Given enough leadtime. (Article 17 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Given enough lead time

At my return from LA, Cal around the end of 1979/80, it looked as if I would eventually end up somewhere in the Bonnier Group. Since they had invested two years of non-traditional education in me including languages, marketing and therapy training, etc. so it was a natural thing when Bofö 1980 asked me be subject to a personnel test, so they could create an impression of my usability.

It was a comprehensive test of an American consultancy group, which had the following conclusion: "Mr. Johnsson has a Superior intelligence compared with-the-selected group and possesses excellent analytical abilities, he is, however, somewhat hampered by interpersonal anxieties (I had in a conscious emotional manner described Primal Therapy for the consultants), but given enough lead time he will maintain a schedule." The phrase "Given enough lead time" I have often thought about during the 30 years since the test. The more I have understood the role of my neuroses and their background, the more I have appreciated the value of having "enough lead time". The phrase definitely strengthened my subjective well-being.

During the past 20 years, or more, DR Janov on and off has asked me to write about my story, tell about my epilepsy and record a dvd presentation about how my primal experiences cured my epilepsy. Often, it had to be fast and I didn’t like that, although I’m  often regarded as a man of quick decisions. At least during three occasions I accidentally found myself in places and situations where my primal experiences have been documented by television companies and various filmmakers. It may have suited the other party, but every time I have felt dissatisfied. They took a snapshot of an adventure that lasted for a whole long life. I did not think I had enough lead time.

A few years ago DR Janov asked for a new 20-minute video presentation. I would produce it in my home in Genovés with the help of a professional presenter. However, it ended up that I refused. There is no possibility in 20 minutes to explain something that has taken nearly 40 years to decently understand. To produce a presentation is not simply a matter of enough lead time. I want to be satisfied with the production afterwards.

I'm glad I refused because the truth was not so easy as being only a matter of entering a concentrate of the last 40-year experiences in a 20-minute presentation. Over the years, a need for the ideal story of how Primal Therapy healed me completely from epilepsy had emerged and  "No more epilepsy" would sit as a heading on a story. There has been an unspoken need, even in myself to push and slide my experiences in the perfect direction and one of the tricks has been to not tell the whole truth. I have, throughout life, as one of my well tuned neuroses had the often short-term profitable characteristic to suppress unpleasant parts of the truth.

An example of a retouched truth had been that I in recent years took a dose of Lamictal, mainly because I did not have peace, space and at a certain degree strength enough  repeatedly to go through my pain, although this has reduced radically. This I have felt as a self-deception and to some extent, as a failure in my ambition as the "perfect" primal patient. Fake truth was thus an equally strong argument, to waive a 20-minute presentation, as the limited time frame. At my next presentation of my story, the aim is that only the objective truth, as far as I can judge, will be allowed.

The letter I wrote to Janov in March 2009, I concluded with:

“To lie, for example to withhold part of the truth has been a “painkiller” my whole life in a pleasant mix of all sorts of personal neurotic actions. Many, probably more appreciated by others than myself. All to eliminate the mental numbing pain that has been part of my life since I was born. I understood early on that no one around me could help me. However, I thought, and felt that with patience I could finally access the truth and that search and that hunt has taken all my life, and I hate that I cannot get my life back. To tell it in a 20-minute  streamlined DVD presentation won’t be possible..

I now have long periods, with normal, wonderful feelings to just exist. For example; talk to, lecture and support my lovely daughter Isabel. To walk in the hills with my dog Puskas and keep in touch with family, friends and neighbors. Being able to write and express myself and solve problems as they arise.” 

Jan

From the sunshine in Beverly Hills to the darkness in Brokamåla. (Article 16 of the history of my epilepsy.)

