Richard Lloyd Jones: It is enticing to follow its seductive lure. It's not your fault. You couldn't help it. There was nothing you could do. That's the beguiling voice we hear. Victims drive the ratings on daytime TV. Blaming, finger-pointing, laying on the guilt. So common, so righteous, so convenient, and so wrong. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Freeing Ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.
Now, you who are regular listeners to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head will already have a good idea which side of this we're going to come down on, don't you? Our program, based as it is on the cutting-edge psychological research coming out of the Brazilian School of Analytical Trilogy, could do nothing other than focus the discussion inward, because that's where the trail inevitably leads.
Norberto Keppe, the scientist behind the profound work coming out of Analytical Trilogy these days, and it is formidable work indeed in the areas of education and medicine and economics and physics, Keppe puts forward the idea that we have contact with all the magnificence and glory of creation through our inner selves. That beautiful atmosphere of universal knowledge and wisdom that resides within each one of us.
Plato called it the world of infused knowledge. Meaning intelligence and savvy we are born with. In Keppe's language, these universal knowings within would be divine concepts inside the human mind. And this opens the door to a staggering thought, given all the modern science that points in the opposite direction. And that is, we are not creatures who are evolving to greater intelligence and knowledge, but we are instead created with all possible understanding already infused in us, and coming to rediscover that is an inner journey.
There is already ample evidence of the presence of this native intelligence and sense of ethics from our very beginning as babies in excellent research coming out of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale and University of California at Berkeley professor Allison Gopnik's studies into the philosophical baby. They've reached fascinating conclusions about the rich and intelligent inner life of babies from the very beginning.
All of this to say that it's by treading the inner path that we really come to know reality, not through our external machinations. Not to say we don't gain substantial wisdom from our experiences. Of course we do, but I mean that it's through this outer contact that we come to know ourselves, that self that already exists and is not simply a product of our outer experience, which is what Socrates was all about, what, 2,500 years ago.
So victimhood, that state of being shaped and fashioned by our outer traumas, can be reconsidered, which is exactly what we'll do today. Helena Melander is a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. She's a Swedish journalist who's been having quite an impact with her new blog in Swedish that she's writing with our colleague and educator Sofie Bergqvist. Helena wrote about this recently to interesting discussion from the Swedish community.
If this stirs your desire to comment, by the way, I'm always happy to hear from you here, too. Rich at richjonesvoice.com is my email. So now, let's get into it. Freeing ourselves from the prison of victimhood. I was on the Internet this morning preparing for this. And I saw a young woman, 38-year-old woman, has just sued her own mother for making her eat broccoli.
As a child. What? Yeah. The lawyer said, it's in France, in France, not the United States. Lawyer says, it's impossible to put a price on the emotional damage that has been done to my client. The damage is irreparable and it
Helena Melander: was unnecessary. She was literally tortured throughout her childhood by a mother who insisted that she eat a food she hated more than anything on earth.
The plaintiff
Richard: is asking for 10 million dollars in damages. She suffers from a chronic case of systematic food preference violation. This condition is characterized by a severe eating disorder and profound psychological loneliness. She trusts no one and she has no friends. Now it's in fact as I'm reading this I'm thinking this can't be true. This has to be like a joke right
Helena: Helena.
So
Richard: I'm just going to say that at the top I didn't do a lot of research on this. I just went through quickly
Helena: so so maybe it's actually a joke yes but maybe
Richard: it's true because there's another woman who sued a zoo in the United States because she slipped and fell and she she's she's blaming the dolphins at the zoo. She contends the zoo recklessly and willfully trained and encouraged the dolphins to throw water at the spectators in the stands, making the floor wet and slippery.
She says she suffered injuries when she fell on the wet floor. So these are the kinds of things that we're seeing. So your recent blog on victimhood, I think in light of these two examples, is really interesting. Sounds
Helena: really sick, actually, but it's a reflection of a kind of view that exists in society in general, especially in the western world, that is very influenced by several psychological orientations um and um where you always think that all the problems that we have in life is because of something that happened to us when we were a child or something that uh in relation to some family member like the mother the father or sister or something that happened to us in school or anything else that is something like outside ourselves.
So we always think that the problems I have is because I was damaged, I was harmed. And actually the person sees himself always as a victim of external circumstances.
Richard: You have an example of an ex-boyfriend of yours in this respect. Yeah,
Helena: exactly. Actually, today I do therapy, I do integral psychoanalysis, but in the past I was very, very skeptical about all kinds of therapy because, exactly because of this boyfriend, because he had a very nice apartment in the middle of Stockholm, but he didn't work.
