From “The Complete Angler” to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

Teach Me to Fish

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My comment:

From “The Complete Angler” to Fisherman’s Wharf. 

When reading your Reflections  about “Teach me to Fish”, I had fresh impressions from a person who had made the Swedish translation of Izaak Walton’s famous “The Perfect Angler”. Unlike Walton, the translator thought that fishing was cruel. Walton, however, considered fishing to be approved by a higher authority = Jesus in the safe knowledge that he chose fishermen to his disciples. Your Reflections and comments about Walton highlighted my memory of how I through a complex sequence of events and a number of fortunate coincidences got my old dream of “Primal Therapy” within reach.

A little more than 35 years ago, I managed to be part of a perfect “package tour” between Oct. 7th and Oct. 22nd, 1977. The package contained a wedding in Copenhagen, a roundtrip to the US West coast, a 2 week study in “How to Build a Franchise” and finally a visit to Santa Monica in L.A. The US journey began in San Francisco at Fisherman’s Wharf, and the last day, before the trip home, I visited the old Primal Institute to apply for Primal Therapy. 

From 1978 and onwards PT/AJ taught me to “fish” by demystifying my repressed birth trauma and all its persistent secondary effects. In my case, it did not happen “as soon as possible”. It lasted more than 30 years because I for many years had to live with a tricky agenda in order to make ends meet in my career, my finances and the therapy treatment.

In my “fishing”, I will neither be a complete angler, nor will I be dependent  of approval of higher authorities, whether religious or profane.

Jan Johnsson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqdtzJvliMk

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

It is easy to pin down a butterfly compared to pin down anxiety.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

On Different Kinds of Memory

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My comment:

Art, you have “pinned down” one of the butterflies in my stomach.

I certainly value that You still are going strong and inspired to create Reflections. They continue to work in favor of my understanding of my birth trauma and its subsequent seizures.

Over the last 30 years, I have, over and again, tried to pin down what memories are causing different fits in me, and I have been persistent in my almost “scientific” search. I have, however, consequently failed to catch a memory in the moment of a fit even after my seizures, over the years, have shrunk to a fraction of their old magnitude. A brief fit does not worry me, which the impotence to catch and explain the memory behind the feeling does. Every time I have had fits in my epileptic life, I have had, what can be described as an electric anxiety shock, which I never have been able to catch. 

Having a stubborn personality, I have every time thought: “next time” I’ll catch it. How could I? It is a wordless feeling of immense anxiety, which leaks out through my defense when I’m caught off guard in an unexpected emotional situation or memory. (This may sometimes occur in combination with a rapid cooling / temperature change). They have never appeared when I have been doing my often challenging job as an international executive.

I remember how I, after a week of qualified work, having driven 1100 km - non stop - from Karlshamn, Sweden, came to visit a primal retreat with Art in Bergen, Norway, in the summer of 1984. I had disarmed my defense by fatigue, and when I met with Art and his therapists I became overwhelmed by the kindness. Art saw that something was going on with me and came up to me and said “it’s a feeling, lie down”!  Then my primitive, instinctive memory relived a traumatic, oxygen deprived birth, which was one of the crucial steps in the demystification of my epilepsy. In this and all the subsequent occasions, it was about wordless experience of anxiety caused by asphyxia and assault recorded during a birthing process between life and death.

To understand how crucial the repressed anxiety was for my epilepsy, a key factor has been my intuitive allergic reactions to cognitive insights trying to verbalize my anxiety / my symptoms. Art’s intuitive knowledge to guide me to my deepest feelings have been brilliant. In parallel, Art had the ability verbally  to analyze the process, communicate his knowledge and make sure that I understood how I by reliving feelings developed an integrated unified circuit between the different levels in my body / brain.

It is easy to pin down a butterfly compared to pin down anxiety.

Jan Johnsson

If Poul O'Neill had known "Life Before Birth"?

