"Letter to a neurotic"

Dear friend,
maybe my story here will help understanding our relationship with ourself ,
with us and with each other in another light.

I begin not with the story  but with talking about neurosis, a term no longer used in psychiatry and psychology. It can mean various ways of behaviour originating in a failure of adaptation to whichever mostly early environment, a regressive way of being going along with fear and the all present defence of an ego which doesn't really exist. 
The methods of this defence are invariably not allowing much change nor communication which could at any deeper level touch one's vulnerability. One can not find this vulnerability because without any balance points one is always vulnerable, and each opening will at the same time be a closing. 
It equals a flower which cannot open.
Such a person will always prefer the safety of unhappiness to the charge of joy and to the exposure to the sky, to life. But he or she will see it another way. They will always only see "I cannot". 
Besides, neurotic persons will always ask what to fear and whose fault it is.
Deeply inside,they mostly know it is their own closure to suffering which makes
them suffer even more: another reason to be even more unhappy.


It is quite clear that each such hurtful accumulation and willful continuation 
of unhappiness will lead to an organic presence in one's life, to so called symptoms, to psychosomatic disorders.
Unfortunately, even if our neurotic friends know it is themselves causing their own stomach pain, heart pain, asthma attacks, 
they see no way to change for feeling better-
simply because they don't really want to.

My story shows that the aim of neurosis and psychosomatic illness
is death itself. 
Obviously one can reach a point where illness and death are preferable to memories of pain and to monotonous circles of fear, defence and retirement.

Psychosomatic disorder is not a perpetuum mobile, it will end  with death:
the afflicted person knows but doesn't wish to know. 
Death is present all the time,
it is the greatest healer and it is the very secret of change.

Apart from this, psychosomatic suffering is a continuous creation, 
a human fertilizing the ground, life, others with unhappiness, 
leveling down all experience to one's own prison, 
meeting each moment fearfully with the always same fixed solution,
one taking human experience out of presence, into unreachable hiding. 
No, a neurotic does not want to change.

Others cannot influence this, they can only try to bear it with tolerance,
empathy can only exist in understanding the root of  the other's
individual trauma.

And whatever you do for or with a purpose will not result in a flow of a kinder, richer, happier, conscious and mindful life: 
nobody should stay a patient. 
I read this somewhere, and it is true.
So much about therapy....

Carl Jung said(on politics): 
"Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic".

In this, all of us show strong traits of neurosis, of being fixed in unhappiness 
and defence of illusionary egos. 

Why? Because our culture taught us behaviour 
from inside the cruel cooking pot of family and school. 
It taught us to be unkind to ourselves, to carry our own mask and prison, marked us with violence. 

And most of all, it rewards us for our distorted functioning
with attention, with consumption, with poisoned sweeties.

Each step out of long ago inside fixed solutions is liberation.

And believe me or not, no religion will take us out, no leader,
no guru, no other fixed way. All will be only false relief, 
harden our wrong ways and possibly bring on fanaticism,
create the illusion to be saved or to be able to develop into a super-being.

Meditation can help to go out of fixed ego bubbles, it is the best way for this-
also it will bring temporary relief like drugs, as a side effect only. 
You cannot gain a higher self: this would mean still staying inside your 
ego-trap and in splendid isolation, just feeling superior.
You should not be be so blind as to imagine a way towards that purpose 
will make you happier. 

You still have to consciously change: 
and first of all you have to want
to do so.

You have to gain your self, step for step, with a new kindness,
meeting your fear,  with mercy, grace, compassion, consolation and embrace.
When you cannot be kind to yourself, you cannot be kind to others.


The neurotic person is stuck, defining impossibility and unwillingness
to change as a first rule to control fear and preservation of integrity,
the integrity of a tinned fish.

All starts and ends with death.
Unlike dolphins, we breathe even when we are unconscious,
but to be alive consciously is an act of human choice, 
a human on a sofa is very unlike a cat on the very same sofa.

Now, with a bad end, the story:

Now i am old, but i remember my first job as a pre-registration
medical house officer in a  hospital in the borders region of the UK.
We had long shifts, many on-call duties. The area had a high
unemployment rate for young people nearing 50%. There was a dense despair amongst people, a palpable ghostly unhappiness. Throughout the
nights we were always busy, in-patients with difficulties, 
many normal emergencies coming in with always 2-5 suicide attempts in between, sleep was mostly impossible.

On one ward we had an in-patient constantly complaining about chest
pain, he had been kept there already for near to four weeks. He had
gone through all at that time possible examinations, nothing could be found
physically wrong with him. Our consultant had kept him on  half for
the fear of legal problems following discharge, half for curiosity.

He for sure was an unpleasant person quite obviously used to terrorize others, 
always complaining, demanding, unkind, throwing tempers, insulting carers and staff. 

One extremely busy night in between treating patients with
suicide attempts i had been running there the third time, 
already having been called for the next emergency. 

It was the third Electrocardiography i did on him this night, 
and all on-calls had previously been like that for every doctor. 
I run there, sweating, looked at his face, into his eyes, i didn't see fear 
but only a man trying to terrorize me. 
All he immediately knew to do was to tell me that nobody ever has time for him.

Applying the electrodes to his arms, legs and chest , 
me being stressed and my hair rising, i told him off, clearly and
not with a soft voice at all, that he is only complaining about chest pain
so people come running for him. 
The ECG was about finished already, all normal.
He reacted, stopped to breathe and turned nearly blue as if to explode any moment with rage at me. In this very moment i really had waited for just this,
wondering what to do.
Then - he was just dead, from one moment to the other. 

The emergency team was with me within 2 minutes.
There was nothing to do. 

The next day he was on the table, cut open: 
there was nothing, nothing at all. No cause for death. 
No blood clot, no coronary artery which didn't look completely healthy,
a normal heart and good lungs.
He could have decided to live, he preferred to die with a spectacle,
the last scene in a final act.
My guess was and is a temporary coronary artery spasm 
caused by rage imploding. 

A black magic kind of death.

The patient who got the most attention on the ward
was the one who just wanted to die.


I had been unkind, reacted, he reacted. He was dead. I was alive.
Nothing to add.


Dear friend, excuse my lengthy letter, but when i talked to you here
i had to talk to me first. Mind you, following this incident i had some bad dreams,  i learned that to lose my temper could kill somebody. And though only possible if they want to die anyway: i had to look into me and face
my own ways.

Do the same, and my story has reached.