Вътрешноутробното развитие: Как ранният живот оформя бъдещето

[Music] [Music] is

is large handmade pepperoni pizza for five bucks this year's fashion we has shown

us some bold new trends for the upcoming season the week started out with a hot designer it was initially reported that

57 people were killed in Iraq today the discussions at the summit was climate change despite opposition I heard that

children wer taken out bloody I am very scared I'm worried about my daughter worried about the military space race is

not over there's [Music] no mind altering

[Music] medic [Music]

we've been very good at making enormous strides in technology it makes us look Advanced but I think where we fall down

is that we haven't gone nearly as far in our internal world I don't know that we've really come too much farther than

people did thousands of years ago most of us don't know why we're doing what we're doing most of the time

especially when it comes to the really important decisions in our lives this is largely a society in

denial we have been stuck I think for a very long time in the ways we've done things and everybody sees it now I don't

think people can really look around the world or the Earth and say it's all great well how about now we start to

look inside ourselves how about we take the ideas that fueled this kind of development and look

inside why wouldn't we go back to the womb why do we want to start anywhere else really but there it's where we all

start in Western culture we have no idea about plate life life begins with birth not before but other cultures have an

understanding or an intuition what prenal life may mean for the becoming child the belief pregnant woman should

be cautious and not excited no burdens and so on the time before birth is your living

time 100 years ago babies were put into you know strange clothes they could not move they were embalmed like mommies and

their heart rate beat was slower they would eat less they would develop [Music]

less up to the 50s even the 60s uh in Europe babies were operated without anesthesia babies don't

experience and don't feel that was the General opinion and that they forget everything and so you can let them cry

and they forget it doctors would do horrible horrible horrible operations and they told their parents that the

reason that they are not using an anesthetic is because the anesthetic would damage the child but in fact they

damaged the children themselves through this traumatic experience the reason I did not become

an obs RCI is because I hated the way Obstetricians were treating women they were yelling at them push push push

what's the matter with you you know push and we were taught that babies can't remember anything before the age

of two in this last century the attitude is changing

dramatically we can identify with the a child with a baby ultrasound is

Magic how could you see a baby into the womb during pregnancy the nature of what we do is

really thinking about development as it starts before birth and we're really pushing back that time frame to say that

there are factors environmentally that happen U prenatally and so their environment is their mothers human

beings are affected by the environment as soon as they have an environment and that means as soon as we implanted in a

womb so from that moment on from that moment on until we die uh we are creatures who

are interacting with shaping and being shaped by the environment our whole story is about

little number five and how his mother is preparing for for him she knows that he will have nothing to grow on except the

food that she eats for him she really is eating for two people herself and little number five 50 years ago we have the

research to brain development we have the epidemiological research and we have the

direct observation uh by via alash sound and film and and so on the epidemiological research is coming from

a man uh whose name is Barker some of the early observations by Barker were uh in England and Wales that

geographically there were different areas that had high neonat mortality risk as well as high cardiovascular

mortality risk there were further investigations which ultimately linked low birth weight

to an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality and when you think about low birth weight the main driver is the

nutritional environment in UDA that was 20 or 30 years ago and that was an explosion of

research some of this came out of studies for example with the Dutch um what called The Dutch famine from

November 1944 to April 1945 the Nazis constrained the amount of food going into the Netherlands and so

the government reduced the rations from 1,800 calories a day to 900 calories a day there were about 5,000 women who

were pregnant during this period and what happened was uh people followed up in adulthood to look at what kind of

problems they were having fetuses who were in this period of famine in the first trimester had a whole host of

problems when they got to be May AG they will be more likely to develop the so-call metabolic syndrome which

consists of diabetes high blood pressure and heart problems and these are obvious examples

of how the environment already in uo can affect the life of the adult the factor that we least appreciate however is that

in addition to these self-evident physical factors is the emotional state of the mother about

how many months pregnant would you say she is doctor about 7 months have you someone to help you with the housework

my sister comes in once in a while but it's hard for her to get away in our life the first big person is

the mother mother is giving life giving birth and if the mother is feeling well the baby feels he is living in a good

world if the mother has stress he feels the world is stressful stress decreases the immune

response everybody knows that if you don't sleep enough if you work too hard your stress level increases and your

immune system goes down the toilet when that happens while you're in utero it really affects your immune system for

the rest of your life human beings are affected in their development by early experiences

including in the uterus they're affected by the [Music]

emotional environment in which they're conceived and carried and birthed and then reared

in the broad outlines of that knowledge is being really well established but we're not practicing it

as a society we're not recognizing it prenatal life is so unknown to us and yet so important to who we are as people

you will see it unconsciously expressed in many ways you will see it in movies you will see it in fairy tales you will

see it in novels you will see it in mythology in folklore you name it you will see it there in older times the

fair Tales were told to the young people to help them to confront the old anxieties from birth and from

helplessness it's the fight with the mighty parent figures maybe a witch maybe cruel father figure and in modern

times we have films they follow the frame of the fairy tales in the utan world you are

swimming and there is this film The Little Mia made hurry home princess we wouldn't want to miss old

