Richard Lloyd Jones: This is Healing Through Consciousness. My drive has been shot down. My drive has been destroyed. That's what I was looking for, the word, my drive. Yes, and you can be sure you are doing this to you now. Yeah. It's not them anymore. You are doing this. It's a suicidal attitude. Welcome to another therapy session online. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Dr. Norberto Keppe, the developer of the psychoanalytical science used by Dr.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco on this podcast, has written extensively about sociopathology, which is the application of psychological conditions to the society at large. Quite innovative, really. So as we might analyze an individual's neurotic response to an everyday situation, we could also recognize an equally neurotic law or institutional bureaucratic hurdle. Our modern society is displaying psychotic tendencies even in our continued application of war and terrorism to resolve conflicts.
We live on a beautiful planet that offers abundance of everything we need to live well, and we destroy it or dominate it to have power and so deprive others of it, etc., etc. All the litany of problems we see on the planet are evidence of our pathological attitudes and even pathological institutions. Our analysis session today deals with one person's attempts to reconcile the difficulty in trying to fit in to a very unhealthy American society.
Here's Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Hello. Hello, ma'am. Hello, ma'am. Hello. I enjoy this. Hello, ma'am. Where
Guest (identity protected): are you from? I'm originally from New York.
Cláudia: Can I ask you how old you are?
Guest: Fifty-seven. Well,
Cláudia: so you imagine you are with me. Yes ma'am, very comfortable situation, like lying down in the couch, and I will behind you,
Guest: and you will go deep in your inner self, and don't be worried if I am understanding if you are doing the right connections, if you're following the right track.
You must let it come like flow from your inner self spontaneously.
Cláudia: So be as less censored as possible. So really be very spontaneous and truthful in what you say, and I will be more
Richard: listening most of the time, so I can know about you and practical facts
Cláudia: of your life, give an idea about your past.
Okay let's
Guest: start. Well, I guess at the beginning, at the very beginning, I was a misunderstood because I didn't really communicate with people very well, and I say this because my studies were very much off the charts as far as at that time commiserate with my age and studies. In fact it was so much to the point that different entities as school boards and parent teachers and associations I actually were given awards because I was producing or interacting with my studies at a far advanced level at that time.
So it always this was something that stood out and made me different from the other kids.
I'm not going to say smarter, but it just made me different. So, but I was not boastful about it. I wasn't braggish about it because I know how it made other people feel. So it was something that I always kept to myself because me having the information and other people not knowing was good enough for me. Um, the people that needed to know were the ones that knew, but this was from my perspective at a long time, my mother, myself and my brother, my brother father was around but he wasn't really around.
It was in body only, if you will. So I was left always to my own devices, which encouraged me to read a lot. I read everything all the time. You could save a voracious reader at a formative age, which might explain some of my success in school. So it wasn't a surprise for me as it was to others because I stayed in books all the time, even unfortunately some material I shouldn't have been reading, but it just kind of pushed me further.
It made me understand on some levels material and different concepts that I shouldn't have understood, but because I was reading so much and then I got to a point where I could get places where they could explain it to me, then I would understand not just what I was reading and taking it in but also getting a full explanation if you will.
So I wasn't just taking in the stimuli, I was understanding it and breaking it down.
In fact, at one point, I was invited to a magnet school, what they call for gifted students. I went to an accelerated program in an elementary school where I essentially went two grades in one year. So my middle school years was done in one year. I did seventh and eighth grade. I developed at some point along the way a talent for memory.
For instance, when I'm talking to you or I'm expressing I remember where our apartment building was in New York City 40, 50 years ago. I didn't really adapt, as I said, deal with people very well. I dealt with them, but I didn't. I remember at one point my high school teacher he told my mother I would never make it in my chosen career field because I didn't like people and I didn't I didn't understand them.
I didn't understand the things they did, you know, it was very bizarre to me, some of the things they did, it was just strange. Maybe that made me the odd one out, but I was the one that was excelling, so how could I be wrong? And you get to a place where you think I'm using metaphors because I like to do that, is one plus what is supposed to equal two, but not in the world that we live in, it doesn't.
And now are those people wrong or am I wrong? So um, that was that, but I entered high school and I finished 1980 to 1983, three years, so the future was supposed to be mine to do whatever I wanted, so I thought, but in high school television broadcasting teacher, we had a tv station in our schools.
I wanted, I went to a vocational high school because I knew I wanted to be in television in the media, and I did, so I was producing things even then. I wrote my first story, and that's another thing, I had my first story was a poem I wrote, stolen from me, somebody stole it and had it published somewhere, and I had the original copies and I knew it was mine.
