Self-knowledge or self-deception. (Article 13 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Self-knowledge or self-deception?

I became interested in Primal Therapy when it I still was young and inexperienced. This meant that I for many years have exposed myself to experiments that have not followed a straight line, and I have made sudden jumps in evolution. These steps have been followed by long periods of inactivity when I for a time left active therapy and could enjoy my discoveries, that far, in my professional career. It has been like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle from Waddington, sometimes it has been difficult to find a specific piece and then suddenly, after relaxing a little, large chunks falling into place.

During therapy, I have not always followed the evolution and been able, backwards, to peel off layer after layer of feelings finally to get down to the very early imprint during birth. The way I have happened to approach my neuroses has been rooted in my confusion during my birth, that I was drugged by antiepileptic medicine and because of the ignorance that prevailed for many years in the Primal Therapy’s own ranks.

My treatment, which mostly has been done at home by myself, has been like a tango, two steps forward and one back, which pattern was repeated until I slowly understood and felt the connection between my isolation, my numbness, my inability to bond and how my birth experiences have developed into epileptic reactions with all its subtle effects and variations. Now that I can see the relationship, everything seems so clear, but it has taken more than 40 years since 1978 to reach where I am today.  I will try to provide some limited examples, of how I've come to where I am and how this has affected my life.

When I mention 1978 as the start of my experiments, it is because that's when I officially started Primal Therapy. In retrospect, dynamic changes happened even before I knew what it was all about. During 1963 and 1965 I had a work situation, when I for a few years was working as a correspondent in a company doing direct sales to the consumers, which meant that I in my own, well isolated and secluded place dictated and wrote letters to company representatives. It gave me the opportunity to occasionally, without the risk of being caught, go with a feeling. This meant to release a petit mall seizure / hallucination / flashback and get what I later understood were connections with pain which I had repressed. Liberating experiences that reminded of what the provocateur Ortiz would deal with at theaters in New York within a few years, which in turn led to the development of Dr. Janov’s Primal Therapy...

1963 I had taken anti-epileptic medication for a few years and had organized my life in  relatively stable orbits for the first time and had no hyperactive neurotic behavior that pushed down my feelings, but they were quite the contrary given opportunities to come up. The sudden ascendance of feelings was about suppressed pain from a confrontation / trauma that I had had with, for example, my parents, siblings, girlfriends, friends and superiors. Suddenly, I could let the pain pop up, and I could feel and relive the memories that I had carried on, repressed, in my memory. These moments were followed by a great liberating relief.

It started as a petit mall, with a burning sensation over my eyes and in the midst of the cramp, I had a flashback to the painful moment that I had repressed. I do not remember exactly how many experiences of this kind that I had, but it could certainly have been somewhere between 20 and 30 in total during these two years, so it was a big purge as the bunker-like basement space for correspondents in Spirella so timely happened to be the scene for. The experiences were about how I had lied and deceived, hurt people verbally, shoplifted and as a young kid had killed a songbird with a sling shot. Most of it had occurred between 1950 and 1960 and was not of a particularly serious character with today's eyes, but for a 10-15 year old kid, they were dramatic events as they occurred.

My own therapy in the “Spirella box” ended in 1965 when Geigy introduced Carbamazepein / Tegretol as an anti-epileptic drug in Europe, and since I had a well-informed doctor as Dr David Ingvar, I got my Phenotyein exchanged. I do not remember why, but I'm rather sure it had to do with my repeated hallucinations / flashbacks (primal feelings) that I mentioned to Dr. Ingvar. He had also promised my then fiancee, on her direct telephone inquiry, that I might well get married and have children even though I was uncertain. Tegretol killed my petit mall and all my time could be devoted to inciting sale of corsets through correspondence, studying at night and starting to build a family.

1978 and 1979 I spent in the USA and then largely in Los Angeles.  My intention was primarily to spend those two years with Primal Therapy and to improve my English. I was well prepared and had read the Primal Scream a few times and was convinced that the therapy would wipe out my epilepsy. During these two years, however, nothing of importance happened on the surface. I got only an intellectual understanding of what the future of Primal Therapy could mean.

