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

Dreams, third line (prefrontal cortex) and feelings.

A brilliant author, Malcolm Gladwell, has in his book, “Outliers”, written about

entrepreneurs / inventors, musicians and other implementers of complex specialities. He describes how they by a mix of skill, chance and historical favourable circumstances have been given the opportunity to practice their speciality during a very large number of hours before their breakthrough. He shows convincingly that 10.000 hours of practice is a critical limit for those who have had the capacity and luck to combine their talents with offered opportunities. His examples include some of the great classical composers Mozart and Beethoven, Beatles, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods etc..

Inspired by Gladwell’s 10.000-hour theory, I made a simple estimate of my own life in the realm between the third line / cortex and my feelings during my trip to demystify my epilepsy and my neuroses. Even if I make a significant assessment of how I spent the treatment time of my epileptic journey, I’m, with ease, achieving 10.000 hours since I, actively, begun my epileptic journey at the Primal Institute, March 1978. Hours, which I have dedicated to emotions, pain (mental and physical), fits, hallucinations, primals and thoughts. 

First my experiences - due to the link between emotion and neocortex - were very fragmented, confusing and uncertain. My, over many years, constantly repeated re-living of my birth trauma has, gradually, become so automated and natural that they have made a deep impression on my dreams, my subconscious, my intuition and my neocortex. Nowadays, it happens, not infrequently, that I, during sleep / dream, bring up a feeling I had, in some connection, the day before. 

A symbolic situation unfolds and brings up a feeling, for example, of fear, which I quickly decide to experience (in the dream). I feel a stab of anxiety that, often, ends in a fit / birth primal in the dream, and when I wake up, I know what it was, during the day, that triggered my repressed emotions. My epileptic stigma / birth trauma influenced so much of my life that I, in order to survive, developed, often skilfully, a variety of neuroses that grew into my life pattern. The neuroses (non-real needs) that are left can still influence my actions, alerting communication between my third line, my prefrontal cortex and my emotions. If I neglect them during the day, the dream and the emotions take care of them at night and my prefrontal cortex helps me to translate (put words on). The translation in my dreams and in my waking state express themselves in an increasingly similar way.

I have on various occasions expressed my disappointment that I met compact indifference and incomprehension, even from my closest circles, because of my therapeutic involvement and because of the cure of my pain and my new vitality. This I have felt as a sorrow and disappointment equal to the loneliness I had to live with as a child. However, during my journey, I have not been completely lonely. My guide, Art Janov, I met occasionally at retreats around Europe, or I could always rely on getting a letter or email from him, by return mail, when I approached him. The world’s disinterest and lack of understanding may even have been an advantage and a prerequisite for my dedication...

Art Janov, my neocortex and my feelings have not let me down, and I have trusted them!

Jan Johnsson

LIVING IN A BUBBLE INFLATED BY REPRESSED EARLY TRAUMAS.

End My Attempts To Understand Emotions.


End of my futile attempts, the intellectual way, in speech and writing, to advise on how to thaw and / or understand frozen emotions.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that certain things do not work; Cognitivists, for example, never find the low brain-level imprints. 60 million Americans guided by medical and psychological recipe writers, get their symptoms treated with psychotropic drugs, without achieving a long term cure. The beaming happiness demonstrated by many Oscar and Grammy award winners has not cured their early childhood traumas as the cheering crowds hope and imagine until drug abuse and suicide are tragic facts.

I have read books and reflections of Art Janov, Ida Rolf and Alice Miller during 40 years, and I had the good fortune, as one of lucky few, by a combination of fortunate circumstances, to have been touched by Art Janov’s magical wand. The Janov connection meant the making of a journey back into my low brain-level imprints. For me, it was a complicated cruise into the wind / unknown that eventually led to a laborious demystification of my epilepsy and my neurosis. The epilepsy, however, a heavy stigma, was at the same time, in my specific case, a rewarding and significant trauma to process. During the final steps of the journey, I have, in my lucid moments, learned to be quite perceptive to understand my own internal physical and mental conditions, and to some extent also to understand others’s.

It has been astonishing and disappointing to me, after several decades of successful struggle against my repressed birth trauma that I have been surrounded by a compact silence and lack of interest. That goes for everyone around me, including my closest family and circle of friends. With the exception of a handful of insightful relationships, no one has dared or been able to discuss my remarkable improvements, which I’m describing in detail in my book. 