Daddy's celebration now would we the crisis begins when she Fells in love and feels weak and loses her

voice and then the film goes back and shows the background there this is a fixation

anxiety fixation by a big cruel dominating mother and the story of of the film is

the fight on overcoming being stronger than this mother and it is a fight on life and

[Music] death so for true love and this ambivalent feelings against the mother

are natural if it is going good our life is an adventure if it is bad it is trauma atic it is

suffering intrauterine life is not the paradise as some people try to make us believe we are the receiver of all the

happiness and of all the anxieties and difficulties of our parents the

Fus is a sentient being think it is moving quivering without a

[Music] skin he marinates in the feelings of the mother it feels every shudder it feels

the mother's gladness and happiness but it feels every anxiety it's the anxieties that cause

the difficulties and of course something that happened in the womb uh would be at

the deepest level it's at the start of your life it happens uh with the woman who gave you life this would be at the

deepest level I think of everybody's personality since I was a child I had the feeling that there were family

secrets my father and my mother gave me versions of the history of the family there was something that didn't work out

completely so I understood I had to look for something that was beyond what appeared on the surface I think from

here came my interest in the unconscious I'm also very interested in dreams and movies because they speak a

very similar language if you look at Alis in one land you have the

rabbit the rabbit is the animal of making many children no no no I'm overdue I'm really in a stew no time to

say goodbye hello I'm late I'm late I'm late what can I do for you well I'm looking for a White Rabbit so um if you

don't mind oh there he is I simply must get through sorry you're much too big simply impassible you mean impossible no

impossible nothing's impossible there is always this question too big too small always the problem to get

into or to go out to go out is to be [Music] delivered once upon a time we were

walking on for legs we had a head which was smaller and we had the hips that were

larger so the birth channel was very big when uh the human beings began to reach bidal erect

posture gradually the bones changed and the birth Channel became more narrow and then another thing happened the brain

began larger and here the obstetrical Dilemma came how will be able the new human baby to come out of the womb with

such a big head so if you see again the whole movie thinking to the obstetrical Dilemma you will get another picture

someone's head Will Roll for this [Music] and there is the issue of cutting the

head the dream of mothers if you can cut the head of the child the child can come out with their

[Applause] [Music] heads with her slowly uh there was a

sort of natural selection that the women who were able to deliver earlier survived

because if you deliver earlier the baby is smaller and if it is smaller it can come

[Music] out I'm late biochemically and physiologically in so many ways the

human infant is way behind other mammals we are all born unripe very helpless therefore the a good bonding in a

welcoming mother is important for development of a child in earlier centuries birth and

pregnancy and the fate of woman was very very difficult every sixth birth meant death for the mother up to one half of

the children died in during birth or in the first year and therefore was an anxiety

from the woman and from the man to all what birth meant in the last 50 years birth becomes

safer and safer now we have the uh uh the power or the stability or the safety to confront on to to be

curious I started out in the lab studying very narrow questions in animal models and I quickly realized that I was

interested in broader questions that affected human health I grew up in Southern California

and I grew up with smog alert days and when pollution was very much defined by whether or not we could see the

mountains that were theoretically really close by I grew up in one of the communities

that we actually study now which I always think is kind of ironic and wasn't until a little bit later that the

epigenetics came in Epi really means on top of a genetics so when we think about our genetic code

which is our DNA sequence when we talk about epigenetics we're thinking about other factors other things that can be

on top of or attached to that can help fine-tune the genetic code to turn genes on and off this is is something that

we're just beginning to explore Gene by Gene it's not what genes you're carrying it's what gets

expressed jeans are you know only the blueprint imagine you have a blueprint for a house you have a house that you

have built sort of to your own specifications and it has followed the blueprint in terms of where things are

but a lot of things have changed as a result of all kinds of uh environmental factors being able to adapt to a

changing environment quickly is very important however not every adaptation is necessarily going to be for the

better when the sperm and the Egg are forming as part of normal development there's this period of erasing past

marks basically and reestablishing the new set of marks for that future of that cell and then this happens again in

early EMB Genesis in some ways wiping the old slate clean and starting new for this new this new fetus this new

baby there's a whole period of time during fial development where many things including just the environment

that the fetus is growing in could alter or shift that process it's fantastic because the idea

of epigenetic changes based on exposure to the environment at different intervals really provides the body with

a way of continuously adapting to their environment bad environmental events cause change good environmental events

cause change and what you got to do is just make sure that you have enough of the

good [Music] events

I was conceived during the second world war in Budapest Hungary in

1943 at a time when Hungary being an ally of Germany um was in the war on Germany's side and there was a lot of

anti-Semitic legislation restrictions and and threats the genocide hadn't happened yet

and then I'm born in January 1944 and then the Germans then marched into the country in March March the

