The Missile Attack and the Burden of Conscience - CIA John Kiriakou

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:04]Riyaku, and welcome back for another episode of Deep Focus.

[00:00:09]Back in 1993, I was a relatively junior analyst at the CIA. Every morning, every organization within the CIA, whether it's a branch, a division, an office, whatever it happens to be, has a morning meeting. That's at 9:00 every meeting and every morning.

[00:00:25]And the purpose is to go over developments that took place around the world overnight. Just so you know what people are focusing on that day and what the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense are interested in that day.

[00:00:38]Well, on this morning in 1993, I was in my 9:00 morning meeting and the secretary walked in and interrupted. She looked at me and she said, "John, General Powell's on the phone for you."

[00:00:49]referencing Colin Powell.

[00:00:51]And I said, "How does General Powell know who I am?"

[00:00:55]She said, "I don't know, but he asked for you by name." I looked at my boss.

[00:00:58]He said, "Well, what are you waiting for? Go answer the phone."

[00:01:01]So, I went and I picked up my secure line and I said, "Good morning, General Powell. May I help you?" He cut right to the chase.

[00:01:07]And he said, "John, if the Iraqis were going to kill the president, who would be in charge of actually carrying out that operation?"

[00:01:15]And I said, referencing an attempt to kill former President George H.W. Bush a little bit earlier, I said, "Well, if you're talking about the attempt to kill former President Bush in Kuwait, Kuwait operations are run by the Iraqi Intelligence Service Basra station. And Basra station is headed by the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service named Sabar Abdulaziz al-Douri."

[00:01:38]General Powell said, "Where does he physically sit?"

[00:01:42]And I said, "In IIS headquarters in Baghdad." And he said, "Thank you." and hung up the phone.

[00:01:48]I went back into the meeting. Everybody was excited to know what it was that General Powell had said. And General Powell at the time was the uh chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[00:01:58]So, we're talking about a senior figure here.

[00:02:01]I told my colleagues what he wanted and I went about my day.

[00:02:05]But, 8 hours later, we fired 47 cruise missiles into Iraqi intelligence service headquarters.

[00:02:12]It was the middle of the night by then in Baghdad.

[00:02:15]And the only person we killed was a janitor.

[00:02:18]A janitor who hadn't done anything to anybody.

[00:02:21]The next morning, I came into work and I said to my boss, "I killed that janitor yesterday."

[00:02:27]And he said, "I knew you were going to say that. You didn't kill the janitor.

[00:02:30]Powell killed the janitor. You had no idea what Powell was going to do with the information." Intellectually, I knew he was right.

[00:02:37]But, that has bothered me since 1993.

[00:02:42]I think about that janitor all the time.

[00:02:45]Well, just about 5 years ago, I was going through a divorce and it was difficult. And I have a friend who just happens to be a psychiatrist. We go to the same church. We're in the same men's group. We worked at the CIA together.

[00:02:58]He's a Brigadier General in the Army and he happens to be a psychologist uh psychiatrist, rather.

[00:03:03]And um and he said, "Why don't you come to the office and we'll talk professionally." I said, "I don't need a shrink." And he said, "Uh maybe you do.

[00:03:11]Maybe you don't. Come and and talk to me." I went to talk to him and he diagnosed me soon after that with something called moral injury.

[00:03:20]This is something that I had never heard of before.

[00:03:23]But, it's a thing.

[00:03:25]And our guest today, John Acosta, is an expert in moral injury. I'm happy to welcome him here to the show. John, thanks for being with us. Thank you, John, for having me.

[00:03:35]John, what is moral injury? If If I If I hadn't been diagnosed with it myself, I think I might have doubted its its its efficacy, let's say. Did it really exist? Apparently, it does. So, what is it?

[00:03:51]So, from from the perspective that that I understand, moral injury is a betrayal of the system.

[00:03:58]It's a betrayal that our values are not in in accordance with a larger system that we belong to.

[00:04:04]And how I usually frame these things is that we all belong to different systems.

[00:04:09]I'm a son, I'm a father, so I belong to my family system, I belong to my business system, the the company that I run, I belong to when I was in the military, the military system. And all those systems have influence on who we are as human beings and how they recapture reignite wounds that usually came from our childhood.