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

More on My Primal World

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My comment:

What might have happened if Poul O’Neill had known of the importance of “Life Before Birth”?.

Over and again I have been asking myself why I have had so much success with Primal Therapy. I have more than once come to the conclusion that PT has been my  symbolic Operating System. To PT / OS I have added applications which have given me winning habits to make it possible to relive pain, dissolve neuroses and to release my “competent neocortex so it could inhibit dangerous impulses and steer me into a healthy life”.

When I wanted to change my problem, I asked WHY it existed, until I felt satisfied with the answer. Then I developed a vision and eventually I developed the HABITS which eliminated the root of my problem. 

I will try to give an example which I have taken from “The Power of Habits” of Charles Duhigg. It is about Poul O´Neill who before his successful career as CEO of Alcoa was working for the US government. He then created a framework for analyzing federal spending on health care, when one of the foremost issues concerning official was infant mortality. The US, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth had higher infant mortality rate than Europe and parts of South America. A staggering number of babies died before their first birthdays.

“O’Neill was tasked with figuring out why. He asked other federal agencies to start analyzing infant mortality data, and each time someone came back with an answer, he’d ask another question, trying to get deeper, to understand the problem’s root causes. Whenever someone came into O’Neill’s office with some discovery, O’Neill would start interrogating them with new inquiries. He drove people crazy with his never-ending push to learn more, to understand what was really going on.

Some research suggested that the biggest cause of infant deaths was premature births. The reason babies were born too early was that mothers suffered from malnourishment during pregnancy. So to lower infant mortality, improve mothers’ diets. Simple, right? But to stop malnourishment, women had to improve their diets before they became pregnant. Which meant the government had to start educating women about nutrition before they became sexually active. Which meant officials had to create nutrition curriculums inside high schools.

However, when O’Neill began asking about how to create those curriculums, he discovered that many high school teachers in rural areas didn’t know enough basic biology to teach nutrition. So the government had to remake how teachers were getting educated in college, and give them a stronger grounding in biology, so they could eventually teach nutrition to teenage girls, so those teenagers would eat better before they started having sex, and, eventually, be sufficiently nourished when they had children.

Poor teacher training, the officials working with O’Neill finally figured out was a root cause of high infant mortality. If you asked doctors or public health officials for a plan to fight infant deaths, none of them would have suggested changing how teachers are trained. They wouldn’t have known there was a link. However, by teaching college students about biology, you made it possible for them eventually to pass on that knowledge to teenagers, who started eating healthier, and years later give birth to stronger babies. Today, the US infant mortality rate, is 68 percent lower than O’Neill started the job.

O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish and to start a chain reaction.”

What might have happened if O’Neill had went one step further and found out of the importance of our “Life before Birth”?

Jan Johnsson

My comment to Richard Atkin's suggestion to start a primal community:

Richard,

In The Country of The Blind

When I read your suggestion of a Primal Community, H.G. Wells’ story “In The Country of The Blind” pops up in my mind. I read it a few times after having tried to explain to my, in many respects qualified,  surrounding what Primal Therapy was. The trick I used in order to “survive”, when my explanations failed, was to imagine that I was a king in a country of “blind” people. So H.G. Wells story is both helpful and beautiful and it has several bottoms...

One of the ambitions with the Primal Therapy is to establish an integrated unified circuit between the different levels in the brain and I am not sure that your community will create such a circuit with the rest of the US or any other part of the world for that matter.

Jan Johnsson

The need of a winner to achieve a vision.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

What a Primal World Looks Like

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My comment:

The need of a winner to achieve a vision.

The last 15 months I regard as the prime of my Primal life. It took years and lots of primal re-experiences to reach this stage, and I would not have been able to understand and literally feel the obvious logic in “What a Primal World” would be like if I had not gone through hell and felt pain first. I admire your constant naive confidence in how easy it would be, in theory, to establish a just, love-filled and healthy world.

