Trump trauma and grim, repetitive play

In the “comments” section of Salon.com, I wrote:

I think that all of us who understand, appreciate and abhor the emptiness and vulgarity of Trump are in the Post-Traumatic Stress behavior of "grim, repetitive play," characteristic of children who've been trauma­tized. They are often compelled to face their overwhelm horror by playing it out repeatedly (such as with action figures or in the sandbox) but without the pleasure of normal play. Like other traumas, the Trump phenomenon is impossible to "swallow" but has been forced down our throats and now will not be vomited out. What else can we do, for now, but repeat, repeat and repeat our incredulous observations?

My comment, a conscious instance of the trauma reaction it described, didn’t go into the behavior’s rationale. My own under­standing is that trauma is a primary wrong that redefines the child’s life in an unacceptable way, and therefore takes precedence over everything else. Children express themselves through play. When they are disabled by the kind of lethal, “soul murdering”* overwhelm or crazy logic** of trauma, their play may manifest the constant force of the wrong. Lenore Terr, psychiatrist who researched the notorious Chowchilla kidnappings, wrote:

“. . . the play that follows from trauma is grim and monotonous” (p. 238). “. . . play does not stop easily when it is traumatically inspired. And it may not change much over time. As opposed to ordinary child’s play, post-traumatic play is obsessively repeated. It is grim. Furthermore, it requires a certain set of conditions in order to proceed – a certain place, a certain assortment of dolls, certain playmates, or a certain routine. It may go on for years. It repeats parts of the trauma. It occasionally includes a defense or two or a feeble attempt at a happy ending, but post-traumatic play is able to do very little to relieve anxiety. It can be dangerous, too. The problem is – post-traumatic play may create more terror than was consciously there when the game started. And if it does dissipate some terror, this monotonous play does it so slowly that it might take more than a lifetime before the play would completely dissipate all the anxiety stirred-up by the trauma” (p. 239).***

I am certain that the ascendance of Trump is an actual trauma to many people. We grasp that his character isn’t simply a species of normal human drama or anger or egoistic self-promotion, but is actually a disease aberration. Our trauma, however, does not come from the person sui generis, who is more a caricature of awfulness than awfulness itself, making him small not looming. It comes from the crazy logic of his adoration or acceptance by such a large, sentient swath of the population, where those of us with an empathic nature find ourselves living in a virtual wrong world. A similar unswallowable, unbreathable perplexity would happen were you, a child, to find your parents happily scribbling dinner recipes that featured the family members’ body parts.**** You wouldn’t merely be alarmed by this discrepancy between love and horror – you would be mentally turned, traumatized.

The state of being troubled and stunned, one moment walking in a benign world and the next in a twilight zone or cartoon world, is to be forced to perseverate. The drone of Orange has hegemony. Our leader might be a fascist demagogue who loves himself to the point of solipsism, the world’s entire purpose a stage and spittoon? Our president might be a man without nobility, dignity, subtlety or vocabulary, but possibly a spasm of humanity when being watched? We cannot stop thinking of or imaging him, secondarily his brown smog of followers. I read quite a few online articles. If a piece is not about Trump, something as innocuous as a “Dear Prudence” column, I’m likely to think: Why is Trump not mentioned in this? I have an urge to foist his foul echo into every comment I write – mostly because I’m drawn to articles he headlines. Other commenters have noticed the same. His name, signifying a ludicrous wight, seems to have become a default theme to the times, a brain implant through which we see and feel.

What can we do about living in such an off world, where a carnival barker is thought to be sound, competent, a leader? We may be feeling like Steven Mallory in The Fountainhead:

“Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me – it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice – your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world. . . .”*****

What can we do about his followers? What can we do to clean the air which we can’t avoid breathing? Over the years, I’ve described trauma to my clients as being forced to swallow an elephant, which is now stuck, too big to throw up. Little did I know.


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* Soul Murder, Leonard Shengold, M.D.

