Sunday, January 16, 2011

Hidden Agenda. A letter to friends for over 30 years. (Article 19 of the history of my epilepsy.)


Hidden Agenda.  
Sometimes the things turned out the way I had imagined, and other times not. I have not always exactly known why one or the other have occurred. So it has been good to have had a strong inner, hidden agenda. We've known each other for more than 30 years, so I think it's about time you get to know my version of how things happened in the late 70's. If I had been patient, you would have the story as a book, but since I do not know when it finishes writing you'll be content with a chapter. Please enjoy!
The foundation for my internal agenda was established already at the embryonic stage during a very difficult birth, which included lack of oxygen, being severely squeezed, choked, drugged with oxygen, and finally after 48 hours of struggle being invited to a breech delivery. My childhood was marked by hyperactivity due to the imprints caused by the birth, until I at the age of 19 developed epilepsy. Over the next 15 years, I took medicine for epilepsy, graduated from high school and read an economics degree plus scores in psychology and marketing while I made a career in the corset and toy industries.
1974, I happened to meet a different Dane, Svend Moller-Andersen; a management consultant of a rare kind. During a course in personality development, he referenced and plagiarized some of Rafael Ortiz absurd performances from New York, and advised me to read “The Primal Scream” of Arthur Janov, if I wanted to get somewhere and get rid of my neuroses. Barely a week had passed before I both bought and read the book in Danish and added a personal strategy for future changes. Regardless of whatever you put into the expression “get anywhere”, the Svend Möller Andersen tip led me into an adventure that includes both an internal and an external universe of physical and mental experiences of an exceptional nature. As an additional incentive, I have experienced contacts, locations and situations that few epileptic neurotics may be part of.
Primal Therapy became a sensation in psychotherapy about 40 years ago. I borrow a description from Art Janov how he made his first experiences and slowly began to understand how the evolution and dynamic therapy could work together:
“A young man who walked into a conventional therapy group, which I was conducting told about a visit, he made to a New York theater to see an absurd notion with Raphael Ortiz (the same Ortiz as Svend Moller-Andersen imitated during a course of personality development in Kongens Lyngby, in Denmark 1974). He said that Ortiz went back and forth on the stage and shouted for his mother. And he invited the audience to do the same. When they did it many in the audience began to scream and cry. I asked the young man to cry for mom. He refused but I was stubborn. Finally, he started screaming for mom, fell off his chair writhing in pain on the floor. This went on for half an hour and was something I never experienced before. When he came out of his condition, he touched the carpet and said: "I can feel." He felt himself changing. I recorded the session and for years afterwards, I have studied what it was for a secret which it contained.
I repeated the experiment again with other patients, and with much the same effect. I knew I saw something that therapists hardly ever get to see, but I did not know what it meant. It was not until several years later that I understood the meaning. I tried to understand what these patients had in common. It was a feeling! Access to the emotions that made the big difference. It would take another 25 years to figure out what was going on inside the person and his brain, but a fundamental truth, I had uncovered. I think the result is a new paradigm in psychotherapy. And it is not just a belief! “
When I had read the Primal Scream, I established a hidden plan to travel to Los Angeles in a number of years. However, another three years passed by before I had the opportunity to take the next step. During these three years, the Danish Brio Company was restructured through rationalizations and through acquisitions and as responsible for the project, I was very motivated and fully engaged in all respects. It was wonderful exciting years of constant change and not without success. Among other things in the game’s segment, we had made successful inroads in Algas (owned by Bonnier) market dominance in Sweden. When our change projects were implemented, and the daily routines began to dominate, I hired a talented Danish successor and looked for a job in Sweden to move a step closer to my hidden project in LA.
Partly by chance I chose to look for a job in the Bonnier Group as Finance Director in a chain of stores selling ladies and men’s clothing, Regment, which was in an even more miserable condition than Brio Denmark was when I started there. At the interview in a Copenhagen hotel, it appeared, however, that Bonnier had a dual agenda, and they looked as much on my profile for a future at Alga and Frosta Fritid as they evaluated my suitability to participate in the reorganization of Regment in spite of my experience in economics and marketing in the corset and fashion industry. Probably, the stronger part of the Bonnier board had even decided to close Regment, but I suspected nothing when I came from Denmark.
However, there was a dramatic event in my home in Jyllinge when I had signed an agreement with Bonnier / Regment, which caused that I during 1977 had an extraordinary storm cloud hanging over my head. One night when I was a relaxed and celebrated  life and my new job with wine and sex with my partner, I got a different epileptic grand mall seizure. It was otherwise in the sense that I had no cramp or fell, but got up and walked out of the house. I was sleepwalking and climbed a tall tree next to our house. I had 15 years earlier read a story "Lucky Peter" by the Danish Nobel laureate Henrik von Pontoppidan, in which a boy climbed high a tree and fell down and killed himself. The boy had been beaten and maltreated by his father in a way that reminded me of how my father had whipped and misused me when I was 10 years old. My girlfriend with the help of neighbors and called paramedics finally got me down and took me to the hospital in Roskilde, where I got numbing injections just like McMurphy in ‘One Flew Over The Coco Nest’. At least a repetition of the tragedy of the Von Pontoppidan book was prevented.
The visit to the hospital in Roskilde is one of the most traumatic experiences of my epileptic journey. The memory of the older neurologist model Nazi, who in a nonchalant and superior way handled my case, not to interview or seek information from my regular doctor, I have been able to live with afterwards by enjoying that the DR Josef Mengele, who performed neurological and medical experiments in the Nazi auspices never was allowed to become a senior of the Danish neurologist thanks to the happy ending of the War. Retroactively, I count myself lucky that he didn’t order a lobotomy surgery. After demonstrating his total lack of empathy and professional conduct the Roskilde neurologist informed me that he would send a report to the police regarding my driving license, which would immediately be withdrawn. I recorded what he said but just then I didn’t worry heavily on it.
Shortly afterwards and only a week before I would move from Jyllinge, Denmark, suddenly one day two uniformed police officers stood outside the house and rang the bell. They wanted to see my license, they said. I suspected, with lightning speed, what would happen and with the luck that often followed me I let them wait outside while I was looking up my expired license that I still had left after I had got a new one. “This we shall ask for, so now you better get someone who can drive you” were the cynical statement from one of the two constables. My inner satisfaction that I within a week I would move to Sweden still in possession of my (at least in Sweden) valid license was controlled but sweet. 