He was mostly doing different courses at the university. And he used to go to a therapist once a week. And every time when he came back from the therapy, he was talking about what he has been talking about with his therapist. And it was always in relation to his father. That his father hadn't loved him enough when he was a child. That his father hadn't seen him.
And I got so like upset with this because the father was a nice, nice guy, hardworking. He had given this apartment to him and he could only live there because of his father. Otherwise, it would be very difficult for him to have such a nice apartment in the center of Stockholm. And I have realized that this kind of orientation that often comes from therapists is that you have problems in your life because of your parents, because of your childhood.
Actually, I had a response to my blog post where there was a girl who said that exactly this happened to her. She went to a psychologist to treat some problems that she had. And the psychologist immediately said, so your parents didn't give you enough love immediately. And she got a little bit offended by that because she said but this person doesn't know my parents actually doesn't know almost anything about my childhood so how can they draw this kind of conclusions.
But I
Richard: think everybody who goes through that kind of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy has that experience. Yeah Helena almost everybody you start thinking about well yeah maybe I'm a real failure in this area because of something because who wants to see their own failure you know. Exactly.
Helena: So it's very convenient. Yeah, very convenient. And it's like, it's, of course, always easier to say the others were wrong.
They have to change. I was just a victim. But there is a big problem with this because if I'm not the responsible one, how can I expect the things to change? I mean, and especially if there were things in the past that I definitely can't do anything about today. Impossible
Richard: uh in fact if you see this in movies a lot. I remember the film about Amadeus about Mozart and all of the the problem with his health came because of his trauma with his father that Salieri was using to manipulate him and he he died of consumption because of this incredible unresolved feelings towards his father.
Totally Freudian exactly and wrong
Helena: in our latest understanding here in Trilogy. Yeah actually this this kind of view has like uh really inspired all the arts all the society in a way that it has almost become like a kind of cliche you know. Sometimes when you speak about a problem that somebody had there's always somebody saying oh but maybe he had a difficult childhood, you know, you always use that as a kind of explanation.
And it's a very, I think it's a very old fashioned type. I think one of the real problems with
Richard: it, Helena, is you see this a lot in the psychological police shows, you know, they have the psychopath, and they always, almost always take it back to something that happened to him. And so they don't take into consideration this aspect of metaphysics that Norberto Keppe is bringing, that we have an essence that's already pure, that we're not a product only of our environment, of our education.
Talk a little bit about that, how you see that. Yes.
Helena: Yeah, because actually, I mean, of course, we are influenced by our parents, our environment, our family and so on. This is no doubt about it. But we also have a metaphysical aspect, like you said, that is our personality, the essence of who I am. And this is like kind of independent to who my mother was or how she was something that is me really me and that also represents my personal choices in life.
So we always have a choice and I mean we you just have to see on I mean there are so many practical examples of this. People, for example, a sister and brother that has grown up in the same family with the same parents, one becomes a criminal and one becomes a successful doctor, you know, identical
Richard: twins. Yeah,
Helena: exactly. So there are our personal choices.
And as long as we don't deal with that aspect, we can't get forward in life, because we get stuck in something in the past uh in what we call a projection in Analytical Trilogy when you transfer all the problems all the difficulties you have you like transfer to another person or something outside yourself. I think
Richard: it'd be very helpful to try to help people see how we understand this in Trilogy.
I'm thinking of an example of a young woman in our school very beautiful young girl she's now a young woman but she was a teenager when she was studying here and she was very beautiful the most popular girl in the school and very intelligent and she got involved in a in a relationship with a boyfriend older than her who completely controlled her by cell phone and everything else.
He didn't want her seeing her friends he was jealous of her and she began to change she began to become less attractive to not shine in school so much, to be less popular, to be isolated from her friends. And we could say, when I ask my students in the classroom, they say, wow, that boyfriend is really messing with her head, that guy is really doing a number on her.
But we would analyze this very differently. Let's take that example.
Helena: Actually, we have to, in this case, we have to consider this pathological aspect of the human being That is what we call envy. Envy in the understanding of Nobertu Keppe would be the tendency we have to destroy the good things, to go against the good things. It's like a destructive attitude that we have inside ourselves.
