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The orbital frontal cortex, which is the cortex just behind the eye sockets, reaches maturity between eighteen to twenty-four months of age. The right OBFC receives feeling information on the right side of the brain, and helps code it; it also helps control feelings and, above all, is involved in retrieving feeling information and integrating it with the left OBFC. This is a big job. Thanks to the right OBFC, we can know what we feel, and feel what we know; if only it will inform the left prefrontal cortex about what it knows and feels.

The right OBFC receives feeling information from below, from preverbal memories, and then provides a high level coding system that labels the feeling. What is important about the OBFC is that it has representations from the depths of the brain. In this way, we can make a connection between the awareness, and what happened to us even before birth. That is consciousness/awareness.
continue: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/08/still-more-on-retrieving-memory-and.html

The postwar German Government turned a blind eye to the injustice and severe abuse of over 800,000 children in state und religious institutions.

In spite of the new democratic law, accepted by the German people in 1949 and the commitment to Human Rights in 1948, 800,000 children were locked up in institutions between 1949 - 1975 without prior criminal convictions and/or proper court judgments.

While these 800,000 children and teens were in orphanages and reform schools, they were not only physically beaten, psychologically and sexually abused and used as guinea pigs, they were also used as slave laborers for Germany’s booming postwar industry and to boost the financial wealth of Lutheran/Protestant Christian and Catholic churches. Most of these youngsters endured Nazi style obedience training and weeks of isolation for disobedience. In addition, proper education was denied and the choice of learning a trade or choosing a career of their choice was out of the question.
All of these state and religious institutions were run like prisons. more

Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences

Suffering from parental abuse as a child increases a person’s chances of having poor sleep quality in old age, according to a research article in the current issue of the Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences (Volume 66B, Number 3).

An analysis of data from 877 adults age 60 years and above found that early parental emotional abuse was associated with a higher number of sleep complaints in old age. It was specifically emotional abuse — rather than physical abuse or emotional neglect — that was tied to trouble in getting a good night’s sleep.

“A negative early attachment continues to exert an influence on our well being decades later through an accumulation of stressful interpersonal experiences across our lives,” said Cecilia Y. M. Poon, MA, the study’s lead author. “The impact of abuse stays in the system. Emotional trauma may limit a person’s ability to fend for themselves emotionally and successfully navigate the social world.”

I would like to tell you a soothing bedtime story but all I have is bad stories. Today in the news is the story of neuroscientists Nora Volkow. She is in charge of studying and treating drug addiction, head of the national institute on drug abuse. God help us because she won’t. She has decided that addiction has all to do with less or more dopamine. She is studying dopamine pathways, etc. She says, “addiction is all about dopamine.” And headaches are all about aspirins. Or, “headaches are all about serotonin.” You fill in the chemical blanks.

Seniors Abused During Childhood Face Increased Risk of Sleep Troubles

Suffering from parental abuse as a child increases a person’s chances of having poor sleep quality in old age, according to a research article in the current issue of the Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences (Volume 66B, Number 3).

The UCLA Experiment Reseach

At UCLA Pulmonary Laboratory, my staff and I filmed two patients in slow motion moving exactly like a salamander (in a birth reliving that was spontaneous and unexpected) for over an hour and a half each. They were reliving anoxia at birth due to the heavy anesthesia given to the mother which affected their respiratory system. Drugs given to a 130-pound mother enters a system of a six-pound neonate and shuts down many systems. They were reliving this anoxia with the most primitive nervous system, hence the salamander-like movements. It was evident that no person, not even themselves at a later point, could duplicate their movements nor their deep breathing voluntarily, and certainly not for half an hour. They would have been exhausted. These patients were not exhausted. In some of these relivings, which were filmed, the body temperature dropped to 94.8 degrees in a matter of minutes. The patient was neither cold nor suffering from it. He is reliving an event where the body temperature was exactly 94.8 degrees.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2008/08/ucla-experiment.html

I have noted in many of my works that trauma to a carrying mother in the last trimester of pregnancy can damage the neocortical brain cells, the cells which, inter alia, control and shutdown feelings. They weaken the defense system. And they leave a mark or tag on the deep-lying brain cells; what I call the first-line. The mark is one of great impact since traumas to the fetus usually have a life-and-death urgency. A birthing mother who is heavily anesthetized seriously affects the baby who also may be profoundly drugged. He is fighting for air, for oxygen and for breath. He is terrified and that terror lingers on for a lifetime. It is the imprint; the first-line imprint. On this level lies terror, rage, deep hopelessness and helplessness.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html

More on Self Esteem

Someone told me the other day that she wanted to see a shrink because her feeling about herself is lower than “poo poo,” as she put it. So I asked, “What do you expect her or him to do?” “I don’t know. Help me find out what’s wrong.” They can’t do that because they don’t know how. All they can do is become cheerleaders, “You are capable, you know. You are a good person and I know you can do it.” Blah blah. That kind of help lasts about four minutes because it is battling a lifetime of neglect that makes any of us feel like poo poo.