1944 and as my mother told me the next day she phoned a pediatrician to say that Gabor is crying all the time when

she come and see him and the doctor says sure I'll come but I should tell you all my Jewish babies are

crying it's so clear to me that the fear that I've carried on my life literally in my

molecules is my mother's Terror and then the terror that I experienced during the first year of

Life under na the occupation those experiences have stamped my personality they've stamped

my um reactivity to the world they St my world view mostly on the unconscious level I wasn't a happy camper I was a

lot of issues in my personal life a lot of depression anxiety Then I I realized in my 50s that I had

add I clearly see that this is not a genetic disease despite the so-called experts um it is the impact of stress in

the early environment when I was in school we used to have conversations about nature

versus nurture nobody says that anymore we don't have nature here and nurture here we have nature and nurture

interacting to form a new thing I do research on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on trauma

survivors and actually the Next Generation I'm interested in understanding individual differences and

how they manifest interacting with the environment and more specifically traumatic

events we have been doing studies of adult children of Holocaust Survivors and we were finding very interesting and

important effects if The Offspring will be raised in the same context their body will need

to be prepared maybe for prolonged periods of starvation or maybe for overwhelming

stress so having a change that is passed from mother to offspring could be very helpful may be

less helpful if The Offspring is not going to live in the same environment if an offspring lives in urban New York

where starvation is really not an issue then having the same kind of biologic adaptations being transmitted may

actually result in a flip side of just being anxious and people not understanding why or even you not

understanding why from this evolutionary perspective the fetus gets constructed via

epigenetic processes to be awfully alert because that would be adaptive in a threatening environment but if you're

wired to be very adaptive and very Vigilant that's not a good fit with a postnatal environment in the late 20th

or TW early 21st century where the requirements for um you know success in school is to be able to sit very

placidly to have you know very unique Focus to not be oriented to what's going around so again it's this bad fit if

there's a lot of stress in the early environment then the infant's capacity to respond to stress will be altered the

tuning out itself which is the homwork of ad is nothing but a defense mechanism infants when the brains are developing

if there's stress around them they'll tune out that's how they survive the tuning out gets programmed into their

brains Bing they they diagnos with ADHD not enough dopamine let's give you [Music]

rlin way to see tomorrow there's no way that I will let you down you can't give up now I will take the weight and follow

I will bridge the gap where you once fell you know you're not alone there are 3 million kids in the

United States according to the latest figures who are taking stimulant medications for

ADHD there are half a million kids according to the latest statistics who are taking antis psychotic

medications they're getting these medications not because they're psychotic they're getting them because

it's the only way we can figure out when I see we I mean Society to control their behaviors and this is what the

pharmaceutical industry is able to exploit in their promotion of high volume drug use in their

advertisements we don't even know what the long-term effects are of antic psychotics on the developing brain and

yet we still see medication advertised as a quick fix endorsed by the medical profession what's going

on and what's going on with the burgering diagnosis of ADHD and oppositional Define disorder and bipolar

disorder in kids and autism which has gone up 40 fold in the last 30 years what's going on and what we're not

recognizing is is that people are parenting and and conceiving and carrying and birthing children under

increasingly stressed [Music] conditions in our society there's so

much rushing you're so busy everything going going going our mind that's always busy chatting Ing and making us

stressed I was born in Israel my mother said there was a place where all the mothers went with their babies for a few

weeks then they bonded and then they all went home together we don't have that here we barely get to stay overnight in

the hospital now increasingly it takes two people now to provide a living in this culture to families and they're

doing so in the context of less support because one the ravages of industrialization and globalization is

the destruction of the extended family the tribe the clan The Village the [Music]

neighborhood frankly hundreds of years ago not to glorify the past cuz there were other stressors but you had

extended family around I think we don't talk about that enough in our society so there's less support there's

less context there's less connection that people can benefit from less connection with grandparents

Elders wiser [Music] women we started by saying let's try to

bring this into the lab and get pregnant women to what we call acutely briefly feel

stress and when we divided the fetal response the fetuses whose mothers were high anxious had a heart rate increase

and the fetuses of mothers who were low anxious either had no change or a decrease

and then what we saw is if you go all the way out to women reaching criteria for depression their fetuses have a

significant stress response in the lab your breathing goes up your blood pressure goes up your heart rate is

going up that's all stimula to the fetus so over the course of pregnancy being in an environment of a woman who

is seriously depressed is different than being in an environment of a woman who is feeling fine no Sy symptoms and that

that shapes fetuses so that by the end of pregnancy when they get a stimula stimula like the

heart rate change they're showing differences almost we want to say in temperament in their reactivity style

big reactors or just [Music] calm emotional states aren't just

abstract psychological experiences they have their physiological correlates in the

body so if I were to scream at you right now your body would change in display at a second nobody touched you nobody put

any poison into you but your body would be a completely altered state high levels of cortisol the stress hormone

would be elevating your blood sugar so that you could fight or have more energy to escape adrenaline would be pumping

through your system causing your heart to beat faster causing your muscles to tighten up to be stronger giving you

more energy enabling you to escape or to struggle and what if you're carrying a baby and what if you're chronically

scared those same stress hormones and other compounds will be going through the placenta to the