From January 1980, I lived again back home in Sweden and would, after two different sabbatical years find my way back into reality. The Primal Therapy had not immediately become so disruptive as I expected, even if it had slightly opened the door, and still I was not aware of what an explosive power, the last few weeks of deep connective tissue massage in Ida Rolf's auspices in Boulder, Colorado, would have. My reentry into working life was made easy by the fact that I came home with a new understanding of English, knowledge of marketing from UCLA, human and psychological insights, that primal therapy had given me and in physical form that had rarely been better. Although I lacked a green card, a USA work permit, I had through the contacts in a Swedish listed company had the opportunity to  help out in one of their subsidiaries in Boulder, Colorado. I flew there every week during the year and acted during 2-3 days as a consultant during a reorganization and kept an eye on a talented but alcoholic branch manager.

Offers of work assignments flowed quickly in at an extent that I never needed to be worried about my security. My wife and I lived well on a small, beautiful forest farm in Blekinge, in the south of Sweden. The only downside was the long journeys to my clients in Åhus, Vittsjö and Höör and to the airports in Kristianstad or Ronneby. I had exciting change missions and could arrange my days depending on my nightly therapeutic experiences.

When the delayed effects of the therapies in California and Colorado were set in motion in January 1980, I stood before a dramatic personality development that I only now, 30 years later can understand the full scope of. I often wrote down my experiences and documented feelings and insights which I filed in my red Pandora's Box, which I dragged around as a growing memory over the years. Free from having to follow a strictly chronological order, I continue to relate some of my emotions and memories from those primal experiences.

Thursday, February 28, 1980 after about six hours of sleep I woke up, and I went through an often repeated and involuntary process of hyperventilation and feelings which that morning had passed without major problems. I got started quickly even though I was in no hurry to my work on Anna-Modeller in Åhus and I drove a circuitous route over Lönsboda and Kristianstad.

During the journey, I felt initially in an almost manic mood, singing to myself and acting funny. As a result, I suddenly got up hallucinatory memories of my father in which he blamed me because I did not fit the time and was driving circuitous routes. He thought that “I was fooling around and got nothing done.”  To be serious had at a very early stage in my life  been instilled in me. Too soon, so that it became a pressure and a burden for me. It caused me to doubt and be uncertain about my right to relax and be able to judge what I could take lightly.

When I arrived at my workplace, I had a slight discomfort of a guilty conscience because I was late. However, I was relaxed enough to take time and talk with each of my closest colleagues and felt a pleasant touch with everyone. Between 3 and 4 p.m., I felt tired and decided to leave the job and drive home earlier. My reason for that was that I would do a more efficient job at home. On the way home during the car travel, my nose suddenly became clogged, and violent, painful tension deposited under the eyes and just above the nose, and I tried unsuccessfully to blow me continuously. Panic was close.

Upon my returning home, my wife noted how abnormally clogged my nose was. Despite my condition, I conducted a few tasks in the nearby village. I was extremely tense, and, for example, had a petit mall hallucination during a visit to the library. Then I drove back to the farm, had a bowl of soup and some crisp bread. I had shortly thereafter violent tensions in my stomach, which developed into diarrhea, and this was on during about one hour while I drank mineral water. I lay on top of my bed and woke up at 22 o'clock when my spouse came home. I got up and ate a couple of garlic cloves and a plate of buttermilk and a little oatmeal and took my epileptic medicine and then went to bed again without being able to fall asleep.

Since my wife had been annoyed that I did not want to turn off the light, I moved into the living room and put myself in an old sofa to read for a while.  I gave up reading after half an hour, and fell asleep. After another hour I awoke, I was paralyzed and had a sensation of seizures in my head, without, however, getting any seizure. I fell asleep again, and these unpleasant epileptic sensations returned but this time in combination with that I repeated a short phrase: “oh, oh, oh, oh, it's no true” which I often repeated as an automatism accompanying petit mall seizures. However, I told them in a less rushed and compulsive manner than usual, but there were more repetitions, and they were louder and probably faster.

(The story behind these "ay, ay, ay" phrases originated from when Sweden in 1950  during the World Cup in Brazil lost a soccer game by 1-7 in a degrading way to the host country Brazil. The radio reporter who referenced the match was called Gunnar Göransson and he reiterated an "oh, oh, oh, oh, it is not true" after each goal the Brazilians made. For decades thereafter he was nicknamed "Ay, ay, ay - Göransson" and the trauma I went through with him in 1950 was later, for decades, to characterize my petit mall fits / seizures).

