Today should be named Parents Day

The least interesting and the most valid perspective: If Trump wins, blame the parents of today’s voters for giving their progeny a sense of life that features impotence, bitterness, free-floating anger and a need for superiority over others. This is the essence of it: Trump is the redeemer of victims who became bullies. (TPS published comment to an NYT article – https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/42vegc?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

This is why those errant minds aren’t changing on Election Day, why they rarely changed over the course of the candidates’ campaigns or over the last eight years, and why they were unlikely to change over the span of their entire lives. If Trump wins the election, it will be because the parents of his voters (and the parents of their parents) wrote blueprints for their children’s formative years that created angry wounds and a broad landscape where healing couldn't happen.

I see the psychic difference between those who opt for a narcissistic, sociopathic and authoritarian president and those who don’t as a factor of bereavement. Those who could grieve the critical loss in their childhood – essentially, deprivation of their distracted or disturbed parents’ love and bond – would find some sad or resigned inner peace. In that calm, they could see and feel more clearly. They would feel tragedy more than outrage in their own lives and, by extension, in the world. They would know, as Irvin Yalom’s Carlos in Love’s Executioner finally knew, that “everyone has got a heart.” Those who did not have the opportunity or courage to grieve the critical loss in their childhood would remain on fire. They would remain the bitter, defeated king on their underground throne, nursing their rageful pain and projecting it into the world. They would see, through unconscious eyes, other people as better able to flourish, as indifferent to their suffering, as their defeaters. They would find comfort in those people, and that candidate, who justified their inner pain and its projections.

Like many who are voting for Harris, I do not find her powerfully inspiring. Presidential politicians are egoists who don’t know how to fix the country or the world. They use different aptitudes and personality points as their guideposts, and we have to hope that they don’t damage our lives. One-half of the population realizes, however, that Harris is a normal person with normal-range flaws, and that this is infinitely preferable to a man whose errors are more toxic to others than to himself, especially as he vigorously endorses those errors as is the nature of personality disorder.

On Election Day morning, I’m slightly optimistic about a Harris victory. It’s not an angry optimism and is not actually focused primarily on the candidate. It’s more the underlying optimism of someone who sees life, the universe and everything (homage to Douglas Adams) in the benign and sunny way that a cared-for child – or slightly healed adult – would.

My final text during an exchange with a former client who will vote for Trump

I doubt that you’ve been reading the articles I’ve sent. And I’ll confess ignorance: I don’t know what you’ve been sending me after the first day of our exchange. I haven’t read any of it (but I did respond Pavlov’s dog-fashion to the word “cute”). It’s time to stop, I’m sure. Trump may win. He’s human garbage, but a lot of people either like that or are blind to it. In my sessions, the general political situation comes up a lot. I’d say that nineteen of every twenty of my clients are anti-Trump even if they do not love Harris. Before the subject ever turns to politics – and sometimes it just turns to Trump because most clients know he’s the avatar of human corruption – I can almost always predict which clients will be Trump people. They have a subtly bitter and cruel core under their surface, normal presentation. One such client let me know he was a “misanthrope” and would love to be alone for the rest of his life, before disclosing his Trump affiliation. A woman informed me, months prior to election talk, that she disliked “all white women in authority.” A middle-aged man whom I saw for two years raged about his child sexual abuse so viciously and so frequently that one would have thought it had happened last week not forty-five years ago. This is what it comes down to: not policy but psychology. Trump redeems the fundamentally frustrated people who, at the root of their psyche, see their childhood injuries and rage rather than grieve. They stay at the anger level and do not go deeper to the hurt level. This is why I consider them my therapy failures.

🎯

The non-judgmental approach that I bring to all clients maintains its purity throughout their term of therapy. For most of them, it continues outside of that specialized setting. But it does not last for former clients who are working to bring disaster upon this country by means of their psychological projections: the endorsement of Trump. I do, however, take some responsibility for failing to reach them.