Why can’t shrinks do it? Because they cannot go deep into the unconscious, deep into history and the brain to find out. Why not? They don’t have the techniques; they don’t know how. Worse, they don’t have the theory. I will give it to them if they want. All they have to do is ask.

Let me give you an idea. A patient was born while the mother was depressed. She did not pick up and cuddle her baby right after birth. She was also depressed while carrying, another weight on the child. The baby in the crib cried but her mother didn’t come; “let her cry it out,” was the mantra.

http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/06/more-on-self-esteem.html

Imprints and Repression And Reduced Access to Ourselves

When the energy of an imprint is blocked, we have little access to ourselves. This also suggests why depression often involves being sexless, as the system is in the energy conservation mode – parasympathetic. All energy is suppressed. The underlying pain has demanded that so much energy be expended in repression that there is little left over for other things. And the memory endures, keeping the system off balance where the parasympathetic system is dominant.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html

Sex and Healing

We can only heal where we are wounded. If the wounds are preverbal, then that is what must be addressed – such as reliving strangling on the umbilical cord and being stuck in the birth canal. Although it may seem odd to the reader, in order to liberate the body it must writhe, shake, and roll, perhaps, to the early lack of oxygen, or love; traumas that will then free us from their lifelong effects. We need to get down into our bodies. We must again undergo an almost seizure-like response to the birth trauma, which then will liberate seizure-like sexual orgasmic response.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html

On Why we Can't Express our Feelings

Having feelings and expressing them are two different animals; and I choose those words carefully because having feelings means having access to the feeling structures of the limbic system in the brain. Expressing feelings means access to the thinking neocortex. The only time expressing feelings is important is if the state of having feelings precedes the expression of them. Then the comprehension is an evolutionary outgrowth of those feelings.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-why-we-cant-express-our-feelings.html

The Pollyanna Effect of Looking for the Positive

Inner tranquilizers have a Pollyanna effect. They permit us to "look on the bright side" of belief rather than the "dark side" of ourselves. The Reagan years were characterized by someone who always did look on the bright side. That optimism was infectious even though it may have been unreal. It was adopted by those who did not want to explore the past and feelings. He was perfect for that— a man with little access to feelings who constructed a weltanschauung of denial and joy. If we ask people whether they would vote for pain and liberation or joy, the answer is a foregone conclusion. The man who took a bullet in the head for him during the assassination attempt was almost never visited by him in the hospital. Could he feel for this crippled human being?
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2010/08/pollyanna-effect-of-looking-for.html

Hijacking Sex
Whenever the system is under intense stimulation, it scans its history and then passes immediately into the prototypic survival mode stamped in long ago. For example, it is a parasympathetic prototype (emanating from the animal “freeze response,” that keeps us from reacting promptly in the face of an impending catastrophe such as an auto accident. Becoming paralyzed and immobilized under high levels of excitation is the way the parasympathetic nervous system deals with stress. This helpless/defeated type of response becomes a template guiding us into what worked before in a life and death situation.

In sex, we see it when it takes a great amount of stimulation to get a partner going sexually. It's typical for the parasympath to have less interest in sex than the sympath. In essence, the parasympath has numbed feelings, is difficult to stimulate, and is very slow to become aroused.more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2008/08/hijacking-sex.html

The Dialectics of Hopelessness

I have come to believe that apart from fear and anger the primary key enduring feelings are hopelessness and helplessness. These are two ineffable feelings that are installed long before we have words for them. Yet they drive much of our adult lives; and more, they turn into their opposite, hope and help, and that then drives us. The process by which this happens is neuro-biologic. In the womb there are no behavioral options when the mother is drinking three cups of coffee or four cokes a day; nor when she is hyperexcitable. Her excited state transfers to the baby. The input to the fetus is too much. It is truly hopelessness and he is helpless. All his system can do is deal with the input. Serotonin is summoned but it is often insufficient. The fetus suffers.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

What About Reliving? Is it Necessary?