My sounds woke my wife up, and she came into the living room and asked me to move into the bedroom again. She felt bad that she had provoked my move to the living room, a fact of which I was very much aware. I went to my bed and fell asleep immediately, but after a while I had violent dreams of the period in my life when I developed epilepsy in the upper teens. In the dream, I had a fight with my two youngest siblings and was also at odds with my mother who could not comprehend that I would need to be doing Primal Therapy.

The dream turned into extremely painful birth scenes where my head is forced through the pelvis of my mother several times. When I during the dream told this to my mother, she screamed and cried and threw herself on the floor in a demonstration against that I relived something she denied. The dream scenes took place in my room at Alnarp, in the house where we lived until the time when I got epilepsy. The situation was a re-experience and felt like the nights when I got my first major seizures 1959. I did not know then that this was Grand Mall epileptic seizures. I only felt a paralyzing agony for what happened to me.

When I came down into the kitchen of my childhood, still in a dream, I was like a mini baby on the kitchen table, and I told my mother that she should expect to get this kind of a damaged child, because she was so narrow and unwilling to feelings and emotional support. In a nasty threatening way, I quarreled with my siblings, including about eating or not eating a variety of sweet ice cream in pink cones that filled the refrigerator.  Continuously, during these nightmarish arguments with my siblings, I had primal / hallucinations that felt like my head being pushed through my mother's pelvis.

When I finally woke up, my wife was sitting awake and terrified at my side, and she told me that I had cried and whimpered as a newborn baby, and I had been breathing as an infant. She had feared that I should slip into a major seizure. However, this did not happen because a birth primal is identical to an epileptic seizure or rather; a grand mal epileptic seizure is my brain's defense response when the birth process is perceived as impossible to implement by the protection mechanisms in my brain; that by repression takes care of my survival.

When I woke up, I felt an unprecedented space in my head. It felt like an oversized room. A variety of sweet, pleasurable words and thoughts flowed in my head and created an unusual feeling of happiness when I woke up. My nose that had threatened to explode out of my face was like new, and the breathing was easy and amazingly comfortable. During the hour or so I felt a new kind of happiness being alive and of having experienced something sensational miraculously, which I certainly had hoped, deep down in my subconscious.

Most of all I would have liked to phone to DR Janov or to Dr Holden, in L.A., to talk about my sensational experience - 40 years back in time. I had a fierce desire to get attention. The attention I never got from my own father. I was trained to withhold my needs, so I did not call LA ...

When you least expect it, but need it most.

Comments on "MORE ON LANGUAGE AS ANESTHESIA"

Dr. Arthur Janov

Monday, January 3, 2011

More on Language as Anesthesia

We have found that circuits from feeling centers to the top level cortex are stronger and more numerous than the circuits leading down from the neocortex. The implications are that language and thoughts do not change feelings so much, but that feelings do change ideas a lot. Thus the premise for so many insight therapies contradicts how the brain actually works. And explains why those who have undergone insight therapy (in all of its ramifications) have been self-deluded into thinking they are much better. The whole point is that the brain figures out a way to be self-deluded. Too much imprinted pain sets this in motion. And so thoughts go off in the direction of the feelings. If we feel like a loser then we give up trying to go to college or to study, in general. Or don’t try to get the girl or guy of our dreams. After all, “Who would be interested in me?”

We have to think, “Why would the brain grow itself in a certain direction; a direction that evolves to repress feelings? How is that a survival mechanism? Think: suppressing feelings helps survival. It has to do with blocking menace, the danger from terribly painful feelings, and

then we have to wonder where do those powerful feelings come from and what are they like? They are mostly imprinted from our womb-life and birth and are memories of what we had to do to survive. Those behaviors become fixed and drive our lives. When a fetus, for example, is probed (in amniocentesis) he withdraws and he shows signs of withdrawal. He grimaces as if in great pain, which he is. And his pain chemicals, stress hormones, rise radically. He is learning what to do in times of danger; withdrawal, removing himself from the scene, is one approach. Because the experience is life-threatening the system remembers it as a heuristic experience (setting guidelines for future behavior). In short, there is a flight to the head, to the intellect; a flight away from feelings and toward something that will reduce the danger. And what is that? Ideas and beliefs. It is the last in evolution and is our most precious defense. We can rationalize and theorize; we can project blame and mentally escape from the danger of terror that lies below so much intellectuality.

