The Difficulty of Translating Principles into Practical Applications.

Janov's Reflections         on the Human Condition

How to Make a Cure 

 (Click to access!)

My comment:

The Difficulty of Translating Principles into Practical Applications. 1.

In principle, it seems simple to define and cure an early trauma. Your books and reflections have during 40 years provided us with numerous examples how simple it might be. In spite of myself being a living example of how a serious birth trauma, and related anxiety, allergies, neuroses can be cured with ”a little thought added with a heavy mixture of feeling”, the principle of ”Evolution In Reverse”, seems in general to be a rocket, too heavy, to take off. WHY???

You certainly do not lack the ability to describe and explain the processes, in our bodies and minds, which in unfortunate situations, of neglect and abuse,  occur. As when a fetus or very young child is exposed to a trauma / pain that is too painful, the evolutionary reflexes rationalize / transform them to secure symbols to protect the child’s consciousness. Over the years, you have repeatedly proven and documented how our repressed / non perceived pain over taxes our internal organs, which, far too early, are worn out and give us heart attacks, ulcers, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, epilepsy, etc.

Over the past 18 months, I have been able to compare my life to a contemporary frind’s life. As young people, we were both talented and had good reasons to be optimistic about the future. We came both from emotionally poor families who, however, offered us a rich ”smorgasbord” of practical and theoretical perspectives. We liked and felt attracted to each other and our outwardly appearances were healthy and charming, although we both were somewhat inhibited and insecure without understanding why... 

At the age of 19, our paths parted. I got epilepsy, was chemically lobotomised with heavy medications, and had for some years, gingerly, to build up a neurotic life pattern based on practical knowledge. My friend went straight on to the academic track, which led to a, seemingly, very successful career in the service of science. My epilepsy made it difficult to apply my neuroses in theoretical knowledge / studies which did not have as a purpose to deepen my practical experiences. My trauma / pain could only be suppressed with medication and intensive projects, lasting 2 - 3 years, which meant a total absorption of my mental and physical energy. This fatiguing lifestyle, I was saved from by The Primal Therapy, by applying ”a heavy mixture of emotions, added with a little reflection”. That way, using nonverbal principals compatible with my epilepsy, I eventually demystified my birth trauma, my epilepsy and my neurotic life pattern and could finally understand my problem. 

My friend had no conscious problems to suppress neglected childhood feelings. The family’s scientific background and support from the university environment pushed the studies and research career and kept the childhood pain at bay. The price for a highly intensive and qualified research career, which contained predominantly theoretical models without regard to practical applications, in time became goiter, hypertension and stroke.

Since we are both retired and free spirits, we can compare our lives and share the joys and sorrows of our experiences. The main balance is that we unreservedly share the understanding of the negative influence that a symbolic life filled with repressed pain had. Through my experiences and the help I have received from The Primal Therapy, I’m not afraid to show and tell about my relived pain. That makes my friend more open and willing  to open up and to get a whole new outlook on the childhood, the research career and how repressions have been over taxing the body and the vital signs.

It is during this ”primal process”, between two soul mates that I started to wonder about the practical setting that ”a little thought added with a heavy mixture of feeling” needs to get the simple principles of PT to become every man’s / family’s reality.

Jan Johnsson

To be dethroned

To be dethroned  (Example no. 1 of outstanding memories)

“The Dethroned Prince” (“El Principe Detronizado”), is a book of the Spanish author Miguel Delibes. He gets into the skin of a four year old boy and tries his world with ingenuity, simplicity and fantasy. The family, which Delibes masterfully paints, consists of a professional, working father and a home-reaching mother who together had a traditional / unequal and correct relationship. The boy Quico, seeks and is continuously receiving everyone’s attention. As a natural consequence, he gets used to dominate and be noticed until the family was extended with a baby girl. The sister, constantly cheerful and happy, took quickly, and seemingly undramatic, the lead role and Quico saw himself dethroned. 