But this kind of I guess began a point in the trajectory for me where I kind of just I felt justified in having disdain for people because I knew they were wrong, they just felt wrong at times, you know, they just felt wrong, and their behavior often justified it for how I felt, you know. So it always was a question, am I the wrong one here or they're the wrong ones, who's wrong here, because it was a lot of embracement of of odd behavior to me.
So I my mother, she kind of embraced that, you know, my teacher says "I'm not going to make it in television," well guess what, that wasn't true, because I went on after I entered college for a couple of years, it just initially, and then we had to leave. Well, we transitioned from New York because my mom had to take care of her mom, my grandmother, she was sick, and the other siblings had done their part and they had done their role, and it was now my mother's turn to share I guess in that burden.
So she took me and my brother and we came down here to Georgia, and that's how we ended up here.
I, at the time, was telling myself I was going to go to school in Texas and, you know, for whatever reason. That wasn't going to be the right option because it always requires a lot of money and I didn't have any scholarships at that time. I didn't really apply or didn't know that there was a way to do that and I didn't at that time.
So I ended up, and I say ended up down here because I don't know that this would have been my first choice even though my family was here. I was not a southerner at all. I didn't like the South because they seemed very backwards here. I came down here and again it was proven, I felt my position and perspective was correct, that people were backwards, they weren't up to date or couldn't keep up with me.
They had all these benchmark testing that placement for students, and I came down here and had to listen to other students complaining about the test being hard and how they had failed it more multiple times, and I came down here in the first year, I took the test and I passed it very well, and I felt no, it's not the test, it's you.
So then again I felt I was out of place, I wasn't in my space with my tribe, because I was in in a space with a bunch of people who just couldn't keep up and they were going to complain about it, but that's where I was stuck at here.
And then I wanted to join the military, which I did as far as the Air National Guard. I didn't go full active at the time. My mother didn't want me to because she felt she was listening to other people who were saying it was going to turn me into a lesbian and those things that she despised and hated. But during that time it was a continuation of something I had experienced in high school, which was an assault by my boyfriend at the time in high school, and then that was very much at the forefront of my mind when I was in the guard, and I began getting harassed by an upper senior level NCO, they call non-commissioned officer, while I was in college, I was finishing up and I was also working at a local tv station.
So I had all these things going on at the same time, culmination, and I grew very angry on a regular basis, enraged, and got to the point where this person was harassing me so much and even talk calling me and threatening to come to my place where I live, nothing to do with military affairs and business, and I threatened him on more than one occasion because my anger was coming out because I felt again here we were in a society at large where things were not adding up the way they were supposed to.
You do your part, you do the right thing and things go right, that's not true. When you're a young person you're not able to really formulate those injustices the way maybe an adult can, so I was angry all the time, and certainly when it came to people doing things like they didn't have a right to or they shouldn't do, I was incredibly angry.
So I always stayed armed at the time because it was part of what my military job was, which was legal.
I was a military police officer so I was okay to carry weapons off duty. It was allowed and I did. Now I understand that was not the best thing but I kept everything boiled and contained and it was okay. I never got him to any problem but I didn't create problems, that was the whole point. So to say one would say well I was always the one that was being aggressed, that is correct, and this behavior went on for at least half the time I was in the service when I went on active duty in 1990 after the beginning of a conflict in our country that we hadn't seen since Vietnam, Desert Storm.
It just got worse. But people were aware of it. The commanding officers were aware of it. I made a case. I reported him. Didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. And it came to a head where he was supposed to have been dealt with and he wasn't. And we went on an away trip and he made some comment and said something to me.
And then I sent paperwork everywhere to everyone, even members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and that's not an acceptable thing. My reaction was judged as an overreaction, even though I was well within my right. As the young person, as the junior officer NCO, I was well within my right to do what I did because I had come to them already.
"This lie that they call chain of command, I followed it, nothing change, so it was time for me to take matters into my own hands, which I did, but at that point my reaction as it was in line with my personality was an overreaction from their perspective, it wasn't an overreaction to me, and I sent paperwork to the secretary of defense's office William B Cohen that got me on the list as far as them wanting to retaliate, which they did, and then it ended up with me being I had to leave." "I talked to JAG officer lawyer who said because of what I did, which wasn't in my perspective wrong, that I would have to leave, and I did, but it began my transition into civilian life, into my media career started at CNN, but I still did not really communicate with people, and for the longest time I silenced that part of my life."
