To Re-live / Cure Pain - An Experience Leading To Joy

Primal Therapy, especially applying the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse, was something I intuitively felt would become a life mission. This journey came to mean that I was able to re-live my pain from my birth-trauma (caused by my mothers’s religious bible fidelity) and eventually demystify my epilepsy. Over 40, years, to find the cause of my symptoms has meant a radical change in my life patterns, my feelings and my relationship to the outside world.

My insane birth trauma and its epileptic consequences have forced and propelled an undivided commitment. With innate talent, a skilled neurologist and chemical lobotomy, I bought time and self confidence until I had access to resources and remedies. The help I found through natural therapies, established by ingenious personalities. Art Janov, who was the most important, became my guide and lifeline. With the help of his innovation, The Primal Principle, I could find and re-live my repressed pain. All this happened over many years and in a slow pace and simultaneously I learned to interpret the impact of the reality distorting, however, necessary neuroses (mental “prostheses”) to pass a short-term survival.

Neuroses were a short term blessing, which I used for many years. Then, in reality, I lived, due to my repressed birth trauma as a handicapped. My Tegretol and neurosis were my light “prosthesis”, without which I had not been able to make my way. I learned from Alice Miller about the worst kind of “prosthesis” in connection with her analyzes of the educational methods filled with moral “prosthesis” which made possible, among other things, the Holocaust. A third line, neocortex “prosthesis” replaced and killed, through early, conditional, physical and mental upbringing, the healthy child’s free will and ability to feel. A systematically imprinted obedience instinct was a prerequisite for many, in and outside the death camps, to carry out their heinous tasks, when being ordered by leaders who had been exposed to similar neocortex humiliation as children.

I grew up in a home with parents, who, in adulthood, had established, 3rd line, religious “prosthesis” in their neocortex. Since their religiosity had not followed them from childhood, but had been established at a later stage, they were apparently not entirely comfortable in their “prosthesis”. This conclusion I draw from that they, with the exception of the traumatic biblical birth advice my mother applied on me, later never used any form of coercion against me or my siblings to share their dependence on these religious “prosthesis”. With all its emotional shortcomings, our upbringing was quite free and lax, and we were allowed to, relatively freely, criticize and choose our paths.

The past month, I have, a few times, written about my disappointment when I have met indifference and incomprehension after my therapeutic involvement. The lack of interest has been general and include my closest circles. The pathologic jealousy and inability to rejoice in others’ success, which I read about in Axel Sandemose’s “The Law of Jante”, affects me when I expect others to pay attention to the vitality in which my cure has resulted. My insight about the indifference in the world, becomes more understandable when, upon reflection, I realize that my own ability spontaneously to appreciate others’ successes, is equally limited. When people has approached me with their delight or concern, I have often had “other fishes to fry”.

Despite “The Law of Jante”, it is important to emphasize that no one around me, during all these years, criticized me for my therapeutic involvement, and it has certainly not meant that my life has been boring or painful. My epileptic journey, in all its demanding and painful transitions, has been stimulated by an inner discovery pleasure that ended in a miraculous demystification. Circumstances have often allowed me to live a full life, seasoned by many typical pleasures of the neurotic world. Without having been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I have lived a privileged life that has become more realistic the more I have re-lived my repressed pain / birth trauma. The meaning of my existence has, furthermore, multiplied the last 20 years, in that I have had the joy of seeing a life-affirming daughter growing up.

I am glad to confirm that The Primal Principle certainly, has helped me to re-shape my own destiny and to understand and see the world with new eyes!

Jan Johnsson