MY STORY
At 17, I no longer recognised my own face.
An accident took movement and sensation from one side of my face. While rebuilding it, I discovered that muscle tone can be perceived from within and trained deliberately.
The accident and the memory
New Year’s Eve, aged 17: on the way home, the driver lost control of the car. We hit a tree. I was not wearing a seat belt, flew into the windscreen and my face was torn open. I was blind for five days.
When I could open my eyes again, my face had been sewn together with more than 300 stitches. I was 17 and no longer recognised myself.
04 stages
My way back
The sentence I began training against
A doctor put it matter-of-factly: if the face had not started moving again after a year, there was little hope of movement returning later. That sentence clung to me like a label. The right side of my face hung down and no longer responded as it had before.
I began with what I could still feel
I stood in front of the mirror and practised, even though nothing happened at first. On the left, I could feel what remained silent on the right. When I recreated that inner sensation on the right-hand side, movement began. Slowly. Weakly. But it was there.
It took more than two years of consistent work to regain enough function to live normally again.
Muscle tone became precise information
When you rebuild your own face from within, muscle tone becomes precise information. I noticed that I could not only see tension, but also reproduce it physically. That gave rise to new questions:
- Which muscle tone remains visible in the jaw, eyes and mouth?
- Which character trait is visible in this muscle tone?
- Do tone, words, voice and body agree?
The experience became a research question
I studied widely: medicine, psychology, human behaviour — because I was not looking for a single discipline. I was looking for the missing link between biology, perception and social misunderstanding.
I now wanted to discover whether what I perceived could be clearly distinguished, repeated and taught across many people.
THE RESEARCH CORRECTION
A mistaken explanation made the method more precise.
The fundamental character traits became clear quickly in my research and could be confirmed repeatedly. Yet one group of people left me stuck time and again.
They were friendly, supportive, readily enthusiastic and seemed sincere. Yet they told evasive stories that were often highly unlikely.
Other people kept encountering the same experience
I was not the only person to experience this with employees. Participants in my research also told me about friendly, supportive people and their scarcely believable stories.
The signs of lying were missing
At first, I looked for signs of lying. Yet even though the stories seemed unlikely, the expected pattern did not appear.
Mythomania explained the contradiction
After lengthy research and a lucky coincidence, I recognised the missing distinction. The stories concealed personal weaknesses and were intended to avoid disappointing anyone. This was not the same form of deception I had previously been looking for.
The new distinction had to be repeatable
I isolated the corresponding muscle tone and reproduced it in a sufficient range of different situations. Test runs and many further experiences confirmed the pattern.
Precision requires you to correct your own assumption
An explanation does not become true because it sounds convincing. Scientific means observing, checking meanings and correcting an assumption until even a difficult contradiction becomes understandable.
This work produced a teachable method: in the Face Reading training, you learn to read the other person’s muscle tone in the jaw, eyes and mouth as a map of character and perceive 24 character traits precisely.