"No one even knew I was in the middle had been in the military and I was a veteran, because I had had no, I had disdain because I knew what it was, I knew who it was, I knew the people, I knew the parties, I knew the kind of culture, and it was evil to me." "I just started calling things the way they should be called, evil, which is how I see most of our world, our society in America is just evil." "It's why I feel quite justified when I pray for, and this is just reality, Genesis 6 5 is a part of the bible in which the creator who made us, because we didn't make ourselves, he grew so frustrated it with his creation."
And he just got so enraged with his creation that he said, enough. The creator called us evil. And I agree with him. I agree with it. And he destroyed us. He sent the floods. He basically raised us from the universe. And I pray for that again, because we are so far gone off the rails. There is no order here. We embrace madness and chaos.
That's who America is. "It embraces madness, which is why you can have the kind of things going on here that don't even raise an eyebrow, why you can have poor little children be slaughtered in a school where they're supposed to be safe and nobody says nothing, or they get a little upset but then we go back to business as usual." "That's America, this country is gone, it's gone, I that's that." "So are you still on tv and CNN?" "No, that that because of who we are, no, that ended a long time ago, and when I went to my next gig, I mean it's everything like I said in what I made statement is is wrong, we're a it's ageism."
My next role was at, was at Weather Channel and that ended right now. It's been 15, 16 years, 2009. So I was too old. I mean, people will say, how do you know? I know because I had the best record there. I made short films on my bonus money. So I know who I am. I know who I am. So
Cláudia: now, what is your everyday life?
What do you do? How do you
Guest: live? Well, my everyday life is that I'm living in a best friend's house, courtesy of her. I pay her because their place, I guess when I think of life, let me back that up. When I think of life as metaphorically driven, I agree. I had my own place in 2019. I had been there for like 13 years, my own condo.
I didn't know where I was living had a problem. So when I say the metaphor took care of it for me, it did. The owner had to sell out of, I mean, quickly because he had some problems, but they also brought a stadium to our neighborhood. But in the same time that that was happening, we didn't know, there was a chemical plant that cleansed medical equipment.
They had been pumping out a very very toxic cancer-causing chemical in the area. I lived within 10 miles of that of that facility. So to say that it was a metaphor that I had to leave suddenly, like how did this. Maybe it was the universe protecting me. Get out of there. Now, I had already been there 13 years, so who's to say?
I don't know what I was exposed to, but it did affect people closer to the plant, and they died. Several people died. So, I was further away, but to say I was still in the area was not far from. Um, so my day-to-day life is that I had to leave there and I had to move in with my friend and I've been here ever since. But to give you some backstory, they just settled with that plant for $35 million because they were wrong and they don't, of course, this is what I was saying.
They don't, nobody wants to admit wrong. They just wanted to give away $35 million, but people died. But I had to move away from that area, which I liked. I was... And do you have any work now? No, I don't. I mean, I only get my military benefits. That's the only thing. And
Cláudia: you don't have any activity that you develop. What do you do?
Guest: Well, I'm trying to finish, as funny as it is, and maybe that's why I've been giving this break. I'm trying to finish a book. I started writing a book a long time ago when I was still in the service. And it was very prescient. Believe me, I have evidence. It foretold a lot of things that have come to pass. And I will give you the back story.
Just quickly. It even foretold a second civil war in America. Because of the fracturing. That was going to take place in the future. So I'm seeing a lot of stuff. So I need to finish that book. And that's what I've been working on right now. I've been trying to get myself going. I've been very down. But I have to find a way to find my.
Get my damn. Myself together and finish this book because that's what it was for, I think. And had I finished it, I would not probably be in this situation right now. Okay, so I got it.
Cláudia: Now, let's try to bring what you said to a psychological, inner-oriented level of your inner life. Okay? Because I'm not going to say here what I think, if I agree or not.
But I feel very sorry anyhow for what we see happening but let's try to work in the psychological level so it could bring you more strength more resistance in a good sense to deal with all these sociopathological situations. You said since you were a child, you felt like you didn't belong, right, to this society? Yes. To this world. Right. So I will ask you now, give me free intuitive associations with this society that you did not belong to.
What do you associate it
Guest: with? Well, from my perspective, how people reacted to me and I mean what you just asked. I just, I just, it just brought back something. When I was allowed to do my job and work and what I wanted to do, my manager would throw so much stuff at me because and she said to me one day, she would send me email, she said to me one day in an email, you never cease to amaze me.
And I'm thinking, why do I, I see I amaze you so much. This came from a grown, a woman who was very very accomplished in her own right, but that's what she said to me, you never cease to amaze me. Because people would throw superlatives at me. I didn't have to do anything to pump myself up, other people did this. So if they're looking at me like this, why is that?