[00:04:31]And you can usually see that people that have a re-injuring of something that that is in their psychic is originated in childhood. Not everybody that suffers from PTSD had a wounded childhood, but many of many of the the PTSD is a re-injuring of a childhood wound.

[00:04:52]Because not not everybody that goes to to war, excuse me, and to to rephrase that, no but not everybody that goes to war suffers from PTSD, but many of them are is a re-wounding of that childhood wound. So, I usually bring it back to the system of origin, where we were betrayed when we were children and that we felt that we weren't protected or our values were out of alignment with our with our with our systemic culture in our family.

[00:05:19]>> [snorts] >> Is there a way to treat something like this? This seems to me to be a deep wound and I mean I I had that one meeting with my friend, he told me what his opinion was and then I thought, "Oh well, I'm a I'm a grown man, I'm just going to have to deal with it." But is there a way to treat something like this?

[00:05:39]So, um one of the most beautiful things that I've seen is that moral injury can come in in many forms and I think it's about the redemptive quality of healing more than anything.

[00:05:51]There's a dear friend of mine, his name is Dan Booth Cohen. I I deal with a modality called family constellations.

[00:05:58]Family and systemic constellations particularly. And he wrote a book called I Carry Your Heart in My Heart Family Constellations in Prison.

[00:06:07]With people that did commit the most heinous crimes in in society but also had this returning the dignity to the perpetrator which breaks the cycle of the victim and the perpetrator that happens in systems, that happens in generations and this was in Bay State Prison in Massachusetts and some there was there were prisoners that were there that had that had committed the crimes and there was also volunteers from the local community that would come in and do this work.

[00:06:36]And the the the information that they brought in was this was the most one of the most sacred spaces that they'd ever been to.

[00:06:44]And you know, I was I was reading this book and I was on a flight with my wife and I'm reading the final chapters and I'm sobbing because of how you know, how I'm kind of covering my face with this book because I I'm I'm embarrassed right on this flight.

[00:06:56]>> point. Yeah, right. But I'm I'm sobbing of how powerful the the returning the dignity to the perpetrator is that people can be all of the above. That there is to Caesar what is Caesar and to God's what is God's, right? That people do pay a consequence but also have this redemptive quality that if you have that assumption of responsibility are contrite, connect again and and and connect with with with that system that you can return the dignity to the perpetrator to ultimately break that cycle.

[00:07:27]>> [snorts] >> How is how is moral injury different from PTSD for the person who has it? What is the difference? So my my understanding of it is that it's it is a core wound or a core core betrayal. It all we call it different things. So, we call it PTSD, we call it a moral injury, we call and we have different clinical understanding of it understanding of it.

[00:07:52]But, I think that at the end of the day these things are a separation from our core values of who we are as as as a human being. And when we do that betrayal, whether that is through external forces or through internal forces, it all creates the same emotional load that we're carrying around that affects everything else in our life.

[00:08:10]That makes perfect sense to me. So, speaking hypothetically for any attorneys who happen to be watching, so if there's a married couple and one one of the couple has an affair, the moral injury is to the other of the couple.

[00:08:31]And it doesn't have to be an injury stemming from some childhood trauma. It could be a current day trauma that goes against the moral upbringing of the person injured.

[00:08:43]So, in what I see a lot in in in couples that have that are going through a relationship is there's there's almost a systemic pattern that is completed. And um Jan Jacob Stam in his book on on organizational systemic organization leadership is talks about these three consciousnesses this this three consciousness. The consciousness of the individual, the consciousness of the group, and the evolutionary force. And so, the consciousness on the individual's like I know that I'm a person, right? Much like a salmon in a river. The salmon knows that it's a salmon, it knows it's in a river. And it knows it's in a school. And so, the the system has some effect in it that if all the fish are going to one way, they're going all going to kind of follow it.

