A Look In The Rear Mirrors During My Journey.

After having presented more or less half of my Epileptic Journey during a couple of months, I feel a need to make a few conclusions of certain reactions and experiences. My need to comment on my reactions is based on the fact that a few small nuisances are leaking into my general satisfaction of having been able to make a presentation of my lifelong collection of memories and facts of my feelings and sufferings.

The biggest irritation is caused by the paradigm which in general is represented by the school of cognitivism. They try to develop a capacity to exercise cognitive control in their patients. The reason for my own negative reactions to cognitive control is because their repressive techniques provoked my leaky gates and stimulated my epilepsy. It did not take many meetings with cognitive therapists to become allergic to their kind of verbal, intellectual treatment and to their antidepressants. The cognitive therapist on their side responded by considering me as a hopeless case.

However, in a complex world I can understand that many suffering patiens can be helped, at least a short term, by both cognitive therapists and prescriptions of painkillers. The most cognitive therapist, I honestly think, are good. That is why I reacted negatively when Dr Janov said that “the psychotherapy of denial is one of the crimes of the century, not including holocaust and other disasters”. He is correct in that the patients become more repressed. They escape reality through medications and through insights and beliefs. However this is due to the existing Paradigm, which neither Dr Janov, nor others, over 30 years have been able to change.

Talking to other friends on the cognitive side, they blame me for being too fixated to the Janov Therapy, which has proven to work in my favor and to save my life. They think that I’m smearing the skilled profession of cognitive therapists. I’m not. I’m regretting the shortcomings of a paradigm within psychotherapy which nobody has been able to change. So far, too few have been willing to accept the new principles of “evolution in reverse” to establish a new paradigm. I’m sure the components for a change of paradigm are avaliable. We have to wait another time for an unselfish, entrepreneurial innovator to put the last pieces into place in this puzzle game.

I have been through a great number of 2-3 year periods of painkilling, euphoric projects of both professional and personal experiences. They have been exiting, both by their nature and because of the relative success they have yielded. I can certainly understand that most people prefer a repressive treatment with the help of painkilling insights, words and drugs instead of feeling pain over a long and uncertain period of time. If I had not had epilepsy, leaky gates, and if I had not had periods of horror and anxiety I would not have gone either to Primal Therapy or Rolfing. Even if I knew that my life would be shorter than normal. Success and painkillers of any kind made me, in reality, dumb, and it was possible to accept when I deluded myself because I thought during the anesthesia that I was intelligent. As Dr Janov says: “What a dilemma!”

One thing which funny enough has not been irritating me is that there existed, at times, frequent element of religious commitment among the comments on Dr Janovs Reflections. They try to bring up the best of feelings with a lot of friendly, positive words of love and support. However, not avoiding in a subtle way to express that Jesus will be with us. I like their support and need for Primal Therapy, but can smell the pain in their disguised cognitive approach to Primal Therapy.

Art’s Reflections is a brilliant source to own thoughts, and they give an excellent training in both feeling through my experiences and putting words on them. These processes, to act and react, give me ample opportunities to modify and straighten out murky thoughts before I publish my posts on the blogg.

A great joy during my presentations of my articles on my blogg has been the fact that I have signed up for a package of sessions in Rolfing, Structural Physical Integration. I have found a well trained and certified Rolfer, Jordi, who is as pure a Rolfer as I could have wished. Through my experiences from being Rolfed in Boulder, Col., 1979, having been through Primal Therapy during 40 years, I am now prepared to enjoy, understand and further to develop myself.

I’m writing small reports to my blogg after each session and that way I enjoy the treatment even more. I am as exited as Jordi (to whom I gave my “El Grito Primal”). We are never totally sure about the reactions and the development. As Ida Rolf once stated: “One of the things I’m trying to tell you is that there is only yourself and what you can learn to see and feel, that will give you a certain security. I want to give you the feeling that it’s all right to be insecure”!

Given enough lead time I have maintained my schedule...