At times it seems like I am drowning the fish; going on and on about how you need to relive in order to cure. And I have already drowned the poor fish in insisting that we need a therapy of feelings, of the right brain and the deeper areas of the limbic system and the brain stem. If there is to be a cure. So what is the proof? Here we go again on the difference between statistical truths versus clinical ones. We tend to over emphasize the statistical because it has mathematics and seems more scientific. And it looks objective, whereas the clinical approach just seems too subjective.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-about-reliving-is-it-necessary.html

It may be that our destiny is sealed before birth, and then our basic personality is simply reinforced or compounded but not changed. Here is what several studies have found. That trauma while we are being carried affects us for life and sets up vulnerabilities that dog us forever. This is especially true when there are serious disputes and maybe violence between the parents during the gestational period. So the background level is high, and when there are dust mites or allergens in the environment this person will suffer the most. It is different for everyone. For those who are susceptible to migraines even a slight disagreement might lead to the symptom. And here is where heredity comes in, for there may be genetic tendencies toward migraine or high blood pressure or whatever. What will finally set off the symptom is the level of imprinted stress which raises the level of vulnerability.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/07/do-we-really-have-shot-in-life.html

How Do 200,000 Shrinks Miss the Point About Primal Pain?

(from: The Rise of the Caring Industry. R.W. Dworkin. Hoover Institution, June 2011)
Today in the U.S. there are 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000 mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. Most of these professionals spend their days helping people cope with everyday life problems, not true mental illness. More than half the patients in therapy don’t even qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis. In addition, there are 400,000 nonclinical social workers and 220,000 substance abuse counselors working outside the official mental health system yet offering clients informal psychological advice nonetheless. This is to say nothing about the number of psychiatrists.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-do-200000-shrinks-miss-point-about.html

On the Right Brain and Sex

In some respects sex and primal have a lot in common. First of all, in sex as the orgasm approaches, the left frontal cortex goes dark and the right lights up like a Christmas tree. And in a feeling the same thing happens. But wait! It is the same thing. Feeling is feeling and deep feeling, however it is manifest, is the same. So primal and sex are identical. Something sets it off, there is a build up of tension and excitement or stimulation and finally resolution and release. It is the analogue of most life processes. In the case of primal it is pain that sets it off but in the case of sex it is a handsome guy or pretty girl that does it. But look what happens; Once the sex is set off it gathers up with it the early pain and deep feelings and drives the sexual impulse. Sex is then hijacked by primal feelings and drives it. And the deviations sex takes depends on early life. Maybe it is the need for power over someone else, or the need to dress up like a woman (in males), or the need to be beaten or whipped. Sex is warped by our early lives. And the way we were warped in order to feel loved early on is the way that sex will be warped or deviated.
More: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/07/on-right-brain-and-sex.html

Still Talking to the Wrong Brain

For decades now I have been emphasizing the fact that in psychotherapy we have been addressing the wrong brain. If we really want to produce feeling human beings and not mental giants in therapy we need to skirt the left brain and focus elsewhere. Science has pretty well concluded that it’s the right brain that allows for reliving, not the intellectual insightful left brain. Several studies have emphasized addressing the right brain in order to penetrate the deeper regions of feelings. (W. Penfield 1958 proc. Nat'l Academy of Science USA 44 51-66. Also, Banceaud et al., 19994 Brain, 117 71-90) So long as we focus on the left frontal, thinking, rationalizing brain we will only get progress limited to the thinking, comprehending brain and not the feeling one. We will be loaded with insights that cover over feelings rather than expanding them. Progress will be limited to the psyche and not the whole system. That is why neurology and psychology must meet and inform each other. For it has been fairly consistent now that the right brain is chiefly responsible for reliving our historical feelings. If we ignore how the brain and emotions work will certainly go astray.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/07/still-talking-to-wrong-brain.html

Being Unloved Makes You More Vulnerable to All Outside Events

Being unloved changes your physiology and makes you vulnerable to stressors that ordinarily should not be damaging. In other words when you feel unloved, whether you know it or not, it puts you under permanent stress. Then when something like air pollution happens it can affect you much more than others.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2011/06/being-unloved-makes-you-more-vulnerable.html

More on Psychosis

How do you know when someone is crazy? Not easy because we can all go crazy in different ways. If that is so then how can we possibly define it. And, as I often say, someone can go crazy to keep from being insane. This is not just a joke but a truism. Let me explain. What psychosis is about generally is when the first line (in my lingo) moves into the third line. When deep pain and remote trauma occupy the thinking, present day frontal cortex. When the inhibitory gates are so leaky that traumas in the womb, at birth and in the first year cannot remain repressed but instead move higher in the brain and interfere with present-day functioning. Those events are so shattering that sometimes they cause aberrant ideation, paranoia, and bizarre beliefs. But those ideas and beliefs are relating to the traumas; that is, they arise out of them, so that these beliefs have been formed out of the sequestered pains, however remote.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-on-psychosis.html