[Music] infant [Music]

already back in the 1970s there was a CTV documentary on how emotional deprivation in early childhood Fosters

the development of violence and aggression psychologist prove the inverse relationship of violence and

affection by studying what happens to monkeys who don't get any mothering parents who are stressed have been shown

not to be able to be as attuned to their infants and children as parents were not stressed not their fault not because

they don't love the child not because they're not dedicated devoted committed simply because the stress effect impedes

their ability not to love their child but to attune with their child so that Mutual responsiveness is interfered with

and that has an impact on brain development there's an important chemical called dopamine dopamine is

essential for motivation and attention now you take infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels in the

front part of the and you find it to be normal separated from the mothers those dopamine levels

have diminished in other words the child's brain chemistry is affected by the unavailability of the mother and

this is true even if the mother's physically there but emotionally absent imagine two tuning Forks like in this

very famous still face experiment the mother is one tuning fork and it's starts vibrating and the baby's tuning

fork begins to vibrate in UNIS with hers and when that happens gradually its own prefrontal cortex gets

tuned so it becomes empathic it begins to relate to the mother infant don't understand

words so they respond to body language so is my mother rigid or relaxed is she afraid because if she's

afraid I am because she's my protector if she's afraid who's going to protect me

the size of the mother's pupils the mother's voice is it confident and relaxed or is it tense this is not

conscious thoughts but this is the infant's experience depressed mothers or even with um schizophrenic mothers they

are not in synchrony the baby is getting the message that there's something wrong with it its prefrontal cortex is not

going to be tuned properly so that baby is going to develop a kind of depressive personality

okay I'm here and what are you doing oh yes oh the monkeys tell us more about the severe effects of infant

deprivation the ones that were reared in isolation just don't behave normally when they're finally given a playmate

they rarely touch and when they do the contact surprisingly vicious

children who are emotionally inhibited will become dysfunctional adults they will have difficulty learning and will

be more hostile and that starts right in the [Music]

womb when the brain begins to be organized um Genetically speaking each neuron is destined for a certain place

where it will eventually end up neurons brain cells are the information processing units of the brain and they

make connections and they organize themselves into functional networks every second of prenatal life

50,000 new neurons are being produced every second there's not a machine in the world that can duplicate

that when you have all those neurons being produced they are very vulnerable and

smallest smallest influence will make a huge sort of imprint on on those neurons on the neural

circuits if there is chronic stress the woman is constantly obsessing about something or worrying about something

more and more stress hormones like cortisone is being pushed into the bloodstream when you have too much

cortisone in the brain itself then the nerve cells will be interfered with in their passage and they may even be

destroyed we were the first or amongst the first to Glimpse inside at the brain becoming wired up with this new safe MRI

technology we're observing large scale systems what we see in infants exposed to stress in utero is reduce brain

volume reduce gry matter density so if you are less dense in those regions that suggest that there are less processors

available we also see reductions in hippocampal volume and increase in amydala

volume the hippocampus is critically important for learning and memory the amigdala is very important for emotional

processing responding to emotional information and why we think those are particularly important during fetal

development is first of all they begin to be developed very early disruption in those areas is also associated with

higher risk for emotional Psychopathology or uh Neuropsychiatric illness if the mother is upset if she

has a very high level of neuro hormones if she has very high level of stress hormones all of those things will be

passed to the baby there all all kinds of feelings coming from the

mother all kinds anxieties depression fears about everything let's be clear mothers love

their children so do fathers but there are these subtle unconscious things see that this mother is dealing with in her

life say she may be in a tough marriage but she gets pregnant well part of her may want the

the baby and part of her May really say gee this is not a good time for a baby in fact this is going to be very hard

and a baby may get a lot of that that little bit of stuff is feeling all that without any way of

communicating it just absorbs just hold it and that's what it gets for nine months what comes to mind is the

um confusion if you can speak of that in in a in a

fetus um a developing human [Music] being whose mother is

conflicted who wants a child perhaps but is afraid of having a

child who wants to love but is themselves very afraid and very stressed so the kid is getting a very

confusing message about the world that this world wants me this world doesn't want

me pleas kill me

no the Alien films show the very difficult side of pregnancy and birth the side that the mother does not want

to be pregnant does not want to have a child but the child is coming the child is there the child wants to

live this is the story of the alien film this alien is an embryonic being that wants to implant in the persons of the

crew and the film is always about this unwantedness and this will to live is a dark film it is in a certain way

hopeless and as a very melancholic film depressive film but for people who have this background that they were not

wanted and had to implant in spite of this it is in a certain way fascinating this is a typical cult film

as there are many peop who see um several times this film to to clear their own feelings about

wantedness and [Music] unwantedness I do worry about this kind

of research getting lumped with research that has a political agenda which is the

personhood of the fetus because that's a holy different question and it's and it's what what data is used in my

opinion for the discussion about the right to choose so there I think also people may

a little bit shy away from this because that is such a fraught debate It Is An Inconvenient Truth that

fetuses feel things it is it is just inconvenient um because if they do then many things have to be

rethought it make no sense for a girl to have a baby she does not want if she is false that means a misery for a whole

life for her and for the child it's a very difficult issue and if she has not the right she takes the right I think

eventually maybe in 100 years maybe not that long I would say the goal would be let's get women and

men in such a good place that they come to realize that bringing another soul into this world is a very big

