Debate between D. Trump and H. Clinton channeling another narcissist, in the manner of Oda Mae Brown in Ghost

Trump: Crooked Hillary. Benghazi. Email scandal.

Hillary: What a sad little joke you are, Donald. Yes, I’ve made mistakes. You are a mistake.

Trump: Nobody can trust Crooked Hillary, who put our nation’s security at risk.

Hillary: Not quite, Sweetheart. But what our nation and the world can trust is that your brain runs on a whoopee cushion and Wonder Bread and is wiped out by Charmin whenever you feel the urge to change your air-quotes “mind.”

Trump: Our way of life is under threat by Radical Islam and you cannot even bring yourself to say the words.

Hillary: You know, I think I did say the words right at the moment when you were pat-patting your daughter’s ass – but you were in a world of dreams and didn’t hear me.

Trump: You’re a world-class liar. You think you’re entitled to the office of president.

Hillary: “Donald Trump is not a flatulent blowhard with about three adult-proof brain cells.” Now that’s a world-class lie, Donald My Man. But when it comes to lying – Jesus H-for-Harry Christ! It’s proven that narcissists like you don’t even set foot in the Land of Fact. Truth to a narcissist is exactly and only what feels good at the moment. And what feels good is to puff yourself up like an emasculated balloon with self-esteem issues. Don’t you know how sad you are, mine liege? [said with false pathos].

Trump: We don’t know anything about you in terms of religion. Now, you’ve been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there’s no – there’s nothing out there.

Hillary: This from the man who says “two Corinthians”! You’re the “number two,” Donald, not the Bible. Ha ha.

Trump: You were the worst Secretary of State in the history of the United States.

Hillary: [Looks at him with a mild, faraway smile of wonder.] Let me pull up a chair, Traitorous Pal of Putin and Sob Sister to the Homeless, and sit rapt at your discourse on the history of Secretaries of State, something you know about because you’ve read many books. A learnèd man you are, Donald! Here we go.   . . .   Start.   . . .   I’m sitting.

Trump: You were favored to win in the last election and you got schlonged.

Hillary: Hey, Fakakta Boy. Shtup is what I’m sure this election will do to you. Just ask any rebbe in Two Corinthians.

Trump: I know you went to the bathroom in the middle of the other debate. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. [Contorts his face.] No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.

Hillary: My fellow Americans, here is a man-baby who is thinking the word “doody” in his man-baby brain, and just can’t take it. Look at his little face scrinch up. Here’s a lollypop, Donald. Calm down, baby. This is a pubescent Casanova who, in his heart of hearts, can’t believe that women go to the bathroom.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when a little boy is shown a world of contempt and power and is given to believe he is superior, he is uniquely special. The eight-year-old avatar of perfection!* This is a jail of roses and gold, and he has never left it. Psychologists know – we all know – that the intellect can grow with age but emotional maturity can remain stunted. Grown men with tantrums, road rage, puerile insults, seeing women as meat. A professor can salivate over child porn, a football coach can rape boys. Donald Trump, though, is a special one. With the vast potential of the narcissistic sham, where expertise and mental strength can be the convincing veneer over a gaping cavity, he has managed to remain a snot-boy mind, along with the emotions stuck in early junior high school, and with only one notch in his Cub Scout belt: money. Make money, think money, weasel for money, count and accumulate money. Be money. This is all he has done, as far as he has come. And he has fooled you.

Even those who despise him think he has a man’s life. But this is the ungrown: in words, looks, bullying, clawing reaches to some throne of meaning and worth. You are seeing the ever-spinning, spitting gyroscope that must spew disdain and superiority to remain upright. Real men don’t need to grab fists of money while plowing through one finish line to the next. They have a center, like a quiet lake in an underground cavern. A center of substance, of self. And it’s a lonely, alone place, which reveals a kind of paradox to the life of someone like Trump. Such an intransigent individualist he seems to be, banishing some, mocking others, indifferent to the rest. But a narcissist is the most dependent person of all. Without a coterie who believe his dream of himself, he is undermined and depressed. Without people to feel superior to, he is empty. This dependency need is child-rooted, of course. You can see the frustration of it in the second-grader who punched his teacher in the face because he “didn’t think he knew anything about music.” Someone set adrift of warmth and bond by his parents, angry, covering his wound with scar tissue Band-Aids, growing a philosophy of Self as better than, punching. This is not how you grow up, become a man on your own. You’re always hating and needing others. You’re always the bitter boy.

This is the person who too many of you want to be president. I ask you to go to the wise part of your mind, the part that knows sense and sanity despite our own immaturities and dream escapes. Only when you access the adult part of yourself, look out from that greater height, will you see the real, small size of this man-boy-child. You will see it. You will not be impressed.

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* I can’t find a reference anywhere (Internet), but I’m pretty sure I heard one of the pundit-reporters quoting Donald Trump’s statement that he is the exact same person now that he was at eight years old.

