My story

Every day I suffer. Ten years ago, I married a sleeping pill called Zopiclone, because in this world there is such resistance to understanding that I cannot get to the point where I can talk about understanding and receive understanding myself. If I talk about it, people say I am harassing them. If I were to talk about it at work, they would say it does not belong there. Society rewards me. Several patients seek me out because they have experienced that, in unusual cases, I was the one who figured out what was wrong with them and they recovered.

How did all of this begin?

After university, I was fired from several jobs. At some point I stopped and asked myself: Why? There must be a reason for this somewhere in my past.

Perhaps before answering that, I should explain why I was fired.

For example, I realised that a patient did not have a condition that justified surgery. But this put me in conflict with one of the senior doctors at the clinic. I was fired. Three months later, the patient came to see me. He had recovered without surgery. That senior doctor never found out. But because I had said that I thought differently, I was fired.

At another clinic, I regularly asked why. Something about this bothered the senior surgeon. I was fired.

How the environment reacts is one thing. What my own part in it might be is another.

By then, I was already actively using the method I described in the “Love” text. So I began examining my past.

I remember that my mother, who was a doctor, once diagnosed me with endocarditis, a life-threatening illness. For whatever reason, she decided to treat me at home and brought home the antibiotic I was supposed to swallow.

We were sitting in the kitchen. My father, who had a university degree in engineering, was sitting to my right and my mother to my left. To me as an eight-year-old child, the antibiotic seemed as large as a walnut. I could not swallow it.

My father became so angry that he beat me so badly that the marks of his palms were still bright red across my entire torso three hours later. My mother watched the beating. Then she stood up and, at the door, quietly said: “You shouldn't have done that.”

As a child, I thought all of this was normal.

I remembered these regular brutal beatings and my mother's psychological abuse. My mother always wanted me to be perfect. But she herself was not perfect, and she knew that. While she expected me never to lie, she lied regularly.

My mother claimed that she had been in love with my father. She also said that she had never liked my father's smell.

Why am I writing these things?

To show where I came from, so that it becomes visible where I ended up.

If I did something for which my mother praised me, my father might beat me. And so on. If I contradicted them, the consequence was withdrawal of love, sadness or a beating.

My life had to revolve around my mother. I experienced this simply as feeling terrible whenever she became sad and I knew that I was the reason.

There was a lot to work through, because my life consisted of living for what my mother said, not for myself and not for what mattered to me.

When, at the age of nineteen, I began using the method I described in the “Love” chapter, it enabled me to leave behind the damaging behavioural patterns that my parents had unconsciously instilled in me.

That is why it matters enormously to me whether a parent can see what is happening psychologically inside their child.

And not only because of my own experience. As an adult and as a doctor, I see many lives.

My parents were a perfect couple in the eyes of the world. Love at first sight, hormones, relationship. Yet my parents were never capable of looking at what they themselves had done.

For me, this is not only about what my parents did. It is also about my immediate environment and the wider environment around me — about the fact that nobody helped.

The rest of my family — grandparents, aunt, godfather — noticed nothing of the brutality taking place at home. And not because there was nothing they could have noticed.

What was missing above all were questions of awareness, because these are largely unknown in today's world.

My aunt saw my mother almost as an angel. Yet my mother regularly imposed her will on other people, only she presented it in the form of explaining why something would be good for them and why doing something else would be bad.

My wider environment saw nothing either.

My teachers picked on me instead of turning to my parents and asking whether a child's difficulties might primarily have something to do with what was happening at home.

I even had a teacher who was almost a psychologist, yet she noticed nothing. I was a good student and well behaved. It apparently never occurred to her that, at sixteen, I had run away from home and my father had chased me through the street. By then I was faster than he was. He could not catch me.

I planned to spend the night outside next to a transformer building. Eventually my aunt arranged that if I returned home, my father would not beat me.

What is remarkable is that neither my father nor my mother was beaten at home.

Looking back now, I see that the brutal world of my childhood was not created by my parents alone. Neither my immediate nor my wider environment noticed anything. Nobody ever helped.

How is that possible?

In my experience, we ask one another almost nothing, and awareness is almost entirely absent.

What do I mean by awareness?