In this context, I will tell you an incident about how history can repeat itself, albeit with a slightly different outcome. When I, one year later, in 1978, was about to move to the USA, I received a letter from the Swedish driving license authority, which announced that they now, one year after the incident in Denmark, had been contacted by their counterparts in Denmark and that my license unfortunately had to be suspended until further notice. I then wrote a letter to the Authority and explained quite clearly how the visit to the neurologist  and the confiscation of the license had happened and asked for understanding of my anxiety not being able to drive which I for my own and my family’s support was dependent on. They quickly sent a friendly reply to L.A., asking me to arrange a medical certificate and approval and the problem would be cleared up. Tapping the right traffic signs and by paying $35 I had then already got a Californian driver license, but it was supplemented in due course with a Swedish license when I had been back home in Sweden and obtained a medical certificate.
The Regment intermezzo was obsolete in a few months. The conditions to make a turn around were nonexistent. The owners disagreed, and the belief in the Regment chain had been driven by Johan Bonnier, who did not have enough support by the Board. He was e.g. disappointed that the chain's president had fallen in love with the female sales manager and at a dinner and at an informal meeting he tried to persuade me to take over the responsibility. “You see, Johnsson, it's the bloody prestige which presses me. What the hell, if Persson (and H & M) can, we can.” I was not even tempted. Partly because Nisse had treated me correctly and partly because I had my future U.S. project and, I was wise enough to realize that I was too ignorant to be able to reverse a trend in a sensitive fashion chain without vision and strategy. A company that was worn down and had too many divisive ideas and desires around the different stores to agree on a new development model.
Our common Bonnier Adventure got its sunny final in California during October 1977. An eventful month. Being married to Gunilla in the Swedish church in Copenhagen, dinner at hotel D'Angleterre, study / honeymoon trip to California, stopped smoking in Aunt Tilly's health food store on Oct21 in Santa Monica, Ca. and the same day I agreed with DR Janov’s former spouse Vivian to start Primal Therapy when I had possibility.
The last two months in 1977, November and December and the first month of 1978, January were the dramatic months of waiting. Bonnier already had plans to divert me into Frosta Fritid. Without knowing how it happened, I had been through and bought Borgs Garner in Lund, an old classic, which would be included in Glimåkra Looms. Words and deeds at the Bonnier Group then was often one. However, I was sitting with a large apartment in Gothenburg at Linnegatan, and the anxiety and stress was hard for me sometimes. One day, the mind ran over and I wrote an angry letter to Bofö and said that unless they quickly helped me out of the uncomfortable seat in Gothenburg, I would immediately sue them.
The letter must have been on the personnel manager's desk the next morning for then he rang, and he reassured me: “Dear friend, please tell us what you want us to do, and we will resolve it within reasonable limits”. The “reasonable limits” covered a fee to Janov, rent in Beverly Hills and other running costs for two years. Everything was done with the approval of the Publisher Abbe Bonnier. I later got the opportunity personally to thank The Publisher for the support, which moved him to tears. He apparently thought of me and made a few additional actions to go with me. Times when I could not live up to his expectations. My internal compass pointed in another direction.
Our relationship has, in principle, been led by the fact that I was correctly treated by Nisse in 1977 and of course that I liked you, and it was for me for many years a natural thing to pay a visit to your shop when I was way past. The "accident" which Nisse met in the 90's while cruising did not worry a "Catholic" like me, and I am glad you got over it.






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