LIVING IN A BUBBLE INFLATED BY REPRESSED EARLY TRAUMAS.

End My Attempts To Understand Emotions.


End of my futile attempts, the intellectual way, in speech and writing, to advise on how to thaw and / or understand frozen emotions.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that certain things do not work; Cognitivists, for example, never find the low brain-level imprints. 60 million Americans guided by medical and psychological recipe writers, get their symptoms treated with psychotropic drugs, without achieving a long term cure. The beaming happiness demonstrated by many Oscar and Grammy award winners has not cured their early childhood traumas as the cheering crowds hope and imagine until drug abuse and suicide are tragic facts.

I have read books and reflections of Art Janov, Ida Rolf and Alice Miller during 40 years, and I had the good fortune, as one of lucky few, by a combination of fortunate circumstances, to have been touched by Art Janov’s magical wand. The Janov connection meant the making of a journey back into my low brain-level imprints. For me, it was a complicated cruise into the wind / unknown that eventually led to a laborious demystification of my epilepsy and my neurosis. The epilepsy, however, a heavy stigma, was at the same time, in my specific case, a rewarding and significant trauma to process. During the final steps of the journey, I have, in my lucid moments, learned to be quite perceptive to understand my own internal physical and mental conditions, and to some extent also to understand others’s.

It has been astonishing and disappointing to me, after several decades of successful struggle against my repressed birth trauma that I have been surrounded by a compact silence and lack of interest. That goes for everyone around me, including my closest family and circle of friends. With the exception of a handful of insightful relationships, no one has dared or been able to discuss my remarkable improvements, which I’m describing in detail in my book. 

Previously, in relation to my surroundings, I was living in an unsustainable negative bubble inflated by my epileptic symptoms. Now, I have punctured my stigmatic epileptic bubble and live in a positive transparent reality created by the fact that I found my key low-level brain imprints. The question is whether this transparency, over time, can create positive needs among the many living in a bubble inflated by repressed childhood traumas.

Until recently, I have been convinced - inspired by Art Janov - that my repeated stories from my epileptic journey might affect the public’s overall approach. However, as I re-live more and more of my birth trauma, my neurotic force, that propelled my blogging campaigns, has dissolved. I accept better the grief that only very few understand my good fortune of having been virtually cured from my birth trauma. The comfort of this sadness is that I no longer feel a neurotic urge to convince those who not, by their own will, ask for my help.

40 years ago Alice Miller wrote: “Regarding unconscious behavior, I do not believe in using recipes and advice as aids. I do not see it as my duty to appeal to parents to treat their children differently. Instead, I want to try to clarify contexts, provide metaphorical emotional information related to the child within the adult. As long as this little child, within the adult, does not become aware of what happened to it, its emotional life is frozen, and its responsiveness to childhood denials are weakened. It leads nowhere with appeals to love, solidarity and compassion if this important prerequisite for humane feeling and understanding is missing.

For professional psychologists, this fact is of special importance. Without empathy, they cannot help patients with their expertise, no matter how much time they spend on them. Parents are equally unable to understand their children, even if they are well trained and have plenty of time for the kids if they are emotional alien to their own childhood sufferings.” 

Experiences and perceptions about me and a few close friends, in recent years, have convincingly confirmed the stunning regularities of Alice Miller’s statement. Evolution represses unbearable pain / traumas suffered by a child before, during and just after birth. These imprints are not reached by intellectual talk. The pain must be found and re-lived on the same level as the low-level brain imprints.

It has been a combination of luck and determinism that I have been able to establish a sufficient number of favorable circumstances and, guided over 40 years by the same outlier of a genius, Art Janov, I have made the journey through my birth traumas and re-lived the pain that for decades distorted my worldview. However, it is at the same time a hopeless fact that so very many people do not seem to be aware of this alternative route and / or not having the ability and resources to create the factors that will allow them to transform their lives.

Jan Johnsson