Although I sprayed them every year they’d just come back stronger. They had become resilient.

There is a spot in our backyard garden where the same weeds pop up every spring – and which I spray each spring. Over time, the spray seems to be lessening its effect on them and now, the weeds simply cannot be killed using those sprays I’ve used before – they have survived and learned to be resilient.

For years I’ve believed that victimhood is the key to therapeutic inaction and failure. Clients who believe they are the victim of abuse feel powerless and helpless against the intense feelings that boil within them. “I can’t help it – I was beaten as a child. It’s DADDY’S fault I’m fat!”

What if you were to look at yourself instead as a survivor imbued with a strength called resilience? Rather than feeling helpless and hopeless, might you feel more empowered? And what if you were to learn that by putting your strength to work for you, you might actually make your life work better? What if you considered resilience an evolutionary gift rather than a problem needing correction?

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Fearful memories can be rewritten.

Researchers at New York University have demonstrated scientifically that a specific fearful memory can be rewritten in the brain without the use of drugs – purely behaviorally. Of course, alternative practitioners like hypnotherapists and Rapid Eye Technicians have seen this over and over and are sold on the fact that fearful memories can be rewritten (in NLP it’s called “Reframing”).

Basing their theories on mouse and rat subjects, the researchers, led by Elizabeth Phelps, Ph.D., and Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., of NYU, grantees of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have demonstrated their training process on human subjects with positive results. The hope is to replace drug therapies with behavioral ones for anxiety and PTSD specifically – and perhaps others after some trials.

The research shows that there is a critical window of opportunity for change – within 6 hours of the recall of a traumatic memory. Once the “file” is open, specific behavioral techniques can be used to rewrite the memory back into the brain without the fear portion – with long-lasting results. The researchers also found that it was not necessary to recall specifics within a memory – just the emotional elements and the “gist” of the traumatic memory – in order to rewrite it. That’s the phenomenological findings of thousands of Rapid Eye Technicians, who basically tell their clients, “It’s not necessary to relive the events in order to release their energy and reframe [rewrite] those memories…”

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This research strongly suggests that the emotional content of long-term memories can be removed by interrupting the labile phase of long-term memory storage.

Another study, this time from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, demonstrates that memories – most particularly long-term fear memories – are encoded when they first happen and then again whenever we re-store those memories. There is a short period of time in which the brain must chemically “prepare” and then “store” the memory. Whenever we bring the memory back to mind, it must go through the same process to re-store it in the brain. In both of these labile phases, the memory is vulnerable to change.

This research strongly suggests that memories are not, therefore, permanent structures in the brain. Their emotional content can be removed by interrupting the labile phase of long-term memory storage.

I wrote about the brain’s file cabinet in another post (Click here to read). Basically, the brain requires a chemical to access memories and to code them back after accessing them. It’s as though we take each memory, like a file, out of the long-term memory cabinet, close the cabinet, look at the file, use it, then open the cabinet again to put the file back in. If I understand Kindt’s research correctly, interrupting that process at the “putting back in” phase can, in theory, stop the perpetuation of the effects of fear memories by eliminating the fear in the memories.

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“What we’re learning is that poor adult health is, in part, manufactured in childhood. It is multiple and cumulative childhood experience that predisposes adults to poor health.”

The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London studied 1,000 individuals from birth to age 32 as part of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand. Their research suggests that sustained health risks stem from childhood abuse, neglect, social isolation or economic hardship.

Adults who had been maltreated as children were twice as likely to suffer major depression and chronic inflammation. Children who grew up poor or socially isolated were twice as likely to show metabolic risk markers at age 32. Adults who had two or more of the adverse childhood experiences were nearly twice as likely to have disease risk factors as those who hadn’t experienced trauma in childhood.

“We live increasingly longer lives and our extra years of life should be healthy, productive and enjoyable, not years of disease and disability,” says lead author Dr Andrea Danese, Clinical Lecturer at Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and MRC Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry at King’s. “In this study, we observed that childhood experiences may affect health in old age, regardless of the risk factors that health policies are currently targeting. Therefore the promotion of healthy positive experiences for children is a necessary and potentially cost-effective target for the prevention of age-related disease.”

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People who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration than others and report feeling “hurt” may be telling the truth.

There are approximately three billion base pairs (connections) in a strand of DNA. That represents a virtually infinite number of possible combinations. The variation between each of us, although nearly infinitesimally small, is so significant that no two of us in the world population of nearly 7 billion humans is exactly identical. Even identical twins are different from each other.

It is that small variation in each of us that is the result of and contributes to the evolution of the specie. In a study by UCLA researchers, publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Markus Heilig, Faculty Member for F1000 Biology, and Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, MD, report that they have identified a genetic factor that causes some people to actually experience stronger physical sensations associated with emotions (in the study case, the emotion was rejection).

There is apparently a wide variation or spectrum associated with the feeling (physical sensations) of emotions. Therefore, some people who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration, for example, than others and report feeling emotionally “hurt” may be telling the literal truth.

Can these genetic factors be moderated through training or experience? What do you think? Are we “hard wired” – or can we significantly affect our emotional states in spite of genetic predisposition or genetic variations?

An abstract of the original paper, Variation in the micro-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection is online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/19706472?dopt=Abstract&holding=f1000,f1000m,isrctn.