Sculpting the Brain

How does a cross word by a father become a chemical in the child's brain? The angry words portend possible danger and rejection. There are clues in the tone of voice, the look, and the words themselves. What is going on inside the child is that the hypothalamic-frontal cortex axis is engaged to send messages to all other systems to be on the alert. This message is sent by chemical courier. It is the meaning implicit in the message that begins the chemical transformation in the child's brain. The hypo-thalamus then triggers the endocrine system to release catecholamines, making the heart speed up and the blood flow. Generally the process goes from the perceiving frontal cortex and other aspects of the cortex (hearing, sight, etc.) to the hypothalamus to the pituitary and then to sympathetic nervous system neurons which organize the flight or fight response to danger.
more: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2010/09/sculpting-brain.html

The hallmark of neurosis for me is the loss of freedom; and the impossibility of gaining it back. Because unfulfilled need makes us obsessive and compulsive and deprives us of choice. So we have to drink, take drugs, work so hard, eat so much, unable to rest; you fill in the blanks. We have reduced our choices and narrowed our perspective. We lead more superficial, narrow lives; lives bereft of feeling because feeling has been buried along with our basic need.

We keep having broken relationships, brief rapports, truncated love affairs because we started out in life like that; inconsistent love, sporadic affection, parents leaving. We are prisoners of these patterns because we have no idea as to the why of it all.
continue: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-loss-of-freedom.html

Complex PTSD in Children

"What we really need to do to help these children is not that difficult, it’s not that hard. It’s something that could conceivably be available in every school system, available to every child: someone who can empathically listen to what the child is saying and work towards having them establish an environment of some safety."– Joyanna Silberg
http://www.cavalcadeproductions.com/complex-ptsd.html

The Traumatized Child

"When trauma occurs early in life, children do not develop the capacity to regulate their experience…to calm themselves down when they’re upset, to soothe themselves, to interact in appropriate ways with other people, to learn from their behavior"– Margaret Blaustein, PhD
http://www.cavalcadeproductions.com/traumatized-children.html

The ACE Study

"We saw that things like intractable smoking, things like promiscuity, use of street drugs, heavy alcohol consumption, etc., these were fairly common in the backgrounds of many of the patients...These were merely techniques they were using, these were merely coping mechanisms that had gone into place."– Vincent Felitti, MD
http://www.cavalcadeproductions.com/ace-study.html

Treating Complex PTSD

"While the therapeutic relationship is very important, and an important substrate to the patient doing his or her work, in some ways we may have to be more like plumbers than like priests. And the task of the plumber is to unplug the toilet, not to have a warm relationship with the person whose toilet is plugged. And so maybe the task of the therapist is to provide the patient the skills that allow them to manage their lives." – Bessel van der Kolk
http://www.cavalcadeproductions.com/ptsd-treatment.html

Severe Early Trauma

"One of the first things you need to ask is, how did you survive this? This is amazing that you’re still here. It’s amazing that you still have the guts to go on with your life. What is allowing you to function? What are you good at? What gives you comfort?"– Bessel van der Kolk
http://www.cavalcadeproductions.com/childhood-trauma.html

Wounds That Time Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse

Martin H. Teicher

Neuropsychologist Teicher reveals the alarming connections scientists are discovering between child abuse—even when it is psychological, not physical—and permanent debilitating changes in the brain that may lead to psychiatric problems. The discoveries are a wake-up call for our society, but they may also hold hope for new treatments for abused children and the adults that they become.
More

The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling. By SPIEGEL Staff.

This is what it looks like, the document of a conspiracy: 24 pages, with appendix, in Latin, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. A "norma interna," or confidential set of guidelines for all bishops, who were required to keep it a secret for all eternity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
continue:
or: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,676497,00.html

The Spiegel Magazine-Cover fits the subject perfectly:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index-2010-6.html

Dr. Vincent Felitti, founder of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Preventive Medicine and director of its obesity-treatment program, was seeing some good results. His patients were losing 50, 80, even hundreds of pounds. He might have considered the program a success, if not for the fact that the participants who were doing the best — those who were both the most obese and losing the most weight — kept dropping out.

Felitti was baffled. Why, invariably, did so many patients quit just as they approached their healthy goal weight? Ella, for instance, a middle-aged woman who entered the program in the mid-1980s morbidly obese at 295 lb., had managed to whittle her frame by 150 lb. over six months. "Instead of being happy, she was having anxiety attacks and was terrified," Felitti says. (See "The Year in Health 2009: From A to Z.")

He asked Ella what she thought was going on. "Finally, the story comes out," he says. "She had been molested as a child, both within her family and outside it. She tried to escape by marrying at 15, at her mother's urging. It was a disastrous marriage — her husband was crazy jealous. They divorced in two years. She remarried. Her new husband was also jealous. He was convinced that when she was out hanging the laundry, she was sexually posturing to attract the neighbors." (A)
continue: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951240,00.html?xid=rss-topstories