Richard Lloyd Jones: Unemployment rates are the highest in 16 years. We've got massive foreclosures and forecasts of trillion-dollar deficits. Our kids have ADD, everything we touch causes cancer, and our football team missed the playoffs again. No doubt about it, living in the 21st century is bringing a lot of stress. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll dig deeper into what really causes our stress.
And more importantly, how a therapeutic science from Brazil can help us finally understand and deal with our admittedly stressful world. You know, here at the beginning of 2009, we have a pretty bleak outlook. Well, it's time to offer an antidote to all that. Some hope, if you will. And the moment I say that, I realize how trite it sounds to our jaded ears.
We've heard it all before, haven't we? This book, that 10 steps to a greater you course, this magic bullet. We're caught between wanting something to believe in and having been disappointed so many times we've stopped believing. We're cynical, sardonic, ironic as hell. But one of the real problems is that we've been looking too much outside ourselves for resolution. Tough to resolve our essential problem out there because the source of our difficulties lies in here.
Inside the human being. And what we're exploring, I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, what forms the basis of all our work at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy here in São Paulo, Brazil, is a comprehensive science that gives us the consciousness needed to treat those inner demons. Norberto Keppe's Analytical Trilogy is a union of theology, philosophy, and science that really fills in the blanks of our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
As a listener wrote recently, Keppe's greater principles make a great deal of sense, he said, and sense is what we'd like to continue bringing in 2009. Let's try to make sense of stress today. We have a lot of it in our world. Helena Melander is a Swedish journalist working in our trilogical companies here in Brazil, who's been working for some months now to develop deep health programs for companies based on Keppe's work.
One of the principal areas of concern in these workshops is, you guessed it, dealing with stress. But I'm thinking, Helena, that our society now is showing huge signs of stress, huge signs of decay. It's falling apart at many levels, and this is causing a lot of stress for people. And we know that we don't understand stress very well in a general sense.
But with Norberto Keppe's science, we can really begin to understand what is stress, how to deal with it, what are the origins of it, where does it come from really. And I'd really like to sort of penetrate this subject today so we can help people because I think people are getting desperate. I remember shortly after September 11th, I had an email from a friend of mine in New York, woman friend of mine.
And she wrote me and said that she and all of her friends were gaining weight because they're sitting in front of the TV, terrorized, desperate, afraid. So what do they do to assuage this feeling is eat. And they're constantly eating while sitting in front of the television. So they weren't handling the stress well and gaining weight. But the problem was not because of September 11th.
So let's start first at that idea that we think that stress comes from the outside, but it doesn't really. How do you see that? How can you help us understand that?
Helena Melander: Of course, there are situations in the society that contribute to our stress, like the traffic we see a lot here in São Paulo, the work situation, the economical crisis, and so on.
But the causes of stress are inside the human being. And as long as we don't deal with that aspect, we can't deal with these stressful situations on the outside. So the most important is actually to see what is the cause of stress inside of us. And we can see that there is one fundamental principle that Dr. Keppe speaks about, and this is our fear of consciousness.
We are terrified of seeing any kind of mistake in ourselves, any kind of problem, any kind of defect. I see this very much in Sweden, for example, where I come from, which is a very, you can say, very perfect society. Everything is very beautiful and very neat and very organized. Uh, but the problem is that then people, they want to be like that, and anytime that any problem appears, they feel like they are going to die because of this extreme fear of just seeing anything problematic in themselves.
We
Richard: really have a bias against consciousness, especially consciousness of problems, don't we?
Helena: Yes, exactly.
Richard: I see it this way. I have a student who has a very high opinion of herself, as many of us do. I think this is one of the problems we'll talk about in the human being is this enormous arrogance that we have that stops us from wanting to see the problem.
But this student has a very high opinion of herself, but she's in tremendous conflict because she's doing a job, and one day her boss comes to her and tells her she has to do the job in a different way. So she's under tremendous conflict now because she's fantastic, she's incredible in her own mind, and here's the boss, a person with authority, a person she has to listen to.
And so she's in this incredible conflict, but the conflict is not coming from the boss, it's coming from her opinion of herself. Right,
Helena: exactly. Actually, we can say that there is, um, this factor of arrogance that you said, or that Dr. Keppe also calls theomania. Theo is, of course, the Greek word for God. So it's like each person wants to be like a God without any flaws, without any problems.