[Music] job I'm 92 years old and I've been practicing psychoanalysis for almost 60

years it was the war by being in the war and what happened to me in the war that decided me to become a

doctor now I wanted to heal people not kill people my training finished in

58 at that time analysis didn't teach anything about the womb didn't teach anything about prenatal life the

paradig in analysis was the Mas the paradig with Freud and edle struggle in doing my work I discovered

that patients when I listened were coming forth with a different story they felt very guilty about their

mothers and they were feeling they had to I put it in a global sense rescue their

mothers now nobody's born like that that's programmed into people people when their environment is such that the

parents can't take care of themselves so one possible response on the part of the child than is well then I got to take

care of them in order to maintain my relationship with them it's a survival thing once you're

in that state whatever mom says goes I'll do anything I have to live I'll do anything so whatever you need me to do

do you need me to hold all of your bad feelings I'll do it now an infant can't really do it but there's an

omnipotent uh attempt to fix it because your life depends on it later that fetus growing up may become a

writer and write these stories and may not know where that inspiration comes from like the story of

Superman okay come on hold it get back if you think I am a fetus and I am to take care of a full grown woman's

problems how well I better become a superhero I better become the strongest person on

Earth I better be able to fly I better be able to LEAP tall buildings in a single bound and really do what save

her [Music] that easy Miss I've got you you you've

got me who's got you if you look at movies about superheroes really the task of an infant

is a superhero [Music] task Superman is partly a story of my

helplessness during or after birth my aloneness and my fantasies to be strong and the strongest man in the

world now this does damage to the baby because really if you think about it how is a fetus supposed to take over for a

mommy how is a fetus supposed to take all of this trouble a fetus can't there's no way the child automatically

adjusts to the environment in any way that'll further the chances of its own Survival the baby has to become the

mother doesn't get to be the baby and if the baby can't be the baby the baby can't develop

up his or her full potential and again it's not according to the intentions of the parent

either but it's just it happens so now we have a baby that has limitations but is going to protect

those because really those were set up so early and they were set up to save this baby's

life these people then develop lifelong patterns of self suppression which then suppresses your immune system as well

because the immune system and the emotional system are are the same not even controversial what will

happen later on in life is that anything that challenges these basic limitations that

were set down a grown person will fight against cuz they felt responsible for their world well if this thing happened

to me it's cuz I'm a terrible person and therefore how do I uh make sure it never happens again I become the perfect

person so I'll be good all the time I'll be good to everybody I'm going to be the best in the class and I'll always Excel

and I'm going to be great at my job and when stuff goes wrong in my marriage I'm not going to say a word cuz

I'm good and I can handle it all and then they get cancer an adal trauma is really a fetal trauma the

fetus feels the pain and all the consequences all the distortions of Personality create an entity I call the

internal sabot it's the job of that internal sabot to see to it you never ever experience that pain again people

will talk about this all the time they say I self-sabotage and I think that's a very

well-known idea in our society I think people don't realize the depth of it I think they don't realize how true it

really is and what they're really doing and what people are really doing is saying mom you gave me this

constellation of trouble I took it into my personality it set down the limits for what I was going to be able to do

but it kept me alive I will hold on to this with every bit of strength I have

underneath everything in your life there's that thing that empty forever empty you know what I'm talking about

that yes yes yes I yes the capacity to be alone and and and and and and to perceive that's been a human challenge I

think for thousands of years and and not just in this Society it's just more difficult now because it's more

pervasive and because we all have these devices and that's famous clip with Louis CK he's talking about cell phones

and sometimes when things clear away you're not watching it you're in your car and you start going oh no here it

comes that I'm alone like it starts to visit on you you know just the sadness yes life is tremendously sad just by you

know being in it and so you're driving and then you go that's why we text and drive I look around pretty much 100% of

people driving are texting yes and they're killing everybody's murdering each other with their cars yes but

people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own cuz they don't want to be alone for a second by not

being alone you never really get a chance to think about yourself so this is a wonderful way of anesthetizing

yourself against uh any kind of introspection there used to be television and movies and radio and in

terms of today's favorite anesthetic I would say it's probably Facebook and the reality shows and and all those game

things and then of course there's pornography so instead of coming to terms with my lack of ability to love or

to care or to feel you can do all this other stuff one is

frantic one will try anything to relieve the pain we can measure it by the number of

people who are addicted to various things addicted to drugs addicted to alcohol addicted to sex addicted to

power Addicted to Money the addictions run and run and run and run if you look at addicts and by

the way not just drug addicts but any addict gambling uh sex addiction shopping addicts What's um missing is a

