Richard Lloyd Jones: Ooh, I wish I had a dollar for every piece of advice in the world about today's topic. Apparently, men are from Mars and women from Venus. There's a secret language between you to understand. There can be perfect love, but imperfect relationships. There's help in the stars. Soulmate consulting. I'll tell you, for a guy who's been married three times, it's a little overwhelming.
Or a little irrelevant. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Today, I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, let's see if we can get a little clearer on relationships. You know, it's been a real pleasure putting together these podcasts and really great to hear from you along the way. Drop me a line and let me know what you think about the show, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Many of you who've written have expressed appreciation for coming to know more about the work of the extraordinary Brazilian psychoanalyst Norberto Keppe and his science of Analytical Trilogy.
I feel the same, as I've come to understand more completely the depth of his remarkable work. I've come to appreciate the crystal clear comprehension he has of the human psyche. He's clarifying this like no one before him, and this gives us some real ground to stand on in investigating any field of human endeavor. His work really makes us look at the world with fresh eyes and challenge the ideas and philosophies that form our worldview.
Because many of our ideas come from somebody else's head anyway and need to be reviewed, really taken out, brushed off, and looked at again to see if they're still valid. Today, we're going to look at relationships through, I hope, a refreshing perspective. I don't know anyone better to do that than Dr. Cláudia Pacheco. Her observations about love are always illuminating and fresh.
Her thoughts today come from a series of interviews my friend Susan Berkley and I conducted with her in her office here in São Paulo. Let's pick her keen mind about relationships. Cláudia, you're going to look at relationships through a woman's eyes, obviously. And one common belief I see, and maybe that is general in the world, is that women are more focused on relationships than men.
Is that what you see in
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: your practice? We see much more women that are inverted. So they are afraid of giving love, or they think that if we love and if we do good and if we give good things for other people we will become poor or somehow as if we have something inside and if we give a hat we need to replace it.
So we don't realize the lucky one is the one who gives love and who feels love. If we are capable to feel love, so I'm the lucky one, because happiness comes from feeling love and doing good and not receiving love.
What makes us feel this happiness or fulfillment is the capacity to feel love in ourselves. "If you have a free love, free of charge, if you give it, probably you will receive a lot of love back to you. And this is a physical law, energetic law. The love you give, you receive back."
Richard: It's interesting, Cláudia, to hear about love being more an experience of giving, of feeling, and not of receiving.
There's so much emphasis today in North America, especially about loving yourself first before you can love others. And your words seem to fly directly in the face of that selfish and rather narcissistic view. According to Keppe, one of the fundamental aspects of the human essence is pure act. This goes back to the ancient Greeks, actually, where doing, giving, would be most important in this philosophy.
And one of the really thorny areas of relationships centers around wanting others to change, trying to get the other to modify themselves to fit some sort of image that the other person in the relationship has.
There's a lot of very wrong-headed thinking here, it seems to me. What's your point of view about that?
Cláudia: If your partner wants you to change, if he's not satisfied the way you are, something is wrong. Not that you don't have your flaws, your mistakes, your bad attitudes, but when you go to live with a person, if you expect that person to change, then you don't love that person.
You really love what you idealize from that person, what you would like that person to become. And this is a wrong start since the beginning. It will not work out. When you are going to live with a person, you have to think, do I accept this person and do I love him the way he is now? Do I accept his qualities, his virtues, and his flaws the way he is now, so I will be ready to live with that person.
But if I don't, so don't start. It will not be a good start.
Richard: Well, this is maybe relieving for some and somewhat of a shock for others, Cláudia, who are living under the sometimes desperate hope, maybe, that the other can get it together eventually and improve their lives.
Cláudia: I'm not saying that the person cannot be improved in some ways, but my improvement has to do just with my own decision. This is my business. If I don't want to change, nobody will make me change.
So you never expect to change anyone. You have to expect to change yourself if you can. If you do a big effort, then you improve your virtues, your good qualities. And you have to have a lot of discipline, a lot of humbleness, and admit your problems. And then you can count on some improvement, and sometimes in a big improvement. But don't count that you're going to change the other one.
We can only change ourselves in reality.
Even God can't change a person. He can't interfere in the free choice of any human being.
Richard: But what do you do, Cláudia, when you're in a relationship with someone who is distant and cold, there's no other way to put it, and you're committed, you want to make it work, but the other person just doesn't have any emotional reciprocity for you? What's to be done here?
Cláudia: If you have a loving attitude towards the other person, if he is not in the beginning a loving creature, he will end up by becoming one. If you don't ask or demand, because every time we demand something we ask something, so this is very unpleasant, the the other one will feel unpleasant and he will do it just for a mask and it will be a very heavy, very unpleasant.
So I would suggest a person to keep doing good and remembering anniversaries and valentine's days and all this and giving, because then you will like create an environment, in an energetic environment, like with this tendency to give and receive more affection and be happy to be able to do that.
But if you do in order to get back, then it's not a altruistic attitude. It's a negatistic one. So it will not get the true response.
Richard: Okay, that sounds good on paper, probably much more difficult to do than it sounds. But I think that makes a lot of sense, Cláudia. Tell me what's one thing we really need to be careful of, what what's one thing that's maybe a warning sign that things are not going well.
Cláudia: If you start blaming the other one, you're not giving me enough affection, you are not giving me enough attention, you are not present in our sexual relationship, you want me just for sensorial satisfaction but you really don't love me, you are not present in in the house, you are much happier with your friends and your work and you don't think about me and your family anymore.
So if you get to this point it's because there is something very wrong in the situation and it will not change in the way you expect it to change.
So if you're, if you married a man who is cold, who is a psychopath or a sociopath. A lazy guy. So this is your problem. In the back of your mind, you thought this was the best way to live. So now it's your problem. You have to fix the thing or to accept or to go away and to take your own way.
But there is no sense to want to change the other person. I want to continue with you if you change yourself. So this is impossible. If you get to this point, the marriage is over.
Richard: Dr. Cláudia Pacheco has written an absolutely essential book, not directly about relationships, but treating them and the difficulties both men and women have in them continually all throughout its incredibly profound and useful pages.
It's called Women on the Couch, an Analysis of Women's Pathology. But make no mistake, it addresses fundamental relationship issues for both sexes.
In your many years of experience working with men and women in psychoanalysis, Cláudia, what's the primary secret to making a relationship work?
Cláudia: In order to have a better relationship, we must, absolutely must, have this inner life preserved, this inner privacy, which is the privacy with God. We need to be linked to God, and our link to God can include other people. But it should be the first thing in our lives.
We have a tendency to stay in this horizontal and this is the sensorial life when we stay just between man and woman. Pleasurable. Narcissistic. And this never works. Because we are speaking about love now. Not about sex only. So if we speak about love, we need to go upper in this triangle. Because love is mostly a transcendental dimension of our souls. And it's the basic essential energy of our lives.
So this me, me, me business and narcissistic and egocentric attitude ruins all the possibility of having a loving relationship. Because this can only happen through the pure love.
Richard: There's a whole lot to think about here, isn't there? And I hope some real consciousness for you about what it means to be successful in the potential minefield of relationships. Drop me a line, let me know your thoughts. Rich at richjonesvoice.com This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
