Epilepsy, soccer, avantgardism and therapies. In the honor of Raphael Ortiz, Arthur Janov and Ida Rolf.
Over the past month, I’ve written and read about how e.g. smells, and music evokes memories and elicit emotions in us. My whole experience of The Primal Principle is a constant process of how different stimuli evoke memories and allows me to re-live feelings / pain that I have repressed. “Memory of odors are idea, concept and situation free; they are pure and unadulterated. If we let the patient slip into them totally we often get remote pains that were hardly ever retrievable. A. Janov.” Because my overriding stigma has been my epilepsy, very many of the memories, stimulated and provoked through relationships, audio and visual impacts, smells and music etc., have slipped me into my birth trauma and its related fits / hallucinations.
On July 9th, 1950, at the FIFA world Cup in Brazil, when I was almost 10 years old, I was involved in one, as it would later appear, traumatic experience. Both sadly and surprisingly (at least for me) Sweden lost 1 - 7 against the host country Brazil before 133.000 spectators in Maracana stadium in Rio de Janerio. The reporter whom I, on the radio, listened to was named Gunnar Göransson. He showed, humanly but completely unprofessionally, his grief with, after every Brazilian goal, to repeat “Ay, ay, ay, this isn’t true.” The reporter was thereafter for years nicknamed “Ay, ay, ay - Göransson.”
What I did not understand as 10-year old was the trauma that the defeat together with Göransson’s miserable report had meant. When I barely ten years later developed epilepsy, and the gates to my birth trauma leaked pain and anxiety, I could not prevent a slip of the tongue / “riff”; “Ay, ay, ay this is not true” to be part of my hallucination / fit. This habit followed me well into the future until I had re-lived my trauma. (In March 1980, I wrote a draft, of my first dramatic primal experiences, which I later presented as a chapter, “From The Sunshine In Beverly Hills To The Darkness In Brokamåla.” In the text, I describe the origins of my epileptic “riff”: “Ay, ay, ay, this isn’t true.” The chapter is included in my book “Evolution in Reverse.” To whom it may concern I’ve included it as an attachment.)
On July 8th, 2014, at the FIFA world Cup in Brazil, exactly 64 years later. In the absence of Swedish participation, the opposing teams, host nation Brazil and Germany, played against each other in the Estadio Minerao, Belo Horizonte. Before the game started, I remembered Brazil’s humiliation of Sweden in 1950. I sensed and wished that Germany would win and when the game started I told Eva, my, after 53 years re-found friend, about the details of my trauma 64 years ago, and I predicted that the result would be 7 - 1 to Germany. My prediction would give me a sort of personal vindication for the trauma at 10 years of age.
To everybody’s enormous surprise, my tip is a hit and Brazil becomes as humiliated as my childhoods Swedish idols were in 1950. However, it hurt me when I saw the sad young Brazilian spectators suffer through the same trauma that I experienced as a boy, it was an incredible experience to be able to feel 64 years of memory span from 1950 until today. Helped by the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse, I have experienced, what many consider to be, improbable adventures and a miraculous cure. I am a determinist and do not believe in supernatural things, but sometimes coincidences are on our side, and the reality surpasses the fantasy.
Jan Johnsson
Annex from my book Evolution in Reverse:
"From the sunshine in Beverly Hills to the darkness in Brokamåla.
From January 1980, I lived again back home in Sweden and would, after two different sabbatical years find my way back into reality. The Primal Therapy had not immediately become so disruptive as I expected, even if it had slightly opened the door, and still I was not aware of what an explosive power, the last few weeks of deep connective tissue massage in Ida Rolf's auspices in Boulder, Colorado, would have. My reentry into working life was made easy by the fact that I came home with a new understanding of English, knowledge of marketing from UCLA, human and psychological insights, that primal therapy had given me and in physical form that had rarely been better. Although I lacked a green card, a USA work permit, I had through the contacts in a Swedish listed company had the opportunity to help out in one of their subsidiaries in Boulder, Colorado. I flew there every week during the year and acted during 2-3 days as a consultant during a reorganization and kept an eye on a talented but alcoholic branch manager.
Offers of work assignments flowed quickly in at an extent that I never needed to be worried about my security. My wife and I lived well on a small, beautiful forest farm in Blekinge, in the south of Sweden. The only downside was the long journeys to my clients in Åhus, Vittsjö and Höör and to the airports in Kristianstad or Ronneby. I had exciting change missions and could arrange my days depending on my nightly therapeutic experiences.
When the delayed effects of the therapies in California and Colorado were set in motion in January 1980, I stood before a dramatic personality development that I only now, 30 years later can understand the full scope of. I often wrote down my experiences and documented feelings and insights which I filed in my red Pandora's Box, which I dragged around as a growing memory over the years. Free from having to follow a strictly chronological order, I continue to relate some of my emotions and memories from those primal experiences.
Thursday, February 28, 1980 after about six hours of sleep I woke up, and I went through an often repeated and involuntary process of hyperventilation and feelings which that morning had passed without major problems. I got started quickly even though I was in no hurry to my work on Anna-Modeller in Åhus and I drove a circuitous route over Lönsboda and Kristianstad.
