The importance of a few words. (Article 9 of the history of my epilepsy.)

The importance of a few words. (Letter to A.J.)

After receiving your letter yesterday in which you told me to write a book about epilepsy I went to bed in a beaming mood, slept well and had an ideal, well-coordinated birth primal in the morning, followed by insights about my father and how I perceived his and my relationship.

As I said, I woke up early, and I had a simultaneously pleasant and painful birth primal. (To re experience pain hurts, but it is also, thanks to the revival of the moment of terror, a pleasant relief.) With the body clamped while my head is slowly bending upward, backward, and my mouth and tongue being bulged outward as a cone, suddenly a pleasant, clean and almost eagerly infants cry rose from my throat. An authentic feeling, which a while later was followed by many thoughts and feelings about my father. We never had a good relationship and I disliked him for decades. My feeling has during all these years been that he did nothing for me. Was it really an accurate picture?

Suddenly, I realized this morning that it was not true. In fact, he tried some times. He spent much time with me during my first three years. I do not remember many details from these years but a summary of letters and photographs and oral reproduce suggests that it was a happy time in my parents' lives. During this period, I was breast fed until I was 2-year-old. Some of my first clear memories are how my father and I in early July 1943 went to the hospital to bring back my mother, which I looked forward to. We would bring home my mother and newborn sister. During the autumn this year my father was drafted as a military fireman in Haparanda, which lies 1000 miles to the north in Sweden. I remember how deeply I missed him, and that I often went to his bed to feel his scent. During the following years, my situation changed drastically. My sister dethroned me, and this created a jealousy that I suffered in several contexts over many years. From my father's return from the war and our move to Alnarp in 1945 our relationship deteriorated over the years.

My father was born in a rather isolated place in northeast Scania, Sweden’s southernmost province. Around the turn of the century, many emigrated to America and the conditions for those who stayed behind were not encouraging and the situation was further impaired by the Spanish flu, the pandemic which is estimated to have claimed the most lives in human history, devastated the area between 1918 and 1920. My father lost his mother, a newborn brother and a sister and he grew up with his father and four older sisters. He always maintained a close relationship with his sisters and took care of them later when they needed help, which e.g. occurred in the late 40's and early 50's, and it frustrated me, because it affected my own comfort when they during long periods lived in our home. Throughout the 40's my father could still be happy and relaxed and tell comic stories from his youth and sing and talk in his childhoods local dialect. From the early 1950s, he became increasingly introspective and was often tired and depressed and developed a pattern that reminded of his older sisters.

A number of painful memories were loaded into my memory when I came to LA at the beginning of 1978. That my father, e.g., without my acceptance had shaved off mine, in his opinion, all too thin hair (to make it grow like his own), that he had dealt with my chicken pox all over my body with a horrible smelling cream that caused a caustic burning and which was meant for cows, that he had asked a hunter to shoot my cat Sniff and my dog Bella without talking to me, that he beat me as a lunatic when I had performed some rascal behavior in the Alnarp Gardens, he had like a lightning bolt from a clear sky knocked down at me and in a degrading manner taken from me a deck of pornographic drawings, again without talking to me, and he angrily had asked me to stop making a wry mouth at the dinner table when I got epileptic petit mall fits. Those were facts that I took with me to my therapy sessions.

I had hoped that these painful memories would loosen my inhibitions if I could put words on them and bring up the emotions around them and that this in turn would lead to that I could get at the cause of my epilepsy. I was not sure that these memories had a direct connection with my epilepsy but that there was a connection between the unpleasant feelings of pain and anxiety that the above-mentioned memories evoked and the similar painful and anxious feelings inside my epilepsy, that I was convinced of. I was a front runner and only now 25 years later brain researchers begin to show that the brain's pain management follows the same principles re both emotional and physical pain. The root of my epileptic discomfort was caused by an abnormally painful physical birth process which was anesthetized and handled internally in the brain just like emotional pain caused by humiliation. What surprised me afterwards is that it has been easier to feel the connection with the pain behind a seizure / birth primal than it was to feel the pain caused by my father. There I have, seemingly, been out of step with the evolutionary order.