So in a strange paradox we flee to our heads to escape feelings and that flight is what becomes dangerous. We live in our heads or take drugs for further suppression, or we drink to help sequester our feelings, but no matter what the feelings never go away, grinding away inside, wearing down the system. They are treated as alien forces by the system; the enemy who must not be allowed to attack us from inside; hence we take blocking-medication to keep the attack from inside from happening. The drugs slow down or block the message from rising to the level of conscious/awareness. So we can think we are fine because we have blocked out of awareness of the painful feelings.

Language is the last evolutionary weapon we have against ourselves! Isn’t that strange? We develop something that can combat our own experience. And shunt it aside. And which allows us to pretend it never existed; and instead of feeling bad because of it we have the tools to make ourselves feel good; a self-deluded state that we all can share. That is what is universal, repression and denial. Wonderful.

Now how is that we evolved a thinking brain that anesthetizes pain? When we think about that too much we get into theology. I prefer science. We first impress pain into the system; we register code and store it for the future and then we develop a system to block it from conscious/awareness. We smother it with thoughts; and you thought they were a wonderful new addition to the human being. They are, and they are also this pharmacy of painkillers which is also wonderful. The system knew it could not go on under a terrible load of pain and find love and avoid danger. So it pushed it aside in order to remain stable and functional. Those who could not set pain aside are the ones who are dysfunctional. And what are those terrible pains? Lack of love, by my definition, of lack of fulfillment of basic need. So it must follow that we need love more than anything. We need it for life, for survival, for sanity. We need it to maintain the basic physical and physiologic structure. Otherwise, we don’t grow properly and our organs do not evolve correctly. Think of it: we manufacture chemicals that block the experience of pain. They do not block pain; that is another matter, although scientists are now close to removing the biochemical elements that build into pain. But most of us will settle for not knowing about it. Repression is the original denial. It denies reality, a reality that lives on a different level of brain function; on a different level of consciousness.

Look a the cult leaders; they hypnotize us with their promises of fulfillment, if not in this world then in another of their choosing. And it is indeed hypnosis; grabbing our need and twisting it so that we no longer are conscious. We follow blindly. We obey without question. And we do so in psychotherapy. They lull our critical capacities so that they are rendered useless, and then they move in to control and manipulate us.

One of the crimes of the century, not including the holocaust and other disasters, is the psychotherapy of denial; for that is what nearly every therapy extant practices. It makes patients more repressed, hence sicker. It helps bury reality, through medications which are designed for that, and through insights and beliefs that shut out the truth of our existence. I mean just a bit of neurology will tell us that the prefrontal area has a major role in blocking feelings. How on earth can we enlist it for change? We are putting the mask of anesthesia over the brains of our patients and we are calling it therapy. Let’s stop the crime!

How to pin a butterfly. (Article 15 of the history of my epilepsy.)

How to pin a butterfly.

Over the years there have on and off appeared mental states which for various reasons have fascinated me and which I wanted to capture and put into words. It could have been everything from humor and dreams to states outside the usual that challenged me. The challenge was primarily for me to create a verbal description of phenomena that do not have any given interpretation. It has not been easy, and it has felt like trying to pin a butterfly with a spear.

My experiments with neurosis and epilepsy in different therapeutic contexts have given me many occasions to experience feelings. If they were not caught in the drain, the brain and the neuron clusters of the memory would soon have oscillated into new combinations and the experience that had passed could be difficult to repeat. Own feelings and dreams are relatively “easy” to catch compared with the mood, including mood swings, which may affect another person.

