A Life-long Strangelhold.

During the last 40 years (calculated from the reading of The Primal Scream), I have learned to understand the principles and the process to re-live my birth-trauma. That way, I have been able to understand my weakness in emotional contacts, in my relationships and in my childhood, and how my neurotic life pattern was developed. This, eventually, led to a demystification of my epilepsy. In summary, my epilepsy can be described as a compressed short circuit / reaction to my organism’s 48 hour traumatic struggle for survival after the amniotic fluid was gone, to come out of the womb. The horrific struggle had many, for a fetus unbearable, complex events such as squeezing, choking, anesthetics in different forms, turning the fetus and strangling by the umbilical cord when being pulled out. Just recently it’s been 34 years from my first experience of how a normally short, however, shattering grand mal seizure developed / turned into a 1-2 hour long, integrating birth primal.

Having, during three intensive periods (10-15 years apart), re-lived most of the encapsulated pain from my birth trauma, my life has become pretty “normal”. My life pattern, although influenced by my history, has been liberated from the filter of neurotic actions that were previously necessary to reduce the leaking pain I, for most of my life, have been distorted by. A unique, but not totally illogical effect of my liberation from inhibitions and repressed pain, has been my initiative to connect with my teenage love Eva. Our contact ended when I, at age 19, developed epilepsy and was chemically lobotomized.

The resumption of our contact, after 53 years, has been and is a unique restoration of the friendship between two soul mates. The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse is the catalyst of that success. We have been able to let 53 years pass in review as a script under constant development. An infinite number of undeveloped and / or hidden scenarios well up out of our, increasingly less constricted, minds. This happens in spite (or perhaps it is thanks to?) there being complications in both of us that require solutions and changes. Eva e.g. had a long, and for traditional values, very success-filled academic career as faculty manager and board member at a prestigious university. These successes were achieved at the price of an emotionally impoverished life. “Free painkillers” such as coffee, sugar, cigarettes and workaholism held an emotionally disturbed childhood, with a bipolar mother, at bay. The pain propelled neuroses overloaded her organs and represented the price for academic success. The symptoms for Eva’s success; hyperthyroidism, hypertension and diabetes culminated 6-7 years ago in a burnout and stroke without other visible symptoms than a corrupted working memory and depression.

Over two, years, I have guided Eva into new habits. Through diet, physical exercises and Rolfing, Eva has made great progress and has been able to eliminate significant portions of her medical treatment and regained a functioning working memory. Eva’s long-term memory and her intellectual and emotional abilities are set in relation to her deep repression, surprisingly intact from our youth. Eva has a deep-set, natural drive to free herself from her inhibitions, and she makes daily small steps forward in her fight to pull herself from these neuroses that have kept her away / filtered from her true feelings. Eva has embarked on a stimulating and exciting, but, long and difficult journey of no return.

After an attempt by Eva, in writing, to describe a traumatic family situation that I received by email and read last night, I was hit by a strange empty feeling of hopelessness. Eva had “scientifically”, objectively, described the trauma over 2 A4 pages and only peripherally touched on the feelings that she had not wanted or been able to feel. I went to bed with Eva’s repressed, undescribed, emotions. At 3 o’clock in the morning, I woke up deep in the middle of a birth primal. At first I was painfully numb in my head, arms and legs, which meant feelings which I have experienced many times before. More unique feelings followed that I was dehydrated and chapped in the mouth, tongue and throat. After violent twitching of the legs and the body, I was ripped out backwards with the umbilical cord in a stranglehold around the neck. Indescribable gurgling sounds welled up from my chest, and I could keep myself conscious throughout the process.

Out of the hopeless feeling when I went to bed, something extraordinarily positive had emerged, and I had been through another liberating, wordless re-experience of my birth trauma!  “My Primal Journey will not end. There is no way, the way turns into reality while I travel. It is the journey that is the labour’s worth, not the goal of the path.”

Jan Johnsson

In motion

The sated day is never first.

The best day is a day of thirst.

Yes, there is a goal and mening in our path -

but it’s the way that is the labour’s worth.

The best goal is a night-long rest,

fire lit, and bread broken in haste.

In places where one sleeps but once,

sleep is secure, dreams full of songs.

Strike camp, strike camp! The new day shows its light.

Our great adventure has no end in sight.

Karin Boye (1927)