Jan Johnsson, Jan. 15th., 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vafrsflot3k

Rolfing5. (Jan. 13th, 2011)

Rolfing 5. (Jan. 13th, 2011) 

After a four week pause I returned to my Rolfing sessions today to continue to develop my coordination of release of physical repression with eradication of mental blocking. As a summary of my first few sessions I want to say that the techniques applied by a Rolfer these days are much more developed, advanced and conscientious than when I tried Rolfing 30 years ago. Rolfing is today an international treatment for Structural Integration, working on the connective tissues (fascia) to release, realign and balance the whole body. 

The Rolfers do it with a well coordinated theory, practice and organization. They are very aware of the risk of exaggerations, which might create undesired mental effects if adequate help not is available. My interpretation is that they are up against the same problem as Primal Therapy. They do not get much of support from cognitive therapists who  are generally in favor of the principle further to repress the pain. Both Primal Therapy and Rolfing are, in theory and practice, in favor of unblocking pain. Together they can form a dream team.

Today's treatment was about one of Dr Rolfs favorite topics: "To walk with the diaphragm and to breathe with the feet". After a 2-hour session, I was convinced by Jordi, my Rolfer, that the movements of my feet are initiated high up behind my lungs. That way I walk with the correct pendulum with my legs. For decades, I have initiated my steps with my thighs. What a difference! As Dr Janov says: "When you cannot delude yourself, you can be helped".

Have you ever heard of MBT shoes? They are constructed with rounded soles to create the correct equilibrium, and they automatically release the muscles in our legs and feet, and we get a natural pendulum in our leg while walking. There will be no more hip problems due to this cause! I have bought, used (during a few months) and been convinced of the advantages they give me. The favours the give me are logic and so close to both Primal Therapy and Rolfing that they represent  a promising long-term threat to the cognitive way of thinking!

Jan Johnsson  

Janov's Reflection on "I Am Happy If I Think I Am?"

Dr. Arthur Janov

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

I Am Happy If I Think I Am?

The question so often posed in philosophy class is, “Are you loved if you think you are? Are you happy if you think you are?" I mean, what’s the difference so long as you think you are happy? Well, we might ask, “Are self-delusions useful? Do they take the place of reality? Not if you believe reality is in your “head,” in your perceptions; not if you're thinking that thinking is what counts. But alas, it doesn’t because, no matter what you think, the body “thinks” too, and it sends out messages of pain and unhappy and unloved. That is why patients come to us saying they were loved as children, and six months later they learn from themselves that they weren’t. When they get to their pain they suddenly realize what happened to them in their lives.

What does that mean, they learn from themselves? Are ourselves the best teacher? Yes. We learn from our real history, not the self-deluded one that could not see what was going on. We learn about love from what we didn’t get, and we learn that happiness for us, was a poor façade to cover what we dare not faced. We learn, above all, how we fool ourselves unconsciously, how we cannot see what is right in front of us. How do we do that? We learn that when our early pain got too much there was an automatic shutoff, repression set in and blinded us to reality; first the inner one and then the outer one.

So there are several levels of consciousness; one is our top level perceptual one, and the more important is what our heart, brain and blood system say about our lives. It is often not a pretty picture even though we are taught to pretty it up, not complain and look on the bright side. Isn’t that what cognitive therapy does? Look on the bright side, think happy thoughts and have wholesome ideas. It is how we grew up writ in psychologese. So who is the real you? The happy one or the unhappy one? Well, there are two you’s, the unreal self that you present to the world, and the other one that you present to yourself. And that one you cannot really face even though it talks to you all of the time. It speaks to us in a language we barely understand; in high blood pressure, in migraines and muscle aches. We need to speak that language and we need to learn it if we hope to get rid of the complaints our bodies are making.

Does it matter so long as I think I am loved and happy? No if you don’t mind falling sick and dying early. Otherwise, yes. Because all that repression kills. I think the real disease so widespread today is repression.

When researchers put animals in pain they developed symptoms, but when they gave them chemicals that stopped repression the symptoms went away. In short, it is blocking pain that creates symptoms, and unblocking it that eradicates them. Those with leaky gates, inadequate repression, do not have the symptoms others have, specifically cancer, because they cannot repress as others do. Leaky gates are the anxious ones, the ADDers, the hysterics, all over the place, unable to focus or listen to instructions but they cannot cap it all to develop serious symptoms, at least in the beginning. Over long term anxiety, there are consequences. They will die of heart attacks and strokes, but it is the repressives who will die of the diseases of repression.

