health sheds

light on this problem by analyzing the quality of interactions between mothers
and their children. Researchers from Duke, Brown and Harvard universities
conducted a long-term study of 482 adults, using data from the National
Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP), a Rhode Island, New Jersey-based
observational cohort of pregnant women and their children (Maselko, 2010). The
researchers observed the interactions between mother and child at the age of eight
months. Those mother-child exchanges were then classified as high- or

  73  
low-loving interactions. Decades later, the children were studied again as adults.
The mothers who were judged most loving produced offspring who were low on
anxiety, hostility and general distress. There was more than a seven-point
difference in anxiety scores between loved and unloved children, and a three-
point differential in hostility scores. Unloved offspring are more hostile. In brief,
the higher the mother’s warmth, the lower the score in distress.

Doesn't that tell us a great deal? And it means that very early love is so, so
important. Without it we have a damaged soul, someone more likely to fall ill and
who has poor social skills. That lack of love makes us unable to interact lovingly
with other adults, decades later. Affection is all, even if we had first line pain.
You cannot as a parent say, “My children know I love them. I just can’t show it.”
Sorry, that is not good enough. It is like saying I know my child is hungry but I
cannot feed him. There is that need for warmth that cannot be abrogated. Love is
love and there is no compromise. Either you love or you don’t and it will show up
decades later in the feelings and behavior of the person. We can “smell” a loved
person; they exude it in every pore, in every word and every movement.

I have for decades stressed the importance of early love in preventing the
suffering we see in so many patients who didn’t get it. Now, science has found
the means to prove the point. As the authors of the maternal love study
concluded, “It is striking that a brief observation of level of maternal warmth in
infancy is associated with distress in adult offspring 30 years later,” stated lead
study author Joanna Maselko, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. “These provocative

  74  
findings add to the growing evidence that early childhood helps sets the stage for
later life experiences and provide support for the notion that biological 'memories'
laid down early may alter psychological and physiological systems and produce
21
latent vulnerabilities or resilience to problems emerging later in adulthood."

Epigenetics is all about experience, about nurture over nature. And in a

dialectical process, nurture can become nature; that is, the system treats the
intruder of experience as genetic and heritable. And we then confuse the two in
trying to understand it. In Primal Therapy, we are the dealers in experience
because we have seen what experience does to us, especially very early pre-
verbal experience. If one sees one primal one knows for all time how crucial
experience is in the scheme of things. The cause is rarely a brain disease. That is
an answer concocted by those who fiddle around in neurons and synapses and do
not see the brain reacting to experience. If we leave out experience we are bereft
of what can give us answers. We see only the end result and miss half of the
puzzle. It is like looking at diabetics and never knowing what they eat. If we leave
out the first three years in an orphanage can you wonder that we can never know
what the matter is? Thinking it is a brain disease is the result of another more
serious disease: solipsism.

And neither is the problem “all in your head,” as mindfulness and other
cognitive therapies suggest. A true cure can never happen with a cognitive

_________________

21
Brauser, D. (2010, July 28). High Levels of Early Maternal Affection May Lower Emotional
Distress in Adult Offspring. Retrieved from [Link]

  75  
therapy that never touches deep-lying imprints that deviated and deviate the
system. Intellectual therapies never operate on the levels that set off deviations.
They operate on the derivatives, the effluvia of the early imprints such as
deviations in perception or thought patterns or learning. Treating all that never
makes a profound change. And who suffers? The patient.

But isn’t this what medicine today is about – treating symptoms? Lowering
blood pressure, giving allergy medication, restructuring behavior. It is called
“whack-a-mole.” Every time a symptom shows up, just whack it back. And don’t
ask where it all came from? Experience takes a back seat as we slither down into
the depths and minutia of the brain seeking answers that do not exist there, and
never will.

I offer a rather immodest proposal. In our coming brain research we hope

to measure the process of demethylation so that we have a quantitative measure of
progress and the diminution of repression. In brief, we shall measure pain and
how it is stored and where. It may then be possible in this way to undo the driving
force of aberrant behavior and the manifestation symptoms. This is to say, that we
hope to reduce the primal traces on the genes that have driven behavior for most
of our lives. To add to the immodesty, this will mean reversing history and
undoing imprints that have held our lives in such constrained fashion, reducing
our options for behavior, and reducing physical afflictions.

If our hypotheses confirm our expectations, I believe it will change the face
of psychotherapy as we know it. We will let science answer. But, I must add that
in addition to science, we have been doing exactly that, reversing the imprint

  76  
for thousands of patients over almost fifty years with highly significant results. That too,
is science at work. We apply our theory to the treatment of patients so that eventually
we leave the realm of theory and see the results in the flesh and blood of our people.
Theory becomes palpable, in the literal sense of the term. We see it in our addicts who
leave drugs far behind, and we measure this “cure” by the reduced traces of trauma on
the genes. And, of course, we see their whole lives change after therapy. They no longer
think of drugs but make choices in life that are not directed by pain, but by freedom of
choice. Then and only then, can we use the word “cure.”

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