And we can see this in many artists some wonderful splendid artists that destroy themselves completely and this this unconscious tendency is always there and if we are not aware of it it's even stronger. And in this case of this uh this girl I guess that she was like using her boyfriend this boyfriend that she chose actually because there are many other people that you can choose nicer people that are not so controlling and jealous she was using him in a way to cut the contact with her friends to isolate herself to herself in order to to lose this this shining this happiness this joy this talent that she had.
So and we do this very often I mean that's maybe be the most common instrument that we have, the most common tool that we use a boyfriend, a girlfriend, in order to destroy ourselves.
Richard: In order to fulfill some sort of intention that we have.
Helena: Exactly.
Richard: It's not very conscious. So how can we help people to
Helena: understand this, Helena? Because this is not something that this girl is doing like rationally.
She's not waking up in the morning and saying, let's
Richard: see, how can I arrange a boyfriend that will help me destroy my life? Okay, him. Yeah.
Helena: It's something very inconscientized, not seen. How do you understand that? Well, first of all, we always have to see what happens in practice. What are the consequences? You know, for example, this guy, I don't know him, but maybe he seems to be a very nice person and intelligent and good grades and maybe a nice job and so on.
Uh, but if in practice, what is happening is that she cannot have contact with her friends because he impedes her or because she cannot, um, speak to other people or dress certain clothes or whatever. If this is happening in practice is because this person is not a constructive person for her. So we have to see what is really happening, not what is our idea about the thing.
Look at that first and of course this is a problem in society too because actually when I said that "we are not we are not victims" this is true to some extent but in one sense we are victims because we don't have any idea of what is going on inside of us we don't learn this anywhere true at school nobody's teaching us how does the human being really function.
I mean the only thing we learn is this kind of old psychological theories like Freudian stuff about traumas and these things that lead more to this kind of victim thoughts but we don't have any consciousness of these destructive tendencies that we have how these work inside of us. So we can say that we are victims of ourselves we could say we are victims of our own unconscious side that we have no idea of.
So that's why I think it's so important with for example this podcast all this kind of information and knowledge that we can spread in society about the research within Analytical Trilogy that I think is actually the only psychological school that really puts the problem inside the human being and Dr Keppe
Richard: has said "Dr Cláudia Pacheco has said too that we know our true intention through our results."
So I kind of had the feeling that sometimes we're like this we're doing things half conscious or semi-conscious we sort of know it's not right but we pretend that it's okay and then when the bad result comes we're like we're like Louis and Casablanca I'm shocked shocked to find there's gambling going on in here I mean I never had any idea that it was going to be but I think we have much more idea of what we're doing.
I think if we're really honest with ourselves we we know when we're doing something or we should know much more than we do know so there's something hidden from our view that we don't want
Helena: to see. Absolutely and it's so needed in society yes because as I'm from Sweden I see this so much happening in society we have a a kind of philosophy in Sweden that uh if you have any problem with your health if you are stressed burned out it's always the problem of the workplace of the company they are guilty or the government is guilty and what this has led to that we have like thousands of thousands of people in Sweden that don't work and that have to to have all this kind of treatments and and financial help from the government staying away
Richard: from work for months years years
Helena: exactly or some sometimes never get back to work.
And of course with their kind of thinking they are right. But if you would invert it and see that everything, all the problems that I have in my life, in one way or another it starts with me. And if I get the right help to to work with this, then I can recover all this capacity, all this joy, all these talents that I have.
You don't have to be a victim. Because actually I would say that this kind of, when we are very upset about something inside ourselves for a very long time and we are like repeating it and again and again in our head and thinking that we were a victim and so on, first of all this leads to an enormous stress inside the person.
Can even get physically sick because of this. This kind of, it's a kind of conflict inside. You're fighting with something, you're fighting with a fact that happened that you cannot change, so it's an enormous stress. Um and also what actually, what we are fighting with is not in this case that person that made that, this did that thing. We are fighting with the consciousness about something about ourselves, something
Richard: destructive, something
Helena: that we don't want to see in ourselves.
Like we are fighting inside ourselves and we are feeling no, I'm I'm not guilty, I'm not guilty, it was not my fault. But deep inside we know that we did something wrong and this consciousness we don't want to accept. So the the fight, this is very beautiful I think. Um What Dr.
Keppe says is that the fight is not, we are fighting against not the fact in itself, but the consciousness that it gives us. We are fighting against the consciousness of ourselves. It
Richard: brings something to us that we don't like to see in ourselves. And this is difficult for us to see, because who wants to think of themselves as acting against their own interests?