[00:09:24]They may bump into the other fish, and they have this subconscious group understanding. But, also the evolutionary force may be the depth of the river, how many [snorts] rocks are in the river, how many if the river dries up suddenly, that has no bearing on who we are and they're just things that happen, crisis is that happen externally. And it And our constitution of who we are as individuals, but also part of a larger group, and then the context of the evolutionary force, all have effects on things. In family systems, we see when people are going through marital problems, it's not the first time that it started in the family system. There might have been a betrayal in a previous relationship of parents on both sides. There may have been a generation that was that had to leave a country. They may and had to start a new family. And so these patterns repeat systemically from one generation to another and um that that we are that systems lead us in many ways as much as we are inside of those systems.

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[00:11:42]We're with John Acosta talking about um moral injury and uh and PTSD.

[00:11:52]Should I have gone through therapy to try to get over this this moral injury?

[00:11:59]Um I I know that every individual case is is is >> different. different, right? Everybody has their own case and every set and setting what I recommend for for anybody is that if they're carrying something and it's and it brings an emotional reaction that spills over into other aspects of life that is a a wound or some baggage that may have an opportunity to be let go and integrated. Much like, you know, I I I volunteer with an organization called the Circle of Brotherhood down here in South Florida.

[00:12:28]And it's men that used to be the problem that are now that are now the solution.

[00:12:32]That reintegration of that dignity creates the letting go of that baggage that you can say, "I was all those things and I did do I did do some things." And have everybody has a past and everybody has done things.

[00:12:44]It's that redemptive quality that when you integrate again and then you're part of the that returning to the alignment that creates the where we can let that baggage go. And if and that's the part that I recommend to anybody. If they're carrying around something on their conscious that's heavy on their conscious there's a process of of reconciliation that can happen. That's that's truly I don't know how else to say it, but in in in religious terms uh this this profound grace that is found in that in that process.

[00:13:12]So, this is something that is broadly recognized and it's something that can be that can be treated.

[00:13:20]Correct. Yes.

[00:13:22]Yeah.

[00:13:22]>> Absolutely. What steps would you recommend somebody to If somebody has something weighing on them and you know, you see it all the time. There's an old cliche. You never know what's in somebody else's heart. You never know what's on somebody else's mind. I remember My my dad my dad fell down the steps and hit his head in 2003 and the fall killed him.

[00:13:44]He he lived long enough to be life-flighted to a hospital in Pittsburgh. I sped to the hospital from New York City as quickly as I could. I was holding his hand. He had Parkinson's disease. I was holding his hand when his tremors just stopped. And um And the doctor pronounced him dead.

[00:14:00]Well, after trying to comfort my mother for a little bit, we decided to go home. We got into the elevator and there was an elderly man and woman in the elevator. And the man looks at me and he says, "Smile. Why the long face?"

[00:14:16]And I said, "My father died 20 minutes ago and you want me to smile?"

[00:14:21]And he just kind of put his head down.

[00:14:22]He said, "Sorry. Sorry."

[00:14:25]So, you never really know what's going on in somebody else's life. Somebody may be suffering terribly.

[00:14:30]What do you recommend that they do?

[00:14:32]I think it it goes back to that conversation of grace, right? Is to assume that positive intent that people are going through things. And and the the thing that I that I do the most is I eat my own dog food, right? Is that I am constantly working on myself to be a better father, to be a better leader, to be a better boss, to be a better co-worker because I know the influence that I have on my system that I can say the more solid, the more aligned I am, the more I can influence my my my sphere from a place of integrity rather than from a place of my wound. I would I am a deeply wounded human being, all right? I have back I have baggage like any other, but I'm not saying I'm saying this from the other side of going through hell and then being on the other side of it and saying there's a place where you can find peace, where you can you can connect with people through your integrity, not through the wound that says I'm not good enough. I don't have enough. I wasn't seen. I'm not connected. I'm out I'm repeating a pattern out of loyalty to my family system because of this pain that I'm carrying.

[00:15:36]Because in in in some way we say in order for me to belong, I need to carry this pain. I need to carry this burden in my family system.