And then when you have this idea of yourself, it's like you have to defend this idea all the time and fight against reality. There is a very interesting book by Cláudia Pacheco that is called Healing Through Consciousness. Theomania, the cause of stress. And in this she explains even about the physical phenomenon, phenomena that happens in our body, because there is this mechanism that is called fight or flight mechanism.
When there is a situation of fear or of some kind of threat, we react either by wanting to fight with that situation or by wanting to escape from the situation. In real life this would be, for example, a big lion attacking you. Either you can try to fight with a lion, which maybe not, or you could try to escape. But what happens in our everyday life is that there is in fact no lion, but there is the truth, and we see the truth as an enormous threat, the truth about ourselves, and especially about our mistakes.
So either when there is a truth about ourselves that we don't want to see, for example in this case of your student who doesn't want to see that she's not so good as she thinks she is in her work,
Richard: for example, then either she will like go away and become depressed. Oh, why doesn't my, my boss appreciate me? Why doesn't anybody see how good I am, you know?
And she will isolate herself and things that life is not fair. This would be the flight reaction, we can say, of escaping. Or fighting, this would be a more, we call paranoid reaction. You start to fight with the boss and say I don't agree, it's impossible to work here, you know. The person is fighting with the truth. Oh, it's not my, I've got 400 phone calls to, how am I supposed to do it all, they don't
Helena: have enough time.
Exactly. So the person finds a lot of excuses to defend herself, and the funny thing is that the person thinks that she is defending herself, you know, that there is even this Freudian ideas of like you have to defend the ego, you know. But what are you defending? I mean, you're defending a pathological idea of yourself that's, that is not going to help you in any
Richard: way.
So let's help people now then try to come into reality, because this is something that we all do in terms of creating an illusion of ourselves, an image of ourselves, the way we think we are. And we have an enormous pact in society never to talk to each other about how we really are. We talk to other people about you, but I won't talk to you
Helena: about this.
So we have this enormous pact. So let's, let's talk about bringing it into reality. What is the reality of the, of the human being that we need to try to see more about ourselves? Yeah, actually we have to see that we are not gods, we are human beings, and that for now means having problems, having defects, problems of relationship, of productivity, of dealing with conflicts and everyday problems.
So we have that aspect, and everybody has, it's not like oh, that, that person is problematic, everybody's problematic in one way or another. The truth about myself is not really so much what I think about myself. We tend to believe very much in our own ideas, but we could say that maybe it would be rather what the other people can see in me, because they have a very much more objective view of who I am.
This shows much more of who I am than just my ideas, my fantasies about myself,
Richard: and through our results, right. In fact, we can see that people who have a high opinion of themselves. They don't want that. Opinion of themselves to be threatened. So they don't do anything new. They don't try new things. They don't put themselves in a place where that image could fall.
And so they're content to stay back and not involve themselves. So this is another, and this must cause enormous stress in a human being.
Helena: For sure. And it's a great, a big threat also to our development, you know, because if I'm always trying to avoid situations that could give me some consciousness of my limitations, of my lack of knowledge, for example, then I will never try these more challenging tasks at work.
For example, I can remember myself. I worked as a journalist in Sweden and I worked in the radio, and I started working in the studio like reading news, but then you could also work as a reporter, like going out on the field and doing interviews. And I was offered that quite often, but I was like no, I think I better stay in the studio because it was easier for me.
I knew that if I would go out I would have to face a lot of situations that would be new, that would be difficult, and more stress, more pressure. But of course I lost with that attitude, because I could have learned more if I would have accepted a more challenging situation. So it's very comfortable to just stay in the same, same tasks, the same thing that we always do, because then we feel safe, then I don't have to see anything in myself.
Oh, I'm good at this, I don't have to, to see what is missing in me.
Richard: And we see this in the language school, two people are terrified to speak English, in, in our case, or Swedish if they're learning Swedish with you, because when they start to speak the language they immediately have contact with the reality. I don't know this word, what preposition do I use, I'm starting to go blank, I'm getting afraid.
And so they start to block because they don't want to see the reality. Whereas the people who learn the language, they're the ones who are comfortable, they speak, they try, they make an effort, they make mistakes, they don't care, they learn, they develop. This pressure of needing to be perfect puts a lot of stress on us. Exactly. Dr. Keppe says in his book, I think it's Origin of Illness you took this from, I have observed that there are two fundamental types of behavior.
