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Our emotions affect our system far sooner than our thinking processes. It’s on the right side that we cope with stress early on, and this may determine how the whole system will react. The prototype “bends” our physiologic processes globally. It is the network of right limbic/

brainstem cells that affects hormone secretion and other physiologic processes; this is where our feelings are directly translated to our biochemistry. In this way our early experiences can determine which hormones are over-secreted and which are under-over-secreted, and whether levels of neurotransmitters are normal and balanced or not.

For the “sympath” (mobilized by the sympathetic nervous system) prototype, there seems to be an excess of secretions. Someone may be “wound up” a lot of the time due to over-secretion of the hormones of aggression, more noradrenaline, for example, due to first-line imprints. This may also later play a part in the development of jingoistic attitudes: “We’ve got to get those bastards!”

Being aggressive may not cause higher

noradrenaline, but a trauma early on may produce

aggression as a style, and with it higher levels of activating hormones.

The parasympath (dominated by the parasympathetic nervous system), by contrast, remains in the “hypo” mode.

Many of his essential hormones and neurotransmitters are below normal output: hypothyroidism, less testosterone, low levels of serotonin, and so on. Though we found low testosterone levels in parasympaths, the opposite was the case for the sympaths. As a result of these prototypes and their systemic effects, the parasympath may tend toward impotence; the sympath may have a problem with premature ejaculation. (Six males that we studied with testosterone levels of more than 600 nanograms per deciliter had a decline of between 15 and 35 percent after 26 weeks of therapy. Those with low starting levels showed a 20 to 35 percent increase.) All of this stemming from chemical set-points that may have had their start way back in infancy or before. The personality and hormones proceed apace, they accompany one another. Thus, those high in testosterone and noradrenaline may tend to have more aggressive personalities. Being aggressive may not cause higher noradrenaline, but a trauma early on may produce aggression as a style, and with it higher levels of activating hormones.

Early alterations in hormones and neurotransmitters are not transient affairs. They are part of the way memory is inscribed. There is a danger: lack of fulfillment. And that danger of needs not being met is accompanied by an

inordinate secretion of stress hormones. Trauma to the fetus and infant causes the sympathetic system to gear up, producing more adrenaline, dopamine, cortisol, and noradrenaline. Once need remains unfulfilled, we are activated. Being vigilant is a matter of survival; the flight, remember, is from ourselves, from our conscious/awareness. The whole system is on alert, and stays alert as long as the imprint is fixed in the system and needs are not met. It is not that we have a memory and then there are hormone changes; those changes are part of the experience. And, in turn, the changes in biochemistry influence our ideas and attitudes and behavior. Because alterations in neurojuices and hormones are part of the experience, in order for them to change, there must again be the full original experience.

For instance, feelings affect the hypothalamus, which governs the output of oxytocin and vasopressin, the “love hormones.” These hormones help us establish loving relationships, and they also function as partial painkillers.

Love can do that. Love is the major painkiller for a young child, so it is not an accident that with early love our “love hormones” are more in abundance. But if no one came to love us early in life when we were lonely or felt neglected, chances are we will suffer from chronically low output of these hormones. The underlying feeling will be “No one wants me” or “No one loves me.” It was, and is, hopeless.

The feeling of “No one wants me” governs our lives. It makes us shy in social situations. It can also make a child so angry as to become violent. What is a gang but a real

family with leaders, a place to belong and gives outlets to the anger. It provides brotherhood, acceptance, approval, and camaraderie. Eventually, we may need tranquilizers to hold down the feeling that “No one wants me.” That feeling hurts—any thwarted need hurts.

Evidence for what I am discussing is found in the research by Johannes Odendall of South Africa (Pretoria Technikon), who studied owners and pets who relaxed together, and where the animals were petted and stroked.

Blood samples of both humans and animals were then taken. The result: blood pressure fell while oxytocin doubled. Not only did it double in the dogs, but also in the loving humans! It is quite clear to me that early love helps us relax—for a lifetime, and it may do the same for the mother.

Deficiencies in hormones or neurotransmitters can also set up vulnerabilities so that later trauma creates full-blown afflictions. We do not see any apparent disease when the child is 5, but the seeds have already been sown. We may say later on, “Anorexia is caused by...too much noradrenaline,” or too little of this or that. However, these are not causes; they are accompaniments to the original trauma—fellow travelers to a trauma we can no longer see and cannot imagine in a person who is 40 years old. The imprint produces deviations in personality and physiology, which ultimately end in specific symptoms. Thus, the aggressive sympath may have an excess of noradrenaline.

It doesn’t cause anorexia; it is part of the ensemble of reactions to the original event.

Likewise, it is not that someone who is depressed is

repressing her anger, as the Freudians would have it. It is that for a parasympath, the chemicals that make for anger are diminished in her, whereas those that make for depression are elevated, while her neurotransmitters tend to drop in the fight against her pain. Chronic depressives have low serotonin levels, for example, and they use up precious supplies in the battle to repress.

Migraine for the parasympath is another example. Lack of effort at birth was life-saving because of the relative lack of oxygen, but now any stress can activate the symptom.

The person remains in the energy-conserving mode due to the imprint of lack of oxygen. Any current adversity can set off the old memory of reduced oxygen and the migraine.

Think of the imprint as a conductor. Because experience affects almost every one of our systems, from the muscles to blood to brain cells, the imprint is bound to produce effects everywhere. Each system plays a different instrument, but all together they form a unified entity. If we only pay attention to the violin section, we will never understand the whole piece, nor will we see the interconnection of the various instrument sections; the same is true if we only study blood pressure to the neglect of the human who owns the (blood) vessels. The same imprint can, and does, affect the central nervous system, heart, and blood sugar levels, and can create chronic sweats. It can alter all of the survival functions because survival was at stake. Compounding our early pain with later experience makes symptoms manifest, giving rise to high blood pressure, diabetes, migraine headaches,

hypothyroidism and/or Parkinson’s disease.

The simple fact of chronically high cortisol set up by the imprint can impact memory later in life, not to mention making us more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease.

When the stimulating stress hormones become overactive, as they do with chronic pain, they can affect brain cells and produce cell death, perhaps not immediately, but over time.

For the brain, extreme pain experienced early in development is truly a matter of life and death. Nothing alerts us as much as pain—a pain we do not feel.

Interestingly, a study published in Neuron found that amyloid plaques, a key culprit in Alzheimer’s disease, is increasingly manufactured in mice when there is a hyperstimulation of neurons in the brain.¹ This is particularly true in those areas involved in memory retrieval (according to a study on humans published in Science News, January 2006).² There is just so much stimulation any organ, including the brain cells, can tolerate, particularly when this stimulation goes on over decades of our lives.

One way we know about the imprint’s role in orchestrating changes in the functioning of multiple systems is that after a reliving of the imprint, there are key and beneficial changes in many psychophysical systems—not excluding the survival functions of heart rate and blood pressure. In other words, the reliving is key to survival, in many cases. In our research some years ago, we found a dramatic drop in heart rate after one year of therapy. It would seem that the whole system is geared up against

memory. When there is a reliving of the memory, the body no longer has to be mobilized, hence the drop in heart rate.

It is one of many indices for how memory is stored and combated permanently. It seems to me that slowing the heart rate affects longevity in no small measure. Given that the set-point tendency for heart rate can be set down even before birth, we need to pay more attention to pre-birth life of our babies. A mother who drinks caffeinated soda and coffee while pregnant may be resetting the heart rate speed of her offspring.

Talking Therapies: No Match for the