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What it is that makes us feel calm and relaxed when we get a hug from Mom? It is as easy as it raises the level of oxytocin, a mammalian hormone. Moreover, the research study conducted by Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin Child Emotion Lab, demonstrated that even a phone call from Mom has the same effect as a hug. ("Call Mom and You will Feel Better." Oxytocin is a key component in the internal chemistry to create cohesion. My epileptic and obsessive life has apparently been seriously fragmented and isolated. It has led me to reflect on my oxytocin levels and my ability to bond.
I've been through a large number of divorces and breakups. I have changed jobs about every three years. I had a home on more than 30 different locations in 6 countries and to be understood I have had to deal with 4-5 different language. If I compare to my siblings, friends and colleagues I cannot be regarded as normal. Does that mean I could not bond with those with whom I had a relationship, whether it was relations due to marriages, friendships or professional contacts?
That is not how I feel myself. Of course, I met people, private and in professional contexts, with whom a relationship did not work, and we parted ways soon. In general, I have no record of not being able to maintain a relationship together or feel close because lack of affection. My inner hindrances drove me repeatedly to relieve me, and changed my complete external world. The changes were often as surprising to myself as they were to others. For my own part, there was a significant additional effect, an immediate and tremendous, temporary relief.
My first three years of life were well, and I asked for and got breast milk until I was two years. My home was safe. Our parents were on hand for me and my siblings, even if as time passed hormone creating hugs were exceedingly rare if not nonexistent. Our home and the place where we grew up was in a beautiful park, and I had lots of playmates from different social backgrounds. My parents were religious (but not excessive) which created a filter to be different which I perceived as a negative situation because it made it difficult to participate in certain worldly amusements and I did not receive many hugs and kisses. Our little community Alnarp, which was a horticultural and agricultural university, formed an extremely tight and rank hierarchy, where each one frightfully guarded his territory and where there was a fear to be different. In retrospect, it appears that there existed serious mental problems in several families, which they of course tried to hide.
Deviate I did in some respects, and I was always on the go, knowing everybody. I knew how to behave, and my friends' mothers, who I assumed had the same attitude to me as my own mother, often could not resist my charm. Since I belonged to the middle class, I could move freely up and down the social ladder with a natural comfort and found amusing experiences at both the poor and the wealthy side. My mother stimulated my climbing tendencies. These ambitions did not stop me from more often sympathizing with the underdogs than the wealthy, since the former were better at showing real emotions.
If I try to summarize my memories, thoughts and feelings from my life between 5 and 15 years old I would consider myself as a sweet, restless, fetching young lad who could wander in and out of any situation at any time. In my dreams, I followed the same pattern. I even went one step further, and could move where I wanted, and I could create the resources, and the strength needed, to protect and inspire the outside world, and I could challenge and crush anyone who stood in my way. Much of the instructions I received by reading Superman, Batman, Phantom and Tom Mix comic magazines that I had to borrow from my friend Anders, who could afford that "evil" (according to my parents) literature. However, I was never regarded as a dreamer. I was no outsider who watched, but I participated in everything. Nevertheless, I felt lonely and restless. Things had to happen, and changes had to take place. If I had exhausted all options, I took to my dreams.
At age 16, I took the Lower school certificate and did not want to continue in high school. I could not concentrate and was mentally too split. I felt often smarter than my friends, but I did not want to follow them. I was afraid of being an underdog from a social point of view in a future high school environment that was tougher competition than the secondary school level. I felt like an outsider, and my parents neither could nor tried to do anything about it. My father had by assaulting me in a fit of desperation five years before played away all the confidence and authority, he would have needed to get me to be reasonable.
Between 16 and 19, I worked up to my first epileptic seizures. The age from 5 to 15 had been a modest but restless travel. However, the next four years became, painful, bad, often embarrassing but nonetheless, highly useful and instructive. All that had kept myself together reasonably well in a functioning way in an environment above average safe was suddenly gone. I continued to live at home, but I now wanted and had to take care of myself.
I had chosen to work instead of studying, and it meant a whole new world, which had nothing in common with the previous summers' potato or beet picking experiences between school years. This meant that I got an enriching ”street education” when I learned a lot of tricks for the future, and I met people of a new and unexpected kind. I had luck when I went through those many times questionable experiences. However, sufficient fear prevented me from crossing the border to prohibited activities, from which it certainly would have been difficult to recover.
During those years, I read much fiction, dailies and weeklies, and, for example, two sports editors, Torsten Tegner (TT) and Birger Buhre (BB) were my gurus. There was a rebel in each of them, which appealed to me. They kept me on track. One (TT), I corresponded with and got his dedicated books, and the other (BB) I occasionally met during the winter seasons in the sauna, in Ribersborg, Malmö. From many aspects, I've borrowed ideas from these two personalities throughout my life.