I have wondered about my need to document these moods. The answer is that if I am living with a person, who with some regularity exhibit reactions, which do neither comply with the general picture of the person concerned nor with either mine or the person's self-granted image, then it can be of help to endure or to use as an aid if I want to move forward.

One such example was an apparently stable woman, who gave a balanced and safe impression, who seemed to have the situation under control, radiated experience and reflection, and whose maturation solved the problems of life without apparent hesitation. A seemingly good state for someone to feel comfortable with and be married to.

Out of the blue, without apparent reason, when we “sat quietly in the boat” it shook violently and the steady-state blew away in a trice and the entire ship trembled. Where it before shone a powerful and quiet soul, there was suddenly only panic from which anxiety and pain poured out. All common sense was gone. Threats, accusations, cruelty, screaming, crying, and impervious to any factual arguments created a terror-like atmosphere that was panicky and unmanageable. A painful soul discharge.

Being a good participant and spectator in the process my own buttons were pushed down and caused a disappointment that this occurred again and made it just as a number of practical problems had been successfully resolved. It was a sense of having been cheated, not so much by the person's conscious behavior as by nature's seemingly unreliable reaction. Apparent unreliability, the pattern of which represents imprinted pain, which is hidden in the memory and brain of the person who collapsed.

With my experience from different painful states of anxiety, I know that it is utopian to believe myself capable of, as a spectator, diagnosing the cause of the incident, just as difficult as it is constantly to act cautiously and carefully to avoid the heart-rending nerve crashes. (Attempts in that direction abort all the spontaneity and naturalness, and an unconscious adaptation to an increasingly controlled and unnatural behavior will take place.)  Since we in the immediate vicinity also had our personal flaws, it could happen that self-control released, and the subconscious could not suppress one, as we thought well-funded needle stick. The frequency of these needle sticks, conscious or not, could subsequently increase, a fact the woman often interpreted as the root of her pain. 

The frequency of the collapses intensified and became increasingly a pattern. The overall pain and tension had found a valve to release its pressure and in the end, it was impossible to suppress or redirect it (which incidentally is not without risks). Medical treatment, medication, or therapy might have been alternative solutions, but this was something that the woman during her stable periods wouldn’t accept. The paradox of this kind of situation is that even in the repeated mental collapses, there is a security, albeit limited, that the process is known...

The mental collapses were not only washed over us in the immediate vicinity, but they penetrated us, and more than one epileptic hallucination provoked by the mentally twisted situations have occurred. I stayed and tried to suppress my feelings to get through the crisis when an escape from the situation would have been the best choice at an early stage, but there was a child, so I avoided this option.

The child, a girl, often causes dramatic reactions close to jealousy in her mother. The girl knows the mother's reaction patterns and knows what will happen if she is acting in the favor of her father. It belongs to the image that both the girl and myself, for the most part, represent a Swedish culture of freedom with responsibility, which means that I soon began communicating with the girl as an equal peer, while the mother represents a Spanish / Latin culture of discipline, obedience, but with many physical contacts and feelings in which they emotionally never cut the umbilical cord. Those facts, of course, played in as an undercurrent and participating factor in the repeated breakdowns, while they for long periods gave ground to much joy and positive experiences. Without the mental breakdowns, by whatever reasons they were triggered, a mix of Swedish and Spanish upbringing could have developed into a success.

A collapse can be described from several different approaches depending on the individuals, causes, effects, and consequences. Surely, we have all three diverging opinions in line with our relatively strong personalities. In my case, I’m trained in arguing and giving reasons for and against which easily can create a risk that I convince the other party of something that is uncertain which in turn increases the risk that I convince myself even more that my argument is accurate. What I am trying to say is that in most relationships we are living with relative truths, which often work for the family’s and the individual's advantage, a modus vivendi. From many points of view, I think we were a normal case if we look away from the emotional collapses. However, even when the mother was right, the collapse occurred and the anxiety and depression, driven by the underlying latent pain, was a fact.