One is neurotic, in which the person is terrified of seeing any mistakes and may even become almost completely immobilized as in a catatonic state. The other is the behavior of people who are committed to their own progress and personal development, who do not allow themselves to be held back by their shortcomings and who persistently try to understand their problems in order to overcome them.
Wow, understanding problems. That's a, we have a real negative attitude of seeing, what do you mean, I have to look at my problems? No, I need to be positive. Talk about that. This is important for us to
Helena: understand. Yes. Actually, we could say that the problem is not a natural part of us, our defects, our mistakes. Actually, because it shouldn't be there.
But as long as we pretend that it's not there, it's going to be there forever, of course. But I think this quote is so fantastic because it shows that a person that develops more in life, that has more success, we could say, this person he doesn't give so much, he wants to see the there, but just in order to correct it. He doesn't give so much importance to it.
Oh my god, I committed an error, now it's better to give up, you know. He sees there and he says how can I correct this. He even feels like good, I could identify an error, I see the source
Richard: of the problem, yes,
Helena: good, then I could go further. This is the attitude we should have. I remember like for example big sportsman like Bjorn Borg, the, the tennis player in Sweden, my
Richard: hero.
Yeah,
Helena: yeah, you know, he was staying hours and hours in front of his garage playing since he was a boy, and all the time trying to see what am I doing wrong. How then he invented this to, to hold the racket with two hands, two-handed
Richard: backhand. Yeah, and uh, everybody said no, that's not going to work, are you crazy, and said no, this is the right way.
So you know
the person who has this interest for growing, or a dancer, imagine he has all the time to see what is not perfect in my dancing, a ballet dancer for example, because then he can reach perfection. So he
Helena: sees the problems, the errors, as a way to, to grow, you know.
In
Richard: my profession in radio and television, when I worked in that in years past in Canada, I remember it was a, the people who wanted to develop in that field, they would, they would do what we call air checks of their show.
They would record their show and listen to it later in the car, or record the television show and watch it later. This is extremely difficult to do if you have a high image of yourself. But if you're dedicated to development, you will sit and listen to that and you'll learn many things by going through that process. Athletes today, they watch hours and hours of film of themselves, of their competitors, to understand the weaknesses, the problems, the difficulties.
Where can we exploit this weakness in the defense of the other? Or what's my weakness? What do I need to work on? And so it's not unusual to be thinking about problems. Why are we so terrified to see our problems?
Helena: Exactly. This is what Dr. Keppel calls censorship. It's like we want to, almost if you imagine like a movie, we want to cut all the parts that are not pleasant for us, that we don't want to see.
Oh, I don't want to see this. I don't want to see that. I just want to see the nice parts of myself. But then we are living in a lie. And that's what's causing stress. Living in a lie, defending this lie all the time, fighting with reality, it's an impossible situation. So if we could just have more humility and trying to admit without censorship the defects that I have, trying to see this, then we could relax so much more.
Richard: Yes, and not from the point of view, you talked about it earlier, not from the point of view of like dwelling on the problem. Oh I'm terrible, I'm a piece of crap, I don't know anything, not from that point of view, but of really trying to correct it to move forward in life. Dr. Keppe said, we become ill because we resist seeing our problems.
That is, we constantly attempt to ignore our weak points. As for our qualities, there's no need to focus on them because they form the structure of the personality and of life itself, or better, they exist on their own. This is what you were talking about a minute ago, that the problem does not exist by itself. It's a creation from some sort of blockage or rejection of the truth of ourselves.
Let's focus on that a little bit more, Helena. The truth of life, what is that, the essence of the human being, and what is the problem in relationship to that?
Helena: Actually, Dr. Cappi shows in his books that the original reality is good, true, and beautiful. And the human being is that also in his essence, we are good, true and beautiful. So uh, but we create a lot of pathologies, psychopathologies like envy, anger, censorship, and all of these pathologies are like distorting that essence.
So and that's why we are not feeling good, we cannot feel good as long as we are trying to, to go away from our original state, because people think that oh, I don't want to be perfect. People think that like being perfect would be like something very terrible and stressful and, and boring, and boring exactly. And like the church in the past was very censoring and you have to be perfect, you cannot commit any sins, and uh, they focus very much on these external things like sex and you know sinful behaviors.
But actually the, the point is that the, since the reality is good, true and beautiful, we can only be in harmony if we are in harmony with these values, and that would be the true essence of man. I mean even we could say a criminal, we, we have a movie here that we, we show very often to our students at Millennium Language School that is called Les Miserables.