[00:15:45]And I think this is in social systems one of the most dangerous things that we can do. Right. Humiliation is a very dangerous tender for genocide. If you start looking at countries from a systemic perspective, you can see the patterns of of woundedness that that repeats. Um Nicholas Christakis has this uh this study on the widower effect that if what if a partner is if a couple is together for a very long time, there's a social network that's around them that if one of the the the partners dies, there's a increased risk within the following 2 years I think it's 2 2 years to 36 months of the other partner dying because it has a reverberation in the system. I think we're all connected in some subconscious that second level of consciousness that we're talking about way that we're transmitting information with each other.

[00:16:35]And that can be leveraged and it's a vulnerability for us as a society.

[00:16:40]John, I'd really love to hear some success stories. You're you're active with people who suffer from moral injury and who are able to push through it. Can you tell us a little bit about their stories? Yeah, so um working a lot with people that are with with the veteran community, with people that have been incarcerated for long periods of time, and also family systems and businesses. They all have the same ingredients.

[00:17:05]Um we we talk about when when we kind of deconstruct moral injury into that betrayal, right? And if we can reconcile the early childhood betrayal, we can walk through the other pieces and then integrate integrate the pieces that we were that participate as a perpetrator or participated as a victim in that process. Not to say that the, you know, victim blaming, not to say the perpetrator blaming. This is beyond blame. It's simply about acknowledging and integrating those two sides of the coin.

[00:17:35]Right.

[00:17:37]You know, is there a difference, I'm wondering, between people who who have one sort of triggering event in life or people who, as you said, have been incarcerated for long periods of time and maybe have, you know, not led the kind of clean and straight life that they once hoped they would lead. Is there Is there a difference? And And is the is the latter tougher to get to get through?

[00:18:04]So, um, that's a great question. I think it's it's it's usually all the above with people. And that's that's where I go into like really understanding systems because we when we have that one, two, and three levels of consciousness, it all it all affects and you can see it with with different communities. A community has a pattern. And then the individuals in that community repeat those patterns on a regular basis because of the that and here's a, you know, kind of lack of a better term, that ancestral baggage that comes in to the the cultural baggage that comes into the into the system. And I think a system will degrade or go into connection based on the individuals have that effect on the larger system. So, when when you people say like, "Yeah, fight the system." It's like, "We are we are part of that, right?" The that Pogo quote of, "We found the enemy and they is us." I love I love that. It's like that's the individual that that is that says, "Oh, I'm part of the system. I'm co-creating this in some way. So, if I assume responsibility, I can have an direct effect in everybody else and then move that towards connection, not towards destruction. You know, I'm wondering too with that in mind. You you just made me think of something.

[00:19:18]With that in mind, you know how therapists, religious figures always urge you to forgive, forgive the people that have wronged you. And sometimes it takes years, sometimes it even takes a lifetime. But once you forgive those people, you realize that you forgave them for yourself.

[00:19:39]You didn't forgive them for them. Half the time they don't even care whether you forgive them or not. Is it the same thing here with moral injury? That you really have to do this for yourself. Not necessarily for the other person. You're I think that is that is the core of it.

[00:19:56]But the piece that I'll that I'll open up parentheses on is forgiveness.

[00:20:00]In forgiveness in in Western culture, we talk about forgiveness as I am doing something for you, right? So there's a first a judgment.

[00:20:10]Then an absolution, right? And then to say I let go of this guilt for you.

[00:20:15]And there's a place in in in in Hebrew forgiveness, there's several words of it, right? God's forgiveness, the letting go of, putting in the right place. There's all these these concepts that are deeper, they're several layers deeper in forgiveness. And the forgiveness that I'm always looking to is putting things in the right place.

[00:20:33]And the putting things in the right place is like you may have transgressed against me. I'm not going to let that happen again. But I let the guilt I leave the guilt with you. I am no one to forgive you. Yeah. To say I leave that with you and I keep what is mine. I keep my responsibility in it and you keep yours, but it'll never happen again.

[00:20:50]That detaching of creating distance between that that dynamic creates a place of of alignment rather than repeating the pattern. Getting back to some of the the men that you work with, whether they are formerly incarcerated or whatever the issue happens to be.

[00:21:10]Are they by and large able to achieve that sort of state of grace, that that post forgiveness state of grace that I guess we all seek?