Normally, the process took 3-5 days, and then suddenly everything worked on the surface as if nothing had happened. It may surprise that the stability so soon regained its form, and life went on. I could, despite my insights into how the brain's defense mechanisms work to deal with unbearable pain, wonder if what I had experienced really had occurred. I was relieved but could sit with a bad conscience while I pondered whether I had been the cause of the abscess to burst and if it would have ruptured anyway on its own. A confusing experience it was, and I hoped that it would not happen again, or if it should happen, then at least not for long ...

Can you prepare and predict the timing of the outbreak, which likely will come? With many years of experience, my answer is maybe. I knew from experience that they would come, but not when this would happen. There were certain patterns that went on, but the infernal (and profoundly logical) with them was that these patterns were “the stability” which we would have liked to be permanent. It is when a fake, apparently stable, and safe conduct passes over into being manic that depression lurks. It is at this moment when the seemingly confident person himself feels sure about his stability and feels euphoric and places the struggle which in the most refined way leads to the brain's internal production of analgesia. With the brain's own painkiller in neutral and with external psychiatric drugs, for reasons of principle, being banned the pain broke through and chaos became a fact. An imprinted pattern. A perpetual motion. 

Our marriage ended in January 2009 after one crash too much of the kind I have described. We lived together for 18 years.

The marriage should have been a port in the storm but was often a storm in the port.

Janov's Reflection on Language as Anesthesia

Dr. Arthur Janov

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Language as Anesthesia 2

In our evolution we had the brain stem and limbic structures to handle outside danger. But our neuro-physiology in all of its wonder also “decided” how to handle internal danger: our stored feelings. There seemed to be a migration of cells upward and forward to develop a neocortex that could not only deal with outside menace but from inside, as well. “Deal with” is perhaps an exaggeration because what that new (neo) cortex does is suppress feelings. It also connects them to where they should finally go for full consciousness. But for the moment let’s concentrate on the menace. Thoughts evolved in part to anesthetize feelings. Ay ay ay. Could that be true? Do we have an internal anesthetic that the brain produces? Of course, it is the basis of nearly all pain-killers and tranquilizers that mimic the chemicals we produce inside of us.

So what happened? Well we went from the primtive nervous system to an higher order affair; from instincts to thoughts and beliefs, and those beliefs also are wonderful anesthetics. Witness all of the religions and cults. I was thinking about this when I watched TV the other day and saw the ads; almost all were for painkillers, Aleve, aspirin, Tylenol ad nauseum. Everyone seems to be hurting and almost everyone believes. Is that an accident? A strange coincidence? Don’t think so. Some of us take our painkillers straight; others go to India to find some belief system. So many actually think that some guy in India knows all the secrets of the universe. Nobody does. You know that an expert is a guy from out of town. The further we go, the more we expect from the “expert.” So allow me to repeat: no one in the world knows more about life than you do. All of those secrets of your life lies just below the top anesthetizing level. All you need is access, and you will become the expert you wanted from that guy in India. We actually need that “guy” or “girl” because we are so driven by our unconscious that it is all a mystery; for that we need an expert. Actually, I am that guy and I am not in India; I am in Santa Monica, as mundane and prosaic as that seems. The reason I am that guy is I can help you with access to your unconscious. I can help you find yourself and your own answers. I can never find your secrets out of my own brain. That would be ridiculous; and oh yes, you think a shrink knows those answers? Guess again, and I underline “guess.” You are buying that guy in India again only now he is in Beverly Hills in a nice suit. If he doesn’t help you with access, he is of no use.

I know I went to those shrinks for battle fatigue or whatever they called it in those days. And we did dream analysis. Ridiculous. I know how ridiculous it is, because I practiced it for years. When I discovered Primal I called many of those patients back and told them I was wrong and I think I have it right now. Some came back and some didn’t. They thought they were fine.