What's wrong with you? I felt like I wasn't that extraordinary. I said, you people need to get yourself together and step up to the plate. It has nothing to do with me. I have people tell me every day after a conversation with them, you're so intelligent. No, I'm not. You're stupid. What is wrong with you? That's how I feel.
Cláudia: So what do you associate their attitude with in one or two words?
That they think I'm different from them Okay It's weird So and the way they were What did you see in them? The way
Guest: they were, I saw that they were just who they were. They were just the same. They were like everybody. They were average. They were like everyone else. They were average. And they had self-esteem issues. And they believed that where they were was okay.
And it wasn't. So
Cláudia: now we will try to do an interiorization here. And now please relax a little bit. And we will try to see what these people were mirroring to you. So you got like in dissonance with them. So you said they were like average. Yes. And? They had self-esteem issues. Yes, self-esteem issues. Now, let's try to bring these two things to your inner self.
What are you saying through this? That when you adopt or when you think that you need to follow their patterns, sometimes you may feel the need to be like them, to belong to this society. And you have a self-esteem attitude about you that you don't realize quite well. So sometimes you may have felt as if you were different in a negative way.
And this is what really is important for you to become conscious because this hurts you deeply. Every time you have a self-esteem problem, every time you want to be like them in the like an average person, you hurt yourself. And this is what you can work now because you can't change your country like alone. This country will be changed but not by individuals like you and me.
But in order to survive and be somewhat useful for yourself and for others, it is important for you to address your self-steam problems and your need to belong to this average, to this society. So when you do this, you become weaker, you suffer.
Guest: It's called blending in. Yes. Not standing out but blending in like everyone else,
Cláudia: yes. So you, you attack your being, you attack your essence every time you do this.
Every time you do this, you attack your essence, your being. It's like healing yourself slowly. I
Guest: don't like standing out and I probably is why and I wanted to see about that, why I can't get myself together to finish this book even though the steps I should be taken to finish writing it and then put it down to work in that. It's almost because I feel it would bring me out out in the area that I don't want to be out, you know.
It would make me stand out because they can go prove it, they're able to go prove it, trust me, that when I wrote it it would bring me out to an area that I don't want to be in. And of course they will hate you, yeah. And the people that saw it, the people that saw it in the beginning, that read it in the beginning was a testify to that.
They said had you finished it, you know what happened to you. I said they couldn't have proven anything, I was in the military so I don't care what they would have thought, I was a witch, I don't care. But it would have affected me and I know what it would do now. So yes, so that's probably why I'm struggling to fit to even put the work in to finish it because if I do a good job with it it will bring and it got published it will bring me out out of the hide out of the shadows and I don't want that.
So yeah, I'm probably doing it to myself. So now you have
Cláudia: to first see more this inner resonance with this situation in the society, in the american society. You need to be stronger and be inner stronger before you do this, before you do this you need to be inner stronger. And do I, don't I, I was not supposed to give you any advice but I tell you, you can do a lot of good still even if you don't necessarily finish the book.
You can do a lot of good, a lot of good in many areas, in many senses. You are like uh turning down your capacity and this is a pity. I
Guest: won't, what you're doing I won't embrace it, I know I
Cláudia: won't embrace it, I'm not embracing it, I haven't embraced it, yeah yeah. So what this bosses did to you in the past and your superiors using you or ever uh not respecting you, we're doing the same thing with you and your talents, even worse, even worse because they did that.
Once, twice, sometimes, many times, whatever. But it's something that it's gone. But now you are with you and you are doing something even worse than what they did to you in the past. You are turning you down every day, every minute.
Guest: Your capacities. My drive has been shot down. My drive has been destroyed. And that's what I was looking for, the word, my drive.
Cláudia: Yes. And be sure, you can be sure, you are doing this to you now. It's not them anymore, you are doing this. It's a suicidal attitude and you
Guest: know what, it's funny you said that word. I wrote a blog, it was a secret blog because I write so much and somebody saw my writing, they said I'm still trying to get a job at that time in the industry.
I said well I can't put this out here, somebody will you know they'll see it, they'll cancel me. And they said I will put it up under my name, an engineer saw it and gave me a blog and the name of that blog was, the name of my blog was Suicide Watch for America, Suicide Watch. That's what I call what we're in, in our country, a suicide watch.
I know
Cláudia: that,
Richard: Suicide Watch for America. Well maybe we could rightfully extend that out to the whole world, sad but true. And it makes Dr. Keppe's science more relevant than ever before for the solutions and healing it offers write me at joneshealing at gmail.com if you'd like to go deeper and see you next time on Healing Through Consciousness.
