Pacto por la sostenibilidad: producir conservando y conservar produciendo

One of my patients had parents who tried to stop him from doing anything. From the start they didn’t want to be bothered with him, and they told him to sit in his chair, not move, and not talk. This was on top of a birth that was blocked and resulted in great difficulty for him to get out.

These two traumatic experiences during the critical period for him became an imprint, which combined to make him unstoppable once he got out of control. He did not know it, but he was reacting to events that had occurred long ago.

To be stopped originally meant death; if he could not get out at birth, he would have died. He had to force his way out, and, when later faced with obstacles, he became overly aggressive. He was fighting birth and parents who never let him have his way. His only solution to problems was to charge ahead, never knowing when to back off.

Another patient had very different key personality-shaping events during the critical period. His mother was heavily anesthetized during childbirth. The anesthetic entered his system, depriving him of oxygen. In order to survive, he had to conserve energy and not use too much oxygen. To save himself, his system slowed down to a

passive, waiting state, a physiology of defeat and despair, as there was nothing he could do about what was happening (the anesthesia). This was later compounded by his childhood treatment by his parents, who never let him express his feelings or object to anything. There was no use in battling at birth, and later no use in struggling for anything with his parents, which would have only made them more dismissive and unresponsive. In both cases, he was dominated by outside forces over which he had no control, and he had no choice but to give in and give up.

Passivity was the appropriate, and in fact life-saving, reaction. And from then on, when faced with even minor obstacles, he would give up, as he did originally and later with his parents. In effect, he would go into a “defeat” mode again and again, just as he had from the start.

Both patients are victims of events, as many of us are.

Early experiences during the critical first three years of life largely give shape to our personality and our health. The Catholic church used to say, “Give me a child til age six and he will be a Catholic forever.” It turns out that they only need the first three years. This is almost the end of the critical period when we become pretty much what we will be for the rest of our lives. We either become optimistic or pessimistic, concentrated or dispersed, active or reflective;

or we try or give up, reach out or reach in, overcome obstacles or are overwhelmed by obstacles, look ahead or look back, are goal-oriented or floundering, are aggressive or passive. There are those who are always helpful—

denying their need for help—versus those who always want

to be helped—acting-out being helpless. Remember, the act-out is automatic and unconscious because the driving feeling is. So if we never had a mother who helped, we get others to do it, and then we are not even grateful because we expect it. There are those who go through life trying to fill old needs, as opposed to those who give up. The need is the same for everyone, but early life circumstances twist us in one direction or another. Because we are largely feeling beings during these critical years, without the cognitive powers that come later, the core of the self is largely shaped through the warp and weft of preverbal and nonverbal processes. Moreover, what diseases befall us also begin here. There are, of course, genetic factors to be considered in every disease, but I have found that environmental factors are the pre-potent ones in most cases. To repeat: because we have neglected womb-life, the most important nine months of our lives in terms of shaping personality, we have forcibly ignored key events that changed us. We therefore have painted ourselves into the genetic box where we must incorrectly assume genetic factors for what is most likely womb-life, birth, and infancy caused.

The concept of the imprint has been central to my work for several decades. When early trauma during the critical period of development is great, it becomes an imprint—a permanent state. The suffering component, the part that cannot be integrated, because it is too much to bear—is sheared off and stored. This is the imprint, and it takes on a life of its own in our nervous systems.

It becomes an alien force, not truly a part of us, detached yet seeking ways of entry into conscious-awareness. It is that alien force that shapes our thoughts and behavior.

Some people perceive “alien forces” in the world; these are no more than their own terror, projected externally. The traumatic imprint most commonly happens because of two important causes. The first is a difficult birth, while the second is a lack of loving relationship between two people

—between a mother and child, and, obviously, father and child. It is usually the mother who stays home and provides care, however.

Earlier I discussed the importance of a mother’s brain being in synchrony with her child’s, and what forms is a kind of mutual cerebral resonance. The more the mother is in synchrony with the baby’s right brain, the better organized the right brain of the child is. When their relationship is out of synch, the stage is set for an adverse imprint.

There are many ways to imprint the feeling of not being loved. For instance, in a situation where the child is not attended to just after birth, not held or caressed, he may be imprinted with “I’m all alone,” a feeling not articulated until years later. Sometime later, a girlfriend leaves, and he tumbles into a deep depression. Why? She has set off the imprint “I’m suffering from terrible aloneness” from just after birth. If he has no idea what is wrong, he may suffer depression or suddenly feel alienated in a crowd with an ineffable loneliness. The feeling of total abandonment can overcome someone who is left alone even for an afternoon.