Previously, in relation to my surroundings, I was living in an unsustainable negative bubble inflated by my epileptic symptoms. Now, I have punctured my stigmatic epileptic bubble and live in a positive transparent reality created by the fact that I found my key low-level brain imprints. The question is whether this transparency, over time, can create positive needs among the many living in a bubble inflated by repressed childhood traumas.

Until recently, I have been convinced - inspired by Art Janov - that my repeated stories from my epileptic journey might affect the public’s overall approach. However, as I re-live more and more of my birth trauma, my neurotic force, that propelled my blogging campaigns, has dissolved. I accept better the grief that only very few understand my good fortune of having been virtually cured from my birth trauma. The comfort of this sadness is that I no longer feel a neurotic urge to convince those who not, by their own will, ask for my help.

40 years ago Alice Miller wrote: “Regarding unconscious behavior, I do not believe in using recipes and advice as aids. I do not see it as my duty to appeal to parents to treat their children differently. Instead, I want to try to clarify contexts, provide metaphorical emotional information related to the child within the adult. As long as this little child, within the adult, does not become aware of what happened to it, its emotional life is frozen, and its responsiveness to childhood denials are weakened. It leads nowhere with appeals to love, solidarity and compassion if this important prerequisite for humane feeling and understanding is missing.

For professional psychologists, this fact is of special importance. Without empathy, they cannot help patients with their expertise, no matter how much time they spend on them. Parents are equally unable to understand their children, even if they are well trained and have plenty of time for the kids if they are emotional alien to their own childhood sufferings.” 

Experiences and perceptions about me and a few close friends, in recent years, have convincingly confirmed the stunning regularities of Alice Miller’s statement. Evolution represses unbearable pain / traumas suffered by a child before, during and just after birth. These imprints are not reached by intellectual talk. The pain must be found and re-lived on the same level as the low-level brain imprints.

It has been a combination of luck and determinism that I have been able to establish a sufficient number of favorable circumstances and, guided over 40 years by the same outlier of a genius, Art Janov, I have made the journey through my birth traumas and re-lived the pain that for decades distorted my worldview. However, it is at the same time a hopeless fact that so very many people do not seem to be aware of this alternative route and / or not having the ability and resources to create the factors that will allow them to transform their lives.

Jan Johnsson

Who Failed Philip Seymour Hoffman?

Who Failed Philip Seymour Hoffman?

A few days ago, when I read about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, I got a flashback of his alternating unscrupulous and unhappy action in the movie “The Scent of a Woman” from the early nineties. His charming, open cheeky grin, on the verge of tears and anguish, was etched in my memory. The painful question of his tragic death became, intuitively, easy to understand. 

Two days before Art Janov wrote about Hoffman, in a Reflection I interpret as a disguised PR for the treatment monopoly at the Primal Center, I had in my mind made my own similar reflection over his fate with repressed traumas. They had driven him through a career filled with the need for love and appreciation. Only superficially and temporarily, his acting career could satisfy his early imprinted needs / traumas in an uneven battle against worsening symptoms.

Those who once had been closest to Hoffman, his parents, had “failed” him. First in the early stages as fetus and newborn and later as a divorce child at an early age. Both his ambitious and screwed up parents certainly had been let down / “failed” by their backgrounds and suffered from traumas which the expertise, around the time of the creation of Primal Therapy, had only begun to deal with, with psychotherapeutic means.

The consequences that the parents had “failed” Hoffman was taken care of by, evolutionary, pain-relieving neuroses. This neurosis propelled him into a successful career, a vicious spiral of euphoria and increasingly painful anxiety. A trap and lifestyle made for serotonin supplements and quick drugs, including heroin. As an actor, Hoffman got 20 years of great successes alternating with deep depressions. 

I think it is incorrect of Art Janov to say that all treatments, Hoffman underwent, "failed" him since they were unable to help him re-live his, presumed, early trauma. Probably just as incorrect as to say that Primal Therapy / Art Janov have “failed” all therapists who honestly and ambitiously is making efforts to cure mental pain because, they are not given the opportunity and / or the confidence to access the treatment methods, built on the Primal Principle. Primal Therapy, if developed under holistic considerations, might be used on more than a single isolated clinic in Venice, LA.

