Reflecting on Gut feelings as the Key to Recovering Childhood Memories that Enhance Healthy Adult Decision-Making

     Many people say that they cannot remember their childhood experiences prior to age 7 and memory studies by psychologists in the field of childhood development and memory will tell you that this is normal. Dr. Patricia Bauer, Professor of Psychology and Senior Associate Dean of Research at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, has been researching the development of memory in children since the 80s. She has found that children begin to have a significant increase in the rate of forgetting memories of their past life events after the age of 7, or the onset of what was termed by Sigmund Freud as Childhood Amnesia.

For a long time, it was thought that the reason many adults could not remember events from their early childhood was because young children just did not have memory ability. But that has since been explored in research and Bauer concludes children do have memory ability but that memories from earlier than age 7 have an accelerated rate for being forgotten once the child is past age 7 than the memories formed after that age. Why the onset of this forgetting process is at age 7 is still in question and has lead to further important memory studies of children.

What is important here to us is that the memory research now being conducted on children concludes that recovering childhood memories is important to the development of personal identity and adult decision-making. This is a welcome validation of our work developing and using the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings to recover memory, with the affect of uniting body and mind in consciousness. The importance of recovering childhood memories is an understanding that we as career counselors have used in our clinical studies with people since the 70s, as we found that the seeds of who we are and who we become begin in early childhood. If we can become conscious of those beginnings, then we have valuable self-awareness information upon which to base healthy and successful life decisions as adults.

We found in counseling hundreds of adults something very shocking to many people who had no prior or very little childhood memories. When we asked people to center their awareness on their gut feelings to guide them and slowly to go back in time and remember when they felt this feeling in their gut before, they would be able nearly 100% of the time to access early childhood memories previously un-recalled. And those people who had previously been able to recall childhood memories were able to continue to recall additional memories using this gut feeling reflection process.

We found that the key to recovering childhood memories was to have people focus on their inner gut feelings and impact of experience rather than the details of their lives. We would  ask them to come in their awareness to a place in their past when they had the same feeling they were centering on in the present (usually starting with a reoccurring feeling connected to an unresolved issue in the present time of their life) and then they would allow the details of the experience in the past to come to their mind. Each time a feeling memory would come up in their consciousness, they were asked to focus on the feeling and continue to go back further in time. It was as if their present feeling awareness was attached to a thread that went all the way back in time to the impact of early childhood. One just had to follow the feeling and see where it landed. My colleague, Robert Sterling, often says that it seems that our feelings are like sausages in a sting, similar impacts of events that are connected.

Often, the early childhood memory in this feeling memory string was completely surprising to the person as the details of the event in childhood would be completely unrelated to the details of the present life issue of the person. But if they focused on the feelings, it was clear that the issue was the same in childhood as it was in the present and the person was often still trying to work out this issue in the present that began so very long ago.

Using the head brain to think back to earlier childhood did not seem to access new memories but feeling back in time, particularly centering on gut feelings of emptiness and fullness, would take people back to feelings in relation to events in their lives that they had not previously remembered. This was usually true in each successive session using the Somatic Reflection Process. The common response after these somatic reflections was amazement at remembering things they had not previously remembered and how useful it was in giving them new insights and perspectives into the present adult issue and decision they may be facing.

How this occurs, that is, how or why neurologically the gut feeling is the key to recovering memory, we never knew when we first developed and used the process in the 70s. We just knew that it worked and that it helped people to resolve issues they had been carrying all their lives and that the acquired knowledge of self through this somatic process on gut feelings encouraged positive adult decision-making.

Although the details of our early lives do come to our consciousness as a result of somatic reflection, the value in doing the inner work of reflecting on our gut feelings to recall our early childhood is not so we can remember these details —where we went on vacations as children or what we did there, the names of our childhood friends, the color of the walls of our childhood bedrooms, or our favorite tree house. But what is important is that our somatic reflections assist us in remembering the impact of life upon us, how it felt, what excited us in life and had value to us, how it felt to be loved or alone or confined or free, what decisions we made about our world, and certainly most important was what we decided as children about ourselves and who we decided that we were or were not. When we remember through our feeling awareness these things, then we have valuable information that is the blueprint for making successful life decisions as adults.