Trump lovers are constipated, angry babies

Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, could be considered immature. Fundamental depression and anxiety are formed in a home where a child was hurt and could not send his pain to a loving and empathic caregiver. This means there is aborted emotional development – immaturity. Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, have repressed or “leaky” or overt frustration of childhood needs not met, manifesting in anger, irritability, self-blame or other-blame.

For a child, other-blame, also known as externalization of responsibility, is right. He did not cause his problems and he is right to blame those who hurt him and left him with no other recourse than to misbehave or inflict pain on others.

Many children, owing to some shard of decency in their lives, are able to grow up and face, in or out of therapy, their emotional immaturity. They are desperately needy but challenge their codependency. They see that their anger comes mostly from their past and they cease blaming it on others in the present. They have achieved adequate separation-individuation not to fall on their knees before heroes. They have achieved enough independence of thought not to form delusions about other races, ethnicities and sexes.

These are not Trump lovers. Trump lovers have not faced their emotional immaturity. They have not done deep grief work in therapy. They continue to blame others in the present, though their perpetrators are in the past. They cling to dependencies – heroes, victimized wives, groupthink, rally mobs. They had to bury the starved need for warm benevolence in their childhood and viscerally hate it now, believing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are hateful, terrible people. Lacking a caring hand, an “enlightened witness” in childhood to guide them out of their self-breathing and self-reinforcing bubble and into the real world, they suffer global delusions about millions of individuals they have never met.

My therapy clients who are Trump admirers are self-declared misanthropes, bitter rejectors of groups of people or of all people. They are rage-filled children still drowning in adult bodies. Beneath a surface which may feel benign about small things and about like-minded people and about the families they protectively own, lies a lava field of unhealed pain and injustice. They, the child, will forever be out of sync with themselves and the world that grew up around them.

It is impossible for a healthy or healing person to admire a sociopath and narcissist like Trump.

Trauma (aka "Get real, label-heads")

Therapeutic healing should be natural, like breathing. You breathe in, you breathe out. How destructive – literally – it would be to just breathe in and not breathe out. You take in the emotional stimuli of the world and you must express them outward. You love your dog and you must pet it. To withhold that expression would be to suffer. A child is hurt by her father, she must cry and possibly rage; but the hurt and tears are primary. Trauma is simply a more powerful injury that must be commensurately expressed outward. Commensurately: You don’t “primal scream” if you spill coffee on your shirt (unless it is the latest in a long series of unexpressed frustrations), and you don’t just say “ouch” if you’re raped. If we set aside all the species of therapy that exist, I believe most people would have a natural sense of what they need to do to answer traumatic pain: Get it out by the most powerful expressions. Tame therapy cannot work. Process must be expulsive, explosive, emotional, verbal, physical.

This was my comment to a Slate.com article about a bad therapist. (In fact, I didn't read the article as I'm not a paying Slate member. My statement didn't require a reading.) Many of the other commenters showed their knowledge of this or that brand of therapy, such as EMDR, “brainspotting” and CBT, and their good and bad experiences with different therapists. I just wanted to point out what should be obvious but what remains as contemporaneously unknown as the foreplay before the Big Bang.

Choose your Trump side, or your life

This is vaporous theory, but I believe it’s true and actionable. For most Republicans who are not diagnosable sociopaths like Donald Trump, it is a matter of choice whether to live internally in a warm place or a cold place, to be an endorser and concluder of alienation or a recognizer of need and love. This would be true because most of us who grew up in emotional starvation in our home also owned a kernel of birth love or infancy bond. My own example may suffice.

My childhood was loveless and inert in feeling. I’ve never had the slightest inkling of warmth, love or even pity for either parent, yet also never any anger and disownership. But something somewhere in my origin planted, along with severe need, the potential for affection. That bloomed during a very short window in my latency years, around six to nine. I loved a friend like the sun is burning bright. That feeling faded to nothing as I approached my teens.

In high school, I was a Libertarian. Libertarianism, not far from Conservatism but more nihilistic, is an emotional attitude turned into specious logic more than it is a political ideology. We Libertarians were for the most part followers of Ayn Rand: lost, inferior-feeling, with no heart-driven loves or passions. We needed some belief to let us feel superior while alone and alienated.