A variety of interdisciplinary research has, over the past decades, solved enigmas that have not been due solely to complex technical problems. They have had their roots in cultural, semantic, historical and organizational reasons etc.. It is seldom that a scientist, locked into his technical niche,  arrive at the idea to “apply his scientific neurons and synapses to real experiences”. It is e.g. not a question of talent, memory capacity or stubbornness that a Chinese can remember three times as many digits as an American. The research had to look at causes entirely different.

To read i.e. Malcolm Gladwell’s books, about finding out of things real meaning and consequences, is a fascinating eye-opener. They give great hope that a leap even within the psychotherapeutic treatment will eventually occur when someone dares to develop The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse in a way so that it becomes a safe and obvious choice even outside the Primal Center. 

That PT has not happened on a large scale, so far, has not been caused by that someone has “failed”. Things take time to realize.

Jan Johnsson

An Insider-look at Reliving

An Insider-look at Reliving

Having read the Reflection (Another Look at Reliving) and having been guided by the Primal Principles / Evolution in Reverse, during 40 years, I couldn’t ask for a more accurate description of how I have experienced and understood that the early traumatic input influenced my function and behavior. Since I’m not only a neurotic but also an epileptic, I can underline your statement “It is rarely a brain disease; that is concocted by those who fiddle around in neurons and synapses and do not see the brain reacting to experiences”.

However, modern medicine has to whack “the very early pre-verbal experiences” back. They have to make the world spin around.  For millions if not billions of patients the symptoms / serious diseases like allergies, high blood pressure, cancer etc., etc. is a reality. They have no time to ask “why”. Their pain and their social, political, religious and economical influences are setting the priority lists for science and the scientists. This tremendously accumulated force, which you so persistently criticize, is propelled by evolution.

Your position is the intuitive, brilliant outsider, who sometimes tell about how The Primal Therapy can cure pre-verbal experiences. Sometimes you speak of a flawless development from life before birth, in a world full of people with neuroses, sufferings and often with a shortened life-span. The sufferers need immediate help for their symptoms, and you cannot / don’t want to multiply your therapeutic relief efforts. What is the short-term alternative since you reject the scientists’ efforts?

Fortunately there is a growing group of young people who follow both their instincts and the message of love, touch and attention to the children they put in the world. Research will catch up and, eventually, develop methods to measure, describe / define your intuitive knowing how experience changes us. And I suppose that is what you are after!

Jan Johnsson

INTUITION

INTUITION

Several of my best decisions in life, privately and in my career, had been when I’ve followed my intuition, i.e. when I subconsciously knew, without me formally knowing. Consequently, I had made some of my worst decisions when I did not follow my intuitive gut feelings, but gave in to logic and conventionality. My life as a series of good and bad intuitive decisions looks pretty much like my book “Evolution in Reverse / Demystifying my Epilepsy”. The treatment, that this trip meant, is not established anywhere in any medical and or therapeutic practice, in the world. However, it fitted into the Primal Principles, and I had discreet guidance over 35 years of Art Janov without him ever having uttered what was best for me and what or how to do. He transferred his confidence in the process to me to trust my feelings and my subconscious. The best 15 years of my professional career were based on the elevated confidence of my intuition, which I got from my first experiences in the Primal Principle and what it meant to be pain propelled.

Art Janov’s books motivated me gradually to understand his interdisciplinary neuropsychological explanations. He became the gateway for my growing interest in the explosion of knowledge that has occurred within the domains of the brain and the behavior, especially during the latest 10-15 years. Gradually, I have gained knowledge through many existing researchers, scientists and writers; Damasio, Kahnemann, Kandel, Miller and Gladwell just to name a few well known. To my opinion most of them have sharpened the point which Art Janov has made in his books. Although most psychotherapeutic treatments still generally fail to get out of denial and treatment of symptoms, the brain research has made the influence of the subconscious to an area of interest for a growing number. It is just the beginning of a  liberating wave that will roll on. 

I often, mainly from his Reflections, get a contradictory feeling about Art Janovs intuition. What he says is based on unilateral information from his patient’s experiences and not from his own. By transliterating the patient experience through new research discoveries, Art Janov struggles obsessively to turn his unique intuitive skills, represented by The Primal Therapy, to a new general psychotherapeutic paradigm. However, he needs the current establishment to get his Primal Therapy affirmed in order to establish a new paradigm. To make the problem bigger; it seems that the establishment has the repressive forces of evolution on their side. According to Art Janov, all of the established scientific community who have connections with cognitive therapy are questionable, and Eric Kandel is not the only prominent brain researcher who have been queried by Art Janov. They are all on the wrong train; cognitive therapy, as well as all of the many spin-offs out of his own Primal Therapy... Art Janov is a hard master with so unique rules that very few will find his station.