He cannot be alone, cannot feel the primal aloneness,

which was and is devastating. Is there a “good” imprint?

There are good memories that shape us and allow us to develop normally. They are not stored in the unconscious as bad events are. They are accessible because there is and was no reason to repress them. Early love simply becomes part of us, whereas bad events become alien, and then are stored.

Research at UCLA and the University of Toronto concluded that depression may be caused by malfunction of certain neural circuits that connect the limbic system with the prefrontal cortex. And, of course, in our work with patients we find this too; only the reasons are different. It is not a malfunction but a crucial function so that we can remain unconscious. That is, there is a disconnect between the two systems to help us from being overwhelmed by pain input. It is a survival mechanism, not a “malfunction.”

Simply not coming when a child calls conveys the message that he is unimportant, that nobody cares. Letting a baby cry it out in the crib hour after hour finally induces a sense of defeat: “What’s the use? I can’t try anymore.” That feeling may exacerbate the already established tendency to resignation and despair stemming from birth trauma. Each new experience builds on imprints and shapes personality.

We see corroboration of this in research on rats. Those rats never touched or groomed early on, never handled during their first 21 days, experienced lifelong effects of this deprivation. They could not deal with stress as well as those rats who were handled.

Once the imprint of “unloved” exists, no one can ever

make us feel loved. This is one key fact of our lives that all of us are in a mad scramble to avoid. We try to feel loved by friends, family, children (above all, our children), and even the usher at the theater. If the pain of not being loved during the first weeks and months of life is very deep, we can later join cults and believe in the most bizarre of ideas, all in the search for the love we did not have. The imprint of hopelessness might generate beliefs in a deity or guru who offers hope. One patient began to relive an incidence of incest. At the apex of his feeling, he sat up and said he found God. He said he was saved by God. Actually, he was saved by the idea of God—an idea that helped block the terrible feeling he was about to undergo. He was “saved” by the idea of being saved. Here is the disconnect I mentioned between prefrontal ideas and feelings held in the limbic system. It is an example of the evolution of beliefs. Lower level painful feelings cause the higher level production of ideas and beliefs, just as in the evolution of mankind adverse events helped to produce a frontal cortex that could eventually develop ideas to flee from internal danger.

This is based on the assumption that ontogeny (our personal evolution) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolution of the species). With the development of the prefrontal area, we could at last flee from internal danger, which, in animal life, we could not.

We walk around each day in the grip of our unconscious memories (“No one wants me,” “Trying to get love is useless”), and our adult behavior is the analogue of the imprint. It is in our posture, facial expression, and gait.

imprint. It is in our posture, facial expression, and gait.

Above all, it is in the decisions we make, in the hobbies we have, in the profession or work we choose, and the people with whom we get involved. The physiology of hopelessness is the bottom rung of a whole chain of feeling that ultimately results in depression. We can feel defeated long before we have words for it. Many of my patients report how they gave up trying in school as a result of that feeling of defeat. Or they gave up trying to find a partner in life if they encountered the slightest obstacle. Many of the choices we make in life fall within the confines of such paradigms.

If a person’s desperate need for his mother in the first months after birth is thwarted, he may forego any chance of love as an adult because he is still stuck in the needing-mother mode. No one woman can make him feel fulfilled because the imprint is feeling “unfulfilled.” He will go through woman after woman, never feeling satisfied, always thinking that another woman will be the ideal one for him.

After all, what is a “womanizer”? Someone who needs one woman after another, and it is never enough.

The lack of a loving mother profoundly affects the little girl who, years later when she is an adult, finds that she does not have the milk she needs for her own baby. This is because lower levels of the hormone oxytocin produced during her infancy have seriously diminished the now-adult mother’s ability to love her own child and produce milk. It is not a matter of will that makes a mother return to work prematurely and neglect her child. She is driven by the same lack of love from which her baby will be suffering. It is

same lack of love from which her baby will be suffering. It is so difficult to believe that it may all stem from pre-birth events or the first weeks and months of life. We just obey those memories, and run them off as if we had free will; as if we made conscious decisions to do so. Alas, it is slavish obedience to unseen and unknown primal forces that hijack our lives interminably. Most of our adult lives are but a rationale for the imprint. I had one patient who never voted because she thought that what she wanted never mattered.

And this was true with her parents, not even what she wanted for dinner. So she was sure that her vote, who she wanted, was of no consequence.

Imprints and Neurophysiology: How