Richard Lloyd Jones: It was Jung who stated that everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Herman Haas suggested that in disliking another, we dislike something in him that we have too. This is an aspect of psychology that's still kind of murky. We're going to clarify it significantly today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Well, today we're going to continue the discussion we began in our last podcast about the inner life of the human being.
What's going on inside us when we react to external stimulant? You know, I get very excited about this subject because I see how extremely helpful it is to people in giving them the understanding they need to comprehend and deal with their jobs, relationships, even their health. Now, before Cláudia Pacheco and I continue our conversation about Norberto Keppe's psychological process called interiorization. Let me let you know that I'm working to make her book, Revealing the Power of Consciousness, the handbook to Analytical Trilogy, available as a downloadable PDF book.
This is something a number of people have been asking me about through email. This is a really great primer about Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy or Integral Psychoanalysis that will help you to understand his profound work a little more clearly. Let me know if you'd be interested in having this book downloadable, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Now, interiorization. You know, the word doesn't even exist in English, but it does denote a remarkable psychological understanding.
I remember Keppe telling an example a year or so ago about a man who was complaining in his analysis session about how one of his co-workers was always creating difficulties for him at work. This colleague was always trying to find out what he was doing so he could criticize him. Keppe asked his client what he thought about his co-worker's attitude, and the client said, he has envy of my work.
He's trying to sabotage it. Keppe, then using this process of interiorization, told his client that this is what he himself did. He tried to destroy and diminish and attack his own work, and then later he would blame others for it. He was doing himself what he thought others were doing to him. This has enormous implications for us in our daily lives, the process of interiorization.
It's a process of returning to and comprehending our vast inner universe. Cláudia Pacheco, let's define it first. What is interiorization?
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: There is a difference between interiorizing and internalizing or interjecting and introversion too. Jung had this concept of introverted people, people that are introverted, meaning that people that do not show or express their inner feelings, thoughts, and lives are like a shy kind of personality.
They are not that much interested in social aspects, an introverted person. Introjection would be when you take a concept or an idea or a feeling, an experience, and you bring that content to your inner self, interject. So I interject some experience, some idea that I got from my parents in my childhood. I interjected some values of my family or of my country.
To interiorize is something very unique because it is like turning your attention and your interest towards your inner self and look inside, feel yourself, understand yourself better, acknowledge who you are and mostly be in resonance with your own being. So that's why this experience is so fulfilling. Because only when you are in touch with this inner life, with your soul, your mind, it's when you resonate with your true essence.
When you do not deviate, you do not stop, you do not put a break in your personal vibration, which is in tune with the universe and with the divine energy. So interiorizing is like opening a portal for the transcendence, for the universal and universals, opening a portal to the true knowledge. So through this you can understand better the world, other people and the universe.
Richard: Because Keppe says this a lot, he says that the true glory is inside, right? So there's this universal world that is full of beauty and goodness and truth, but there's a big resonance with that inside us, and this is not understood by most of us very well.
Cláudia: Yes, it's already not acknowledged, because everything in society, in education, in culture, is to make you pay attention to the external world.
So it's a sensorial appeal, social things to pay attention to, even relationships, Jones. We are so much interested in having good relationships. But all our relationships depend on the relation we have with ourselves. So if I am a projective person, if I am not in touch with who I am, I will project onto other people my problems. So I will fight not with the other people, but with myself through people.
Like a dog, when they look at themselves in the mirror and they bark, as if there was a dog in there, another dog. We do this with people.
Richard: You said something in a book that you wrote, Revealing the Power of Consciousness, which is a book that's very helpful for people because it's sort of a basic primer on what is Analytical Trilogy. And you said in this book that we're very confused about this because we think that we are reactive beings,
Cláudia: that we're reacting to external things, to stress, to
Richard: attacks.
But you said this is not true. Explore that a bit for us.
Cláudia: Because there are some people that tend to be more projective and paranoid, as we call in our language, and they are tend to be more envious and attack more the good in their life. So they feel more unsatisfied. They are always complaining about life and other people. They are not grateful.