Disputed treatment results in Primal Therapy, have over the years been explained with the fact that the duration of therapy is uncertain depending on the age of the patient, his / her background and (quite naturally) the nature of the accumulated, unknown / repressed traumas. What once was a quick fix has evolved into a lengthy, often next to life-long treatment process. Art Janov deliberately ignores the importance of a general counselling on issues related to social relationships, career and finances. This sounds like an overlooked, blocked, relic of the happy, golden period when the patient imagined that the entire, expensive, however, quick treatment was supposed to complete in 4 months.

A likeable and logical conclusion, in the ongoing word swap, within the Primal world is;  if the fetus’s need for love, touch and attention are met and if the fetus is not damaged, we will avoid the majority of the staggering number of mental sufferers in the health care. That advice seems to be a safer bet to provide a new psychotherapeutic treatment paradigm, than to believe in a further refinement of the unique intuition that has borne Art Janov’s hallmark for nearly 50 years. We will have to wait for some young revolutionary genius / entrepreneur  - a body / mind pragmatist - within neuroscience who can act interdisciplinary, within the confines of our health care.

Till then, those of us, who want to go beyond the treatment of symptoms, will have to rely on those psychotherapists / guides who know, without knowing and can make snap decisions like one Art made 30 years ago in Bergen, when he turned a grand mal seizure into a birth primal. However, It’s one thing to acknowledge the tremendous power of intuitive snap judgments, but quite another thing, generally, to place our trust in something which is still so seemingly mysterious.

Jan Johnsson

A Collective Dynamic Therapist

To Art Janov,

I agree with some of your concern about the back up given to cognitive psychotherapy by your famous Jewish-American compatriot Eric R. Kandel. Like many, Nobel Prize awarded, scientists even this multifaceted superspecialist in short and long term memories suffers a slight bout of megalomania. He gets, apparently propelled by his selling name, with ease, an article printed in the NYT about “The New Science of Mind / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/opinion/sunday/the-new-science-of-mind.html?_r=0 ”. He seems to suggest, theoretical, cognitive applications without, seemingly, having an extensive own practical psychotherapeutic background, at least not one, which is on par with his, awarded, technical specialities.

I wish you had responded to Eric Kandel’s fourth comment about the biology of mental disorders; “the effects of psychotherapy can be studied empirically”. “Aaron Beck, who pioneered the use of cognitive behavioral therapy, long insisted that psychotherapy has an empirical basis that it is a science. Other forms of psychotherapy have been slower to move in this direction, in part because a number of psychotherapists believed that human behavior is too difficult to study in scientific terms”. I have since 1980 heard and read about your plans and ambitions to make scientific research and studies of Primal Therapy. However, the output that has leaked out has been borrowed from various research papers, and they have been interpreted through conclusions based on a limited number of heterogeneous patients with a dubious long-term value.

Unfortunately, feelings have a lot in common with a mirage. Both are real phenomena, but they have a tendency to dissolve under changing conditions and not allow themselves to be caught. However, I sympathize with your desire; “to bring the emotional and mental into the equation”. I have experienced how mental and emotional provocations have initiated lasting, detectable physical changes in my brain and body in a mindful way.

In 2008, Eric Kandel and Daniella Pollak discovered that it was possible to condition mice to associate a specific noise with protection from harm; a behavior called “learned safety”, which produced an internal behavioral antidepressant effect comparable to medication. So Eric Kandel might after all introduce interesting novelties into his version of psychotherapy and new science of mind.

Eric Kandel as a collective dynamic therapist

Finally, I want to give an excerpt from Wikipedia to show that Eric Kandel has an intuitive feeling for re-living tremendous, collective, imprinted pain:

“When Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, it was claimed in Vienna that he was an "Austrian" Nobel. He said it was "...certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel." After that, he got a call from then Austrian president Thomas Klestil asking him, "How can we make things right?" Kandel said that first, Doktor-Karl Lueger-Ring should be renamed; (Karl Lueger was an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf) Second, he wanted the Jewish intellectual community to be brought back to Vienna, with scholarships for Jewish students and researchers. He also proposed to have a symposium on the response of Austria to National Socialism.”

Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city. His book from 2012, “ The age of insight”, has a subtitle “The quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present”.

Jan Johnsson