When I try to imagine a Primal World, I often confront plenty of arguments, both internal and external, which are working in the opposite direction. Many of these arguments are offsprings of evolutions unique patented headline “Survival of the fittest”. Although we believe in a future, love-based existence, the consequences of a competitive environment will cause distortions. If we combine these effects with all the flaws which several thousand generations have planted into the human genes, including epigenetic tagging, life will become more of a competitive struggle / stress than love and peace.

I know myself well enough to admit that the pain behind my struggle-filled person is putting a bias on my objectivity. However, it is through this bias that I often get the opportunity to discover and access repressed feelings from my life. Your vision of a Primal World teases and challenges my values and gives me, time and again, opportunities to become aware of neuroses and pain that I have carried for a lifetime.

A Primal World is a vision. The Primal Therapy has a unique principle to bring us one step closer to this vision. In most projects, it is necessary with small wins / gains and measurable successes creating a Frame of Reference. That is how I used the Primal Therapy when, son of a cowboy, I made my way through hands on change-management in trade and industry.

Thanks to the strategy of adding small wins I’m at 72 in the Prime of my Primal life. Thanks for your visions.

Jan Johnsson

Feeling Love.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

On Loving Yourself

 (Click to access!)

My comment:

Feeling Love.

It is fascinating how I am able to screen my long life, when reading and analyzing literature and exposing me to meaningful reflections.

The past week I have been reading an excellent book on “The Power of Habits” + a Reflection of Art Janov: “On Loving Yourself +  an article in The New York Times about oxytocins “The Lovehormone as Sports Enhancement”. It is of course no coincidence that I “accidentally” read this combination of material. There are several inputs to each of the three compositions. I am and have been interested in sports (especially European soccer) and its driving forces, The Primal Principles (about Love as one of our basic needs), and finally of the habit forming processes, which (through the Basal Ganglia in the brain) makes changes possible either occurring in my own, mya daughters or my friend’s world.

Behind my stimulus is an inescapable factor and that is Love: to be unconditionally accepted, recognized, respected and part of a community and the opportunity to develop according to once’s own unique needs. I have spent considerable time of my life creating a neurotic compensation, keeping pain numbed and survive without daring / being able to feel the trauma that an unmet love had caused. Fortunately, my initial lack of love was not total and, despite an emotionally stunted mother and a nasty deforming birth process, I got some compensation. Eg I was privileged to be breast fed for more than 2 years, and I got my mothers specific attention for nearly 60 years.

For several years, I have helped by, primarily, Primal Therapy, slowly been able to demystify my epilepsy and learned to understand, feel and relive the pain behind my neuroses and my struggle, which had its roots in the lack of love. Since then I have aimed much of my life at changing habits, which meant replacing the habits developed to produce anesthetics (neurotic, endocrine and pharmaceutical) to the pain that the lack of love creates.

When I had lived enough pain, and the internal pressure (including the vital signs) normalized so grew the courage being myself and mainly satiesfy my real needs. Two noteworthy examples of this are my daughter and my friend Eva from adolescence. My daughter’s life was founded during my most intense primal-therapy period many years ago when she with my support could choose to define her existence after essentially her own needs and circumstances, and not after my and other’s neurotic needs, which would have meant to fulfill what I / we had failed.

After the pressure in the “pain-chamber” eased during 30 years, I contacted last year a woman Eva. We had during our later teens created lasting impressions. These memories had for 53 years been repressed like “underground oxytocin sources” in my / her subconscious. The year which has passed since we resumed the relationship has been a confirmation of both the positive and the negative forces operating in our subconscious. The good thing is that time has not erased the original positive feelings. However, it was also a testament of the flipside of the coin / the biology of what happened during all the years when repressed pain replaced love.

When I contacted my friend Eva, I had no intention engaging in Primal Therapy. Now it happens, however, as a natural process in order to be free without limiting inhibitions. 

Love is feeling.

Jan Johnsson