Richard Lloyd Jones: This
Guest (identity protected): is
Richard: Healing Through Consciousness.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: What do you associate your father's attitude at the time?
Guest: Weakness. He allowed the family to deteriorate. And I always saw him as a very weak man.
Cláudia: Let's try now to see how this inner weakness works inside of you.
Richard: Welcome to another therapy session online. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. We are always in our programs trying to get to the psychological and spiritual causes behind our physical and emotional problems.
It's a journey that Norberto Keppe's Integral Psychoanalysis is well positioned to embark on. Keppe has synthesized Freud's psychoanalytical methodology, Melanie Klein's observations on envy and gratitude, classical German psychiatric findings on megalomania and arrogance, Socrates' dialectics, and Aquinas' discussion of the perfect inner structure of man, with his own discoveries of inversion and psychosociopathology that lead us to oppose what's good in and around us.
This, I think, is unique in his work. We are good by nature, by creation, but we have attitudes against that constantly, and we need means of becoming conscious of that or it will dominate us. In today's episode, a fascinating conversation that leads a man to see that the family abuse he suffered, he's now unconsciously continuing on himself because of a total blindness to his own weakness.
Here's Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco to set the
Cláudia: table. So I will give you instructions now. Imagine you are on the couch. I'm behind you. You will not see me, you will not distract yourself with things around you, and be spontaneous as much as you can, and don't censor anything. Okay.
Guest: Well, I suppose as a background, I will begin with a brief summary of my childhood.
I grew up in an abusive household. I had three siblings, all girls. My father would not discipline the girls, so since he wouldn't punish them physically, spanking them, I received all the spankings for everybody in the household. Of course, I didn't think that was terribly just, but I was the boy and I could take it. As I grew a bit older, the beatings became, well, beatings.
My father was a big guy, like I'm a big man now. He put me in the hospital three times. Back in those days, there wasn't such a thing as, you know, child protective services or whatever. And you made an excuse. Well, you know, he was playing on the roof and he fell off, or he walked into the door. So the broken ribs and the bruises were all explained away, and the doctors didn't ask any questions.
So I knew that were I to stay there, eventually something bad was going to happen. Either I was going to lash out at him with a weapon to defend myself, or he was going to kill me, literally kill me. So at 16, I had my own truck. I had been working since I was 14. I was very industrious. And I worked evenings and weekends after high school.
I bought a brand new truck right off the showroom floor at the age of 16. I was the only person in a very large high school that was able to do that without any parental assistance. So when I had my license and my truck, I left home at 16 for self-preservation. But from that early beginning, I had no choice but to strike out on my own.
And I realized that whatever my life was going to become. It was up to me. There was no assistance being offered. I was completely alone. So I had my own apartment and I worked in a machine shop, saving money for college. No one in my family had ever talked about college. No one had ever gone to college. But I definitely knew I was charting a different path.
This was a new chapter in a new family branch, I guess you could say. So after a couple years of saving, paying off my truck, I enrolled in college. Everyone discouraged me. Nobody said I could do it. Everyone said, you can't do that. No one's ever done that in our family, blah, blah, blah. But I thought, well, look, if I try and I fail, at least I have tried and I have my answer.
So I thought I have nothing to lose. And it turned out I did rather well in school. So I stayed and I started taking day classes. I quit my job and started working night shift at Jack in the Box, 7 p.m. Till 3 in the morning. Anything I had to do to stay in school. So seven years later, I ended up with a master's and two bachelor's degrees.
Of what? Well, I had a master's in architecture, a bachelor's in architecture, and another bachelor's in construction management. And so that experience told me that if I was to believe in myself and to get the negative talk out of my way, to get out of my own way and believe that anything was possible if you worked hard enough, I knew I was gifted.
I knew I was intelligent based on my college experience. So I thought, anything anyone can do, I can do as well. I just have to put in the time and the study. So I worked for over a decade in architecture and another 12, 14 years in construction management. I had the unique opportunity to build a lot of the projects that I designed.
It was an amazing, amazing time. But from the time I was in college, a friend of mine, who is still to this day my best friend in the world, got me involved in technology. Now, in those days, the Internet was just coming of age. I'm talking 77, 78. And we would go on something called the ARPANET, and we would hack into it and talk to people in the Balkans and Ukraine.
And this goes back to the Balkans War. Back then, a phone call like that would cost you $1,000, but we could do it for free. We thought that was pretty cool. So we started building computers back when you had to build a plywood box to put the components in, and you bought the pieces at Radio Shack. That eventually evolved into my career.
So construction management yielded to IT, and for the next 30 years I became an IT specialist and eventually was running a nationwide computer network encompassing 25 offices and 4,000 employees. COVID came along and took that job away because by then I was making a fairly handsome salary and And they were looking for budget cuts. So since I was at the top of the food chain, my job got cut.
And they installed one of my subordinates in my position. So that's when voiceover came up. People had told me all my life I should do something with my voice, but I was quite happy with my three different careers. I was successful at all of them. I loved all of them. I always did what I loved my whole life, so I was really very fortunate.