They are always denying what they have and looking at the other people's lives or attacking those who love them the most. So for instance a person who lives with another person who is more envious or more unbalanced, more neurotic. He will wake up in the morning and during the breakfast will perceive that the other one has that look, that way of being that you know already that he is upset.
So you think, oh, what did I do now? Or what happened now that this person is so upset, so angry. And we should think in another form. What is the excuse this person is using? And this makes no big difference, because people that are envious, they find always some excuse, even if they have everything going on very well in their lives, and the sun is shining and the day is beautiful and you do the best you can to please that person.
And that person will always react like this.
Sooner
Richard: or later
Cláudia: we'll find. This is absolutely something. So when you see someone sad or angry or upset, you have the tendency to say, what happened? What did they do to this person? As if it would be necessary something to happen socially, externally so that person will would be sad or angry because something happened as a reaction. And not that many times, most of the times there are only good things happening around that person.
And this is the reason like this rejection, this crazy lunatic reaction we here have in this planet to go against what is good, beautiful, and truthful. And even enjoy, morbidly enjoy, this kind of negative feelings.
Richard: We get pleasure, don't we?
Cláudia: Yes, a morbid pleasure, Richard. This is sickness, this is crazy, but this is us.
Richard: You said in this book that these bad feelings, this uneasiness, this anxiety, this fear, are born inside us.
They're
Cláudia: not stimulated by the external environment. They may be stimulated when things go too good, when someone is too happy around you or too good or too generous, when the envious person sees too much good things and good people and too much happiness around or too much good energy around. And so they react. And this is reactive. But normally, a more balanced, generous, grateful person, they tend to think, what did I do wrong?
Should I do better? Could I do better? Because this kind of personality, they see the good of themselves in other people too. So it's the opposite kind of projection. They see the other one good and them always wrong. It's also a form of projection. Projective idealization, as Dr. Keppe mentions in his book Origin of Illnesses. There are two kinds of projections of what goes on inside of us.
One is this projective identification which Melanie Klein explored wonderfully and kept it to even deeper where you project onto other people your pathology, your negative qualities. But there is this projective idealization when you project onto other people your qualities, your ideals. So you idealize that person and later on when you see sometimes very painfully have to admit that that person is not what you thought.
So then you have to be very interiorized to to be able to cope with the situation that
Richard: usually happens after three months of a relationship, right.
Cláudia: Yeah the illusions are all broken three or six as they say isn't it, maximum six months the things start to show up and
Richard: you start to see have you always been leaving your underwear on the floor.
You start to notice those things. What does it mean to be interiorized in this situation, though, Cláudia, if you start to see things going on? What does
Cláudia: it mean to be able to deal with those relationship difficulties, those when the illusions get shattered? What does it mean to be interiorized in that situation? We have the tendency, Richard, to think that in order to be happy, you need another person, and you need a good partner or you need a lover that is okay with you.
We have the tendency to think that happiness comes from people, things, situations, countries. But in reality, happiness comes from us and we can share this. We can resonate with happy people, happy situations, but this comes from our inner selves. I can be happy with very little things, very simple life. And another person can be very unhappy with everything, materially speaking, socially, meaning a person can have a very rich life and be very unhappy.
Happiness is like being in resonance with goodness, beauty, and truth that exists all around us and in the universe and mostly in our Creator. And this is done through our inner selves. So if I am happy now, I can be happy tomorrow, I can be happy yesterday and I can share the happiness, but never take it from another person. So when you perceive that the other one is not what you idealized, you can become mad, angry, but you have to think that poor person has a lot of problems as you have.
So, if we have, each one must carry his own problems. If we have to carry our problems and other people's problems too, the responsibility to make other people happy, this is unbearable.
Richard: Very difficult. Very difficult. Let's use some specific examples to illustrate this process of interiorization, Cláudia, because we received an email.
Cláudia: Yeah,
Richard: this is a good example. Yeah, we received an email from our last show.
Cláudia: From
Richard: Washington, D.C. A woman saying that she's really been enjoying the show. I want to actually encourage people, if they have specific topics for us to cover, we would love to do that. You
Cláudia: can just email me at my email address, rich at richjonesvoice.com. This woman said she's having a difficult time dealing with some grief in her life.