During my three weeks with Patty, who was my therapist, nothing happened. I tried to see and feel how the lack of contact with my parents had influenced me, but it led nowhere. The only incident worth mentioning occurred when Patty tried to get me to react emotionally, and I suddenly became like mad and threw a shoe at her with full force. We were both equally surprised at my reaction. She was obviously angry and told me to never do it again. The feeling of uncontrollable anger that Patty provoked, I have experienced later, and it has proven to be identical to that feeling which developed when I was stuck in the birth process which was a dreadful experience between life and death.

Much more didn’t happen, which affected my epilepsy. I remember from the group sessions, which I visited from time to time, that I had a feeling which oscillated between panic and numbness as I stood up in front of the other patients and the therapist group led by Art. When I had gathered courage and told the group about my lack of contact with my father, I cannot exactly recall the situation, DR Janov asked me to go and beat the sandbag and tell my father what I needed. When I made it, I thought myself that I had passed the exam, and then I called it a day and did not experience more during my stay at The Primal Institute, and I owned several unused and paid for group tickets when I went back to Sweden.

How could it be possible to let two years that were intended to be devoted to deep dynamic therapy just slip by without being worried that so few feelings were connected? Tegretol, stenosis, two years with fantastic weather, gorgeous beaches, a beautiful spouse uninterested in therapy, stimulating experiences, relaxed acquaintances were the heavy reasons. Since I did not have to worry about my income which I was assured by my former employer, with the dollar at its all time low level during these two years and with moonlighting for my employer in the future in an exciting environment in Colorado, my spouse and I had the two best years of our lives. Furthermore, the seductive situation fit into my self-deception. I had many subtle tools that held down my pain. “Colorín, colorado y el cuento se ha acabado”. (Which is a Spanish proverb to end stories with; “and here stopped the story and all lived happily until the end of time...”).

Fate, however, had new surprises in store. My moonlighting, for a Swedish company, in Colorado and to be more specific in Boulder, where much of the experimental hippy movement had moved from California, gave me the opportunity to many different contacts. Among other things, I stayed with a talented Jew, David Lesermann, during the days I did a job in Boulder. The contact with David I had received from the Primal Institute. Through David, I established relationship with The Rolfing Institute in Boulder. It was founded by Swedish descendant Dr. Ida Rolf, who did deep-tissue massage to release the body's original natural movement pattern. Ida Rolf had found out that the body is often locked by muscles which, controlled by neuroses, erroneously take root incorrectly in the skeleton so that the body is inhibited and give expressions of the repressed needs.

It was five approximately 60-90 minutes long and painful, bordering on violent, massage sessions. Normally, you did the entire series of massage treatments over 10 weeks and let it run 1-2 weeks between each session, but I had come up with the idea a little more than a month before I should move back to Sweden, so I compressed the treatments which I managed in 5 weeks instead of 10-15 weeks. After each treatment, I experienced a euphoric, almost intoxicating feeling, which soon was followed by a depression during a couple of days. I did my last Rolfing session just before I late in December 1979 flew back to Sweden. My adventure began almost immediately I got home, when my seizures turned into birth primals. With hindsight I might have started with Rolfing in the spring of 1978, but if I look in the same records then probably neither Dr. Janov nor Primal Therapy had been prepared to handle the situation... For me the effects of the Rolfing massage treatment meant, seen from a positive but hazardous viewpoint, that I could overrule the law of evolution and skip several protection filters of neuroses and go directly to the root of my epilepsy, to the primal birth feelings, creating fascinating experiences and insights which I managed with the help of luck and Tegretol.

To experience birth primal which had begun as epileptic seizures meant a different life and a new world opened up. My approach to therapy changed, and I began slowly to gain insights into how my life had been affected. The birth experience that stands out most of the many, I have experienced, is the one I experienced in January 1982 during a retreat in Frutigen, Switzerland. I came late to our ski resort where we would live during the week, and I was tired after a long and difficult drive up through the mountains and went to bed in the room we were assigned, and I crawled into my sleeping bag.

After a few hours sleep, I woke up in a birth primal during which I moved around the room inside the sleeping bag, and I relived how I as a fetus was a turned around and pulled backwards while I nearly got strangled, and it ended with the most liberating literal sound of  a baby scream I have felt and heard. The feelings afterwards of being full and completely normal were fantastic. All the following week was great and rewarding, including the painful experience of the “Killing Softly” which I will talk about in another chapter. In addition, I had the first and only time in my life three glorious days of skiing in the Alps. My balance became better in more than one respect.