One night when I was between 5 and 6 years old I got up and went to the toilet to pee and had some minor difficulties due to an apparent urethral infection. My father came up suddenly wondering if something was wrong, and because I didn’t want him to walk again so I replied: “I cannot pee, dad!” Faster than I could blink and without discussing with me, he took a decision immediately to take me to the hospital in Lund. He dressed us quickly, put me on the rack on his bike and pedaled to the nearest village, Lomma, from where we took a taxi to the hospital. This happened 1946.  During the whole trip, I was worried and pressured. I wanted him to talk to me, and I didn’t dare to tell him that I did not require any hospital visit. It was him, I needed, not the hospital. The doctor in Lund quickly realized, by pressing lightly on my bladder, that I could pee so much I needed, and he asked me kindly and jokingly to try the trick with pressing the next time I had difficulties. The return trip was painful. Partly, because I felt I had deluded and partly because my father did not speak with me.

This morning a number of memories ascended, which showed that my statements and feelings during the years that my father never did anything for me was not correct but had been neurotically tinted. Different filters which have now been dissolved, has done that I have not been able correctly to evaluate the number of contributions that my father did. These efforts have been suppressed below the traumatic unmet needs, e.g. that he did not bother, took no time with me and didn’t talk to me. Love it is called and it was not met.

As the only of us siblings my father let me study at a status school, the Cathedral School of Lund (after advice from my school teacher) which was a considerable financial sacrifice in those days. Referring to his own study scores in math he started me on this subject after the first semester of secondary school when he realized that I thought school was just a joke. (Neurotic needs developed my ability in mathematics so that I from being worst in the class became one of the best.) My father helped me to technically oriented jobs and to practical theoretical courses, when I refused to continue in high school. He helped me out of an illegal exchange business about a car when I was 18, and he accounted for the costs associated with a collision with my car when it was without brakes and insurance. My father arranged for a place to live in Copenhagen when I in the early 60's moved there to start working with hats. There may very well be more things I have forgotten, but I am now aware of that my previous image that my father did not do anything for me is not correct, at least when it comes to practical matters.

Behind my longstanding feeling that my father never stood up for me is the fact that he didn’t speak to me when I needed it. He didn’t help me to understand things. I had to find solutions myself and sometimes when things went to hell then he acted and helped me off the hook but did not explain or talk to me. This humiliation has created a feeling in me that he never helped me, which has not yet been literally correct because the feeling of lack of love has had the upper hand.

In the spring of 1979 I flew home to Sweden from LA to fix a number of practical issues, including my Swedish driving license, and then I visited my parents. When I was about to leave my father came up to me with tears running along his cheeks and asked stuttering if I still hated him for what he had done to me 30 years ago, when he beat me like a madman. To handle the situation, I had to nerve myself and push down my feelings in my stomach, and I'm glad I said no! I felt instinctively too much for him to be able to tell how much he had hurt me. I have afterwards realized that his pain for 30 years had at least been of the same magnitude as my own. Two months later, my father died of a heart attack while sleeping. Then I was back in L.A., and decided not to go to his funeral but asked my spouse to go. My reasons  for not going were that after our poor relationship over a lifetime, it felt wrong. It was difficult for me to grieve someone who had not been there emotionally when I needed him.

To compensate for the lack of someone who understood me and to fill the sense of loss of contact at home I searched for people outside of my home to communicate with, and I became quite good at this over the years. Books, magazines and newspapers were my drugs. Writers, journalists and movie stars became my substitute fathers, and they guided me literally through an ever increasing complex world and there were those I contacted and corresponded with. My father gave a helping hand when I could not manage to pay my illegal money orders...  A few well-known journalists, served as my role models in my way of thinking and acting, and I still pull from them to this day in my mental toolbox. Which, moreover, also has been the case with various gurus whom I have met in different fields.

As a consequence of the abovementioned experiences, and in spite of my unfulfilled needs, I feel sympathy with my father whom I admire in many aspects. He was admittedly introverted and often depressed, but he had great qualities. As a professional, teacher and leader for his subordinates and students, he was very well liked and respected. He followed the rules of the game, was honest and lived a fairly healthy life. He moralized never, despite his religiosity, neither when I smoked, drank nor had girls in my room, which was not unusual in the late teens before I developed epilepsy. He donated through his entire life a significant portion of his limited income to his church so it could afford to make relief efforts in Africa. Unfortunately,  he could not create opportunities to develop his true potential.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection. 

Sigmund Freud