It's a very famous story by the French writer Victor Hugo, and it shows how a man who was a very good person initially, but through different circumstances he became a criminal and he became like a bad person. But then it shows that through goodness and through seeing his own defects and his own mistakes that he committed, he can return to his initial original state, that would be to be good.
So and then he's feeling happy again, he's feeling good again. So this is actually the only way.
Richard: Students love that movie.
Helena: Yeah, absolutely, because I think it touch, touches this essence of the human being. I mean the modern society, the modern man has tried to invent a lot of different ways of living that we are trying to, we think that this will give us liberation and happiness, like this very kind of sensorial life that we are living today, where it's only sex, food, money, status that counts.
But it doesn't give us satisfaction, it's a fact. Yeah,
Richard: we need to return Dr. Keppe talks this, the difference between the neurosis of having and the sanity of being, the quality of being who we are. And this is I think one of the fundamental aspects that you're touching on now, but our society is a mess, Helena. So we've created a society that's really doesn't support us in being who we really are.
And so in terms of let's just talk about that for a minute, we can come back to this internal part, I think that's important, but this aspect of the society being so stressful today with people.
Helena:
Helena: watching!
Richard: Losing their homes and rates of depression increasing. Suicide. People are drugged more and more today. People feel there's no hope. There's no light at the end of the tunnel.
How do we be sane? Deal with this kind of stress? Yeah,
Helena: this is very difficult, the society is sick, no doubt about it. Uh, but first of all, we cannot change the society today. Hopefully we can change it in the future, but right now it's like I have to go to work, I have to do my stuff, I have to get my money, I have to pay my bills.
So we just have to try to strengthen our inner life as much as possible to be able to deal with this situation. So through these techniques that Dr. Keppe has developed of interiorization, that is like trying to see inside, everything that we see on the outside that is disturbing us or irritating us, trying to see this inside of ourselves.
Richard: Let's try and use an example of that, Helena, because this is a very powerful tool that Dr.
Keppe has developed in his psychoanalytical approach, this process of interiorization. Do you have a ready example that you could use to show us?
Helena: Yes, I remember, for example, a dialogue in a book called The Trilogical Bible by Dr. Keppe. In his books, he gives many practical examples of analysis. And there is a man that says like this, I crashed my car and I started to worry about how my friends and co-workers would react.
Or I'm not going to tell my husband, I'm not going to tell my family. You know people get so stressed about what other people will think, what other people will say. Uh but then Dr Keppe says here your word about what about how they the co-workers would attack me and accuse me of
Richard: crashing the car right.
Helena: Paranoid right. Exactly. And then Keppe says with what do you associate their behavior accusation.
Then Dr Keppe answers they bring you consciousness of how you accuse yourself. So what
Richard: I'm what this person is seeing as being accusation from the outside is a reflection. Because he may receive accusation from the outside too but the problem is that he it's the reason he's so attached or worried about that is because that's what he does
Helena: to himself. Yes if he wouldn't be so accusing towards himself first of all he wouldn't be so worried about the others what the others would say.
And if they would say something like accusing him of this problem he would say okay this person is sick or you know he could like try to not be so involved in that. But he's resonating with the accusations of the others he's taking it in because he has exactly the same attitude
Richard: with himself. Cláudia says 99 percent of the time, Dr. Cláudia Pacheco in her book, Healing Through Consciousness, which you quoted at the beginning, 99% of the time, it's we ourselves who adopt an attitude of persecution, a position of fighting against life, against reality, and principally against the consciousness of our errors.
What is she getting at here? What is she trying to show us with this quote?
Helena: Yeah, she said 99%. So it means that usually, almost all
Richard: of the time, the problem
Helena: is not outside. And this is the big thing for us to understand that we are creating all this stress, all this paranoia, all this suffering. She even uses a very strong word here she says that it's like we are creating our own torture chamber.
So you can see this in people's faces. It's very rare to see a person who is relaxed who's feeling good with himself and with life and the world. Everybody's in these uh paranoia all the time what's going to happen at work today what are they going to say what's going to happen tomorrow. So, you know, people are always fighting against life because actually, if we just would accept life as it is and accept reality as it is, we would be totally relaxed.
Richard: What tools can we give people to begin to understand that this is that the problem is happening because of our reaction to the situation, not because of the situation by itself? Yeah.