It was surprising and interesting that my birth primal took place although I went on strong medication. From this point on, I started to feel and understand how my life had been conditioned by my need for love (especially from my father), of need for physical contact, of fear for seizures and of not belonging to somewhere and of not being good enough. The pain not to feel loved and to not be given time by my father made me for decades an easy victim for those who had something to offer as a surrogate. My father showed almost no emotion for me, rarely talked with me (when he did it, he corrected constantly or criticized me ironically), controlled me and did things behind my back (he had at various times had both my cat Sniff and my dog Bella shot without first talking to me). It created a sense of epileptic numbness in my head when I saw him. I began to avoid him and when the school gave me information about the various incidents and grants for which they demanded a parent's signature, I didn’t give it to him but signed with his name and handwriting and collected grants that I would not let him get.

When I was a little boy of eight years I was once very well treated by another boy who I went to school with, a boy whom I barely knew. I drove several miles with my bike in the darkness without light to pretend that I was his little brother, so he could get us both into the movie on one ticket. I still remember the pleasant feeling when the boy took my hand, and I can feel the sense of loss that my father never did it. The movie, I have no memory of. In 1974 I was contacted by a headhunter regarding a job, I should not have bothered. However, I accepted the offer unable to resist the fine feeling, that the headhunter and the prestigious job created, which was a temporary pain relief from feeling worthless and unloved, and I could not say no. The impact was dramatic, both for me and my family then, as I will mention in another chapter.

The physiological consequences of my difficult birth have often caused complications, and here the therapy may have had its most revolutionary effects. My fingers, my feet, and my nose they have all during most of my life been very vulnerable and their involvement in and connection to the pain which was imprinted during my birth is remarkable. As an extra painkiller I,  August 23 1963, added physical education. Not to build muscles, it would not have seemed sufficiently sophisticated, but more to build stamina, strength through endurance. In this way, I always felt in control and kept my head clear enough that it would work.

The physical exercises aborted the feeling of overpressure in my head. For over 20 years, I made e.g. 125 push-ups x 2 standing at my fingertips with my feet on a table or a bench. I did them every day without exception 6 o’clock a.m.. Although I impressed strong friends I did not make the push up to impress, but primarily to eliminate my unbearable tensions. In the 1980s, after the start of my birth primal my fingers grew more than 10 mm and I got rid of the tendency that they became numb and bloodless when the weather was cool. The growth of my fingers meant e.g. that I had to go up from size S to M in gloves. My feet have been through a similar process and have received their fair share of treatments.

My nose has endured a lot and has been a very vulnerable part of my painful and complex physical suffering. As a kid, I had frequent sinus infections, and it was always considered due to a cold. After receiving strong anti-epileptic medication my nose was regarded as allergic. I went during the 70's through two painful operations, one to drill wider holes into the sinuses and to remove and reduce my mucous membranes of the nose. In addition, I have endured de-sensitivity treatments to counteract my reactions to house dust without results ... Sense of smell, I have only had short periods.

From the second stage of my epilepsy and therapeutic experiments in the mid 90's the constipation of my nose and the numb feeling in the area around the eyes and nose have disappeared. After a birth primal when I have been through the feeling of pressure, squeezing, slime formation and strangulation and experienced the sequence when the baby cry ascends my numbness is gone and all channels are open, and I've regained my sense of smell, which has been repressed by the pain and constipation in my head during a large part of my life.

So I can now feel and understand the connection between my birth process, its anesthesia, strangulation, confusion and my clogged nose. When the anesthetic is gone so blood and other body fluids can circulate, and my nose is clean and sensitive to scents, which in turn affects my taste. The same connections, I can better feel my fingers and toes. They have all been involved in the game which pain imprinted during the birth trauma indirectly produced. I have visited specialists in various departments, in many hospitals because of my sufferings, and I have left with treatments and answers I never thought were correct and I have met doctors whom I could feel had no idea about the reasons of my afflictions, which obviously didn’t reduce my own confusion. This confusion was compounded by the feeling I had that they thought I was a hypochondriac or imagined ill.... 

Doubts are more cruel tan the worst of truths. 

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière