Richard Lloyd Jones: We see the legacy of its long history in the trend of magical thinking. Ask for it. Believe in it. Receive it. The mantra for getting what you want. And woe betide you if you fail to follow its sunny-side-up paradigm, then you could be hit with a double whammy. Problems because you weren't positive, and big guilt on top of that. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the downside to being up.
Well, we're striking into the core of one of the foundational pillars of the American way of life today. We're weaned on positive thinking from the time we're in our mother's wombs. We're praised and coddled and told we can do anything. We're reminded to use smiles as umbrellas and exhorted to make lemonade with the lemons life deals us. Positive thinking, or the importance of it anyway, comes as naturally to us as breathing.
And it's a tricky thing because it seems so right but it often leads us to something so wrong. Positive thinking is based on the premise that human beings have wonderfully good intentions. And for those occasional hiccups that occur during our gilded steps along the yellow brick road leading to happy ever after, we just need to reframe our thinking. And we'll be back on our feet and heading in the right direction again faster than you can say, think and grow rich.
But there's a dark cloud moving over the sunny side of the street. Americans, for all their training and encouragement to think positively, are not very happy people. A recent analysis of over 100 happiness surveys worldwide found Americans mired in 23rd place among developed nations. The Happy Planet Index puts the U.S. In 150th place worldwide. Americans are number one in antidepressants. They have more kids on Prozac and Ritalin than anyone in the world.
And pessimism about economic recovery is high, too. What's going on? Well, we can turn to the study of psychology for some clues. According to the leading-edge research emerging from Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy in São Paulo, Brazil, the basic premise that we're well-intentioned and good-hearted people who occasionally screw up is being challenged. Exhaustive clinical research and practical testing has shown a darker underbelly to the human psyche, and that is that we are much more pathological than we thought.
We actually have many more desires against our development and happiness than we believed or perceived before, and positive thinking only serves to slip a thin veneer over this deeper trouble, and so only covers for a little while. Like painting over a watermark on the ceiling, the leak behind continues unaffected, causing more damage than if we'd gone to the source of the problem in the first place.
So it is with our psyches, and real understanding of this is well documented in Norberto Keppe's vast body of work. Our Trilogy portal might be a good place for you to start in your research there, trilogia.ws, T-R-I-L-O-G-I-A dot W-S, our web address. And all of Keppe's extraordinary work will be laid out from May 12th to 15th, 2010, at our World Forum on Psychosociopathology, along with some planetary solutions, and I encourage you to get on my mailing list for updates on that, rich at richjonesvoice.com.
Today, Susan Berkley joins me for what is not our first kick at the positive thinking can. But I feel it's very important to tackle this again. Today, I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the downside to being up. Susan, I have an article here from The Economist from June 11th, 2009. And the headline says, For some people, optimistic thoughts can do more harm than good.
Isn't that interesting? Because if the positive thought is too far away from what you really think of yourself, you'll never believe it. So if I say, of course I can learn to play the piano like Mozart. That's so far from the way I am. It doesn't matter how many times I say that, I'm never really going to believe it. So it actually can undermine myself because I'll even start feeling worse about myself.
This is what they're talking about here. So the idea of positive thinking as being the be-all and end-all, the answer to our prayers, it appears is not quite that way.
Susan Berkley: We're so hung up on that concept, I think, in North America, in the U.S. Barbara Ehrenreich, who's a great social commentator, wrote a book called Bright-Sided. Is it The Dark Side of Positive Thinking or something like that?
It's a critique on it. And what happened to her, she had breast cancer. And she got really fed up with like this sort of pink ribbon culture of people telling her to think positively about her cancer as if there could be some benefit that came from that. And I think we've seen it, Rich, haven't we, with some of our friends that people who become very ill think that somehow the illness is there to teach them something.
And in her book, she has a great quote from a prostate cancer researcher who says, Prostate cancer is an opportunity, a path, a model, a paradigm of how you can interact to help yourself and others. And by doing so, you evolve to a much higher level of humanity.
Richard: Because this question of evolution runs all throughout
Susan: this belief structure, doesn't it? That I'm evolving and I have to evolve and get better through my thought process.
And of course, one of the first things we learn from Dr. Keppe at an Analytical Trilogy, his body of work, is that really all the value was in the past, the way from the way distant past where we had paradise, and man has fallen from that. And it's been a steady, steady ride downhill since then. But it is so curious, because why can't our culture accept the fact that we have pathology?
And I was thinking about this, you know, when we were preparing for this podcast. I think that one of the main problems is that, because when you say to people, you've gone way overboard with this positive thinking stuff, their response is always, well, what's the option? What do I do now? Do I start thinking negative? Or, you know, you guys talk so much about pathology, pathology, it's depressing me.
Richard: Exactly. If I start to think negative things about myself, I won't get out of bed.
Susan: You won't get out of bed. So I think that a lot of, part of the problem here is that we are not taught, it's not part of our philosophy of life, not part of our culture, to really understand our true nature, which is good, beautiful, and truthful.
And this is the knowing that Dr. Keppe brings to the table. And so, therefore, without what he calls this healthy dialectic between our sanity, which unfortunately has been disturbed and impeded and impacted, and even we're born already with distortions in our psychogenetic structure. But there is a sanity to which we can return. But the only way to do so is through seeing our pathology, through making that dialectic.
Richard: Yeah, you've said something I think that's really essential, Susan, is that we have a starting place. We're not coming from nothing. We're coming from something. And in metaphysics, this is very important to understand because if we have the idea that we're nothing, then we're improving day by day because we're getting older, we're getting more wisdom, we're learning, having more experience. But if we think about ourselves as having this core essence of goodness, we're a long way from that, actually.
And so we can start to see our mistakes as things that have caused us to be away from the truth of who we are. And
Susan: this has been the big surprise for us, because I think that what I'm seeing here is that the American culture is surprisingly nihilistic. That they're clinging so desperately to this positivity, they're so terrified to see illness, to think that if they see it, they'll become it.
Because really, most people, and I include myself in this, we don't have a sense of who we truly are, that there is goodness, there is truth, there is beauty. But there's, you see, this dialectic thing, we are a mixture of that. And so it's like people think that if I don't think positively, then what am I? I have nothing else left. I'm like a hollow shell inside.
What is
Richard: the truth of that? We're not hollow shells inside.
Susan: We are something. Yeah, we are something. We have an essence. We have a way. Uh, we have a like a basic format, a basic structure in some way. So this also is a problem that Dr Keppe's spoken about a lot of, a problem that Aristotle introduced, isn't it, Rich? That we, the confusion between potential and act.
And so Aristotle, I think, and correct me if I've got this wrong, but he introduced the idea that we are potential becoming something rather than what Plato discovered and wrote about so brilliantly, which Dr. Keppe has resuscitated, saying that, no, we are act. We are pure action decaying into potential. So this is a fundamental philosophical flaw that I think was never corrected among the Western people.
And
Richard: now it's been perpetuated in the New Age movement. This, what you were saying about the cancer is my friend in some way. This idea that it's been sent as a learning tool for me on my evolutionary path to perfection. Rather than that if I'm sick, it's because I'm doing something against the natural health that I have.
Susan: Yes. One of the big problems, I think, about the New Age movement is this incorrect idea that darkness and light were co-created and exist somehow in harmony.
And this is another big fundamental philosophical, deep philosophical mistake. There's no such thing as darkness that exists in and of itself. This dark side of the human being, this yin and this yang, no. There's this correct dialectic that there is goodness and the negation of it. Evil is the negation of goodness. And I think that when people start, uh, this belief that about disease, you know, that there's some positive aspect that can come from healing.
Of course, we're not saying that a person can't learn from their misfortune. In
Richard: fact, they
Susan: have to learn. They have to learn. But that in and of itself diseases a teacher, I don't know about that.
Richard: Well, metaphysically, as you're talking about, there is another metaphysical view that you're proposing now that came from Plato and Socrates and Parmenides before him, that we are something and we corrupt what we are.
We are something in perfection, and so anything that's not
Susan: perfect in our society or in ourselves is something that we are doing against our own true nature, and this is a metaphysical point that's very, very important to understand. And it seems like in North America, we don't want to touch that. And I'm thinking here about The Secret, you know, a couple of years ago, when you and I were doing these podcasts, we were talking a lot about that.
And you did some great critiques of The Secret. And I encourage people to go back through your podcast archives and find that the critiques you did not just about The Secret, but also about that, what the bleep do we know, which took so many people by storm. You know, people actually think we should purge everything that brings us down, eliminate negative people from your life, don't watch the news, don't pay attention to disasters and war because you can't do anything about it.
So we have to have consciousness of reality the way it is, and this is part of our reality today. The world isn't a mess, but the only way that we can really correct a problem is to fully understand that problem, to see that problem. You can't ever correct a problem in the dark, through blindness. And this is what people who are trying to block out reality are talking about.
I'm not saying to wallow in negativity, to only watch as there's people that do the opposite. They all have CNN on all the time, and then they become morose and morbid. That's not what life is about either. But I think we have to be more balanced and just completely eliminating the negative, quote unquote, from our lives never will help anybody.
Richard: You've been working with Dr.
Keppe for over 20 years. What have you learned about what a mistake is, what a problem is? What have you learned about those things from Keppe's perspective?
Susan: I've learned that problems are perennial, that you're always going to have them. And I've also learned, and this is something so important and so uniquely Kepian, that you can only see a problem when you're in goodness.
So it's kind of some cold comfort that the more, when we're really alienated, and sometimes we can be like in a sort of wearing rose colored glasses, it's a bad thing. And we think life is just like la-di-da, you know, you're almost cruising for a fall. That's when you're in a really fully alienated state and you are really at great risk in your life.
But there's something metaphysical that happens as I learned from Dr. Keppe is that the more you do good, the more you're in good positive action in your life, the more problems you're gonna see. And it's actually a sign that you're getting better. So over the years, I've trained myself to recognize that and to accept.
Richard: What I feel is that as we start to see the problem, we realize that the problem is really the distortion of something good, right?
So
Susan: if I'm avoiding making that follow-up phone call that I need to make to my clients, this is not a laziness. This is a pathological aspect. Well, you mentioned phone calls, cold calling. I mean, I think that's one of the places where Keppe Science has really been helpful for me is in sales. And I see it with my students, too, because I coach a large group of actors who are trying to get their careers off the ground.
And they have to make calls to agents and to producers and things like that in order to proceed. And these are not trained salespeople. They're terrified of making those phone calls, as are many people that are starting businesses or working in business today. And what that really is, I've learned from Dr. Keppe, it's a projection. It's a psychological problem called projection. If we are sitting there in our office and we're thinking, I don't want to make this call because I'm sure that person is going to reject me, well, that person doesn't even know who you are yet.
You haven't even introduced yourself. They have no clue who you are. And what's actually going on is you're rejecting them first, and you are putting the blame on them. So that's just a very simple, easy example of projection of a psychological concept that's really, once a person grasps that, they can really start to move ahead.
Richard: What are the other things you see with your actors as they're developing their careers that are things that you can really help them with, with this perspective?
What aspects of their problems?
Susan: There's a big problem called narcissism in actors and in many, many people in general, where it's an extreme focus on the self. And so, interestingly, and you and I have seen this in the public speaking groups that we've worked with, the apparently shy person is really one of the biggest narcissists and has one of the highest ideas about themselves of many, many people.
Because if you dissect a narcissist, what's going through their heads are, I can't, a phobic narcissist, for example, what's going through their heads is, I'm afraid I'll screw this up. I can't do this. What if they don't like me? I'm afraid that I don't have what it takes. So it's all me, me, me, me, me, rather than being client-centered. And one of the secrets of being successful in business is to serve more, not to try to be the best you that you can be, which is so much of what we're taught in American culture.
Not to have more self-esteem, but to really be more altruistic, to try to give more to other people to the best of your ability, to serve rather than to be served.
Richard: It's interesting, isn't it, that a person who's thinking about themselves thinks that I'm not speaking because other people will judge me or I'm afraid of what other people will do is actually not speaking, not because of the other people, but because of themselves. They're totally focused on themselves.
Susan: There's another problem that the narcissist has. They think that if they give of and they use their talents and abilities, those talents and abilities will become exhausted.
They think that they don't understand on a deep level that by giving, our talents and abilities are increased. And we might consciously know this is true, but believe it or not, unconsciously and deep within us, almost all of us have this idea that we don't want to, and what are the talents and abilities? They're something that are given to us by God, by the Creator.
And we feel that those gifts, we don't want to share those gifts unconsciously on a deep level. We have
Richard: to save them,
Susan: right? We have to save them or somehow it's something negative or somehow we'll be ripped off or it's just not the right thing to do. Or somehow it's demeaning or we won't benefit.
Richard: Yeah, so this idea that people are holding themselves back because of other people is not true.
We're holding ourselves back because of something inside us.
Susan: Yes, or a big idea that people have is I'm afraid of success. That's why I'm not moving ahead. Well, it's nothing of the kind. Than want anything to do with success, unconsciously, because of this problem. They feel that if they, in order to have success, you must make other people successful. You must use your talents and your abilities to give to others and to help them to the best of your ability.
And to also give glory to God, to the Creator, which is a subject for a whole other podcast.
Richard: I remember a student now, Susan, a woman student of mine, who was very afraid that when she went in front of the room, to speak in public, that she would go blank. She had this tremendous fear. But what I noticed from her, because I also taught her in a theater class, was that she never prepared herself.
She never did the work to memorize her lines, so when she came to the rehearsal day, she was prepared and ready to go. She was leaving it to the last possible moment. So it twigged for me that the reason she was afraid of going blank is because her intention was to sabotage herself by not preparing, so she would go blank in front of the room.
It was like a big light that went on for me. And so I told her, your fear actually is very good for you. It's showing you that you have a bad intention with yourself. And we're not used to thinking like this. We don't think that we have bad intentions for ourselves.
Susan: We don't. And the other thing is that we want to get, we want to achieve success through magical thinking.
I think that this is a huge flaw in modern psychology. And a lot of these New Age philosophies that have come along. And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be optimistic because optimism is a quality of our being. It's a good thing. It's a quality of our being. It's a quality of the creator. The creator's not depressed. The natural state of things is to be expansive in a positive and balanced way.
But I think a lot of people who are not successful are magical thinkers. They want to get success without working, without giving to other people. And this is a big danger of some of these, of this new age movement. You know, these vision boards that people do and these affirmations that they do. And I have to tell you, if you go to a conference where a lot of these people are, there are a lot of losers there.
You don't see anybody that's really, really successful in life is certainly optimistic and might certainly set goals, but they never got there through magical thinking. Sort of like a lottery mentality. It's very sad.
Richard: I totally agree with what you're saying there, this idea that I can imagine myself into success. Dr. Keppe says the essence of the human being is not what we think.
Our essence is what we do. So what we do is what makes the difference. So if we're not doing anything, we're not going to get anywhere. But, you know, I was thinking as you're speaking, you're talking a lot about the people you work with. And I realized that I was dealing with this in my own analysis with Dr. Keppe one time, my own narcissism, my own talent and stuff.
And he said, you know, Richard, your talent is not for you. Your talent is for the world. It's for other people. It's not for your own self-aggrandizement. This was like a big shock for me to think like that. I like that. I think that's really beautiful, but I never thought about that before. Our talent's not for us. What are we so concerned about?
What are people going to think about us or how we're going to appear, how great we're going to be or not be? Why are we more concerned about what we're going to give to other people, how we're going to help other people, well, how can we give a little piece of ourselves to help other people grow?
Susan: For example, if you go to see one of the great symphony orchestras of the world or hear a great singer, an Andrea Botticelli or somebody like that, they're not performing thinking, you know, the first violin is not there, you know, going, how did I do maestro?
How am I doing there? They're completely immersed in the music and in creating a sound in conjunction with the rest of the symphony orchestra and expressing what the composer intended for the joy, for the beauty of the music and to please the audience.
Richard: I saw James Taylor in concert a number of years ago playing Outdoors Live and he played my favorite song, which is Sweet Baby James.
He must
Susan: have played that song 10,000 times, right? He must be so sick of that song, Susan. He
Richard: must think, do I have to play that piece of whatever again? But he plays it with such affection because he's not playing it for himself. He's playing it for us. And
Susan: so the question our listeners should ask themselves are, what do you do with affection?
What can you do? How much affection can you bring to your work? We all do repetitive tasks in our work. And is it weighing on you? Are you annoyed? Are you irritated? Are you aggravated? Or is there some way you can elevate that? Because from the simplest task, Something I noticed here in Brazil, for example, this is a very, very spiritual, cool country in a lot of ways.
Over the holiday weekend, we did some traveling and we went through a lot of toll booths. Now, I know toll takers on the New Jersey Turnpike. They are not a pleasant lot. I mean, I've literally almost had my hand slapped by a toll taker and been scowled at and practically been cursed. But to a person, I must have gone through five or six tolls, greeted pleasantly, with a smile, have a great day, sincere from the heart.
So that's something very, very beautiful in this country. I'm looking here also about something that Norman Vincent Peale, the roots of positive thinking are also very, very interesting, if we have some time. They actually sprung up in the 19th century, in the 1800s, because at the time, the overriding feeling was Calvinistic, which was that God wants you to suffer and you must work, work, work, work, work.
And people suffered from something they called neurasthenia, where they were emotionally overwrought, easily overwrought, and frail, and invalids, and things like that. And then from that actually came Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science and Positive Thought and this sort of all new thought movement that kind of morphed into Norman Vincent Peale in the mid-20th century. And I think that we still have a lot of that today.
It hasn't gone away. Norman Vincent Peale taught that you should reprogram negativity and condition yourself to think positively, form a mental picture of yourself succeeding and stamp it indelibly in your mind and never permit it to fade. And whenever a negative thought comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out and don't build up obstacles in your imagination, minimize them.
I mean, all these things are beautiful. They're good. But the danger is, as we were saying earlier in the podcast, is we've lost the dialectic. That people then become completely unable to deal with problems that arise.
Richard: Yeah, and also, Susan, we have to see why am I negative? What's the reason I'm negative about my life? That shouldn't be a natural part of me.
So there must be something going on where I'm negative. I need to try to see the roots of that and not
Susan: just gloss over it. And it could be socioeconomic because there's sociopathology that you've talked about on and on in these podcasts and also our personal pathology and even spirit pathology. So it's like we human beings, we don't have an easy lot of it, but we're here, and this is our task, and we've been placed here, and we really have to rise to the occasion.
And I don't think we're going to do it through positive thinking alone.
Richard: Dr. Kibbe said one time that analysis is not to improve the person. It's to help the person see how they are. So if a person has a negative or a lazy streak, they need to see the roots of that to really understand it. You can't just gloss over that and just cover over it with a little veneer, because I remember when I was playing basketball, I was very competitive.
And then one day I suddenly decided I wasn't competitive anymore. I suddenly decided, no, it's not good to be competitive, so I'm not going to be competitive anymore. And I had this illusion that I had overcome that. But, you know, the moment the heat came on in the game, boom, there came that competitiveness again. And I remember thinking after the game, where did that come from?
I thought I was over that. You know, this is the problem, that we gloss over it with a veneer and we don't see the roots of it. Why am I competitive? What is it I'm trying to prove? What is it that's going on underneath that I don't see about myself? Maybe I'm not what I think I am.
Susan: Something interesting happens when we start, when we become more balanced and able to look at our problems and see ourselves as the way we really are.
We become a lot stronger people. Because it's like if you just keep pumping yourself up with positive affirmations and positive, you become very hollow inside. And it's like you can't deal with any kind of adversity whatsoever. I think the great leaders, the more responsibility you have, the more you are a leader, the greater your ability to deal with adversity and to lead people to a positive outcome through the adversity, not by glossing it over, not by minimizing it, but by dealing with things the way they really are.
Richard: Keppe says in his book, The Origins of Illness, that we become ill because we resist seeing our problems. So by seeing weak points and shortcomings, we have more success and happiness. It seems strange, but that's what psychology is showing us today. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time.