Since we primarily worked with adults, we have not engaged the use of the Somatic Reflection Process with children below the age of 10 years old, so we do not know what the youngest age is that it would be useful to use to explore memory. We suspect that reflecting on gut feelings with young children would be the key to educating the body-mind, our multiple brains, whole person, and to developing intuitional intelligence. We do know that if used with adults to recover childhood memories, the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings is both a key to and validates the recent findings that children do have the ability to form memories and that these memories are formed around the impact of their experience rather than around the details in their lives, a bottom-up rather than top-down formation.  We also know that these memories are recoverable and the consciousness of them is valuable, perhaps even essential to good emotional and physical health and longevity.

If you would like to learn more about our work with the Somatic Reflection Process, we invite you to read our book What’s Behind Your BellyButton? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and GutInstinct and please do come join the conversation on this blog and/or email us. The following is a short excerpt from our book that we think you will enjoy reading that relates to the key to recovering memories in childhood: The Impact of Experience, from Chapter 3:

“Today is felt to be the most complicated day in our lives and rarely in trying to deal with the issues of today, are we aware of the impact of the past on those issues. As we try to sort through the details of what is going on around us, we are often unable to see a clear positive path into the future. It seems no matter what we do to take action on the issues the same empty feeling persists or reoccurs and the actions seem only to further complicate the issue, leaving the emptiness to be dealt with later on.”

“It seems to be quite natural for us to try to figure out what is bothering us—to understand what is going on. Usually, as long as we keep the reflection to ourselves, we continually see the details and fail to find the meaning of the issue. Even though we reach out to a friend and ask for attention around the details of the issue, we may gain little or no insight into what is bothering us. Often the attention we get is sympathy for having to deal with the details of the issue. We become quite confused about ourselves and we get hostile at the one to whom we have asked for help and have gotten sympathy. Such an experience with another person focusing on details, serves only to leave us feeling more empty and alone.”

“As we comb through the piles of details of the past, we know in our feelings that the details weren’t the meaning of the experience. Somehow through the external judgments we used in the assessment of the experience, we become too confused to understand this clearly. As a child, we often move into action with our instinctive feelings, often with no logical motive. Others who observe our actions are privy only to the details and often make judgments about us from what they can perceive, without an understanding of our feelings.”

“If we enter experience from our instinctive feelings, we must assess the meaning of the experience from the original feeling needs involved. We must exclude other external logical judgments if we wish to understand clearly what our behavior means. Only by such a reflective process—reflection with the inner gut feelings—is the confusion eliminated.”

“When we can push the details of the experience out of our awareness, we can turn into the awareness of ourselves and reflect on our inner feelings. It is when we can do this that we are able to see the relationship of the confusion of the present to the issues and the feelings of the past. It is only through the process of reflection on our feelings, triggered in the confusion of the present, that we can begin to understand the sources of the feelings that are causing the confusion. By dealing with these past feelings, we may begin to arrive at some understanding with what we are dealing in the present moment.”

“These feelings accumulated from our past, rather than the details of our lives, seem to be the accurate record of the impact of our life experience. Until we perceive these early childhood feelings as acceptable, the patterns that develop with time constantly interfere with our understanding of ourselves in the past. Not until these feelings are validated by another person as acceptable human feelings can we let go of the past and put our full energies into present experience.”

“Fear, guilt, hostility—with an underlying emptiness feeling—triggered in by our present experiences are signals telling us that there is a need to reflect upon the past issues up through time in order to free ourselves from the past unresolved feelings about ourselves. The surface logical feelings of guilt and fear signal to us a conflict between what we think and what we feel about ourselves. A conflict or lack of communication is going on between our gut feelings and logical thinking brain. On the basis of our feeling awareness, the reflection up through time shows us the necessity for the actions we have taken.”

