“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart could possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” This is a quote from C.S. Lewis, from The Four Loves. He completes this with one final statement: “The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
If you are reading this, you are human. That means you have been hurt at times in your life, perhaps many times. Sometimes the hurt is unbearable and you look for ways to escape the pain, or at least numb the pain for a little while. If you manage to avoid street drugs or alcohol, you may still be using prescription drugs; and if you avoid those, you may indulge in binge eating, television, or other distractions — hobbies and little luxuries. Yet the pain remains.
Perhaps you think things are good, and you aren’t feeling mental pain, yet you still are finding yourself drawn to addictive behavior or just bad habits that you know you should break, but don’t have the will to do so. What is driving that? Is it old pain that some part of you still remembers, even though you don’t realize it now? Why else would you be tempted to do what you know is not good for your health and well-being?
Medical science to the rescue?
You believe in science, right? This is a popular saying these days: “I believe in Science!” Well, the scientific method is valid and worth trust, but the premise behind the science may or may not be a useful one. Medical science keeps telling you that it has answers for most anything in life. Not only does it claim control over almost any disease symptom, but it also has alleged answers to mental pain, including fear, anxiety, and anger. We are told that non-prescription drugs and alcohol do nothing to fix the sources of mental pain, they just push it away for a little while. But doctor-prescribed drugs have an air of legitimacy about them: since they are prescribed, they are good for you, right? But is there any drug, be it prescription or otherwise, which really fixes the problem at the source? Or is is a way to merely escape the pain, under a banner of legitimacy?
Don’t blame the messenger
Neurotransmitters carry messages between cells in your brain, but they do not create thought. Just as you put the right amount of oil in your car’s engine, having the proper neurotransmitter balance in your brain simply allows your brain to work properly. For the neurotransmitters to work, they have to be in sufficient quantity and their messages must be accepted by cells that they reach. One typical way of dealing with depression is to use selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that block the absorption of this neurotransmitter into cells, making more of it available for message transmission. Serotonin levels build in the brain, increasing the signaling or excitation of the neurons. Too much excitation can shorten the life of neurons, however, so this approach can actually cause damage, especially if used for long periods. Also, the neurons get tired of the over-active signaling and start to become numb to it, so the SSRI loses its effectiveness and results in increasing dependence upon the SSRI for normal levels of brain function.
The same is true for norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitors (NDRIs). The prescription of SSRIs or NDRIs varies with the specific symptoms treated, but they all carry the same dangers. Overfilling your car’s oil can actually cause engine damage. Too much of a good thing is often a bad thing. As long as you have a proper diet, your body can produce sufficient neurotransmitter levels to keep your brain running. But what messages are being carried via those neurotransmitters?
Patients come to doctors looking for help with their symptoms, and doctors are expected to come up with something. Over 13 percent of Americans are taking antidepressants. They get something to help with the symptoms, but not the cause. Researchers are still looking for even more ways to put bandaids on the symptoms. Published in Translational Psychiatry, researchers from the Department of General Zoology and Neurobiology, Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany ran experiments where some animals lacked a certain serotonin receptor (5-HT2C) and thus could not respond to serotonin the same as those in the control group. The researchers found that those with impaired serotonin response would “unlearn” previously learned fear more quickly. The researchers hailed this as a medical victory: because they presumed that PTSD patients need to unlearn fear, and SSRIs cause neurons to become less receptive to serotonin, they hypothesized that SSRIs can help those with PTSD to unlearn their fear.
Their experiments initially associated a tone with an electric shock, then later played the tone with no shock, waiting to see how long it took both groups to ignore the tone and no longer anticipate a shock. The SSRI group took shorter time, meaning the group that was less sensitive to serotonin lost their fear in an unnaturally short period. From their standpoint, they were quickly losing fear of a threat; this fear was appropriate for them to have. Losing that quickly, in wild conditions, could mean that they too quickly unlearn fear of something that could harm or kill them. This experiment caused an unnatural outcome. What other fear of threats would they also lose? They were throwing caution to the wind.
Putting a monkey wrench into the gears of machinery will alter its operation, but at a cost. There’s a big difference between impeding a natural response and retraining thoughts. Your brain is responding to your thoughts— both those you are consciously thinking, and those caused by “recordings” of earlier events, especially in early life. Leaving harmful recordings unchallenged and impeding brain response to them is going to have unintended consequences.
Memories are encoded into your brain with a combination of perception and emotion. What you remember is rarely exactly what happened; rather, it is what you perceived as having happened. To you, that memory is reality. As you experience similar events, you perceive them in light of the previous experiences you remember. Changing neurotransmitter responses does not change memories. To really heal from negative memories requires new input to counter them, not erase them. Neurotransmitter uptake inhibitors can’t remove the source of the problem.
Balancing act
Reuptake inhibitors are meant to compensate for a neurotransmitter deficiency by preventing reabsorption. But they should not be out of balance in the first place. Primary reasons for the imbalance are based in diet and lifestyle, particularly because of gut flora, or microbiota to use the technical term. If you are experiencing a lack of serotonin or dopamine, you may not have happy, healthy microbiota. Producing sufficient neurotransmitters without drugs will avoid the side effects that the drugs cause, not to mention the insensitivity to the neurotransmitters that the drugs promote.