I got to do precisely what my heart loved, and I was good at it. God gave me certain gifts. God has been very, very good to me. I'll finish with, I recently, within the last couple of months, have had some significant medical challenges. I was always extraordinarily healthy. I was the guy who hadn't been sick in 30 years. In my 29 years of working for the same company in IT, I had only taken three sick days.
I always believed that the key to health was to believe that God put everything on the earth that we needed for perfect health. And if I simply treated my body the way God designed it to be treated, in my diet, exercise, and so on, I was never overweight, I had a good diet, I exercised regularly, and I was extraordinarily healthy all of my life.
If I hadn't darkened the doors of a hospital in 35 years. Then one morning I was out for a ride on my mountain bike, and I felt a pain over my heart as I was climbing a hill. And I'd never had that before. It was a brand new experience. And so I dismounted the bike, and I... Started pushing it, just walking beside it.
And after about 20 yards, that didn't work anymore. And eventually a passerby stopped and asked me if I was okay. Turns out she was my guardian angel because I needed to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. And that day changed the rest of my life because I was having a heart attack. It was an awakening for me because it showed me that even though I had led a healthy lifestyle, I'd done everything right, even according to the doctors, there were limits.
And my father's genetics caught up with me and I had clogged arteries and I needed immediate surgery when I got to the hospital. So I had heart surgery. And I'm still in the process of recovering from that sufficiently so that I can have another major procedure on my heart. I'm going to put that off for a couple of months, and then I'll be going back to a different hospital for another procedure.
And that kind of brings us up to date.
Cláudia: Well, where were you born? I
Guest: was born in Michigan.
Cláudia: And now where do you live?
Guest: I'm now in Southern California. I've been here since I was eight.
Cláudia: Okay. So, let's go back to the beginning of your talk today. You said that your father protected your siblings and discharged in you his anger, right? Yes.
Um let's try to do a free association with your father's attitude at the time. What do you associate your father's attitude at the time? Weakness in what sense? He
Guest: was for many years allowing my mother to be an alcoholic and a habitual gambler, and because he was too weak to lead in the household and get her the help she needed, he allowed the family to deteriorate.
And I always saw him as a very weak man because he had no backbone.
Cláudia: Let's try now to see how this inner weakness works inside of you. Because for 35 years or more, you did not realize that you also have a weak aspect inside of you and you were playing to be stronger than you could be. You were hiding this inner weakness inside of you and thinking that trouble could only come from your family and not from within you.
So let's try to see this weakness that is inside of you and is causing you so much pain now. You have an opportunity now to look into yourself and discover. Do you perceive that you want to be stronger than you really are, like pushing yourself, beating yourself up sometimes to be strong? Yes,
Guest: I do believe that's true. I always felt that I had to be the strong one because there was nobody else who was going to come along and do it for me.
I always felt alone in my goals. I didn't have a support system. So I think I overcompensated in some ways. Like you say, perhaps putting on the facade of strength, while simultaneously wishing it were different, wishing that I could rest and trust somebody to care for me the way I ended up taking care of so many others in my life.
Cláudia: But this is an unloving attitude towards you.
Well,
Guest: I suppose so. I guess I gave up at some point. I didn't feel loved as a child, obviously. My mother didn't show me any love because I knew she was an alcoholic. And so she continually tried to discredit me to my father and to my siblings because I was a threat to her. She wanted to keep drinking, and I wanted to see her get help.
So there was no love coming there, and my father just saw me as a constant pain in the butt because I was always trying to get him to step up and be a man, but he never stepped up. So between the two, there was no real support or love for me, and I guess at some point, I guess I just capitulated, and I thought, well, you're not a very lovable guy.
You just cause trouble. And in fact all I was trying to do was to stand up for truth. But truth is never popular. So
Cláudia: probably you have this inversion in here. You think that if you feel your inner weakness, if you acknowledge it, you will be weak. But if you pretend you don't have this weakness, you will be only strong and weakness will not exist inside of you.
And this is bringing you a repression, an inner repression, which is causing you stress and harming your health. So if you do feel your weakness consciously, feel it will give you more strength. You will be stronger if you acknowledge. If you feel your weakness, besides that, you need to check that this strength will never come from you.
Strength never comes from us, but comes from the energy, as you call energy of the Lord. You call this in the United States, you give this name to God, right? The Lord. Are you religious? Yes. Do you
Guest: believe in theology? Oh, absolutely. I'm
Cláudia: a Christian, man. Yes. Okay. So, it's easy to talk to you then and remember that all strength that you ever had in your life could only come from him and not from you.
So, it's not your merit anyhow to be strong, but it's your merit to accept his strength and use it in your life. But it's important as well to see yourself as weak, innerly, and insecure. You don't need to be God-like, and this is not healthy for you, to play God. I
Guest: believe all of that to be true, and I do believe that whatever strength I've ever exhibited comes from God.
I know, of course, that there are times in my life when I was just doing things in my own strength because I felt they needed to be done, rather than trusting God. When I was riding in the ambulance recently, when you're looking at the ceiling of an ambulance and you're the patient and the paramedics are looking at you the way they were looking at me, I remember thinking, I may never see my children again.