I’ve done some work on myself in the meantime, over the last thirty years. A result of that work was to let me see the buried “golden kernel” that already existed – more than it was to grow that kernel. Even now, in a mood, I can feel my predominant darkness and see Trump as the perfect representative of my survival as a soul amputee. I salute him and wish his malignant agenda great success. But then I feel – a molecule to the left or maybe beneath – my seed of life, the good, the cherished bond, the best potential of life in love. And Trump is revealed to be the disease that he is.

I choose that molecule. I choose it because it is right and feels best though it brings pain. It sits alone, an ungrown seed of gold in the dark field of the past that will extend to the future, to the last day of my life. But I would rather love and be loss, than never to have loved at all.

This is the choice that most of us have. It’s the choice to be our human best not failure. And incidentally, it's the choice that would relegate Donald Trump to obsolescence.

Victim Personality Disorder

I have recently had six clients who would not, I believe, be diagnosed with a personality disorder by any rule-following therapist, yet I believe they would qualify for an unspecified one. Some of them have paranoid-like assumptions. Some meet criteria for the once-proposed Depressive Personality (DSM-IV axes for further study). Some meld both syndromes in a thick soup of negativity.

They could be called Victim Personality Disorder.

D, 43, is enmeshed in his family of origin. They are the constant headline in his life. There is a bitterness and rage against them for deprioritizing him. It is the subject of every session. E, 23, is similarly fused to her parents and older sibling. She has been the recipient of bullying and malign intent at every job she’s had. This includes conspiracies among coworkers. T, 52, with chronic baseline anger and vengeance intent, feels condescended to and harassed at work and has an EEO case in the works. Same with N, age 41, except that her discrimination case ended in defeat. K, 31, suffers extreme dysphoria, is constantly miserable, passively endures bullying by coworkers. He has a girlfriend but she doesn’t seem to bring him any happiness beyond the moment. L, 24, has lost five jobs in a row, has been bullied and made fun of at each one.

None of them has a capacity for stable happiness or even calm, though most of them are in a relationship they would call positive. This is the Depressive Personality component.

What in these clients equals or approximates a personality disorder? What differentiates them from people who have a “bad attitude”? I think you have to go geological here, down through the layers of their character history to some early place in childhood where there was either a proton or an electron, a positive kernel or a flame. Those still simmering will see only smoke in their landscape and will probably have no insight: “I am being harassed, disliked, mocked every place I work. It’s not me, it’s them.” It’s this seamless certainty without relenting that begins the diagnosis of a character disorder.

Next step is the cognitive escape from feeling. Each of them lives in thought, pessimistic thought beneath which they cannot go that covers their volcanic, childhood-origin emotional pain. Their thinking insists and argues like a cornered rat to prevent their vulnerability to the tears that belong to their youth.

A supplemental feature that I've seen in some of these clients is a blind childishness. They believe with rock-solid certainty that their fellow adults are disliking and bullying and ganging up on them, persecuting them as only immature children would do. They don't realize they are still children forlorn in their elementary and middle school classrooms.

I don’t doubt that some of these individuals have both flame and calm at their core. These are the ones who can grudgingly accept that there may be reason for hope, the sun may come out, but they can’t live in that place.

Therapists know (or should know) that personality disorders are next-to-impossible to dispel. Dialectical Behavior Therapy and other Cognitive approaches do not attempt to get to the root of Borderline Personality in Masterson's "abandonment depression." A Narcissist would disintegrate were he to somehow lose his sense of special perfection. We can’t make a Dependent Personality want to have initiative, be independent and alone. We can't give a sociopath a conscience. And my lesser afflicted clients? Is there a way to break through their suffering and thinking and victim-mind that protect their pain from exiting?

Why most of my therapy clients are wiser than all the pundits’ and psychologists’ printed words

(Article submitted to a journal which will bury it then expunge it from memory.)