Delibes’s narrative, with few deviations, could have been my own story. I was 3 years old when my sister was born. I was first born and eagerly awaited according to the, slightly formal, suitor letter, which my father wrote to my mother a few years before my birth. My parents were young, had lots of friends and family, whom they socialized with. Even if World War II was going on, the situation in the neutral Sweden seemed relatively “safe”. 

For someone, who is inexperienced in the emotional processes, it may sound contradictory that the advent of a sister July, 1943, would show up as a larger threat for my future, emotional, security than the threatening war around the borders of our country. A circumstance that was not changed by the fact that a B-17 Flying Fortress crashed quite near our home.

During decades, my agonizing jealousy and my obsession with curly people were propelled by anxiety neuroses. They had their roots in my being dethroned and in my nasty birth process. Anxiety provoking stabs from my inhibited environment, which was poor on emotions and touch, easily started these painful reactions. 

Many years later I was seduced by the cover picture of a book by a curly shrink in Santa Monica. The “Primal Scream”, had in addition to its cover art, also a revolutionary content, and I intuitively knew it would bring me closer to a demystification of my stigma. So in April 1978, I went through three weeks of Primal Therapy in LA and I had my first primal experiences.  I had a feeling / flashback and saw, how my sister (with blond curly hair) sat on my father's lap and I found myself standing heartbroken, pushed to the floor. In my sister’s early teens, her hair color turned very dark from being blonde and curly, which I had forgotten / repressed. Eventually I could feel / understand why I, for decades, had been obsessed with people / girls with blond curly hair, and why I had been neurotically jealous when my position with someone was threatened. Over the years, I intended, often with success, to impress my father with blond, curly fiancees to get his attention and avoid my feelings of inferiority / jealousy.

I needed many occasions, when I have “laid back and felt the stab of anxiety”, to realize that my picture of my life prior to Primal Therapy was not true. The picture of my happy childhood was, in fact, a fake in order not to feel the pain. A dramatic birth, lack of physical contact and conditional love were the factors which created my neurotic life pattern. By going against the current and apply the Primal Principles, I have painstakingly regained much of my original self. It has been a kind of modern, short term “archeology”. Archeology is defined as the study of human activity in the past!

Jan Johnsson

More on our remembering selves.

More on our remembering selves.

When the WHOLE body, everything included, is involved in the memory, we feel complete / together. With other words, we are our remembering selves. Often our experiencing selves are like strangers. I got this from Daniel Kahneman, and, he also described that, for most people, the value of a vacation trip is not the experience but the anticipation beforehand and the memory afterward. From a Primal point, he says something interesting; many people would be willing to experience a tremendous amount of pain if they were guaranteed that their brains were wiped clean of any trace of memory. (He didn’t go that far that he included the whole body. His wife, Anne Treisman is a cognitive psychologist at Princeton...)

During my whole life I have a few memories which stand out; each of which were complete (with as much of my body included as I was capable of). For example, they include how I was dethroned as a kid by my 3 year younger sister, how I refused - was unable - to accept my mothers religious drivel, when I got my first kiss at 15 and when I smoked my first Pall Mall cigarette. Later comes my memory when I was recommended The Primal Scream in the beginning of the 1970is, my first Rolfing session in Boulder, Colorado, my first experience of how a grand mal seizure turned into a primal feeling / birth experience, my mother giving me her version of my birth 1980 and how Art put me into a sensational primal experience in Bergen, Norway 1984.

All these are important examples of memories I trust because my whole body was / is involved, contrary to many of my countless memories which are merely mental events.

Jan Johnsson 

The whole body must be involved.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

What Does the Unconscious Make Us Do?

  (Click to access!)





My comment:

The whole body must be involved.

My mother did not smoke or drink alcohol. She was “taken care of and protected” by religion. In the holy bible, Genesis 3:16, my mother had read: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children”. Having an exceptional will power my mother decided, when the amniotic fluid had passed, to expose me (her first child) to all the severe pain she was mighty to please the bible / her god. Her willpower (read imprinted pain) almost killed both of us during the 48 hours she blocked her body and me. When the staff of the birth clinic took over the command they pulled me out as a breech with the umbilical cord around my neck in a stranglehold.

