Self-therapy. A knife in the chest of my boss. Spring 1993. (Article 22 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Self-Therapy. A knife in the chest of my boss. Spring 1993.

Something is wrong, I'm stuck. I am full of phobias, feeling lousy and sometimes I provoke, and eventually I crawl to get respect from others and from myself. I feel like a parachute that cannot unfold in time. If it is because it is improperly packed or has been triggered incorrectly, I am not sure of.

There are many old feelings that I repress, which creates an overload of feelings and the result will be psychosis and epilepsy followed by fatigue, confusion and passivity as companions. This has been a pattern for over 30 years. How can I cope and how do I fix it? Physical exercise, diet, discipline, and constant changes of home, spouses / partners and environments and workplaces have created enough demanding energy emissions to avoid that the trapped pain energy has not been able to break me down. Several years of training in dynamic therapy took me past the crisis in my forties. Extraordinary challenges, has from my horizon, been a necessity and a “quiet, normal, rhythmic life” with ordinary problems would have triggered some kind of core melt.

I am now 52 years old and have for the fifth time changed cohabitation partner, for the sixth time culture / country, for the twelfth time work and for the fourteenth time accommodation (if I am only counting the main home) in the past 30 years. I'm not physically tired, which I am very rarely. However, my mental capacity and inspiration have gone out as a plug too soon this time, when I got a new boss. My emotional dependence on a manager, who understands me and trusts me, is much higher than I thought. I overestimated my own strength in the relationship with my new boss. He and the executive board had sold a work situation that seemed to fit in perfectly with my profile as a problem solver,  which it does if you only read the job description.

What I have totally missed out on is that the head himself is a serious problem. Not work-rate, he has about the same neurotic energy as I and will never get physically tired, and he has had the good luck to be in the correct place at the right time when a new product success was born so his position is difficult to threaten, and he has, short term, formally all the power which economic success provides. Nevertheless, he is a potential mental risk, not only for me.

He is an engineer with the ambition to be The Manager and his emotional brain is stunted and overall dominated by the logical left side. What the hell have I gotten myself into? The other day when we flew to Hong Kong, he shouted suddenly out loud, that no one who was still awake in SAS business class could have failed to hear it: “You put a knife in my chest and turn on every time you remind me to make personnel decisions”. The poor man could just have talked about the problem, and I would have prepared an elegant solution. However, for once I have got a manager unable to use my strengths. I have a feeling that he sees me as a competitor. Nothing could be more distant. I have no management ambitions. I know my limitations all too well.

Doubts on my part make me paranoid and tear holes in my whole structure if I am to operate with uncertainty and doubt, being the case in my new complex work situation. My madness and my doubts strike both my outward behavior, and my confidence. My inner, intuitive view of the situation and the context is relatively unaffected. I know that behind everything I think and write the relationship with my father is hurting, which was just as disastrous as the one with my new boss and lasted throughout my childhood and until I left home. I have thought and tried to feel through much of what was wrong in our relationship, but right now everything feels like a free fall, and I am equipped with an improperly packed parachute. Each time it is used it folds out wrongly. This is not the case with my hallucinations, petit mall seizures and birth primal. They will be my valves as long as the cooperation may last with another neurotic sufferer.

The relationship with my father was disturbed by the fact that he constantly asked imprecise requirements, indirectly threatened me, never offered understanding and empathy, hid behind a religious filter that distanced me further from him and dried up all the joy of life. He was always mentally tired and slept away the time he could have used to socialize with his emotionally malnourished children. I had as a child the feeling that I constantly had to lie and deceive him to obtain a reasonable life, similar to my comrades.

I quickly became split, one person together with my parents, another person among my friends and a third when I was on my own. I acted socially smart and could jump between my personalities, which meant that I survived and stood the pain of not having any relationship with my father and not really with most of my peers whom I did not inaugurate in my other roles. The relationship with myself is the one that has developed in a trusting way. The relationships with superiors and colleagues, have only in very few cases had upon them trust. The relationships which have been relatively safe has been my relationships with women, then I could be myself. They have acted as a buffer for my conflicts with the male / father figures.

My mother did not have a big emotional spectrum, but a slight, steady flow of controlled warmth against me. With her, I could somehow always talk. We never had a relationship mother to son, but more as a companion relationship. There didn’t exist a problem area which I not, in one way or another, through paraphrase or straight out, could take up with her. That she was religious did not care in our internal relationship. (I remember when I was about five years and mother was baking in the wood stove, and she used a Bible quote, and I suddenly thought to myself while the brain's blood circulation increased dramatically, “I do not believe you mum, when you talk like that, it is not true what you are saying”. From that moment, her religiosity did not affect me very much, and I was liberated for a lifetime, from using religion as an escape.) In order not to go too far in my bantering with her and in order for her to still have a little foot on me, she had a nasty weapon - certainly for herself to survive her relationship with her husband. So when I became too advanced in my conduct, she threatened with my father... So she used the tools which were available, her religiosity was on the practical side.

This relationship with my mother has always made me secure in my relationships with women; with one exception. When someone reminds me of my three years younger and prettier sister, and there is a male "competitor" present I can get the same insecure feelings I had when my sister took over my position with our father, and they dethroned me after I had had three years of exclusivity. I can remember how I emotionally and physically almost was squeezed away. As she was good looking and was my father's favorite a lot of my subconscious efforts later became to seek a female company which would surpass my sister.

If you cannot put into words what you feel, your body will show it.