So here we have a feeling system, the amygdala, hippocampus and other structures, and over time some of those wily little cells began to migrate and they formed its antithesis; a pure dialectic. They formed the anti-feeling; not to be confused with the anti------. And the circuits leading upward were much more robust and numerous than the circuits from the cortex to the limbic system. Now we go to a cognitive/insight therapist who insists that the new insights and changed ideas they help you with can change those feelings; when everything in neurology militates against it. It is far easier for feelings to mount up there than for ideas to go downward and put down feelings. Still we try, and when we cannot, we use painkillers that simply add to what the brain already produces to shut down pain. Don’t forget that past feelings and needs are engraved into our nerve circuits; we are not going to eradicate them so easily. And they are not meant to be eradicated, in any case.

Jan Johnsson’s comments on

Languages as anesthesia

I am a living example of that you are the guy, who can help us find the access to our unconscious. How did I find you? By insights and marketing!!! When I read the Primal Scream, I got my first insights. The general interpretation of an insight comes from the Greek word noesis and is the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively.

I know  that you are skeptical about marketing. Nonetheless, the Primal Scream was an excellent example of marketing and fulfilled perfectly the interpretation of an insight in marketing:

“Insights are most effective when they are/do one (or more) of the following:

   1. Unexpected

   2. Create a disequilibria

   3. Change momentum

   4. Exploited via a benefit that your brand/therapy can deliver.”

However, Primal Therapy, was, and even more now, is up against serious gigantic competitors (operating in oligopolies) like, for example, the pharmaceutical industry and the cognitive therapy treatment. This is caused by the fact that the society needs efficient and rapid solutions, even if they develop side effects and shorten our lives.

I needed Primal Therapy to be able to stay alive today. At he same time, I needed as well the pharmaceutical products as I needed the physical structural integration of the Rolfing. Maybe I was lucky to have developed epilepsy? If I tried alcohol and drugs they triggered seizures, like sex, coffee, and sugar, and if I tried cigarettes, I developed asthma. My dope was languages and, by mental preparation, to be one step ahead of my surroundings. I needed over the years to find an equilibrium to loosen my fascia in my body structure and  gradually to quit the painkilling rat poison, Tegretol, which prevented my seizures. By following the Primal Principal, I could start to feel the original pain and resolve my neurosis (the use of this word now almost eradicated by DSM).

There exist a proverb “If you can’t beat them, join them”. The problems of P.T. are often blamed on a few suspects/issues. It is tempting to think that we can solve the problems of P.T. by tackling these issues. But we cannot. These issues reflect basic human motives and are unavoidable.

However, the same motives drive us forward. P.T. must establish itself as a credible player and must build alliances. It must recognize the need for other elements in the treatment.

P.T. is complicated and must constantly develop repeatable, quality, auditable processes for its treatment.

Passion for the therapy and it’s process. People are motivated by an inherent interest in the human body and brain and the quality of life. An organization that encourages this passion will benefit from a general respectability. Be it in California, India, Sweden or wherever we look.

Jan Johnsson

PS

In 1492 when Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean, he believed he had reached the East Indies. Hence the name Indians of the original inhabitants of America was born. 

This is your life. (Article 14 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Lasse Strömstedt

This is your life.

Lasse Strömstedt was a known jailbird who became a writer and journalist and often appeared on television. At the end of April 1984 Lasse Strömstedt was the main character in the television program "This Is Your Life" and as usual during these programs the television personality Lasse Holmqvist was the presenter. During the program Lasse Holmqvist made fun of Lasse Strömstedts story of a birth trauma that he had experienced, and it prompted me to send the following letter to Mr Holmqvist:

“Thanks for a wide range of "This Is Your Life", which is a program with high involvement and unusual approaches. Since it is live broadcast everything that is said can be less accurate and thought through. The positive points outweigh the negatives, and sometimes it feels human with a natural mistake.

During the program about Lasse Strömstedts life, such an ignorance and humiliation were presented, that I suspect if from your side is a naivety which, however, unfortunately, can have severe consequences due to your popularity and the impact you have on the television screen. I am referring to the sequence in the program when you ask Strömstedt if he has any idea what might be the reason for his criminal orientation. Strömstedt then in a fascinating and insightful way tells us about his childhood. The home had been simple and very normal, however, what appeared to have been less normal were his birth records, in which it was documented that he had been born blue in the face with the umbilical cord wrapped several times around his neck. You turned this fact into an amusing point. You made fun of this serious birth trauma not only once, but allowed yourself at the end of the program to laugh it off again together with the exposed Mr. Strömstedt, who had had his life spoiled during many years as a jailbird based on neurotic complications probably due to this particular birth trauma.