Yeah. We all
Helena: think that we have our best interests at heart. Exactly. And also, I think it's very interesting because it's so taboo to speak about children, for example. But what I said about our own personality and our own choices, this comes, it's shown very early in the personality. Like yesterday, I was having a conversation with a student and he was speaking about his sister who had got cancer.
And this was because she had been smoking for a very long time. And so he said so in her case cancer is not caused by a psychological reason. I said "but smoking is psychological too, why do you smoke, why do you do that to yourself." And he said "no but for example in my case, because he was a smoker, when I started smoking I was 12 years old and I did it because I wanted to be a man, you know, there was group pressure and so on."
And I was saying, yeah, okay, you are right. But on the other hand, there were other kids that didn't start to smoke. You know, I can even remember myself when I was a young girl. I was that kind of person who was attracted to try smoking and like I thought it was cool.
Richard: And there were other girls that really didn't want to try.
They just thought it was wrong, that it was terrible. So we have already this personality, even when we are very, very young. You know, one of the things I want to say just in focusing on this is there's a lot of talk now that you never can blame the victim. Don't blame the victim. That's just like the state. The victim is a victim and you can't blame that.
But unfortunately, with that kind of conversation, I understand why that's being said. Women who've been raped or situations like this, horrible situations. The problem with it is if we don't analyze the victim, we stop the discussion. And that person can never overcome because they can't take away what happened to them. That's happened. That's it. It's over. And so the only way to really help is to see why, to see what it is that's so deep inside that person related to this incident.
The incident's horrible. That's obvious. But we can overcome many things in our lives if we try to get to the bottom of what is this saying about me? What is there I need to see about me, about my attitude of life? Not just the person who did this to me, but me too.
Helena: Because, as you said, normally when we say this, people think that, oh, you are blaming the person.
But it's not about that. Because if you look at it clearly, there is no advantage in seeing yourself as a victim. Even if you are a victim. But there is absolutely no advantage in this view. First of all you you can't like you said change what happened and you will never get forward as long as you put yourself in the position as a victim.
So the only person that really loses something with this view is the victim himself. So you you don't help people by saying "oh poor you, you really were not loved, you really were not helped when you were a kid", you don't help anybody by that. So real love really is to show this aspect that you're talking about and
Richard: dr Keppe's psychoanalysis is all about this.
You who are listening, it's about connecting us up with what's going on inside our own psychology, not inside the chemicals in our brain or the sociological things that happen to us outside, but what really is going on inside my psychological life. Why am i identify with this aspect of the thing where somebody else is not, like your example of smoking, you know the other girls weren't and you were, so what does that say about you.
That's not a problem of the cigarettes, that's not a problem of the peer pressure, it's a problem of helena's attitude towards that that particular situation or Richard's attitude
Helena: whatever. Because this thing of being a victim, it's something that has become so automatic in our society. So it's almost like a kind of allergy or something like uh you you take a small thing just to say "oh look i'm a victim of discrimination, i'm a victim of a virus, i have my
Richard: rights, i need to fight for
Helena: my rights, i am a victim of uh of of uh depression", you know.
So this has become is a kind of paranoid attitude that people have. I i perceived this when i was in the United States recently um because i think it's even stronger there in in this sense. Um i was on a bus tour, it was like a kind of sightseeing and there was in our group there was an American woman and when she was going to get off this bus with a very nice driver who was explaining the things to us, she like slipped a little bit because it was raining a lot so it was very wet on the steps of the of the bus and her camera broke a little bit.
And then she started to blame the bus driver and the company that they didn't have prepared well these steps of the of the bus and it's created a really bad sensation because he was so nice and she should have paid more attention when she stepped off the bus since it was wet, it was raining you know. But it's a it's like an immediate reaction that we have been, so we have gotten so used to this kind of mentality.
So immediately you project, immediately you see the blame outside yourself. Look
Richard: what happens, marion berry the former mayor of washington dc was caught red-handed smoking crack and he blamed it on "that bitch who set me up" and later insisted his prosecutors were racially motivated. Uh there's a woman who blamed the tobacco industry for her deadly lung cancer, a man who jumped in front of a moving train in new york causing the amputation of his two legs, he sued the engineer in the subway system for negligence.
Marion berry got only got a slap on the wrist, and that was it.
The courts awarded this woman who had deadly lung cancer, they awarded her $400,000 in damage to be paid by the cigarette manufacturer. The man who deliberately and voluntarily jumped in front of a New York subway train got $650,000 in damages. So the system is totally supporting this kind of thing. And we play this game at great damage to ourselves because we are losing our sense of ourselves, our sense of control and power.