My mother regularly let me know when I did not behave according to her expectations. For example, when I was twenty, her friend offered me a finger's width of Martini in a glass. My mother reacted by saying: “Do I have to live to see this too?!”

Yet my mother herself drank beer at eighteen.

Awareness would have meant my mother asking herself: Why am I saying to my son, “Do I have to live to see this too?!”

The deeper step would then have been to examine the fact that she herself had behaved completely differently.

My mother expected behaviours from me — and punished me if I failed to display them — that she herself had never practised.

She sent me into a world of which she herself had no experience and did not prepare me for it.

I once saw a nature documentary about orcas in which there was a sentence saying that the mother teaches her offspring all of her life experience so that it can survive.

My mother, by contrast, did not pass on her life experience. She gave me expectations about how I should behave without knowing how to live according to those expectations herself.

It was good for her because it allowed her to see herself as greater: she could look at what a fantastic son she had. She used me to make herself appear greater to herself.

Perhaps this was one of the things that led me to ask how a society can be foolish enough to fill people's heads with the idea of love at first sight, hormonal attraction and tradition, while suppressing the natural process of love — a process that would examine precisely these things: How well can you see how you came to be who you are? How capable are you of self-reflection? How capable are you of understanding things?

I am not the only person who has written about this.

Another line of thought was how my parents themselves had become the way they were.

My time horizon expanded. I remembered that my grandmother was like an icicle. I even asked my mother whether her mother had ever told her that she loved her. My mother could not remember a single such moment.

I suppose my mother became asthmatic because that was at least something my grandmother reacted to, and that my mother learned to ignore the outside world because her parents' behaviour was unbearable for her.

Then I thought further back, to my grandparents' parents. People standing one behind another, generation after generation, surrounded by society and human history — and by fear of one another.

Where could all of this have come from?

There are certain things that seem characteristic of humanity regardless of where you live.

A child's spontaneous sense of wonder and desire to understand how things come into being almost completely disappear by adulthood, even though I believe this is one of the greatest treasures human beings possess. I wrote about this in the “Love” text.

I also came to think that because understanding had been replaced by the abuse of power and by appearances, human brain volume and grey matter must have decreased over the past millennia. Anthropologists have confirmed the decrease, although the reason for it may be something entirely different. I suspect reproduction plays a role.

Our fairy tales and legends tell of relationships in which love comes from people seeing what is inside one another. This has shifted toward outward appearance becoming important, while in our modern world the inner content of a person is either unknown or misunderstood.

For one woman I know, for example, “content” meant that a man could quote poetry and knew history. It became a great love affair. Three years later, she had a different opinion from him, and the man locked her in. He could not tolerate another person having a different opinion.

Young people today are afraid.

At twenty, a young person already knows what kind of relationship they are supposed to want because society has filled their head with these ideas. They also know that talking to a middle-aged man is supposedly wrong, even if their knees were trembling because of him moments earlier.

Society tells them what kind of relationship is good — a society in which, perhaps, 95 percent of people in relationships suffer because of those relationships.

Anyway. This is a life story.

Twenty-year-old women, sometimes even younger women, may look at me, but they all know what is “right.” Society has told them.

Unfortunately, as time passes, my chances of having children become smaller and smaller. Not because I am physically incapable of having children, but because society tells people that such a relationship would be wrong.

As long as I can remember, this society has been hostile to the way I live. It maintains relationships in which both partners and their children suffer. Then, because of all the accumulated tension, people hate one another: the young hate the middle-aged, one group hates another, people hate their neighbours — whoever it is, “we are different and you are stupid.”

And we destroy the environment.

I have been married to Zopiclone for ten years because I have not found a courageous woman who did not look first at society's expectations. None of them saw me; they saw society's ideas.

Incidentally, almost everyone in this society is a prisoner.

I know where a billionaire goes for medical treatment. His doctors are among the world's leading physicians, but we had different opinions. They did not follow the process of discovery; they recommended surgery. I followed the process of discovery, and theoretically I arrived at the conclusion that surgery would be more harmful. Over the past years, scientific evidence has moved in the direction of the position I took.

Behind BlackRock or similar institutions, in a sense, there is no longer simply a human being but an algorithm: maximise profit.

The billionaire maximises it. If the others do not like what he does, they remove him, the shares collapse, and a fortune that existed can disappear.