The undersigned is no psychologist who feels stepped on sore toes. I can indeed be very skeptical about the flummery which many psychologist can accomplish by putting labels. However, I believe in a trustworthy USA research showing that a criminal coercive behavior often can be linked to a dramatic birth. A difficult, life-threatening birth, being restrained in the birth canal, where pain caused by, for example,  suffocation and strangulation can create lifelong imprints, which later are compulsively repeated symbolically as a neurotic act out. This continues until the pain either leaves the system or the person dies by a heart attack or cancer, which occurs prematurely because the body and heart are worn out by the trapped tension due to the overwhelming painful trauma that was imprinted into the brain's memory.

Like Strömstedt I was born first (a fact that may cause a difficult birth) and suffered throughout my childhood (which took place in a seemingly good environment) of hyperactivity and could not concentrate and use my talent. At the age of 19 I suffered from epilepsy and was subsequently treated with anti-epileptic medication, which pulled down my tempo and put a filter over my anxiety so that I could live a “normal” life and pursue a career in business both in and outside Sweden. I married and had children and divorced and married and divorced, so I lived seemingly normal...

My old pain which lay latent in my body and mind and fueled my neuroses, and I knew that  I could not keep myself together much longer. 1978 I went to the United States and sought treatment at a different therapist, DR Arthur Janov, who some years previously achieved considerable success with his book ‘The Primal Scream’, in which he describes how he almost by chance found a key to relieve repressed pain which the brain, when the pain was intolerable, had closed off to create the conditions for immediate survival. At first the book was interpreted speculatively by psychologists and followers. Primal therapy needed time to evolve and as the Janov way has been tested and verified by research institutes worldwide, it has gradually been defused although the final breakthrough is still delayed.

After that I have felt how my seizures have turned into my traumatic birth process, which had many similarities to the Strömstedt story, they have changed in character. It is nowadays possible for me, if I have the right environment and correct conditions, to re-experience a birth primal, rather than an epileptic seizure. The normalization over a 4-5 year period, has meant that my fingers have grown about 10-15 mm. The size of my gloves has gone from S to M. As my neuroses dissolved and my insights into my traumas have increased so has my need for painkillers, for example, coffee, cigarettes and liquor as compulsive painkillers completely disappeared, and I can now at times celebrate and use them as a mere stimulant.

In the meantime, I have undergone Primal Therapy in Los Angeles as well as Paris. I have seen a large number of patients undergo miraculous normalizations due to the Janov ingenious techniques by which they have made connections to and re-experienced past life-threatening painful traumas. Patients have included alcoholics, drug addicts, victims of rape, rapists, etc., and patients with a multitude of psychological and somatic sufferings. It is not a quick fix, but it can take a long time to fully re-experience the entire painful process that the brain in a very earlier stage has not endured but turned off.

A program on brain development was produced by a French television crew, and I participated in a dramatic episode, filmed at a treatment 1982. Firm documentation is available from all over the world to suggest that birth traumas often cause wrecked lives. This is something you can have had without ever having been a jailbird. I have been lucky myself and managed to keep me on the right side of the law. My anxiety, however, I haven’t been able to cheat, but it drove me to seek proper treatment. That was why it hurt so badly when you sneered at Strömstedts explanation, and you assumed that he was not entirely serious with what he meant was the cause of a degrading life as habitual criminal.

Everybody is not fortunate enough of being born according to Frederick Leboyer's advice, on a natural and harmonious birth, that gives physically and mentally healthy people. Many of the inevitable traumas that has occurred and always will occur can be resolved by therapies (in a state when body and brain have become more robust) for example, Primal Therapy, which can access and relieve the pain that was turned off when the brain was too sensitive to cope with it.”

Hoping to have planted a seed.