We are damaging ourselves immensely by this kind of
Helena: attitude. Exactly, um here at our school Millennium we receive many students that they are like mature people that already speak English many times. And I received a new student last last week, um very tall beautiful strong woman, uh very elegant, she has we could say here in Brazil we say a kind of European style, she has a high cultural level, she speaks German and French.
And um so I thought that she must have a really, she must be a really successful person, I mean I judged her by what I felt from from her appearance and everything. Um and then I started to talk to her this first class and then she started to tell me some things of her life story. And she said that she was, when she was three years old, her parents gave her away because they just didn't want her, didn't want her, they gave her away to another family.
This was quite common in the past here in Brazil actually. Uh they gave her away in order to be a maid in another family, and so she was not actually adopted, she was working in this other family from that she was young, too very young,
Richard: from that she was three years old, uh
Helena: helping to clean the house and take care of the the house, the kids and everything.
And uh of course she it was very sad for her, but she somehow accepted the situation. When she started school she understood that in school she could really um she could really be someone, she could make herself into someone. And so she started to study a lot, she went to the best university in in Brazil, she learned languages that I mean here 99 of people here don't know any any language at all.
And she met a German guy, a German boyfriend, and she moved with him to to Germany and they had two kids. And when her youngest daughter was just like four months old they moved back to Brazil, and just right after that she was about 30 years old, her husband died in a car crash. And uh it was very difficult for her because she had to bring up her children alone, she didn't have any parents.
Richard: This is a
Helena: tragic story. Yeah, obviously. But I was so surprised with this story because I just couldn't believe that this warm, happy, strong woman had been through all of that and that she had that kind of background because she seemed to come from a really good family, you know. And she said, no, no, but I'm so grateful for my life. I'm so happy that I have been able to raise my children alone and that they have become successful people, professionals.
And I just can't complain about anything. And nowadays she's also helping people that are like in a terminal state, people who are going to die in hospitals. She works as a volunteer to help these people. And I was just thinking like, my God, if this was in Sweden or like somewhere where we have this idea more a victim thinking, this person would be a total wreck, you know.
Oh my God, my parents gave me away, I had to work as a child, oh I lost my husband, I mean these things are terrible. But it's the attitude that you face these these uh happenings with.
Richard: I remember Mark Ulira, one of our teachers here from Finland, telling a story of a young boy and his sister who were abandoned in the forest by the mother.
The mother went kind of crazy and she left them in the forest to die in a ditch. And the little girl, the sister, started to cry and the boy too. And he said, well, I can't stay here. So he started to walk down the road and eventually he came to a farm and a man at the farm took them in. He didn't have a family or anything.
He took them in. He did the best he could with them. But this young man grew up to be very angry and kind of self-destructive. And then one day he had kind of an insight where he realized that if he continued like this, he was going to die. So he dedicated himself to writing and speaking about his experience to help other people.
Then he became a very successful therapist. Now he's very successful in Finland. He goes around doing motivational talks and telling his story and saying, look, if anyone tells me that they can be a victim of anything I'm going to tell them my story. Because he said nobody can stop me from having a life of contribution to others. But he made a big decision I think Helene, he decided to get out of just himself and think about what can I contribute to other people instead of just focusing on my problem, look what was done to me, how can I help other people.
Helena: Wow. Because this thing that I'm a victim, it's kind of narcissistic, you could say, because you are so like this woman that was forced to eat broccoli when she was a child, for example, that you spoke about. It's like she's so stuck in how she's feeling pity for herself, how terrible it was. So she doesn't even see the world, you know. And this is a typical idea also in psychology that you were not loved, you were not being seen by others, by your parents.
But we are never told like, oh, are you really loving other people? Are you giving love to others? Do you see other people? Do you see anybody but yourself? This approach nobody has except from from Analytical Trilogy. So actually only when you go, when you take action and start to give love and seeing other people and see what do they need, not only what do I need, then you can forget about yourself a little bit, stop feeling pity for yourself, feeling like a victim.
And that's the only way to cure even, because when you are in these victim thoughts, then you are stuck. And when you take action, then you can free yourself.
Richard: Gandhi's suggestion was, be the change you want to see in the world. This idea that we can't because of what happened to us from others is an example of an inversion, Keppe's brilliant term for this universal psychological misunderstanding.
There is always more at rich at richjonesvoice.com. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