sufficient activation in part of the brain's reward motivation um circuitry of which dopamine is an

important driver biochemically cocaine elevates dopamine levels nicotine elevates dopamine

levels um caffeine elevates dopamine levels so people whose early development sabotage the development of the reward

motivation circuitry will find some relief in doing drugs that elevate dopamin levels temporary

relief or in activities that elevate dopamine levels so for the gambling addict that's the gambling he's not

after the gambling he's after the dopamine that he's getting and it's not about the

money because when they win the money they go back next day and they lose the money so if you look at brain scans of

people engaged in compulsive shopping the same part of the brain will light up as will light up if they do

cocaine if when we look at those people we don't see the pain that's driving their

behavior it's because we're denying our own pain and if we are driven to judge them

for their compulsive attachment to seeking momentary Joy from external Source like

a drug is because we live in a society that's completely addicted to seeking

momentary Joy from external sources whole Industries and uh businesses and the

livelihood of millions of people depend on manufacturing stuff that's completely unnecessary doesn't enhance anybody's

life in any significant way but which provides momentary [Music]

pleasure I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago and on this block there was this thick lineup people for

breast you know around the block I said Gee what's going on they said oh the new iPad is coming out so I actually talked

to somebody I said look I get it the iPad is a great and I don't have one but I get that it's a great device and but

why line up here could you wait till tomorrow or next week no man I'm it's like that you know got to have it right

now you know Bob Dylan and his great dog I think the Martin Cori the documentary with Bob Dylan uh he's sitting in the

back of a limousine or a car and these two young fans want his signature come on I won't take

BL they don't ask me those other two people don't ask me why do you why should you give it why shouldn't you

give it why we come to because they like me they they said we don't like you call me a

bum well may I have your autograph you called you bum you sign come on come you don't need my autograph

you needed it I'd give it to [Music] you nobody needs an iPad people can use

it why line up at 4 in the morning you think that's going to somewh fulfill your life fill in the holes where you're

empty that's the society we live [Music] in

we see the addiction as the problem and of course that's legitimate addiction is a problem it creates

problems but it's not the primary problem we really need to appreciate the importance of the prenatal environment

in child development and to understand that when we see dysfunction in people we're actually seeing the imprint of

that early [Music] experience

[Music] you talk to people about their childhood and they say I don't remember I don't

remember I don't remember well the fact is everybody remembers they just don't recall it's

usually because either nothing happened or too much happened and usually they're too

much and so that one way they dealt with it was to split their attention from what's going on so they're not going to

recall I know that people often tell me that I have a sad expression on my face that sadness is a

memory it it's somehow just it's programmed into me but it's not a recall [Music]

memory we have to distinguish between those two important kinds of memories and and and so so often Our Lives show

up as those imprinted memories and that imprint starts in your door you during the time in the uterus

we have no speech all these experiences are real experiences are not represented in the

speech ego therefore these preverbal experiences are unconscious they can be in dreams but

also in all daily situations they can be present [Music]

when you put optic fibers into the womb you can see rapid eye movements of babies which in adults always means that

they are dreaming people will often wonder you know what can vetus dream about well he

dreams about the same things that you and I dream about in terms of our experiences there's a lot more to feed

the life than we have ever thought I reckon by and now I have analyzed thousands of Dreams by many patients and

the dreams reveal earlier levels of Life the patient may be far away from his or her fetal life but in due time as one

wipes away level by level eventually we'll get down to the truth everybody has an imprint the

imprint happens because of the long history of traumas in the

world we have to be aware of the fact that there is a whole Spectrum you know uh of of traumas that can happen to us

and it is those things that are passed on from generation to generation so that if a certain Gene is switched on it will

continue to be switched on until the environment somehow switches it off genetically we have taken genes from

a lot of people so each one of us has roots even if we don't know the roots that we have and these roots furthermore

go back in time so in some way we have inside of ourselves layers of humanity what we actually looking at is

the impact of the multigenerational family history mothers but grandmothers great

grandmothers and however far we go back people have been through Wars famine disasters of all sort stress that

affected one generation will be played out very exactly in the Next Generation to the degree that that next gener ation

has understood or not understood it has dealt with it or not dealt with it so fundamentally so long as we're not

conscious we're going to pass on our stress and our trauma onto our kids when I was in graduate school at

the University of Michigan one of my classmates was talking about this idea called the black white disparity and

pre-term birth and low birth weight something I'd never heard about and I was shocked at the reality that in any

given year black women are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to deliver a low birth weight or pre-term

infant and why that's such a big concern is that babies's born early obviously have higher rates of morbidity IM

mortality when I became a professor here I immediately wanted to know what was behind this and then with my own

pregnancy I was carrying twins a higher risk pregnancy so I started thinking about my great-grandmother um she had

two sets of twins that both perished before they reached 12 months of age it haunts me no one has since had twins

until from my great-grandmother to me so that was always a story my grandmother told me that she remembers them briefly

in her life she was working out in the fields so she brought them out in the fields with them and she wasn't able to

breastfeed them so that contributed to their early demise obviously she felt a deep sadness

about that and my mother repeated that story and she as well as I felt this deep remorse for the loss of these

twins My Grandmother Had undiagnosed depression which then contributed to my mother's stress level as well and I

started thinking about that and how that got transmitted to me and how I was going to transmit that to the Next