“The instinctive feeling of emptiness is signaling our logical mind that there is unfinished work to be done. There is an inner and outer conflict to be resolved and a reckoning of our two brains, the beginning of which lies festering in our past experiences. Once we find the source of the original disturbance, in the often distant past, reflecting back through time identifying the occasions when the feelings of emptiness matched the feeling of the now—the same feeling and likely reoccurring at several different ages; we need to clarify the purpose we were trying to achieve by the action and what need we were trying to fill. Then we need to work our way back in time in reflection touching the same occasions of emptiness we found before, and clarifying each instance all the way up to the present. It is then that we have become aware of much about ourselves and our environments, which we have been unaware before, and now we can realize the necessity of dealing with experience from our inner center of intelligence as well as the outer sensory judgment of others.”

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"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites

"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.

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Why Is Reflecting Upon Our Gut Feelings So Important to Our Immune System and Well Being— Distinguishing the "You" and "Not Truly You" for Excellent Mental and Physical Health!

I just completely finished reading a fascinating new book titled “mBraining” about the head, heart, and gut brain intelligence and exercises to align the three. I highly recommend it. Actually I was truly excited as I began reading it because I do not find many other people writing about the intelligence of the “gut brain” and certainly not the psychological aspects of what Dr Michael Gershon calls the  “second brain”. And as I read, I became more and more excited because our findings in our studies that we describe in our book “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?” and that of “mBraining” authors seem to overlap and validate each other in some very crucial ways. There are some differences in our theories as one might expect, but these are for the most part a matter of language and emphasis, as we both have our own created language for describing the gut brain and its relationship to the head and heart. Interestingly though, even some of our created language is the same and this points to the fact that when you are aware of your gut feelings, the descriptions are going to be similar. As it is said, “a rose is a rose is a rose”.

So let's talk a minute about one of the more important overlaps in our research and theory that are discussed in both of these two books and that is: Why is being in touch with our gut feelings so important to our health and well being. We talk in “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?” about how the gut response of emptiness and fullness gives us the ability to distinguish the “You” and “Not Truly You” and thus gives the gut response the ability to regulate the immune system with its production of endorphins and to bring us closer to our awareness of our authentic self, who we truly are and what we truly need as human beings from moment-to-moment in order to flourish.  Furthermore, we find this ability of the gut response to distinguish the “You “ and “Not Truly You” to potentially play an important role in finding the cure of disease. Interestingly, “mBraining” authors while speaking of the gut governing the sense of one’s core identity, also speak of it as the distinction of what is the “You” and “Not you”. We find it exciting that we selected the same language here to describe this important psychological function of the gut intelligence. We certainly find this over-lap in our findings, both based on clinical studies, a validation that is important to explore further in medical science and among practitioners.

To help begin this exploration and conversation of the gut function in regulating the immune system with the ability to distinguish what is "you" and "not truly you", we have decided to publish here an excerpt from Chapter 11, page 282-288 of “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?”on the relationship of the self-awareness and healing of the emotional body and the physical body:

Distinguishing the “You Cells” and “Not You Cells” , page 282-288, Chapter 11 from “What’s Behind Your Belly Button”

“Immunologists are beginning to understand something about the existence and need for the immune system to have its own reflection process to identify unhealthy cells that need to be eliminated. The process and intelligence of reflection of the immune system is similar to the process of inner somatic awareness that leads to the restoration of emotional health. If we look first at the reflection and identification process of the immune system itself in fighting disease and bringing wellness to the physical body, it is easy to then demonstrate how the process of the immune system has similar elements to Depth Psychology processes, including the Somatic Reflection Process, that lead us to healthfulness of the emotional body.