I’m not a happy adult, but I am a joyous infant. I was also an unhappy, anxious and depressed child and teenager, but the infant remains permanent. I can feel him any time I’m not distracted by my present successes and failures. Absent the distractions, I feel something joyous at the molecular level. It may be only three or five or ten molecules, like the surface of a tiny lake, delicate and poignantly sweet, but it seems to be the foundation of my life. Now – if I tried to find what the arcane psychologists call cellular memory pre-birth, there would probably be a mess of trouble down there. I was born premature and kept in an incubator for a long time with no bond with anyone. So it’s probably the post-birth molecules I feel, let’s say, much of the time.

Examples: I take a tissue from the box and feel a split-second beautiful high and the subliminal thought: “I can have this! It’s free for the taking!” I walk outside the apartment door, down the walk to the dumpster, and feel the enchantment of the world. I grab a small Fiji water bottle: I feel like a prince sitting on a voluptuous cushion on a throne. A honey bee hovering around a bud: a sensation of love of nature. It goes even more quiddity than that. I pick up my wallet before leaving for work. “How am I so privileged?” is my chest sensation. My wife has bought me two different brands of fancy toothpaste. I feel blessed.

At different times, I have interpreted this phenomenon in a diametrically opposite way. By “interpreted” I mean that sometimes the joy feels sad. That is because the dark weight of my adult life pollutes it. But it really can’t be polluted. It’s always at the base and is frequently invoked by itself throughout the day. I know that on my death bed, which is not unlikely to be in poverty, the early toddler’s wonder and shock at the free gifts of life will be there.

I know, and I teach my clients this, that this positive core may exist but doesn’t exist for everyone. Look for it by quieting absolutely everything. They also learn that childhood pain and spirit-amputation become their more powerful foundation, above the earlier one. They learn that we are what we were, that positive thinking and forgiveness and grace and rationalization and religion and futile hope for an emotionally dead parent won’t change that foundation. They learn the difference between their façade, their persona and their fundamental self which is their alpha and omega.

I’m sure some of the psychotherapists and pundits have felt all this both before and after they’ve written their words. They probably chalk it up to indigestion or depression or an ignorable quirk. They write happy or hopeful, invariably. Cognitive and “spiritual” therapists and Arthur Brooks and David Brooks and Anne Lamott. They know, I suspect, that all of one’s experiences from pre-birth to now add up to an internal wash: meaninglessness. But for their readers, they are impelled to paint good and hopeful. What does this really mean? That the answer is to live and die in dogged and perpetual pink thought, which we must force. If we do that, we will never notice the joy of the infant, the eternal template.

Double feature: Social Depression, Silent Empty Chair

Social Depression

From an earlier TPS blog post: “For some (dysfunctional) people, it can be painful, though subliminally, merely to entertain the consciousness of another person.” By a very strange coincidence, within a recent week I saw three clients who named a peculiar phenomenon featuring this uncomfortableness with another consciousness. Not in the twenty-five years prior to that week, as far as I recall, had a client ever described it. Two of them, one a twenty-year-old woman, disclosed that it is “draining” to be among people, even for five minutes, to be expected to and proceed to talk. The third client described it as "a drag." A single person’s presence, it could even be a family member, would be enough to distress, numb and pain her mind.

This is not “social anxiety.” It is “social depression.” I know the essence of it because I am the fourth person on that list. In my predominant adult persona, as therapist, I am invigorated by a client’s presence, his thoughts and feelings and challenges. In my secondary persona, as husband to a compatible, former-therapist wife, I am comfortable with our mutual familiarity with my preconscious* psyche and its easy translation into conscious talk. But outside of work and marriage, I find it painfully and heavily burdensome to be silent with or talking to a stranger or a neighbor or to one of my wife’s friends, small talk or ‘medium’ talk. (Deep subjects would invoke my adolescent-stage narcissism fused to my professional garb.)

