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A negative pain-filled imprint established before or after birth can cause permanent neuroses. Act outs due to repressed pain do not satisfy real needs, and the wound may eventually develop into chronic physical and psychological inhibitions. The opposite, intellectual pleasures may develop into productive memories that can stimulate the development of strengths, build self-confidence if the enjoyment strikes strings that are in harmony with one's potential. I will give some examples about some experiences of this kind, and how they have been part of or counterweights to my epileptic stigma.
When I was a teenager, we were a lot of girls and boys, "The Gang” that had much fun and stuck together. We learned to dance with an older sister of one of my friends acting like a dance teacher. We organized innocent parties, and when we had got a certain routine, we went on to "Plaskan", which was the name of students summer dance at Alnarp which each year from midsummer attracted large crowds from the villages around Malmö and Lund, with the help of prominent dance orchestras.
In "The Gang", I was probably a frequently irritating loud and dominant member and the reason was my constant need to suppress the feeling of not belonging, not being alike enough because of my religious home, where I nor felt an affinity, and due to my social class. Alnarp, then, was an extraordinarily complete micro society, which was tight and steep. There was everything from pig men and grooms attendants to principals, directors and university professors. My father was a low official, instructor and head of the dairy herd of 400 cows, and in homes where "The Gang" appeared, the parents were agronomists / teachers, professors or senior administrative officials with or without inherited wealth. I was never allowed to become a formal leader of "The Gang".
We grew up in something of a "Carl Larsson environment" with a wonderful, well maintained park, with large farm, gardens and orchards, its own dairy and research in all sections which included national research for farm machinery. What put extra color to the fixture for years was that both the agricultural, horticultural as dairy departments had 1-2 years of training followed up by senior management training, which took place at the Alnarp Castle. The presence of all these students meant endless festive occasions with exceedingly "wet" celebrations and burlesque theater. Especially estimated entertainments were the opening and closing events of the semesters. All students had nicknames like The Rat, The Mouse, The Tongue, The Cherub, and each of us had his favorite students. By the parents, of course, we were well known among the students. My father's nickname was "Honky" since he wore a white coat at work in the stables and with the milk production. Because of my fathers nickname, I was during a few years called Little-Honky. However, none of my friends did call me that because I hated the name. So far, my authority worked in The Gang.
Once, when I was around 15, a rather confused foreigner tried a little awkwardly to interact with the "Gang" when he, for some reason, visited Alnarp, and this caused a degree of curiosity. Eva, who was one of the most talented of us (the daughter of an intelligent researcher and university professor) said to me: "Understanding the psychology, Janne, please talk to him and find out what he wants and why he is here. I do not remember the details of my interview, only that it went well. What I would always remember, however, was the faith Eva showed for my psychological capacity and the importance this over time would mean in my extensive work with personnel/HR in different groups and companies.
When I at one point, some time later, invited Eva to a soccer league match in Malmö, we had an appointment at the railway station in Åkarp. When I breathlessly arrived at the place Eva looked at me and said: "Janne, how can you wear brown shoes to your blue pants?" We went to the match, but I did not see much soccer. I suffered deep anguish over my brown shoes with my blue pants. I felt utterly useless. Over the next several decades, I have never left home without knowing that my colors matched.
There existed a social gap between Eva and me while growing up, and we had no relationship, and Eva was not one of those girls whom I was trying to win by charm. I had too much respect for her. Imagine my surprise when Eva after a few years sent me a photo of herself. That shock was further reinforced a few weeks later, when I happened to turn on the photo and see that Eva had addressed it "To Janne my childhood sweetheart". For once, a good memory of a girl when my obsessive behavior did not lead to negative consequences.
Another noteworthy event occurred in the same period of my life. It happened in the middle of the night, and I slept, when my father came rushing into my room, and he had entirely lost his composure: ”Mother is dying, you must help!” In a few seconds, I was in their bedroom. What had occurred was that my mother, who occasionally tended to get leg ulcers had knocked a hole in a vein during sleep, and blood was pulsating out. I became quite calm, tore a piece from my mother's linen and tied closely enough that the blood flow ceased and called for DR ”Helpless” in Lomma. The event was in retrospect seen undramatic. It had probably pressed a button in my father and released a feeling from his early childhood when he tragically lost his mother.
To me the fascinating, and lasting memory of this event was that I took over. The circumstances had singled me out to solve a crisis for my ultimate authority, my father, with whom I had an awful tense relationship. This experience, to take over in a crisis, became later something of a trademark for me, and I have developed, over many years, myself into an internal change and crisis consultant in a few different Swedish groups. I have been in situations where terror and pain have paralyzed owners and board members over the risk of losing money, business and prestige. They have lost the control in the same way as my father and saw everything in black. These moments have on several occasions given me the opportunity to calm them down and take responsibility for resolving the problem. I loved those times. A crisis drugged me, and I had nothing to lose because I literally always lived on the knife edge of epileptic birth pain. It was my cup of tea.