** By “crazy logic,” I mean a traumatic event that has happened – it is in the real world – but which is impossible to assimilate. Not unlike my father’s saying (fortunately, in jest), “When Tuesday falls on Friday.”

*** Lenore Terr, M.D., Too Scared To Cry – Psychic Trauma in Childhood, Basic Books, 1990. 

**** Idea taken from an old Roald Dahl short story in which (as I dimly remember) post-apocalypse, a starving old man and a little girl resignedly cut off their limbs for food.

***** Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, pdf – http://pieceofmind.publicrealm.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/The-Fountainhead.pdf. Pages unnumbered; search “drooling.”

In-house #6: Love actually

I’ve been reading more in the marital therapy literature (far from a comprehensive perusal, and I am not a Marriage and Family Therapist), and come away with the sense that these writers think that love is love. All kinds of things are questioned (such as, to use Gottman’s concepts, spouses’ criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling; along with the resonance of childhood injuries into the present), though not someone’s claim of “love.” One says “I love him/her, but . . .” and only the but is examined, not the elemental force, the immovable mover of “love” itself.

But isn’t that absurd? What if it doesn’t really exist? I suspect that even those therapists who recognize the futility of a marriage still believe the love is, or once was, there, but that it died, or “wasn’t enough” (what the hell does that mean?) to save the marriage, or was surpassed by a greater imperative love. What if we overuse the word? What if we actually feel desperation or attraction or sex or being liked or being visible? What if real love is not at all need, or only one little part need, not the vast part need? What if there is some genuineness of love within the dysfunctional messy feeling many people have, but that it needs to be acknowledged as the weaker substance it is in order to save the marriage? This might be the healthiest of all compromises: “I can’t love someone more than I have the capacity for.” “She is the source of my comfort with my poorly formed identity, and that is love, but also pain.”

I talked love during the romance phase with my future first wife, employed the word during the greater part of a decade’s marriage, and asserted love (writing to my father-in-law) as I ran away from her. But it was all nonsense, and my disabuse coalesced soon after, like a drop of dew evaporating one morning. This was a depressed, weakly narcissistic man conjoined to a Borderline woman: two sick seas coming together from polluted, barren sources who somehow, miraculously, could feel “love” for one another.

Cynical as it may be, I believe that love’s intrusiveness comes out of the contradiction between our absolutely critical need for it and our ability to live without it. Our ability to run a life on empty. This makes us see love, or imagine it, when it is absent; to take a complex feeling and rename it that.

If I’m right about marital therapy, and about couples and love, then questions arise. Should therapy address the actuality of love? Or simply assume it when it may not be real or strong, and still help the couple communicate better, re-romanticize, create harmony and enrich the relationship on top of this underground fault? One answer to these questions may come from a fact known to depth psychology: The fault exists at the base of most of us. We are composed, from our roots up, of differing degrees of love, or none. Seen through this lens, a marriage may then be the closest grasp of our birthright and birth-need that we will ever find. We wouldn’t want to question too much, then.

Snark and the hypothesis

I picture saying to two therapists I know: “My clients, for the most part, get better. Yours (pointing a professorial finger at one) get listened to, and yours (sliding the finger over to the other) get cheered up.” One of these therapists is elderly, and sees many older-middle-aged women who have a sunken Titanic-load of physical and emotional disorders, histories, crises past and present, hysteric process. These victims are a hallucinatory purple, oozing red. They return to therapy week after week, sometimes month after month, ooze and talk and get listened to. How do I know they don’t get better in any significant way? If the therapist had proceeded to work into any of these wounds, the clients would have left much earlier – improved or escaped. Deep trauma work? Confronting the family toxicity? They’d probably scram. Teach, or even mention psychosomatic pain and disorder?* Scram like lightning. The younger, bushy-tailed counselor whose laughter could be heard through the wall much of the time, did have a certain practical program in her tool belt: She presented clients with the goal of six sessions to “work through” the presenting issues. Cheering up the client, by New Age or Cognitive therapies, can work only if two factors are in place: The client has to be mesmerized or distracted by feel-good fluffery; and the therapist has to actually believe this is what therapy is about. There is then peace and self-satisfaction. The same is true of the listener: She must believe that this is the height of what we do.** Ignorance is both bliss and success.