[00:21:19]Yes. Um and and this is and the the work that I do is one of the components of this of this community. They they have an incredible array of tools that are extraordinarily effective that work in different aspects of where people are.

[00:21:36]You can't come to somebody that was recently released from incarceration and be like, "Oh, let's do this healing work and jump into it, right?" Or somebody that just was in a crisis and was in an accident go into say, you know, "Let's write your biography." It does It's just setting setting is important, right? So, there there is a myriad of tools that is where you are in that in that arc of transition and how ready you are to be able to do that. And when you go through the first processes of first, you know, that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's like, "Okay, I'm safe."

[00:22:08]You're at least safe and then from here we can evolve. But we usually we see when things aren't necessarily effective is that we we we deal with level one and level two, which is that safety and the belonging, but then we don't get to meaning and we don't get to alignment.

[00:22:22]And those that's the deeper work that takes on follow follow-up work that is a little bit heavier that that that takes a little bit of time for that to to settle like the family constellation work that I do.

[00:22:34]Right. Before our next question, I want to go back to another um another message from our second sponsor.

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[00:23:45]>> [snorts] >> You know, getting back to the the basics here, too.

[00:23:50]What does What does someone How does moral injury manifest itself in someone? [clears throat] If you're If you're just You're living with someone who's suffering from moral injury or you're friendly with someone, how can you see that that they're suffering? Is it the same kind of thing as, say, depression or anxiety or PTSD for that matter? That's a That's a great question and and I was As you were saying that and I I I brought up this this case that we were working on. So, um I was first introduced to to this work in Romania in 2008.

[00:24:26]>> Romania. And if you you you know probably about the the history of Romania and how much depth of the trauma and age of it, right? Russian a great deal of time in Romania. The whole country still traumatized from the Ceaușescu regime.

[00:24:43]Yes. Yes, absolutely. And we did a lot of work with psychologists and psychiatrists in Romania and it was this in the Carpathian Mountains near Brașov. And what this massive former communist headquarters, party, you know, meeting area. And it was 55 Romanian psychologists and psychiatrists. And in the family systems, the Russian-Romanian War and communism would come up repeatedly.

[00:25:07]And And the positions where people had to be put into to survive.

[00:25:12]And the guilt of surviving, but also the guilt of of the betrayal is part of that that systemic inheritance that people take in as a as a as a as a family. So, one one individual came in and her uh, their their father had been uh, in the Russian-Romanian War and had been a hero.

[00:25:33]And so, in this field of of of working in this workshop, there's 40 people laying down of the people that that he had to to to come be in war with, right? To to kill. And that that the family system was carrying that injury over generations. And once those people were reconciled in the family system to say, "You also belong to my system."

[00:25:59]The As much as the victims and the perpetrators belong to the system, there's this and I can feel it now.

[00:26:04]There's this release There's this the systemic release that happens when everybody's given their place in the family system. There's no one that is excluded and say what This is what happened. That acknowledging what is creates the reprieve and the alignment and the letting go of that of where that guilt comes from.

[00:26:21]I mentioned a few minutes ago I'm a member of a men's group. It's called the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. It started off as a as a pro-civil rights group to like almost like a militia to protect African-Americans in the Southern United States. It's a Greek group formed by Greeks who had just arrived in the United States. They had escaped 450 years of Turkish slavery, Ottoman slavery. And found themselves in places like Atlanta and Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama and places like that. And they're seeing these black men hanging from trees, and they they're thinking, "What in the world is going on?" So, now we we raise money for, you know, college scholarships and medical research and such. But, uh one of our members uh is a documentary filmmaker, and he uh did a film about the Greek Civil War, 1946 to 1949, that he wanted to screen for the group.

[00:27:15]So, he put the film on, and we're 10 minutes into it, and one of the old men, I'm I'm the youngest guy by like, you know, 20 years. Uh one of the old men stood up and shouted at the screen, "You communist bastards, you killed my father."

[00:27:34]And then another one jumped up and said, "You royalist scum, you killed my father." And I thought, "Oh my god." We had to shut it off. We couldn't screen the movie. But, we're talking about something that happened what, 75 years ago?

[00:27:52]And these two guys were ready to go to fisticuffs.