My ability to handle crisis situations, my confidence in my psychological ability (reinforced by my understanding of Primal Therapy), and both my practical and theoretical knowledge in management was my tool box when I returned to work after two years in LA 1978 and 1979. During a couple of years, I was working as an independent consultant and realized I was decent at it while working with solving problems and change projects. An exciting group with positive developments on the stock market hired me in a serious project and gave me a valuable specialist training for 10 weeks spread over a couple of years in advanced modification techniques, and I worked then, as an internal change consultant to the group for 16 years. Dynamic therapy and many of the effective modification techniques have many similarities. Cognitive modifications function up to a limit in an emergency, then more rigorous and more human, powerful solutions must be introduced. Many of the changes I was participating in was painful in the short term to save companies and employees and with my insight into the pain, I became a suitable change consultant / therapist.
It happened often that my own pain from birth and epilepsy was a necessary experience to create the courage and the energy needed to build up with the process of analysis, decisions and actions. To act at times meant to fire, move around misplaced employees, recruit leaders and start working on a more reality-friendly way. When the change was over, I felt a need to move on or my own pain would take over. I was no "long-term" manager and needed a new crisis. I was a "crisis" addicted.
After several successful change missions (they lasted between one and up to five years) I took in the mid 90s on too broad a job as leader of a furniture component division headquartered in Germany. I guess no one else wanted the task, in that loss unit, built on old technology and with about 1000 employees. I knew I should not have taken the trouble, but Sweden was undergoing a serious crisis, and I had no choice at that moment where I could live out my neuroses. The business section I took over had several subsidiaries in different countries, and all were in crises of various kinds. The fact that the dominating star unit in Sweden created inhibitory, so called strategic constraints on how to market ourselves made the situation extra complicated.
During 2-3 years, I felt stuck and worked on the borders of my birth primal with the risk of losing my life, for 12-16 hours daily. I lived with my Spanish spouse, and newborn daughter in a house up in the Odenwald forest south of Frankfurt and I studied German during weekends in Heidelberg. By driving like a Fittipaldi on the German motorways, during the rest of the week, I managed to get to the various factories, airports and customers. I did my pushups 2x125 at my fingertips every morning. If I had finished with these pushups, my imprinted pain would have started to leak. That I would have had to hire 2-3 talented employees, to help me solve the crises never hit me, and the way I acted apparently prevented my principals to propose it. So I continued the mad race as a ghost until I had burned myself out thoroughly and the company, doctors, therapists and insurance companies rescued me for life by a premature retirement.
In the midst of the chaotic situation described above, I passed through an interesting example of how my neuroses and primal experiences could feed and develop a project within one of the units. It was a project that responsible managers for many years had put on held because they regarded it as too complex to begin. It was a unit which printed decorative paper on 20 feet wide cylinders of stainless steel, and the set up time when changing the cylinders was extremely time-consuming and lasted an average of 12 hours, which meant lost production at a high value. Potentially there was much money to be made if a radical solution could be developed. Totally unbound with prestige, from a print technical point of view, I had nothing to lose and grabbed the task.
Through contacts' contacts, I got connected with a change guru at ABB, and I felt that I met a soul mate and during my problem description, he took notes and drew sketches, and we made a quick tour around the printing department. The same week he told me that the set up time easily could be reduced to 3-4 hours, and this process in the future would require only half as many employees as before, and the investment would quickly pay for itself. The next task would be to persuade the tenacious (to put it mildly) German engineers who were probably fully convinced that it would be no match to stop the ignorant and naive Swede. They could not be happy to know that struggle was my elixir of life, so the project was a success while I was burnt out.
My way to convince the German printers was to create a good relationship with their union leader, and by chance, I asked his advice on the Waldorf school system, which I had found out was his large private interest. Steiner-Waldorf education is an education based on a philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who is the founder of Anthroposophy. Education has to be comprehensive and integrate practical, artistic and conceptual elements and must be coordinated with the natural rhythms of the daily life, according to the Waldorf Anthroposphy.
The Waldorf method emphasizes the importance of imagination in education and to develop an approach with creative as well as analytical components. The overarching goal of education is to provide young people with opportunities to develop themselves to free and integrated individuals so that each child can meet their own unique destiny. The Waldorf project, which was my private sub project, which I happened to develop within a major company project. It was very beneficial to the company, by the unexpected key, I got to the union code among printing workers. I had even something interesting to communicate about at home where I normally constantly was criticized returning home worn out and blown-out.
The Waldorf option developed very well for my daughter who got the kind of care I would have wished, and she had excellent preschool years in Waldorf.
Problems worthy of attack, prove their worth by hitting back. Piet Hein
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