Until her death at high age, my mother and I had a peculiar / subconscious relationship. I never felt there was a limit to what I could tell her. After 2 years in LA and PT, I introduced her to the principles of PT and what it might mean to me and my epilepsy. Suddenly I experienced the Eureka effect of my life, when my mother started to cry and after 40 years of denial began to tell me about why my birth became as it became. Her “primal” gave us both a belated compensation for our long and agonizing sufferings.

WHY am I “drowning” Art’s famous fish by, over and again, talking about my birth, my epilepsy and the life pattern they caused? These experiences translate the principles of PT in practical, functioning curative reality.

After years of experience with evolution in reverse, I have carefully introduced techniques that have taken me several steps forward in my development. I have spoken before of how my fingers and feet have grown over the last few decades. This week I have again been made aware of how my whole body during a long life has been stunted / restrained / undeveloped after I, during the birth process, had been trapped / compressed on the border between life and death. It is a powerful feeling physically / emotionally to feel the communication (both ways) between the feet, hands, and the anxiety / pain when I can experience sensations that surely have been normal for most people during a lifetime. 

"We need to free the body of its pain. The whole body must be involved again in the memory; otherwise it is a mental event." I could not agree more!!!

Jan Johnsson 

“Side Effects”

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

How to Deny Your Feelings and Die Early?

 (Click to access!)

My comment:

“Side Effects”

In principle Art is right, of course! To move past unwanted, negative feelings,  - “self-distancing yourself” - is a sure way to shorten your lifetime potential. To keep your emotions at arms length and denying feelings makes you sick and you are bound to overtaxing your immune system and your vital body organs like brain, heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas.

So why does it, in practice, not work as Art says and WHY are we continuously fed with all these repressive techniques to deny our feelings? Which are the values behind all that? How has it been possible to accept all the “Side Effects” (Referring to the new Steven Soderbergh-film to be released Feb. 8th, 2013.) caused by drugs and cognitive talk developed to dissimulate and take its toll by “keeping emotions at arms length”? According to an article in NYT, Jan. 9th, 2013, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing of America remains strongly committed to the development of new drugs, including 187 medicines now being developed to aid about 60 million(!!!) patients who have some form of mental illness in the US. 

The current treatment paradigm (intellectual talk therapies and painkillers) is based on evolution’s own principle to repress the pain, physically and mentally, at the cost of a shortened life potential. It is a method / “bubble” which is interwoven with the economic / political system we all depend on, and, which gives priority to short-term solutions, which are reasonably possible to manage and control, at least in the short perspective. 

During decades, I kept my pain / anxiety / epilepsy at arms length by the help of the Pharmaceutical Industry. I was a prisoner of my own pain and  Carbamazepine/ Tegretol. It was the prize I had to pay to act normal and to be able to support myself and those who depended on me. Tegretol rescued short term my life at the cost of Side Effects, which were devastating, and debilitating. My longterm battle to break out of both Tegretol and my nasty birth trauma / anxiety / epilepsy was made possible by Art’s unique guidance over 40 years through the principles of Primal Therapy. Eventually I understood and learned - fortunately not too late - to feel my repressed feelings.

Having a new life style I especially like Art’s word: “Feelings predate thoughts and long before we think they inform us about life”. My new life has plenty of experiences which confirm my feelings and his statement! Having been a longterm prisoner of pain (still having some painful scars) is now a rich experience when I know the value of feelings as the essence of life.

Jan Johnsson

Arthur JanovJanuary 14, 2013 at 9:08 AM
Jan: Well done and well written. art

Another kind of Alarmist!

I was just writing on a serious article about the decadence of our western society due to how we keep feelings and emotions at arms length, when I happened to get my eyes on this wonderful article by Woody Allen: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/hypochondria-an-inside-look.html?src=me&ref=general .

Next to you, humor is the best remedy for depression. Though yours is a cure.

Jan Johnsson