I am snarky because more than a handful of clients depart after one or two sessions and I have never figured out why. (Those who pass through that two-session gravitational boundary may soar into space for a long voyage.) So I have to consider the likelihood that they are turned off by my premise that there is real damage, it needs to be known and faced, and there is work to be done.

And yet . . .

Could I become positive, see the client in a different way that is deep but does not get stuck in his or her wound? Should a therapist see the client as predominately healthy, resourceful, or as being more potential than actual? That is a lovely thought, and I admit that as I get older, through my sixties, the desire to see the world as beautiful and people as good and essentially whole is compelling and musical. But what if I’m spiritual in a cosmic-psychological way, and believe that this universe of ours needs the scales of justice to lean to truth not a dream? There is an error embedded in the universe, where emotional injury changes and limits everything, bends each self, has darkened our long past and a long chain of futures. If we don’t recognize this, can we ever change it? We all want to laugh, be happy, especially if we’re alone, especially if we’re with our partner. But it’s too fragile if this happiness, even this love, is not based in our ground as it is. Human beings are too in-time, too historical, to live on a joke, a plane of “mindfulness,” a feel-good moment.

When my wife and I are very old, I will speak to her in the most gentle way, much more sweet than bitter, some pains that may never be named ’til then. We have not been perfect to each other – an equality – have not been able to give each other everything, and some of it is silently cataclysmic. It would not be a “kindness” to her to ignore something that underlies everything, from the beginning of our dear relationship. It would be a deeper intimacy to name it. But the same must be true of anyone’s life: We should feel and give words to our depth, because it is feeling that is always there, and therefore meaning that is always there. We shouldn’t run away from it. Even in therapy.

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* Dr. John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders, states that the psychosomatic client will not accept that diagnosis from a mere counselor or psychologist, as the medical symptomatology is itself a defense against emotional insight. Therefore, the “news” must come from a medical doctor (“your problem is not fundamentally medical”) – much more convincing to the client. 

** This therapist does see some young children and adolescents. Twelve sessions into the therapy, a teenage girl began cutting. Barring early personality disorder, this very probably means she continues to feel isolated and unable to get the best words for her pain out. This appears to say there is something wrong with the therapeutic listening. On the other hand, Levenkron’s experience is that as a disturbed teen gets close to her “crisis of healing” (collapsing into the necessary nurturant-authoritative dependency), there may be regression.

All the faiths to choose from

Moving from Ohio to Nevada, I was officially regressed from Counselor license-holder to purgatory-dweller and had to pass a big flatulent exam. To prepare for it, I reviewed many of the established schools of counseling and psychotherapy. The result, other than exam success, was this thought:

I wonder if many people would be discouraged to enter therapy if they knew of the numbing proliferation of theories and practices – all princely little islands – that have accreted over the past hundred-plus years –