“Dr. Toru Abo, who saved countless lives by discovering extra thymic T cells and later in 2000 that the gastric ulcer is triggered by the dominance of granulocytes in white blood cells rather than by gastric or hyper secretions (as we had thought for 100 years), also discovered in 1996 that the immune system is compromised by stress. His findings suggest that leukocytes have an increase of granulocytes when the sympathetic nervous system is dominant and an increase of lymphocytes when the parasympathetic is activated. This means that if the autonomic nervous system is stuck in sympathetic mode caused by chronic exposure to stress, the parasympathetic nervous system is not activated and lymphocytes decrease and the number of granulocytes and inflammation increases. Without the proper amount of lymphocytes that are the immune system’s ability to mark foreign cells in our body, the immune system does not have a method of identifying which cells are healthy and unhealthy, which cells are and are not cancer cells to be eliminated. We could say that as long as we have chronic stress in our lives, we are at risk of being haunted with cancer cells and becoming sick because they will continue to be produced and be of sufficient strength to go unidentified and hidden in our bodies without being eliminated by our immune system.

“Dr Abo found with the identification of T cells that the immune system has the ability to mark a foreign cell (cancer cell) from a cell that is normal and then eradicate the foreign cell. This has been described as finding the “you cells” and “not you cells” and getting rid of the “not you cells”. T cells continually scan the surfaces of all of our cells in our body and kill those that exhibit foreign markings.

“We can compare this T cell function in the physical body to the necessary process of reflection in eliminating old, outdated mental tapes and complex constellation affects that occur in the emotional body. When we explore our true feelings with the Somatic Reflection Process, and we trace our feelings and gut responses back to their origin, we find that our guilt, for instance, began with an experience when we were empty and without our human instinctual needs being met. It was in that state that we may often find that we accepted the negative thinking judgment of another person about ourselves and who we are as a human being. This external judgment is foreign to the assessment of our own internal assessment of needs and may become such an automatic tape in our thinking that we do not remember where the idea came from in the first place. We may carry this external assessment of ourselves in our consciousness for a long time and not even be aware that the thinking of these thoughts about ourselves were told to us by an authority or other important person in our lives. In that case, we may feel guilty that we did something or did not do something that someone else disapproved of and now we have laid the judgment on ourselves without question. We decide to accept that we are stupid or ugly or selfish or lazy and we feel guilty and thus depressed. And all of this is not something that we originally invented, but accepted in our emptiness, as human beings are prone to do when true acceptance for who we are is not available.

“These are assessments of whom we are, with an origin from an external judgment of our organism, foreign to our own thinking in origin, that we may live with for a long time without understanding that we carry something foreign in our emotional body. We can go all our entire lives without questioning our emotional complexes or what we like to call emotional hauntings. So our understanding of the “you” or what we truly feel about ourselves from an inner needs perspective and the “not truly you” or what we were told we are, never gets distinguished and thus the “not truly you” becomes so integrated in our thinking that we have no way to identify what is “you” and “not truly you”, except in the awareness of some distant feeling in our guts where the voice is still screaming very softly of feeling emptiness and aloneness—although it is generally true if the emotions of guilt, fear, and anger exist that we are certainly not listening to our gut instincts of emptiness and fullness. In this condition, our energy is drained, our thinking becomes distorted, and our premises often consist of lies we tell ourselves that only feed into these emotional hauntings and seem to validate our low self-opinion and esteem. Without reflection on our inner gut feelings to dislodge the external, foreign thinking from our consciousness, we cling to our misconceptions of ourselves and we cannot function at an optimal healthy capacity for neither ourselves nor those we care deeply about and our stress level is high, yet often the awareness of all of this is suppressed and unconscious until a time of crisis.