So to answer my question, yes, it counts a lot not to be deluded, not to think we are fine when we aren’t. There is a price to pay for not facing reality, and yet so many do not get physical exams because they “don’t want to know.” Denial is so convenient, and so deadly. Then we wake up and want to know when it is far too late; when our disease is so advanced that nothing can be done such as in emphysema. People know that smoking is harmful but the need to suppress pain is a lot more powerful than that knowing. Understanding is helpful but a weak sister to need. And eventually our pain-killing habits are what will kill us, and we don’t want to know because we know that we can’t stop. The only way to stop is to get rid of the early imprinted pain. Not easy to do and painful. Who wants that? Those with leaky gates who suffer all of the time and cannot delude themselves. So those in pain can be helped; those who do not know it cannot. Such a dilemma. 

Overall, I have been lucky. (Article 18 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Overall, I have been lucky.

As an epileptic I have through fear and skill in a working combination been fortunate enough not to let me be influenced by the general attitude (which varies in different countries) to epilepsy, especially the attitude which prevailed until the late seventies. In addition, I have managed to avoid harming myself or to lose my life or, which could have been even worse, have caused other people's misfortune and death during seizures, which might have occurred at non appropriate times. I've also been fortunate to meet and establish contacts with people who liked me and helped me.

Fortunately, I had an inner confidence, which had a confusing similarity to a religious belief, which had its basis in the fact that my memory cells knew from the beginning that I had been able to sustain an impossible situation during the birth process. As opponents of my faith, I have always been accompanied by anxiety and concerns about whether epilepsy in a negative way could slow me down and affect me. This in turn has often offended and disturbed the people who have been dependent on me.

To cope with everything most of my life has been routine processes with more actions than innovative thinking processes. Deep down, however, there was always a feeling that I could solve the riddle with my epilepsy. This belief, although it varied in strength, followed me through my seizures and suicidal feelings. It is easier to understand now that I have the knowledge that the seizures and my suicidal thoughts were the symbolic birth process of the memory. Although I was born ass first and was offered a breech delivery, I came out. This has been imprinted over the years in the cellular memory banks, but now also the left side of the brain that specializes in intellectual activities has access to the information, and I can make connections to my feelings, which has its base in the right side of the brain with roots down into the reptilian brain that controls our most important instincts. These insights will facilitate the understanding of many wrong decisions, which repeatedly led me into dead ends.

As I mentioned earlier, I had the pleasure to meet people who showed me the way and DR Art Janov is the one who helped me to crack the code for my epilepsy and birth, and I have been fortunate that he during nearly 40 years has been open when I have needed it. It has been a process that lasted from the early 70s with the then-available methodology to date when I am inside the third step of my process of normalization, where new knowledge and research results are accessible. There is a dynamic knowledge explosion in the brain research. Not because of epilepsy, but due to that resourceful individuals and institutions are motivated to invest in research regarding the progressive neurological diseases such as Alzheimer and Parkinson. 

This third stage began with a letter to Art in September 2008, when I was mature and realized that I had time and resources to continue my therapy, my epileptic journey. I decided to pull out of two relationships, which had gotten out of hand and become a neurotic spectacle. One of the relationships, my former Spanish spouse, was a long lasting relationship, in which I had invested much of my energy and stubborn preservation. However, a 16-year struggle to preserve a marriage built on the ambition not to be separated was incorrect. The aim was to disprove previous divorces ... I had made yet another unsuccessful attempt to maintain a relationship. I can if the terms and conditions are right.

Since my letter in September 2008, I have made progress. I have received confirmation from both my ex-wife and the female friend I broke with that they are satisfied with their situations. The breakups have been painful but the outcomes appear to have positive effects on us all. The most important thing is that Isabel, my 15-year-old daughter, who opted to stay with me has responded positively and seems to be much more in harmony with herself. The letter to Art initiated that I in an organized way reestablished my old habit to write down and document my feelings and experiences, and it has enabled me to see my life in a new perspective and has given invaluable insights.

The more I have tried and the more I have realized my shortcomings, the more luck I have had. 

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!