People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right – especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong. Thomas Sowell
but my post wasn’t really good. I worked on it, and replied the next day:
“Thanks for helping me improve this post!”
I remember and miss Dr. Janov when I read research and curate studies from what I interpret would be his viewpoint. For example, were he still alive and well, I feel that he would have provided favorable feedback on my Epigenetic effects of early life stress exposure post.
He often noted that aspects of Primal Therapy were proven by subsequent research – especially topics in epigenetics, where research didn’t really start in earnest until the 1980s.
This post has somehow become a target for spammers, and I’ve disabled comments. Readers can comment on other posts and indicate that they want their comment to apply here, and I’ll re-enable comments.
This 2017 New York/Swedish rodent study subject was the epigenetic effects on the F1 children of maternal low protein diet during pregnancy and lactation:
“Male, but not female, offspring of LPD [low protein diet] mothers consistently displayed anxiety– and depression-like behaviors under acute stress.
Our proposed pathway connecting early malnutrition, sex-independent regulatory changes in Egr1 [an Early growth response gene], and sex-specific epigenetic reprogramming of its effector gene, Npy1r [neuropeptide Y receptor Y1 gene], represents the first molecular evidence of how early life risk factors may generate sex-specific epigenetic effects relevant for mental disorders.”
How can the other coauthors respond when a controller of funding publishes the paper referenced in What is epigenetic inheritance? and otherwise makes his narrow views regarding epigenetic inheritance well-known? If the controller’s restricted views won’t allow the funding scope to extend testing to study F2 grandchildren and F3 great-grandchildren, the experiments end, and our understanding of epigenetic inheritance isn’t advanced.
This purposely incomplete study showed that the coauthor only gave lip service to advancing science when he made statements like:
“Further work is needed to understand whether and to what extent true epigenetic inheritance of stress vulnerability adds to the well-established and powerful influence of genetics and environmental exposures.”
“It doesn’t matter about the facts we know if we cannot maintain a relationship with someone else.”
I kept that thought in the forefront.
Both of us are prisoners of our childhoods. I’ve tried to see and feel the walls and bars for what they are.
Like all of us, J hadn’t tried to process the reality of her childhood and life. For example, on her birthday I asked her how she celebrated her birthdays when she was growing up. She provided a few details, then mentioned that her parents had skipped some of her birthdays. Although I had no immediate reaction, she quickly said that she had a happy childhood.
I was at fault, too, of course. I again asked a woman to marry me who hadn’t ever told me she loved me, except in jest.
I asked J to marry me around the six-month point of our relationship. I felt wonderful, in love with her that August morning after she slept with me at my house. I made an impromptu plan: in the middle of a four-mile walk, I asked her to marry me while kneeling before her as she sat on a bench outside a jewelry store. But she wouldn’t go in to choose a ring. She said she’d think about it.
A month later, after several dates, sleepovers at her house, and a four-day trip to Montreal, I again brought up marriage while we rested on her large couch in her nice sun room. The thing I felt would be wonderful brought about the end.
I tried to understand why she couldn’t accept me for the person who I intentionally showed her I am. She abstracted everything that she said.
I tried to get her to identify why, after all the times we cared for each other, after all our shared experiences, she didn’t want me around anymore.
Didn’t happen. She didn’t tell me things that made sense as answers to my questions.
One thing she said without abstraction was that I was weak for showing my feelings. She told me I was clingy.
Another thing she communicated at the end shocked me. She somehow thought that I was going to dump her. I said that the thought never even crossed my mind.
I didn’t recognize it as projection at the time. Prompted by her underlying feelings, she attributed to me the actions and thoughts that only she herself had.
I’ve tried to put myself in J’s place.
How horrible must it have been for her to be steadily intimate with a man and not feel that his touches, kisses, words, affection, expressed love?
That he couldn’t really love me, and so I couldn’t love him?
That he was actually after something else, because it was impossible that he loved me?
One thing I’ve felt after the end was that the need underlying my only stated relationship goal – to live with a woman I love who also loves me – is again ruining my life. My latest efforts towards that goal were rife with unconscious symbolic act outs of an unsatisfied need from my early life.
That unrelenting need is for a woman’s love. The women I’ve chosen, though, have always given me what I got from my mother: they wouldn’t accept me as I am, and didn’t love me.
And there can never be a substitute. Most of my Primal Therapy sessions included the PAIN OF FEELING exactly that.
My prison cell is what Dr. Janov calls the imprint where I – as a child, teenager, young man, middle-aged man, old man – futilely ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE PAST.
“Standing next to me in this lonely crowd Is a man who swears he’s not to blame All day long I hear him shout so loud Crying out that he was framed
I see my light come shining From the west down to the east Any day now, any day now I shall be released”
P.S. – We got back together seven months later, and are still going strong.
Surface Your Real Self 