“Without the caring of another human being to first reflect to us acceptance and understanding, it is doubtful that anyone ever reexamines their feelings thoroughly enough to find their way home to who they are or as Dr. Carl Jung suggests, sets their foot on the individuation process. Once initiated with this identification of who we are on a deep feeling and somatic level, the process may begin toward true emotional healing. This is something that we as psychological somatic practitioners have seen in process for decades, going back to early analysis with Depth Psychology leading us toward the process of individuation or wholeness for health and healing. But recently, in the last decade, immunologists have begun to look at this same process of identification in the physical immune system in answer to how does the white blood cell know what cell to attack and what healthy cell to leave in tact? How does the white blood cell make the distinction between the “you cell” and “not you cell”?

“What excites us about Dr Abo’s research is that he is finding that disease of the physical body is naturally healed by the physical immune system using a process with a notable similarity to the somatic psychological practices that are used to treat complexes of the emotional body. Somatic practitioners have long found that clearing the emotional body by using modalities like the Somatic Reflection Process, yoga, breathing meditation, and other somatic psychology processes that bring us closer to the awareness of who we truly are and release our thoughts and emotions of who we are not from our consciousness, returns the emotional body to its natural state of wellness. Dr. Abo, with his latest book now translated in English in 2007, has found that the immune system works to heal the physical body in a similar fashion, using a similar process of identifying or “tagging” what is a “not you cell” from what is a “you cell” and being given support to naturally eliminate what is “not you”. 

“Moreover, the health of the emotional body is affected by the health of the physical body and vice-versa. There are similarities in how they both function and how they directly affect each other. This effect leads one to inquire if there is something in certain somatic and psychological interventions that not only supports the immune system but also activates its healthy processes? Based on experience with hundreds of clients, as well as our own inner experiences of using the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP) for over 40 years on a daily basis, we have found that there is experienced with this process a relief of tension/stress symptoms and a body-feeling/mind connection that feels united and connected with a result of much more energy accessible to the individual.

“We could hypothesis that the greater ability you have to distinguish between “you” and “not you” affecting your emotional body and to thus return to a normal state of body-mind unity, the better the chances for longevity and a strong physical immune system that can also tag the “not you cells” from the “you cells” to fight off physical disease. A case for the vice-versa affects of the healthy physical immune system upon the emotional immune system may also be made.

“There is an ancient Daoist saying in the I-Ching or the Book of Changes that reads “As above, so below” and applies here to this relationship between the emotional body-immune system and physical body-immune system, if we might for a moment separate the two. At the heart of the body-mind connection, we understand that we are but one entity, united in body, emotion, spirit, and mind. But for the sake of scientific study, it is useful to break down and identify component parts and examine them from as many angles as possible. So we might ask, if the emotional body-immune system works in a similar fashion to the physical body-immune system, what else is similar about the two systems besides the identification of and elimination of the “you” and “not you”?

“Could immunologists and somatic practitioners learn something valuable from each other by engaging together in discussion and inquiry about how these two systems work and how they might be compared or if they just may be the same in source and both a function of evolved human intelligence? It is possible that the immune system (IS) may be just the RNA intelligence converted to a repair function after birth. Since the RNA is the builder of the fetus, by differentiating the cells of the body, designating and sending cells to their proper locations of the body, at the proper time. Nature would not add-on another system if it already had a successful functional system that worked—like the RNA. It would be contrary to the add-on principle of life, to abandon the RNA and start over with a new immune system.

“We suggest that the immune system is a continuation of its work—original work—patching up the wear and tear of the organism it originally built. Who or what would be more likely to recognize my cells or not-my-cells after birth and throughout life of the organism than the RNA intelligence? The implication here is that our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it’s T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity. In this way, we could say that all people who are fighting to strengthen the emotional immune system along with the physical immune system, for whatever reason whether it is to overcome disease or emotional pain, are doing the work to overcome the body-mind split for not just themselves but also for the healthy evolution of our entire human species.”

 Aloha, please comment, and stay well!

From "What's Behind Your Belly Button?

 A Psychological Perspective of Human Nature

 and Gut Instinct"

Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:

  

"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites

"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.

If you are on the homepage of this blog, click word "comment" directly below to see all comments and make one yourself! If you are on the webpage for this post, then simply post in the box provided below.