Sid: Hello Sid Roth here with Paul Hegstrom, and Paul was an abuser in every foul way you can think and finally his wife had had enough, did she have enough or…
Paul: No, she didn’t…
Sid: You decided to leave her?
Paul: I left because I figured someday she is going to leave me and I needed to be the hurter not the hurtee.
Sid Roth: And then you have one abusive relationship after another and finally you have this sentence of prison for how many years?
Paul: Fifteen to twenty-two that was what I was facing.
Sid: And so you surrendered to God at that moment…
Paul: Absolutely. That’s a crisis you know.
Sid: And everything, God made everything turn out wonderful to the point where you started dating your ex-wife Judy – I’m amazed she did it.
Paul: Yes, I am too.
Sid: And she saw such a difference, but then you used to have discussions with her of your research on the brain.
Paul: Especially the areas of the brain and how…
Sid: Tell me what the Holy Spirit was showing you about the brain.
Paul: He was showing me, see I had no background in mental health, and I had spent almost thirty thousand on therapy over the years to get well because I knew something was wrong but I felt flawed and defective and so I really, God really took me to this area of research in the brain and how we are wired as children, the tapes that happen, the things that happen to us before the age of nine to eleven and the wounds, and there are five things that will stop a child’s development and that is rejection in the original family, incest, molestation, emotional and physical abuse, and if any one of those happens or they have had, I have worked with people that have had three and have five of them, and it literally stops the developmental structure of the core character of the child at that point, and in mental health it is called fixation, and they have never learned to restart the maturing process so in…
Sid: So they stay a prisoner for the rest of their life?
Paul: Yes and they develop a pseudo-personality so the personality that I had when Judy and I were married the first 16 years, people outside really liked me because I was a nice guy, it was the guy behind closed doors that could not love, could not understand intimacy, could not manage anger, could not resolve conflict, did not know how to parent, I meant the list just goes on and on so what is happening is emotionally I’m a child raising a family, and when my three kids got anywhere from nine to thirteen years of age they were more mature than I was and I left, that’s why I walked away.
Sid: You spent all that money with the best psychiatry and psychology had to offer and not – zero, not much.
Paul: Absolutely, they sat there and the thing that irritated me was, I would say but why, why do I do this.
Sid: So you found that before puberty that if some, one of these five traumas occur, something happens to the brain early and they stay a child in certain areas the rest of their lives.
Paul: Yes, because a child under the age of puberty is lacking: And that is why Apostle Paul said in his writings, “When I was a child I acted, spoke thought, and reasoned as a child and when I grew up I put away childish things.” I understood acting like a child because I did it for forty years, I understood talking like a child, embellishing you know, I had to be number one, didn’t understand thinking as a child and God sent a Godly man who was a brain researcher for thirty-eight years into my life and we found that the three chemicals that are missing in the brain caused the child to be teachable. And then at puberty those chemicals kick in and the child takes the teaching and then that creates reason, so the chemicals cause the child to reason and to think in an abstract type of way or to see that if I do this today this is going to affect me tomorrow or the next day…
Sid: But if these chemicals aren’t released, they are trapped as a child in an adult body.
Paul: For the rest of their life, because what happens is trauma in childhood activates the adrenalin, the fight-flight syndrome, and the adrenalin literally pushes away the chemicals that are supposed to come in and find the balance in the brain and move that child to puberty, so what will happen is the chemicals will kick in and the body will change but the mind does not grow because the adrenalin keeps that child in a position where I am waiting for the next trauma to happen, and so we found that this…
Sid: So how was this solved, it was solved with you?
Paul: Yes sir, and it’s being solved by tens of thousands of people…
Sid: How?
Paul: by being able to tie together what I am struggling with today, say I’m forty years of age and I am struggling with, I am going through divorces, I am angry all the time, I trigger at a hair trigger with my rage and anger, I act out, I have no stability, I change jobs every two or three years at best and sometimes can’t even hold one, all of these symptoms we think we are defective because we are dealing with the symptoms, not understanding the symptom has a source, and the…
Sid: So when parents are giving these various new drugs to their children because they are ADD or things like that, there is something better?
Paul: Yeah, there is something better and that is dealing with the issues, but you can’t deal with the issues sitting talking to someone because if I am what we call “arrested in development” or mental health calls it “fixation” I am arrested in development below the age of puberty and I need directives, train up a child, I need somebody to tell me what is going on so what we do in the program is we have adults in their eighties who says for the first time in their life they find out that all this behavior they have struggled with since childhood was rooted, sourced here, and see I am not responsible for the original wound below the age of puberty, because I’m below the age of accountability, that victimized me, but I am responsible for my behavior for the rest of my life, see so it is not letting somebody off the hook, it is connecting their whole life.
Sid: Dr. Hegstrom has found out how to rewire the brain, this is so phenomenal, but of course it’s in the Bible, science is just catching up