He is tied to a place because he cannot simply take the entire structure of his wealth with him. He does what the system demands. And the person giving the orders may himself live in a bunker surrounded by guards, or at least by security personnel, worrying about who might remove him.

His captivity may be more difficult than that of the ordinary person who gives up part of themselves so that their boss will not disadvantage them.

Almost everyone here is a prisoner.

Will I ever be able to come home?

Will there be a woman who discovers that by using understanding she can be free, materially secure, have a genuinely deep relationship, and not expose her child to the consequences of her own unrecognised mistakes?

The world clings so strongly to behaviours that harm it.

One person I know puts metal into a patient. He does not agree with doing it, but refusing would mean contradicting his superior. So he puts the metal in.

Then he relativises things. He cannot maintain deep friendships.

Another person believed that money was what mattered. Today all he has is alcohol and his dog.

Because the pain can be almost unbearable when you realise how much unnecessary suffering you have caused other people.

People are operated on because money is paid for operations. Some of those who undergo surgery develop complications and die. They might also have been treated without surgery.

The police lose a complaint and cannot find it.

A bank collects money claiming that it has a contract with VISA; VISA says the bank does not need to transfer the money merely because it has a contract with it.

Ordinary people work at the bank. They have subordinated themselves to the interests of the bank. The surgeon does the same so that he does not have to contradict a superior who may fear for his position of power.

An airline puts something into the small print. Even if you fly with them regularly, if you do not take the outbound flight because you bought a ticket for an earlier flight that same day, they cancel you, and when you want to fly back to work, you cannot.

There is the poor person somewhere in East Asia or Africa who will not work but instead asks for money and deceives people.

There is an African woman who attracted me, which is why I approached her. She goes to university, but because she never asks questions, all she knows about me is that I am a doctor in Germany.

A few years ago, I spent eight days walking through the wilderness without food.

Years ago, I told some of my classmates the month in which they had been born. With one of them, something became confused in me, and I gave two months. He told me never again to think about what he was thinking. One of the months I named was his birth month; the other was the month he was additionally thinking about.

Sometimes I say aloud what another person is thinking. In the past, there were occasions when I experienced it as though I could hear it very clearly in my head. The other person is then astonished and asks how on earth I knew what they were thinking.

Similarly, I once bought a single raffle ticket. I felt which one to choose among thousands of pieces of paper, and with it I won the second prize: a trip to Prague for two.

There was also a time when I marked what would have been the five lottery numbers, except that I reversed the digits: where 75 was drawn, I had marked 57.

I am deeply religious, but it is my own religion, something I feel modern people no longer really know. I thought God did not like me doing this. So I never did it again.

There were times when I developed a rash. Three days later, I unexpectedly met someone I had not seen for a long time. Then the same thing happened again: I developed a rash and once again happened to run into the same person.

The defence lawyer of the last prisoner executed before Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped executions, although he was not present at the execution and was sitting in a helicopter, developed a rash.

Other people experience shoulder pain when something is wrong in their relationship with a friend.

This, of course, goes very deep.

Modern people hardly know this world anymore — the search for patterns that occupied the Pythagoreans, astrologers and feng shui.

For modern people, there are no patterns.

An acquaintance of mine, who has a teaching degree and four children, said that he could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Five minutes later he repeated it. Half an hour later he said it again.

I asked him whether he knew that he regularly repeated the sentence that he could now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

He had no idea.

Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world begin at least with knowing what you yourself repeatedly say.

Another acquaintance of mine is also a highly educated senior executive. When something goes wrong, he talks down to people, and I have to point out to him that this has no constructive effect.

Asking himself why he does this seems beyond what can reasonably be expected of him — just as he does not notice how regularly he tells stories about how well he does things and how regularly he criticises other people negatively.

He is someone close to me and is now over eighty. Despite his age, he was never someone you could truly lean on, because he understands neither himself nor the other person.

Of course, he has a family.

Once, a person whose several descendants became psychologically unwell in a family environment whose emotional dynamics he did not understand told me that I was overcomplicating things because I was examining whether a three-year-old child had invented a pretext in order to receive my attention.

In our world, perhaps ten percent of people live well materially. Ninety percent live badly materially. And many of those who live well materially live badly psychologically.

With the method of understanding, I believe it is possible to live well both materially and psychologically.