Generation it was scary I felt like at any point in time unfortunately my children could die in

utal How I dealt with the anxiety was that I refuse to look at the ultrasound until my husband told me everything was

okay with their heartbeats um and that's basically how I lived through that pregnancy and I think

that affected me in my attachment to them when they were born initially I couldn't change their diapers I didn't

really want to hold them which is probably part of the reason why we had a third

[Music] child every woman who has a child puts on that child her

experience and so any way that women are treated is what gets past down women have borne the burden the

pain of thousands of years where men have treated women badly have devalued

women that devaluation that pain is part of every woman's [Music]

Heritage men took over being stronger and made women believe they were second class and women are second class in the

minds of men to this very day you you know examples and I know many examples despite our talk about

equality it is an uphill battle thousands and thousands of years of this

toxicity that is ground into the unconscious of every person and every woman now that stuff is what is

projected into the new [Music] baby and what's terrible is the children

born now have to bear that burden from the past and have to bear the burden of current conditions in the

[Music] world we had this sex trade worker who has died since of HIV but I asked her

what the heroin did for her and she said the first time I did heroin it felt like a warm soft hug which is exactly what

she would have gotten from her mom had her mom not being traumatized herself and uh a guy in his 40s big

imposing looking muscled tattooed fellow in rehab I asked him

what the Heron did for him and he said doc I don't know how to tell you this but it's sort of like uh when you're a

kid and and and you're three years old and you're sick and you're shivering and your mommy puts you on her lap and she

wraps you in a warm blanket and gives you warm chicken soup that's what the heroin feels like what are they talking

about they're talking about love heroin gives them that feeling of Love who wouldn't want that the heroin

is their attempt to solve the problem of the absence of love in their lives and that of course again goes back to your

experience there's that awareness that we have to come get to know ourselves but we flee from that kind of knowledge

and I think we flee from it because there's pain there and people don't want to experience

pain I think Pharmaceuticals are so prevalent because people don't know what to do the problem is when you say to

somebody take this drug what you're really saying is I don't think I can understand you I don't think we can get

at your pain I don't think we can understand why you're anxious every day or understand why you're depressed so

what I'd like to do is quiet you down I'd like to at least let's make it feel a little better every day well then

you're stuck you have to take a pill the rest of your life and most people on medication will say Well it helped me

for so long but the doctor I still have nightmares what do I do my relationships still don't go right what do I do I'm

still not happy I'm not suicidal but I'm not happy what do I do when they present a stuff about trauma and and early

experience and pain to Physicians they don't get a lot of arguments and I don't get a lot of

arguments we present the data what we get is silence a kind of stunned uncomfortable

silence this is your last chance after this there is no turning back you take the blue pill the story

ends you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe you take the red pill you stay in

Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes I think the kind of suffering people at least come into the

office with uh runs the gamut and it really is everything from I can't find the right mate uh to my marriage is

falling apart to I don't know what I want to do with my life and then of course you have much more severe

pathology of people can't work or they can't go to school they can't sustain any kind of meaningful relationship and

uh you know sometimes they're really on the verge of saying I'm done in The Matrix Morpheus would play

the analyst what it's really talking about here is uh the imprint it's really saying listen each person doesn't

realize that they're plugged into their own imprint The Matrix is a system

Neil that system is our enemy this is it you think you are living your life but really you're not and what Neo discovers

is that life is a fantasy in a way that's what the power of denial does keeps you from really living your life

you have to understand most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so iner so hopelessly

dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it you've split off your

personality you've taken on an enormous portion of your mothers so it's not really

you the moment when Neo is unplugged is quite a moment I think it's just as terrifying for a patient because they're

facing the moment of their initial trauma okay get my body back in a power plant

reinsert me into the Matrix I'll get you what you want I think everybody could understand Cipher's desire to be plugged

back in nine hard years they're running for their lives this is a constant battle he's saying what have I really

got please make me numb again give me back my fake life after 9 years you know what I

realize ignorance is bliss the part of him that can't tolerate it this says this is too

painful I don't like it wins but we know where he's going back to and it's not not

[Music] good-looking I think a lot of people consciously want freedom they're talking

about it all the time but if we start to see the reasons that people may talk about it but might

not either fight for it demand it or even notice when it's chipped away at because there is a an idea already uh

embedded that says take care of me take care of me see if you're free you won't take care of me I need you to

take care of me because I can't handle doing all of this civilization is a very thin veneer that everybody

wears you wipe that off everybody's functioning like a baby with all these archaic

mechanisms with all those archaic feelings running rampant now the good news is life in the