Richard: A favorite animal of the family died very suddenly.
And she wanted some help with how she could deal with that, treat that, what could you say that could help her? Well,
Cláudia: if I would attend her in analysis sessions, I would ask this lady to free associate the dog that she lost in a very traumatic, sudden, unexpected event, as she says here. So, I would ask her, what does she associate this dog with?
Well, she may say beauty, happiness, joy, the dog itself, maybe purity, innocence, energy. So, then we would say that this dog represents these aspects inside of herself. The dog is a symbol of her inner joy, her inner vibrations, energy, joy of life. Purity. Purity that she has in herself, but she is not realizing that she is stopping, killing, destroying in herself. The loss of the dog represents the loss that she makes in her own life with these aspects.
And what really makes her or made her happy with the dog was not really, really the happiness or the qualities of the dog. But it was her own inner qualities that resonated through the dog.
Richard: She found it easier to access her own qualities when she was with the dog.
Cláudia: Yes, and she should improve this access through other means. She must have, and she does have, a lot of means to access these inner qualities in herself, and not only through the dog, because she's much more than this dog.
The dog is okay, skewed or okay, but she has much more qualities in herself to be developed.
Richard: This is really beautiful work that you do with Analytical Trilogy. Let's look at some more because I ask this question in my classes a lot with students. What irritates you? What's your pet peeve, that little thing that really irritates you? And there's a number of things that come up over and over again.
The first one is arrogance, arrogant people. What can we say to help somebody who deals
Cláudia: with... Ah, this is very interesting. Because you know something, Jones, we have a tendency that we don't realize, but this is present in all of us. When we hear someone saying something, we have the tendency to say, is this in agreement with what I think? Do I agree with this?
If I do, this is true. If I don't, this is not true. Or I become like the criteria of the truth, the universal truth. If things are in accordance to what I think, they are truthful. If not, they are not. And we lose a lot of opportunities to learn from other people and through other people. So we can be very fanatic, very sectarian in our ideas.
Because many times I grew up learning that those ideas are the true values in life. But they may not be that way, and many times they are not the true values, because we are raised learning values that fit the intentions of the powerful people. This morning I was teaching a client, she's a medical doctor. And I was telling her that it's not her own personal individual problem, but she was taught in the medical university establishment and now in her profession that only the medical pharmaceutical industry interests are true in her life.
And they are starting to learn that this is the other way around, that most of the values and the statements of the medical industry are in opposition to human interests. So, you see, Richard, we learn in universities, in schools, through the media, in books, in churches, values that have nothing to do with us. So we have to think about this arrogance in our minds.
We can be very arrogant and be lost in this arrogance.
Richard: Totally intransigent. And this is why we feel such fear and anger at terrorism, fanatical terrorism, because this fanaticism exists very much. Another thing
Cláudia: that is linked to our arrogance is this idea that I am what I think and not that I may be and most of what I am in my behavior has nothing to do with what I think about myself.
Other people know me better than I do, so I should be more attentive. Pay attention to what other people say about me.
Richard: And also to my results in life, because the results that I
Cláudia: create show the real intention, not the intention I think I have, right? Like, for instance, I do everything I can to develop, to progress, and I have like a bad luck.
Nobody understands me, and my efforts are worthless. So if I am not succeeding, it's because unconsciously I don't want to follow the right things to be done in order to succeed.
Richard: Yeah, bad relationships are like this, too. We can attract to us those people that will attack us, those people that we
Cláudia: will use as an excuse to stop developing. And don't you see that people admire arrogant people in society?
They are more powerful. They have the tendency to admire an arrogant person. Humble people are not that much admired in society.
Richard: So if we're irritated by arrogance, it's because there's something that we're not seeing about our own
Cláudia: intransigence, arrogance. And how much we give an enormous value to arrogance.
Richard: That's very true, Cláudia.
Cláudia: And arrogant people.
Richard: Another question, another issue that comes up a lot is this question of betrayal.
People are very upset with betraying partners,
Cláudia: partners who cheat or have other relationships outside the marriage or outside the relationship. How can we see that in this interiorized way? So we have to perceive that we betray love in our lives and we betray feelings of love in ourselves. So we are not that loyal as we want to see ourselves. If I am too much upset with other people's betrayal, it's because, first, I betray myself.
I betray my true values. I betray my feelings of love. Very easily I'll say, okay, so I will split. I break up, or I stop here, or I don't want this anymore. This is a betrayal to my own feelings of love. Either I love or I do not love. If I love, I will not put a stop in this feeling like this.
Otherwise, I will just, if I cut off a feeling, a good and beautiful feeling in myself, I'm mutilating myself, psychologically mutilating myself. And if my love like is contingent or it depends on the attitude of the other person it's not a true love. So there there is a lot of forms of understanding our betrayal when we are paying attention in other people's betrayal.
And my love should never depend on what the other person does, otherwise I'm not loving. And feelings of love and this is something jones, this is something I'm not well loved or not loved enough by my partner. And I want to be loved in order to love back, or I deserve to be loved back from what I from what I give. I should receive back love and gratefulness.
So people do not understand that in reality we are not pleased or happy by other people's love for us. We can be, but we really are, and this is something, really happy and and we feel pleasant and satisfied when we feel love. Our own feelings of love give us fulfillment and satisfaction. You've talked about
Richard: this in another podcast we did and I think it's it resonates very very beautifully this question of the the love is something that's an internal experience not dictated by the outside.
I like this
Cláudia: so like this lady jones from washington dc she was so happy or she was so pleased because she had a capacity to love her pet or something. It was not the pet that brought her happiness but the capacity she had to love it was what was meaningful here. This
Richard: is beautiful. What would we say to somebody, how would you counsel somebody who is faced with a betraying partner because that's
Cláudia: a situation that really is happening and it's
Richard: not enough to see that my love doesn't depend on that person.
I mean, how do we help this person to cope with the actual situation as well? Understanding their own betrayal, I think this is very important.
Cláudia: Yes, and rethinking about the value that the person gave to this other one. So maybe the qualities that person has are enough to keep on or maybe the person has to rethink should I stay with a person that is not really giving value to our friendship.
Am I betraying myself when I made a false image about the other person the other person is giving me very clear signs that he's not or she's not what I think. So I am betraying myself if I fool myself with false images and idealizations. You use an example
Richard: in a teleclass. By the way, you give these teleclasses every Saturday, and they're very useful for people who want to understand more about Analytical Trilogy.
So I just mentioned that, that this is something that goes on every Saturday, a teleclass with Dr. Cláudia Pacheco about these themes directly. You used an example in one of these teleclasses of a young woman who had married a bad guy, a guy who controlled her totally, called her every 15 minutes by cell phone, stopped her from studying, stopped her from seeing her family, stopped her from developing in her life.
How can we help this young woman to understand the situation because I'm sure
Cláudia: there are many people in situations similar to this or maybe not as strong, but in some way related. Because these people are victims of their own choices, inner choices, and not from this partner. Socially speaking, they can become victims and they can even be killed in extreme examples. If the other one is too sick, too psychotic, They can even put themselves in difficult situations.
But what is important is this interiorization to see what and why did I choose a person like that in my life. I wanted to destroy myself. I wanted to imprison my freedom, my liberty, my talents, my happiness. So I wanted to use that person to criticize me, to put myself down, to attack me. So I would have a good excuse to say my life is being destroyed and not that I'm choosing unconsciously choosing to destroy my life.
So if I'm really decided to stop destroying my life, the answers, Jones, will come from within. Because an analyst can never interfere in a relationship when it's time to end, when it's time to start, or how it should be. So the true answer is we have within us, but the problem is what is my true intention? Am I really willing to construct my life, do something meaningful and good with my life, or will I continue using other people to destroy it?
Richard: A quick note, integral psychoanalysis can be conducted over the phone. Many clients in Europe and North America do that every week. If you're interested in this treatment, write me. Rich at richjonesvoice.com. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Thanks a lot for listening.