[00:27:55]They were They were so angry.

[00:27:57]Is that what I was seeing? Is that moral injury?

[00:28:00]>> That is exactly That's the heritability of the trauma that comes in the family system. That they both come from different sides of the conflict, but both carry in their DNA both the victim and the perpetrator. Yeah. And, you know, I I I wrote um I wrote a a while back on this of like the influence of mice, right? The money influence, coercion, and ego. On your Substack, by the way, I recommend people check it out. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. But, it's like when we have a moral injury, that is a vulner that's an attack factor for people that we can say, "I can leverage this betra- Have you been betrayed before? Do you feel like you're out of alignment?" And then these questions are probing to say, "I can leverage this attack factor against people and say, you can influence people through their wound." And I'm And I think one of the most patriotic things that you can do is heal.

[00:28:49]Is the more we heal, the more we influence our sphere of influence to to be able to heal and get that that the less um manipulable we get to to external forces. I think it's a deeply patriotic thing that we can do. We create stability. Create stability in large systems. There is a way then to break the cycle. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Okay.

[00:29:10]Yeah. And And that's the my my mission is to really educate as many people as possible on the dangers of how um mind viruses can go through a through through a system through these wounds of collective unresolved trauma.

[00:29:25]Yeah.

[00:29:26]Right.

[00:29:27]How do we teach this at a young age? How can we teach people to be aware that the possibility of moral injury is out there and how you can sort of protect yourself or maybe not if you can't protect yourself, maybe to dull the effects of it while you seek treatment. Um I I think one of the the biggest things is to be an example, right? And to talk about men talking about being vulnerable. Men talking about the stuff that they dealt with is to be the And And these voices and these conversations are the exact conversations that we need to have to say I'm on the other side of whatever this is and there is light on on on the other side. There is solid footing on the other side and to say we don't what what happened to us is not our fault, but it's our responsibility to fix it because nobody else can.

[00:30:19]It's It's just It's deeply empowering.

[00:30:21]It's to say I'm not a victim of my circumstance and being a victim of your circumstance is a position that you can you can heal out of.

[00:30:28]And when you when you're around people and you hear them talk and you hear them talk about I didn't have enough. Um I didn't I don't I'm not I'm not good enough. I don't I I'm not aligned. Nobody Nothing ever goes my way. You really start understanding that this is a chip that people are carrying that can be let go and can be healed. I used to be that guy. I used to be a guy that was the world owed me something. I grew up I'm I'm originally from Venezuela. The world owed me something. I was my parents got divorced and I had a traumatic but and I have I I can have a myriad of things that happened. I had to leave the country when Chavez came into power and all the everything. And I had all the excuses in the world and nothing was ever my fault.

[00:31:09]And it wasn't until I assumed that responsibility did some heavy lifting that I was like, oh crap. I have a broken picker. My picker's broken, right? I was picking the wrong relationships. I was picking the wrong partnerships. I was picking the wrong ways to go down. I was the common denominator of all my problems.

[00:31:25]And then when we have that conversation say there is a place where you can not go from not not be taken by the system but have the agency to be able to react to to to address what that is to have respond, not to react.

[00:31:42]The ability to respond that we can take those three seconds to say ah this is a pattern.

[00:31:47]This is something that I've been pulled into before. Yeah.

[00:31:49]>> This is where I where this goes sideways usually in my life.

[00:31:53]You know, I used to joke that I have a tattoo on my forehead that only women can see and it says, "Please cheat on me." Mhm.

[00:32:04]And I I ran with that joke for a long time.

[00:32:07]Until until one of my best friends called me.

[00:32:11]It was the day of my second divorce.

[00:32:14]And he said, "Well, it's over, isn't it?" And I said, "Yep, it's all over.

[00:32:18]Today it was over." And he said, "Buddy, I'm going to tell you something because I love you like a brother.

[00:32:23]Now you need to find a therapist to help you figure out why you're attracted to women who treat you like shit." Mhm.

[00:32:31]And I realized only when it the words came out of his mouth.

[00:32:34]>> Oh. I'm the problem. What a beautiful friend. I'll say. Yeah.