Pod was nothing you thought this would all kill you at the start but giving it back or getting rid of it unplugging

from it will actually give you a life this may be your first chance to know your whole self

can you imagine but you're talking to a baby you're talking to a little baby

who's saying no I'll die you're not talking to an adult an adult might say yeah I get it doctor I I

I'm rooting for you but a baby says don't you dare I'll fight

you [Music] in The Matrix there's a whole scene

where there's a battle and I would say the battle is between Neo and a terrified baby which

is are you going to be able to change things see every time a person wants to change something the the baby that's

afraid steps in and it says I can't change this this saved me this preserved my life you want me to change this you

must be crazy and it's not so polite that experience is so Dreadful

that any anything any clue any hint of an analyst approaching that

domain will send a number of patients scurrying fear of reexperiencing that terrible

trauma the necessity to wake up is universal but what induces sleep is our

vulnerability as fetuses to handle the suffering and so that we don't even fault ourselves for having been asleep

but we do we accept that that's what happened when I was 21 and enlisted in the Air

Force I thought war was exciting with all kinds of fantasies built up by movies and

books the 25th Mission the target was to hit this Jet Plane Factory deep in Germany and over the target we got

hit and felt the noise and I screamed it was so

painful and I saw the pilots were like dolls on a side I knew they were

dead and it was only myself and the engineer and he couldn't move and I called him a name I said you

son of a [ __ ] come on he was frozen then it was too late I

jumped this fear overwhelmed him I know about fear you cannot be in the

war without knowing about fear one understands why people seek to Die For example stand up in a trench and

be shot by the enemy just to get it over but I also

learn that survival is what people strive for

survive survive at any cost do anything to survive when you see people fight to get

their lives and you see what human beings are capable of I don't think there's anything like it in the whole

world it's striking how often I've been told by

people with serious illnesses and even fatal illnesses that this disease was the best

thing that ever happened to them now I don't recommend that way of waking up but what they mean is that

having to deal with this disease actually woke me up to who I really am and who I've been and who I've not been

all my life and has taught me what life really is all about and that's

worth dying for I think in the matrix it's very interesting because when Neo finally

dies what brings him back to life is love well wait a minute love can bring you back from Death this is very very

good news when you come to a point of knowing what

is the cause of all this and you know it's your fetal life where all this desperation this pain takes place when

you have an answer like the door opens because one can make sense of

it one can make absolute sense of all the feelings the patient has to come to an emotional understanding because what

is first in a human being is feeling a fetus is a feeling entity not a mental entity a feeling

entity only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth

compassion for the fact that unconsciousness is a response because it was too painful to be conscious When We

Were Young not to blame ourselves for what we did as a result of that but to be compassionate with ourselves not to

fault ourselves what they did to ourselves or others but to be curious as to why we did

it I read a quote by Maya Angelo she said you do the best you can until you know

better and then you do better that's a [Music] paraphrase you have to be careful how

you tell a woman that what she does impacts her baby because she can only do what she

can do I tend to be very analytical and think about things a lot and um um give

myself some unneeded anxieties is this child going to be healthy is the child going to have um

some kind of you know developmental disorders or be killed at whatever age I spend a lot of the pregnancy being

very on edge the way that we're taught in our society we're always second guessing um

we're looking to books and other people for information on how to raise our children when it should be and it is an

innate knowledge women need to know that babies are

strong we all spent uh nearly n months in this intrauterine life with this happiness

and with the sufferings and we all had to pass through birth which is perhaps one of of the hard hardest labors on

this planet to be born and to give birth the birth is a journey of the hero like the little M made Alice in

Wonderland and the Matrix I remember walking into the clinic on a Monday and having nurses jaws drop I was 213 lbs

the day before I delivered them I started having contractions around 1 or 2 in the morning

when labor actually started all of our children were able to be there for the birth it was absolutely insane getting

to the hospital my feet were hanging out the window practically we arrived screamed up to the front door and then

you know like an hour later I was ready to push certainly the contractions were

intense but I can only imagine what it feels like inside I was thinking to myself you know just breathe just

breathe Just Breathe it's in awful pain but it brings you ahead and with every wave you come a bit

nearer to our [Music] world

[Music] World ecology has to start with womb ecology we cannot have peace and good

people in the world without raising peaceful good children and that has to start at at conception not at Birth but

at conception the more people really realize all of this I think the more

thought goes into how we treat the unborn child but also how do we treat the mother how do we start to make sure

we're really making this a world where we don't have to send so much very troubling difficult thoughts

feelings towards our fetuses it's our responsibility to make a better job of it than we have done in

the past there are too many children who are neglected who are born and raised

unloved and unless this changes the world is not going to change when you start to lift off the

damage you get to a much more loving state of mind and love in that sense is not only a Feeling it's also set of

actions it's also set of relating it's above all a constant seeking to understand the

other when a baby is understood that baby is loved when the

mother puts the baby to the breast and the baby's hungry that baby is loved when the mother picks the baby up

and holds it and Pats it and that's what the baby wanted the baby's loved being

understood is being [Music] loved

[Music] [Music]