This is not because the more real self of me is too murky – complex and historical – to know which words to pull from the deeps. It’s because without the appropriate context for my (professional) conscious and (marital) preconscious selves, there is only left the inner child – the unformed and ungrown self – that has only fear, oblivion, and no words. Were there no behavior controls that must fall into place, in an “adult” context with stranger, neighbor or friend, the needful urge would be to collapse and become fetal.

My three clients are also this person. We don’t really go to that inchoate darkness but to recognize how recondite we are and to offer therapist’s empathy and care for it.

 

Silent Empty Chair

This is a slight idea but one that I find meaningful. I don’t know if many or all therapists who use Perls’s Empty Chair exercise bastardize it as I do. To me, the client needs to feel her internal ocean of “all the unsaid”** between her and a parent. But to feel this and then try to talk it, put it into words and concepts, is like painting the surface of the ocean. It's reducing the immeasurable to something temporal.

So sometimes a client’s failure to have the nerve to speak to an agelessly frightening father or an unloving mother can bring her to an even deeper place, beneath words. In her silence she is starting to feel and know parts of her history, aspects of her true character, and feelings that she never experienced but for a glinting moment in childhood. The look on a silent client’s face as she stares in the direction of the empty chair shows that she is changing on the inside, is finding and reclaiming more of the real childhood self that was banished early on, more of her self as left open and empty of her parent. I can’t assume, but hope that this internal change will manifest in new eyes, new seeing, new acting in the world.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Look up Freud’s notion of the “preconscious.”

** Term taken from Nathaniel Branden’s “Death Bed Situation” exercise. See blog post "The antithesis client," July 16, 2024.

The sound of labels makes me ill

I think it would be great if all of the thousands of YouTube and Instagram and TikTok (and whatever else there is) psychology videos were to disappear in a flash, electrocuted in a painful instant. Millions of children’s, teenagers’ and adults’ heads would no longer be toilets of wisdom, giant billboards of diagnostic labels shoved into their brains like Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head. Fourteen-year-olds wouldn’t be saying their father is a Narcissist with an Avoidant Attachment Style. Teenagers wouldn’t be told by their parents that their grandfather cheated on their grandmother and that’s why . . . . Twelve-year-old girls wouldn’t call their mother Borderline Personality (when, factually, both of them would be). The entire world minus five people wouldn’t have the middle name “Trauma.” Therapy clients wouldn’t prefer Rod McKuen-like couplets of profundity in melodramatic typefaces to the powerful work of therapy.

We would also remove many psycho-nouns and adjectives from the public domain. We’d make them private feelings that only the individual would discover in himself. “Abandonment,” “depressed,” “people-pleaser,” “codependent,” “gaslighting.”

People are deeper than, other than, the labels, but as soon as they buy one or two, they become them. They will evermore have trouble feeling the feeling underneath, far underneath to their buried history of meaning.

Imagine that even therapists didn’t have the labels, like John Lennon’s Imagined world without religion. Clients would still be describing – vaguely and poignantly and accurately – their distress, pain, emptiness, lack of a sense of identity, soul sickness, chronic hurt-frustrated-angry wrongness. And with their clients describing injury and hurt, therapists wouldn’t be focusing on their thinking, trying to change their thinking – the sick domain of Cognitive Therapy. They would help the client go to where they were wounded and pour their pain out.

Therapy without labels would enable so much more healing, it would be a phenomenon.

I’m thinking of “trauma.” Trauma is rape and being in war and watching your buddy’s head blown off. But even more, because the consequences can be so much deeper and longer, trauma is being a child of divorce, feeling unloved, being regularly left with a babysitter, being bullied and having no one at home who knows how to listen. I’m thinking of “abandonment.” My clients’ mothers and fathers left when they were two years old, seven years old, twelve years old, left and never returned. But abandonment is also telling your parent that you’re sad and hearing “you’ll feel better.” Or in my case, telling my father that and seeing him flinch. It’s saying the teacher was unfair and being told “I’m sure she was just having a bad day.”

Please join me in wishing all these labels, brain candy and brain poison, gone.