accelerated experiential dynamic therapy / acceptance and commitment therapy / acceptance-based behavior therapy / addictions counseling / Adlerian therapy / affective cognitive-behavioral therapy / aversion therapy / behavior therapy / behavioral activation therapy / bioenergetics therapy / bonding psychotherapy / brief cognitive therapy / brief solution-focused therapy / brief psychodynamic psychotherapy / cognitive behavior modification / cognitive behavior therapy / cognitive processing therapy / cognitive restructuring / cognitive therapy / coherence therapy / comprehensive behavioral intervention for tics / dialectical behavior therapy / eclectic therapy / electroconvulsive therapy / emotion focused therapy / emotional freedom technique / existential therapy / eye movement desensitization and reprocessing / family-focused therapy / family systems therapy (structural therapy, strategic therapy, systemic therapy, transgenerational therapy, functional family therapy, multidimensional family therapy) / focusing / gestalt therapy / group cognitive behavior therapy / group therapy / holding therapy / holistic therapy / hypnotherapy / imagery therapy / internal family systems therapy / interpersonal and social rhythm therapy / interpersonal therapy / Jungian psychotherapy / logotherapy / Masterson Approach (to personality disorders) / Maudsley family-based therapy / mentalization-based therapy / mindfulness-based stress reduction / multisystemic therapy / narrative therapy / neo-Freudian analysis / neurofeedback / biofeedback / neuro-linguistic programming / object relations therapy / parent-child interaction therapy / parent management training / parts and memory therapy / past life regression / person-centered (Rogerian) therapy / primal integration therapy / primal therapy / problem-solving skills training / psychiatry / psychoanalysis / rational-emotive behavior therapy / reality therapy / rebirthing therapy / relationship therapy for one / relaxation therapy / schema therapy / self-control therapy / self psychology / sex therapy / social constructionism / social skills training / somato-emotional release (body) psychotherapy / STEPPS group therapy / thought field therapy / transactional analysis / transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy for treatment-resistant depression / transference focused psychotherapy / transpersonal psychology / trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy / virtual reality therapy

– and, if they knew the meanings of this profusion. What does it say about our grasp of psychological truth, human functioning, objectivity, that there are so many educated guesses about them? And if you accept that an individual is capable (though with difficult and subtle work) of learning the sources of his emotions, turning points, his suffering, his character growth, what does this legion of pet theories suggest about any given therapist’s – your therapist’s – self-generated self-knowledge?

All of these philosophies, schools, systems, programs and techniques come from hairsplittingly to grossly divergent takes on human nature. An assumed positive but, I believe, damaging factor is that all of them, with the exception of Freud and psychoanalysis, suffer the personality disorder of global optimism*: They believe in the inherent potential good (or wonderful) outcome. This includes Existential Therapy with its death anxiety, ultimate aloneness and meaninglessness. This optimism, were it built into medical practice, would have doctors proclaiming that no condition is terminal, all dysfunction no matter how deep-seated or malignant can be either healed, safely ignored, predominately surmounted, or accepted with grace and good spirit. Shouldn’t we ask – Why is the physical body deterministic and fatalistic in the ways it is, but the mind-body is not?

Another problem with the therapy smorgasbord is that theories of emotional healing are self-medicative for the counselor. Just as a person adheres to a political or religious doctrine because it conforms to his self-image, soothes or enhances him; just as an unloved boy must warp reality and believe that feelings are “weakness”; so therapists gravitate to psychological theories that support their defenses, their hopes, their view of themselves. Individuals who live in their head, who have run away from their childhood catastrophe, are bound to accept a Cognitive theory that promotes the power of thought over feeling. Clinicians whose past was hell will swear by “here and now” approaches. Those uncomfortable with ambiguity and the cloudy turmoil of emotion will leap to the solid, arid land of Behaviorism and Reality Therapy. People whose story is, in their heart, intolerable, will love Narrative Therapy, which invites them to rewrite it.

All said, most clients, probably, do not know that our field is splintered into micro-religions. While a minority of my clients have heard of, or even ask for, “cognitive therapy,” most are facing new information when I describe the simple differences between present and past focus, thinking versus injury focus. Ignorant, though, as they may be, clients must still suffer the effects this therapy inflation and this faith have had on practitioners. Imagine if there were no religions and that each one of us was left to search our world and soul for meaning. How many would find a God in our image? How much herd consensus would there be? How little abdication of self-development and deeper truth-finding would there be? Psychotherapy needs workers who have dissolved the churches by searching the primary field – inner experience – with clean reason. It needs the emasculation of all these pretentious do-good-isms. It needs less faith, actually, to be the most useful.

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* If global pessimism, which identifies the unofficial (DSM-IV) Depressive Personality, meets the definition of personality disorder: “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture”; “inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations” (American Psychiatric Association, 2012), then so should global optimism.