As strange as it may seem, perhaps mostly to myself, I lived during those four years in my parents' home at Alnarp and always enjoyed the full services of my mother, which I paid for. She never criticized me so that I experienced it in a negative way, and I always felt safe with her. Probably she needed me as much as I needed her, and we stuck together. My father was often depressed and tired, and we avoided each other and what in retrospective has surprised me is that despite his religiosity he never demonstrated moral regurgitations of whether I smoked, drank and had girls in the room. He neither had the ambition nor the strength to bother about me. My sturm und drang period could not have taken place in safer conditions. When I eventually got sick, and when epilepsy was a fact, I did not lose face because I still had my home base to start from, and thus the recovery could be carried out surprisingly quickly.
My first marriage lasted from 1966 to 1974 and my then spouse I had met the first time when I was 19 years. We began a serious relationship around 1962 and we married in 1966. The marriage, however, increasingly impoverished because all my excess energy went to work, evening studies (under five years, I took the student exam and a master's degree in economics and management with the psychology as an optional topic). From 1968, my career took off gradually and after a few years we moved to Denmark with two children and a cat, which was then a radical step for a young family. Two years later, in 1974, a headhunter seduced me for a job in Gothenburg. It lasted four months, and then I received a new job offer back in Denmark. My wife refused to move again, and was heartily sick of me, and we parted. It was a painful divorce. I survived because I pulled out of a job I should not have accepted in the first place, and, within a few months, I met and fell in love with my second spouse.
With my first spouse, I have over 50 years maintained a respectful contact, and we had over the years no problems to reach agreements on decisions concerning the children, and we could also go on foreign holidays together 10 years after the divorce. Although we have developed in entirely different directions over the years, there is still a sense of some coherence.
With my second spouse, the marriage lasted from 1975 to 1982, and we passed along a turbulent but exciting time, and she experienced the two years in LA as intensively as I when she studied art. We parted in 1982 but has maintained a long friendship. As late as 2009 she found out that, by mistake, she had forgotten to register a property, in her name, as the court had ruled at the divorce.
My home is a collage of furniture, paintings and gadgets each with their own unique memories of people, jobs and memorable occasions. They give me now and then kicks of bonding and oxytocin, and they represent a form of a positive relationship with my own life and history, and what has meant something to me.
Bert is an old friend who I met in Spirella 1968, when the company changed owner. He has been my boss, colleague and friend through good and bad. He may have more ideas of Primal Therapy than many of my fellow patients. I do not think he needs it. He is at 77 despite his football knees, so bright and well I had hoped myself to be. He has met the women I married and lived with, and he was certainly sad when I broke up. He never criticized me and was a social support, even if he let me know that neither he nor his wife liked that my wives disappeared out of the picture. For Bert, I have tried to explain the impact epilepsy has had on my backing out and start all over. If he has got a clear picture, I am not sure, but I am, however, convinced that he believes that my epilepsy and my birth experiences have something to do with my seemingly irrational behavior in various contexts.
To prove, at least for myself, my ability to stay in touch, I could have continued with a long list. That is not my intention, but my point is that I undoubtedly have been able to maintain many contacts and simultaneously experience needs to back out of important relations in order to survive. My neurotic feelings have then been that I could not get out (like when I was paralyzed and locked in the birth canal. A repetition of the horrible confusion to first fight in one direction, and then, suddenly, be pulled in another). It has, for example, for many years been a nasty joke for me that I cannot find my way when I'm on the road without first driving the wrong way. There has been persons who believed that it was due to laziness and lack of interest to find the way properly, but, unfortunately, it was not that easy.
I have tried and tried again to get out. If I did not try, it was because I had an epileptic seizure. So I have tried since 1940. Now I know that I did not come out the normal way, but when both my mother and I were totally exhausted and stunned I was violently sucked out with the ass first, breech, and was nearly strangled. I almost choked when I was trapped during 48 hours in the birth canal, and when Ifinally was drawn out backwards I was close to being strangled by the umbilical cord. My mother's intention to give birth with pain was crazy, but she had the idea in cold blood from the Bible. She loved me in her own timid and discreet manner throughout her life. I was the person she felt close to, and we retained that feeling, via long telephone conversations where ever I found myself until I was well into my 50s.
My life pattern has been that, after some years of a successful effort in a project of whatever kind, I felt a compelling need to get out of my relationships. When the feeling of being trapped occurred it felt like a matter of life and death, especially when the relationship ended in a deadlock, and I lost my ability to fight and act. The entire process took between 3-5 years (marriages 1-2 years more) before I backed out. A habitually repeated pattern in the process before withdrawing was that I was stuck and had thoughts of suicide. It was the same experience as when I felt and experienced the birth process with all its pain and terror. If I failed to relive it and if I did not eat anti-epileptic medication an epileptic seizure occurred.
It would have been difficult to go through all these events and still maintain a significant number of contacts without bonding capabilities.
A wife of many years of a marriage one day said to her husband: "I know you always loved me, and so you still do, I hope?"
The spouse with a troubled face: "Yes, but do not remind me about it!"
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