[00:32:39]>> I'm deeply indebted for even just that one sentence.

[00:32:43]The courage to say that to a friend is because that could go two ways, right?

[00:32:47]It could go like, "Yeah, you can go, you know, you can go shove it where the sun don't the sun don't shine." Or you can say, "Thank you so much." I mean, that is what a But it's so hard, as you just said. It's hard to intellectually come to the conclusion that you're the problem. I mean, maybe not the whole problem, but you are enough of the of the problem that there's something you can do to fix it by fixing yourself. And and when we hear this in language all the time, right? We hear these stories and and and these um colloquialisms that we say like uh you never met a taker that didn't like a picker that didn't like a giver, right?

[00:33:22]That you're like the takers love givers.

[00:33:25]They're like, "That's That's my favorite person in the world because of the boundaries that are set in that relationship dynamic." You hear it in social media now. It's like, "Oh, they're they're a narcissist."

[00:33:35]Like, "Well, why are you picking a narcissist?"

[00:33:37]That that relate that dynamic is like, "I was I was in relationships with narcissists. I was really I was in terrible relationships until I met my wife because I had a broken picker. I couldn't even attract the right woman into my life until I did this terrible, difficult, really taxing work that I was like, 'Man, I got to let go of some stuff that I've been carrying for a long time.'" There it is. And until I was doing that, I wasn't going to attract the the woman that didn't, you know, didn't have that. And thank God that we were I was exposed to this work at 26 and and and did this incredible work in Romania.

[00:34:11]And it was Romania that that put you on this track, yeah?

[00:34:15]>> Oh, yeah. Well, to to go So, my my my mother's a retired uh senior foreign service officer. Fantastic.

[00:34:22]>> And she was she was stationed in Romania at the time. And this is kind of a an odd story, but she was stationed in Romania at the time. And after my parents divorce, she she was in a relationship with a man that was killed in a car accident. Head-on collision, he was visiting his daughter in in in Africa. This story sounds made up. Um, but this Romanian psychologist, um, she was she was going to a psychologist to go through the grieving process, and he was like, "Hey, there's this man that's coming to do this trauma work that's called family constellations developed by Bert Hellinger."

[00:34:54]And, um, and and she was like, "I'll do whatever If you tell me to run and do These are her words, not mine. If you tell me to run down the road naked, I'll do whatever to get to process through this pain." And she saw this incredibly profound methodology of dealing with trauma.

[00:35:11]And to see that things and and Mark Wolynn has this book called It Didn't Start with You that creates a really beautiful framework to say, "I'm carrying something that doesn't belong to me that's inherited from the past that I am playing out out of loyalty to my family system, these things that that I'm repeating a pattern."

[00:35:30]And when you start seeing things in that framework, you start you start understanding the larger system and say, "Oh, now I have the agency to actually do something about it."

[00:35:39]And I that was that was the kind of the relation realization for me is that I I I found out how I was participating in it. And I said that it didn't and it wasn't a switch. I didn't suddenly say, "I met my wife, my life is awesome." I got into crappy relationships with business partners that I fought with and did the stuff and had to heal my way out of as well. I had Some patterns [snorts] stayed lingered on for a little while, and I I'm I'm a stubborn man, so I had to hit my head against the wall for many years, but almost 20 years later, I can say my life is is significantly better because of this trauma work that I've done, and I attract people into my life that are also in that that vein. And from this not from a place that I've like, "I've got the answers." to say, "This is one methodology that's that's worked for me, and I think it's very powerful."

[00:36:26]John, where can people find out more about your work?

[00:36:29]So, Zulu 1 dot org is our our website.

[00:36:32]It's a Zulu 1 z u l u o n e dot org and we have a podcast called the Zulu 1 podcast and I write on Substack as well under the Systemic Newsletter and I love to kind of challenge the status quo and have these difficult conversations with figuring out why and how systems influence us. Yeah.

[00:36:54]Great stuff. I highly recommend your your Substack. Full of great information, deep analysis, good stuff.

[00:37:01]Thank you.

[00:37:02]>> Thanks for joining us, John Acosta.

[00:37:04]>> Good to see you.