Helena: Yeah. First of all, we have to consider that we have a big part of ourselves that is unconscious. So many things in ourselves happen on an unconscious level that we are not aware of.
And for example going back to the example of crashing the car I can even have a self-destructive attitude of creating situations that are very bad for myself in economical terms health safety and so on. So this is one thing that we have to consider that we are not conscious all the time we don't know what we are doing. So we have to to have that humility to to admit that I don't have
Richard: full control of what I'm doing.
And this is beautiful and because our problems actually Dr Keby talks about this a lot our problems come from our lack of awareness not from the situation that's happening but because we're not aware we cause our problems. So consciousness is our big friend not our enemy.
Helena: Yeah and then this tool that we we discussed about a little of interiorization is when I'm trying to see this thing on the outside that is affecting me so much that is irritating me so much or making me so stressed.
For example if I can try to see that attitude in myself, for example in my boss I see my boss being extremely intolerant with me, pressuring me, and if I try to interiorize that attitude I would have to try to see that I am putting all this pressure on myself, being extremely intolerant with myself towards my own errors. So of course it might be a problem in the boss as well but sometimes it's not I am doing this with myself.
So this is the fundamental tool that we have to try to calm down because as long as we see the problem outside we will get more stressed. This is terrible in our society today even in in media they are showing all the time that the reality is dangerous. So this is dangerous to talk on the cell phone uh some many kinds of foods are are dangerous
Richard: cause cancer.
Helena: Yes exactly, I even see that there is a very strong like health movement right now in United States, in Sweden, where people who are like extremely healthy and they want to eat only very very pure natural things, and oh no you cannot eat that butter or that kind of yogurt because it has that kind of component that is extremely bad for the body.
Okay that might be true but just this idea of things being dangerous in food is causing more stress, more damage
Richard: than that little component in itself. And also it's putting a big, big focus on the fact that all of this material is much more powerful than our own psychological life. So we give a lot of power to secondary elements in
Helena: society and no power to the fact that we have this inner pharmacy.
We have this consciousness inside us that can overcome all of this. Yes.
Richard: You used an example in your notes you gave me in preparing for this podcast about the opposition to work. Yeah. This is great because this shows our attitude is the problem, not the work. Explain that for us. That's a
Helena: nice story. Yeah. I have a student, for example. She's a physician.
She works at a big hospital. She's a professor, too. And she has a lot of responsibility. And she's participating in a lot of congresses. And she's giving lectures and she's traveling a lot and so on. And she's always very, very exhausted. And she's always saying, oh, I don't know what I will do because I have too many things to do. I can't handle this.
I'm too tired. And I said, but is your work something good? Are you doing something good? She said, yes, of course. So I said, OK, so good that you're doing so many good things, you know. And probably that your tiredness is rather this fighting against what you have to do. I'm not questioning that she has many things to do. But I also said, can you do anything to change this situation?
She said, no. Okay, so then just continue doing it.
Richard: We have this expression in English, I want to leave everything on the court. When I'm playing the sport, I want to leave everything there. I don't want to have anything in reserve. And we have this attitude in life that we have to be careful, we can't do too much, we've got to have this private time, this extra time, but what about leaving everything on the court in our life?
Helena: Life is so short anyway. I mean, at the end, in the final analysis, I mean, what is it that really counts? Was it how much I rested or how much I really actually accomplished in my life? And I mean, for sure, the more you are accomplishing, the more energy you get at the same time. As long as you are not fighting against this work that you are doing.
Of course, you get stressed.
Richard: Yeah, but this inversion we have about thinking that work is the sacrifice, work is taking things from me, and not that my life will be measured by what I accomplish.
Helena: Yeah, I remember the examples of, for example, Bach. Beethoven. You know, they were guys who really worked hard. You know, being an artist just doesn't mean being like floating around and doing what you want.
Both of them, they were like, they tried to write until the moment that they died, literally, you know, because they had so much music that they just had to give to humanity. So I don't have time to rest. I don't have time to sleep. It's impossible. I have to accomplish things I have to write my music. So I think this is the attitude we should have more how can I give as much of myself in terms of goodness as long as I am alive and how would
Richard: our lives be if we ask that question huh.
It's a beautiful antidote to our supremely selfish society isn't it. Well Aristotle did say the essence of man was pure act so doing good makes us truly human and helps us deal with stress. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Talk to you next time.