Look at me. For all I've done, for all I've accomplished, it's come to this and I may not survive. I had never entertained those thoughts ever in my life, and it changed me. Since that experience, I have a moment-by-moment relationship with God, and I'm constantly asking for His will in my life, that my goals are His goals for me, that my recovery is in His hands.
And I'm trying to step aside and not be this pillar of strength. You know, everybody's rock. They call me the rock. Everybody I was in a relationship with would call me their rock, their stability. But in truth, I was exhausted. I was drained and tired. And I just wanted to rest. Are you married? I'm not married now.
Cláudia: You have three children with your previous marriage.
Two. Two?
Guest: I have a boy and a girl. Both are wonderful people who have terrific lives. My daughter married a Christian pastor, and my son just this past Friday proposed to his girlfriend of the last five years. Both have college degrees, and they're wonderful. They've never been in trouble. They don't smoke or curse or take drugs. They are my legacy, and I'm very, very proud of them.
Cláudia: And what about your ex-wife?
Guest: Well, my ex-wife... Had a habit of expressing herself with physical violence. Whenever there was a dispute or an argument, I would tend to get quiet and contemplative. I would go for a walk, and then I would come back and try to discuss things calmly and quietly. She escalated one such incident over what we should watch on television.
I laugh because it's so ridiculous that escalated within three minutes to her beating me, a closed fist beating me in the face. I tried to brush it off like I had so many times before, but this time I couldn't walk straight. I was dizzy. My daughter is in medicine and she said, Dad, you have a concussion and you need to go to the ER right now.
So she actually came over and picked me up and took me to the ER. Well, when I got to the hospital, they are mandated reporters of domestic violence. And I didn't know this. I had never been in that position. This is during COVID. So I had my mask on. The admitting nurse asked me to take the mask off. And the moment he saw my face, which was completely bloodied.
I had 12 lacerations, black eye, swollen nose, you know, I was beaten. I was beaten very severely. And I wouldn't hit back to defend myself because I won't strike a woman. I'm six, you know, two, 230 pounds and I could I could kill somebody. So I won't strike anyone in anger. So they said, well, sir, we're mandated reporters. If we don't report this as domestic violence to the police, we could lose our license.
I said, well, I'm not here to cause you problems. I'm here to get treatment, so do what you have to do. So they called the police. Police came to the hospital and interviewed me. They went to my home and interviewed her. Of course, there wasn't a mark on her, and they took her to jail, and that's the last time I ever saw her.
She had to serve a year in jail and take 52 classes in domestic violence, during which time we divorced. So that's not a pretty story, but that's
Cláudia: the truth. So now it's a good opportunity to explain some basics to you. As you mentioned your situation with your ex-wife, do you see any similarities in what happened in your childhood and then now with your ex-wife?
I see in your situation with your marriage similarity, a correspondence so to what you lived in your childhood, in your family. So this is what we call in psychoanalysis integral psychoanalysis, that your unconscious worked against you. Do you perceive that there is a similarity, a correlation between what happened in your childhood and then now in your marriage? I hope you do perceive that unconsciously you had a self-destructive behavior that led you to accept a person.
Unknowingly, I mean unconsciously, there was a resonance between your unconscious and your wife. So this is something that you need to go deeper and understand better, because now you don't have your father anymore, you don't have your siblings or your mother to attack you, you don't have your ex-wife to attack you, but there is this inversion inside of you, this sort of drive to self-destructivity.
So you need to go deeper in that, otherwise this unconscious will keep working against you. And God is bringing to your attention this problem through me now, through this conversation. Okay, so God speaks to us through science as well, and there is indeed a very good, very important consciousness for you to research, to dig more, and to see if you can acknowledge, so you can have better control of your life from now on.
And you will need it because we have inside of our unconscious a big inversion, which we call in Christianity, the original sin. We have this original sin in our DNA. This is inversion. It's a kind of attitude that works invertedly against us, against our being, against what is divine in us. If we don't see this, we cannot be better than we have been.
Okay, so we need to understand inversion in depth. We need to see how you destroy yourself. You need to feel this better so you can have the power over this inversion inside of you, this attitude that goes against your being, your divine being. And this is in everyone. This is not only in you. This is everywhere, in everybody. Yeah, okay. Even your wife, she was fighting against her true being, and that's what she did.
Your father, she did the same with him, your mother, and everyone. I, I do
Guest: see that, and I've often thought that I draw people to myself who need rescuing. I knew these qualities in my ex-wife before I married her, but I still married her, and I was thinking I could change her, I could heal her, I could fix her, but I couldn't.
Cláudia: Yeah, I understand. This is a mistake we often do. Yeah. We do not accept the consciousness we have in front of our sight. We see reality, but we think, I can change reality. Yeah. And this is theomania in us.
Guest: That's very thought-provoking.
Richard: Thought-provoking it is indeed. If you'd like to be a part of our Therapy Online podcast, write me at joneshealing at gmail.com.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time on Healing Through Consciousness.