During the journey, I felt initially in an almost manic mood, singing to myself and acting funny. As a result, I suddenly got up hallucinatory memories of my father in which he blamed me because I did not fit the time and was driving circuitous routes. He thought that “I was fooling around and got nothing done.” To be serious had at a very early stage in my life been instilled in me. Too soon, so that it became a pressure and a burden for me. It caused me to doubt and be uncertain about my right to relax and be able to judge what I could take lightly.
When I arrived at my workplace, I had a slight discomfort of a guilty conscience because I was late. However, I was relaxed enough to take time and talk with each of my closest colleagues and felt a pleasant touch with everyone. Between 3 and 4 p.m., I felt tired and decided to leave the job and drive home earlier. My reason for that was that I would do a more efficient job at home. On the way home during the car travel, my nose suddenly became clogged, and violent, painful tension deposited under the eyes and just above the nose, and I tried unsuccessfully to blow me continuously. Panic was close.
Upon my returning home, my wife noted how abnormally clogged my nose was. Despite my condition, I conducted a few tasks in the nearby village. I was extremely tense, and, for example, had a petit mall hallucination during a visit to the library. Then I drove back to the farm, had a bowl of soup and some crisp bread. I had shortly thereafter violent tensions in my stomach, which developed into diarrhea, and this was on during about one hour while I drank mineral water. I lay on top of my bed and woke up at 22 o'clock when my spouse came home. I got up and ate a couple of garlic cloves and a plate of buttermilk and a little oatmeal and took my epileptic medicine and then went to bed again without being able to fall asleep.
Since my wife had been annoyed that I did not want to turn off the light, I moved into the living room and put myself in an old sofa to read for a while. I gave up reading after half an hour, and fell asleep. After another hour I awoke, I was paralyzed and had a sensation of seizures in my head, without, however, getting any seizure. I fell asleep again, and these unpleasant epileptic sensations returned but this time in combination with that I repeated a short phrase: “Ay, ay, ay, this isn't true” which I often repeated as an automatism /"riff" accompanying petit mall seizures. However, I told them in a less rushed and compulsive manner than usual, but there were more repetitions, and they were louder and probably faster.
(The story behind these "ay, ay, ay" phrases originated from when Sweden in 1950 during the World Cup in Brazil lost a soccer game by 1-7 in a degrading way to the host country Brazil. The radio reporter who referenced the match was called Gunnar Göransson and he reiterated an "Ay, ay, ay, this isn't true" after each goal the Brazilians made. For decades thereafter he was nicknamed "Ay, ay, ay - Göransson" and the trauma I went through with him in 1950 was later, for decades, to characterize my petit mall fits / seizures).
My sounds woke my wife up, and she came into the living room and asked me to move into the bedroom again. She felt bad that she had provoked my move to the living room, a fact of which I was very much aware. I went to my bed and fell asleep immediately, but after a while I had violent dreams of the period in my life when I developed epilepsy in the upper teens. In the dream, I had a fight with my two youngest siblings and was also at odds with my mother who could not comprehend that I would need to be doing Primal Therapy.
The dream turned into extremely painful birth scenes where my head is forced through the pelvis of my mother several times. When I during the dream told this to my mother, she screamed and cried and threw herself on the floor in a demonstration against that I relived something she denied. The dream scenes took place in my room at Alnarp, in the house where we lived until the time when I got epilepsy. The situation was a re-experience and felt like the nights when I got my first major seizures 1959. I did not know then that this was Grand Mal epileptic seizures. I only felt a paralyzing agony for what happened to me.
When I came down into the kitchen of my childhood, still in a dream, I was like a mini baby on the kitchen table, and I told my mother that she should expect to get this kind of a damaged child, because she was so narrow and unwilling to feelings and emotional support. In a nasty threatening way, I quarreled with my siblings, including about eating or not eating a variety of sweet ice cream in pink cones that filled the refrigerator. Continuously, during these nightmarish arguments with my siblings, I had primal / hallucinations that felt like my head being pushed through my mother's pelvis.
When I finally woke up, my wife was sitting awake and terrified at my side, and she told me that I had cried and whimpered as a newborn baby, and I had been breathing as an infant. She had feared that I should slip into a major seizure. However, this did not happen because a birth primal is identical to an epileptic seizure or rather; a grand mal epileptic seizure is my brain's defense response when the birth process is perceived as impossible to implement by the protection mechanisms in my brain; that by repression takes care of my survival.
When I woke up, I felt an unprecedented space in my head. It felt like an oversized room. A variety of sweet, pleasurable words and thoughts flowed in my head and created an unusual feeling of happiness when I woke up. My nose that had threatened to explode out of my face was like new, and the breathing was easy and amazingly comfortable. During the hour or so I felt a new kind of happiness being alive and of having experienced something sensational miraculously, which I certainly had hoped, deep down in my subconscious.
Most of all I would have liked to phone to DR Janov or to Dr Holden, in L.A., to talk about my sensational experience - 40 years back in time. I had a fierce desire to get attention. The attention I never got from my own father. I was trained to withhold my needs, so I did not call LA ...
When you least expect it, but need it most."
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