Feeling Pain; Growing Fingers and Dissolving a Neurotic Life Pattern

Feeling Pain; 

Growing Fingers and Dissolving a Neurotic Life Pattern.

The principles of Primal Therapy / Evolution in Reverse, as I have interpreted them, have worked excellent for my specific needs. They have helped demystify my epilepsy / birth trauma, dissolved my neurotic life pattern and helped me understand / internalize why evolution saves our lives by eliminating / repressing unbearable pain. My cure, overall, has been a holistic process where body and mind, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes separately, have been involved. My three union brain has become significantly better coordinated and my feelings have been given a more natural influence on my intellect and vice versa. 

My physical coordination has to a surprisingly high extent improved. I have experienced how allergies have dissolved and how fingers and toes, after the 40s, have grown out to their original potential (before being inhibited in a traumatic birth trauma). I had and, at a lesser degree, still have, since many years, a feeling, below my fit body, of not being fully physically grown. A feeling of being weaker and minor than I really am. Examples: I have had too insensitive fingers when I would hug and caress someone. “My emotional feeling did not reach all the way to my fingertips”, which I unconsciously compensated for by putting more pressure. 

For decades, I looked for and dressed in clothes that were just on the verge of being too small. Just right size or slightly too large clothes brought my feeling / pain of not being fully grown. My neurotic disability made me a perfect employee in the corset industry, which those days , before modern day slimming madness took off, was about lacing too large bodies in tight-fitting underwear. In this industry, I spent, successfully, my first 10 years before my career took off. I am nowadays enjoying baggy trousers and large shirts…

I found no direct coverage for my undeveloped physics and my feelings of being too small in the Primal Scream and I did not become wiser in these matters during my first few months at the Primal Institute. Coincidences /moonlighting in the biotech industry, brought me, however, to Boulder, Col., and I attended Ida Rolf's institute with deep tissue massage even though I knew that PI was not for it. 

“Physical individuality is shaped by the forces of life - how we were born, when we learned to move, experiences, accidents, mental and emotional sets. All of these leave a record in our mental and our physical memories.The more you watch people in front of your eyes, the surer you are about how people can get stuck in childish incidents, or birth incidents, or for all I know pre-birth incidents. You see it right in front of your eyes. Through Rolfing, it begins to be possible for a body to take on what we consider appropriate adult form. Then the person continues on psychologically, and develops.”

These, by me often quoted, statements, together with the Primal Principles / Evolution in Reverse, have been my lead stars when I made my journey from being a physically hampered, repressed person with leaky gates / epilepsy, who had developed a neurotic tool bag with a large arsenal of short-term survival techniques into a reasonably well-cured person with good vital signs.

For me, the combination of primal therapy and Ida Rolf's method of deep tissue massage was a big step on the road to understanding my repression / epilepsy and my equally inhibited and uncoordinated body. Janov and Rolf approached the problem from two opposite directions. In both their written communications, it appears, unfortunately, that they do not accept each other's methods. To cooperate was, therefore, probably never an option. Fortunately, neither of these therapies prevented me from combining the two and achieve a result which, for me, was better than the sum of both.

Of course, they could do it together. Why have they not done what have seemed obvious for decades?

Well, after having read “Beyond Belief”, I think I am beginning to understand!

Jan Johnsson