Published in Nutrients, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reviewed results of numerous studies to look at the link between gut flora and neurotransmitter levels. They note that neurotransmitters do not cross the blood-brain barrier, but their amino acid precursors do. Through a number of steps and with the aid of some enzymes, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters are produced. The microbiota are controlling the production of the precursors, and that means they have a major influence on whether the resulting neurotransmitters are in balance. An example: a precursor to serotonin — tryptophan — does pass the blood-brain barrier. The research also highlights studies where patients with autism, Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease generally show abnormal microbiota. And finally, they note that antidepressants greatly and negatively affect the microbiota — this is yet another problem with reuptake inhibitors.
if you don’t deal with a problem at the source, the problem isn’t fixed. Work-arounds may help for a time, but in the case of an antidepressant drug, the work-around is causing long-term trouble, creating legalized addicts. The source of depression or other mental stress goes back to the recordings in your brain, and possibly dietary or lifestyle issues that are not maintaining good gut flora balance. The real fix deals with these rather than artificially and illegitimately boosting neurotransmitters — that just drives the real problem deeper.
If you want to sum up the real fix in one word, here it is: love. Give your heart wisely, but don’t hide it away. Hiding your heart is hiding from life. Do you want an abundant life? Love.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
What is the purpose of neurotransmitters?
It’s to take an electromagnetic frequency and change it to a biochemical signal. So in essence, it is a messenger bringing a message that was initiated in the mind, translated in the brain, and then communicated to the cells via neurotransmitter chemicals.
Why are we spending so much time and money researching the messenger instead of the cause of the message?
If you want to change the messenger, you have to change the message and its source, and that source is subconscious and conscious mind programs. These are stress-related programs that are stored in the brain itself, and that cause electromagnetic frequencies to be continually generated in the brain, which communicates directly to the cells via these electromagnetic signals and through the channel of producing the biochemical neurotransmitters.
Look to the source first and foremost.
This is the goal in any treatment. Treating the effect has some value short term but that approach requires continual treatment, which will never end. It’s just common sense to understand: if the mind generates the thoughts that causes the brain to produce electromagnetic frequencies, we would first want to address the thoughts, and second want to balance brain function to make sure the electromagnetic frequencies are not getting watered down or made hyperreactive.
Why is our major mode of treatment all the way down at the third step of creating neurotransmitters?
These mental emotional stress programs start early in life. They commonly are generated in utero and are formed in the first six years of life. They are subconsciously driven, meaning below your consciousness or below your awareness. To put it simply: you do not remember them, but they are still there, generating the frequencies to produce neurotransmitters.
What is the primary thought that generates these electromagnetic frequencies in the brain? Thoughts of insecurity, not being safe, and most importantly, not being loved.
What’s the answer?
Find the thought, and the area of the brain that lights up with that thought, then release that thought, reprogram with new thoughts, and finally make sure that the new program is permanent by confirming the area of the brain that originally lit up no longer does.
This is the basis of our Mind-Brain-Emotion-Body Protocol at Revolution New Medicine.
We’ve imaged and developed a blueprint of the brain with the exact area of activity each thought produces, so we can measure the amount of imbalance at that specific area and know when it has been corrected.
God is unconditional love
What causes these stress programs to develop in the first place? It is the mental-emotional trauma of various aspects of not receiving unconditional love. The problem with most people is they give conditional love, which is the most toxic and the farthest from true unconditional love. The problem is: if the brain and body are out of balance from a subconscious stress program formed when you were four years old, then receiving unconditional love when you’re 40 years old does not release the subconscious program that was there first. To receive the unconditional love, that program has to be released first. This is why our protocol has such far reaching ramifications on the body and the emotions.
We hear this regularly when we treat patients: “how did I get this tumor? I eat great; I exercise. I take supplements and have the perfect body weight. My life is great. My husband and kids are so wonderful. I just am shocked that I ended up with cancer. How could this happen?”
My answer is that there must be a subconscious stress program there that has not been released. You cannot put unconditional love into a person who already has a prior program of “not good enough”, “not safe enough”, “not secure enough.” You must first release the program. Make sure that the program has been permanently released by re-imaging, then and only then is the brain free to be reprogrammed with the unconditional love.
This is the cause of most of disease, and this is not even recognized or addressed in healthcare. But we learned this 40 years ago in our learning journey of treating patients, and that is why we developed a mind-brain-emotion-body protocol to not only assess the problem and objectively document it, but also to develop a technique that would completely release the stress program and to continue to re-image the brain to make sure the release had become permanent, not temporary.
So let me close by clarifying a statement: “love heals all things.” Actually, it does not. It can only heal all things when it’s received subconsciously and consciously after prior programming has been released and when that love is unconditional, not conditional.
God is unconditional love.
Here are the ways we can help you in your health journey:
- Outpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-has the most benefit of teaching, treatment, live classes and personalized coaching. This program has the most contact with Dr. Nemec with 3- 6 month programs that can be turned into a regular checking and support program for life. This is our core program that has helped so many restore their health and maintain that restoration for years.
- Inpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-is our four-week intensive inpatient program for those that are not in driving distance, usually over 4 hour drive. This is the program that is an intensive jumpstart with treatment, teaching, live classes and coaching designed for all our international patients along with those in the US that do not live in Illinois. This program is very effective especially when combined with our new membership program support.
- Stay at Home Program-is offered to continental US patients who cannot come to Total Health Institute but still want a more personal, customized plan to restore their health. This program also includes our Learn Membership Program.
- Membership Program is our newest program offered for those that want to work on their health at a high level and want access to the teaching at Total Health Institute along with the Forums: both Dr. Nemec’s posts and other members posting. And also, to have the chance to get personalized questions answered on the conference calls which are all archived in case you miss the call. The Membership Program has 3 levels to choose from: Learn, Overcome and Master. The difference is at the Overcome and Master levels you received one on one calls with Dr. Nemec personalizing your program for your areas of focus.