The narcissist's lie and the election (See related Addendum at July 17 post)

It is difficult to explain the nature of a lie in a sociopath’s and Narcissist’s mind. It is hard to explain how lying, to them, is only secondarily a matter of amorality or immorality, or a middle-finger to the dupe (or to the world), or a stratagem, or an angry offense, or a brain injury, or an amusement. Its primary nature is to be an absolute, critical, unavoidable need – a heart pacemaker – in his life. He must, that is, lie. This is hard to explain because the cause of the disturbance lies in the fuzzy and theory-heavy psychology of identity formation, a process secretly crystallizing through birth and infancy.

For the sociopath (psychopath) and Narcissist, identity formation failed. The person we see is a shell containing a synaptic network of escapes from an identity crater. Truth, factuality, reveals the real world, and in the real world he is a baby on fire, a fire that no one can put out; a little boy gutted by anxiety and lost in the moment, every moment; the infant who couldn’t bond with his mother owing to birth trauma or mother’s character defect, and is therefore alone forever. I’m suggesting that to him, any truth – any unspun reality itself, whether it’s material, personal or remote – will pull him out of his mind and into a disturbing place that he will not identify but senses he must avoid.

How does truth gut the sociopath or Narcissist? To be, to simply exist in the real world is to have to feel, to feel the body self with its history, without holding onto the buoy of thought. Either of the Heartless Pathologies is constantly – from waking to unconsciousness – bathed in the ether of attitudinal thought whose theme is Ego, a place beneath which he can never descend. To simply feel would be to become the muteness, deadness, lostness who never left the starting gate of the crib, the circle of mother’s inept caregiving.

Do people grasp that the “narcissopath” is living on this plane? No (most people don’t see what a proctologist sees). They believe he is showing high or sinister vital emotion and drive. But it’s all “holistic” escapism, running from hell. Try to picture such an individual simply living, “smelling the roses” without a cognitive hitchhiker on board: just sensing, experiencing, pleasuring in simple silence. It should be impossible to picture what he cannot do. He will necessarily be thinking: “I need roses like this in my garden,” or “They smell wonderful – who owns them?”, or “The scent brings back my lonely childhood; I’m so much better now,” or he’ll be in a detached “head place” that dims the redolence, decapitates it through dissociation. Thought is the desert island beneath his feet that protects him from his deeper self.

One reason we don’t see this false existence in others is that most of us live in the default of thought or attitudinal feeling. Most of us have grown a cerebral layer over pain in our childhood. The difference between us and the Radical Deformation will consist of how much loss of our real self we have suffered, and how painful was the cause of it. A solider person might, for example, acknowledge his or his son’s averageness with some pain, but will be able to face it clearly or with a bit of finessing. A psychopath, whose heart was engulfed in flames at birth, will be able to face no flaw in himself, no emotional truth. The Narcissist, with less egregious birth trauma, may experience pockets of regressive maudlin sentiment. But to not be unique and apart from humanity will be to feel the hole of his life: to be extinguished.

Not all escapist thought is Ego

There are many cognitive escapes from identity pain; not all of them are narcissistic. For the child in Levenkron’s book* who requested a vacuum cleaner for his tenth birthday and spent his days ensuring the cleanliness of floor and walls, the ideal – or idea – of purity staved off identity collapse, kept his nihilistic wisdom at bay. He could not accept the truth of a dirty floor, the impossibility of a perfectly clean one. Reality was unacceptable because it made him feel the descending spiral – anxiety, lack of a security-making bond with a parent, lack of separation, and ultimately the absence of a self. Others with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder) may need the rigid purity of morals – no messiness – or the ordering of reality by counting, color coordinating, symmetry, thinking magical thoughts. To touch reality, even one flaw or wrinkle, would be the touched water droplet: opening to formlessness.

The Narcissist became, in early childhood, an absence that may have been filled by his parent’s idealization. “Our perfect boy.” “He’ll play in Carnegie Hall one day.” He may have been pampered as a prince pauper: always offered the last of the entrée or dessert, though there were other people at the table; given no chores, no critical correction, no consequences. Unable to grow in the vacuum of benign neglect, during the adolescent crisis of maturity he would fall upward to the lifesaving plateau of narcissism.

In summary: Being a lie makes lying necessary. An identity-hollow person, who must still function in the world, can never let himself visit the truth. Narcissists are understood to be delusional people: They “know” they are uniquely special, perfect, entitled. Though they speak and walk and gesticulate with aggressive confidence, and seem to be connected powerfully to our real world, they are entirely insular, in a cave of dreams, living solely on the urge of self-beatification. Though you vote for them, they do not feel you, see you, or care.

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* Steven Levenkron, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Warner Books, 1991.

"I see cheering Muslims"* (with 7/27/2016 Addendum: Another approach to the Narcissist's aversion to truth)

Armed with only my own remembrance of the Narcissistic experience, and a sense of what it means, I want to place myself in the mind of someone who could see “thousands and thousands” of people who did not exist. I know there is a type of fixed or necessary false belief peculiar to the Narcissist which is different from the psychotic’s delusion but only by a little, and which is different from the sociopath’s lying but only by a little. Entering the preconscious and unconscious of such a person, I’ll hope to give a taste of his reality.

(Delusion-ish) ‘It doesn’t matter what these idiots think is “true.” On television I saw people cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers and it was a crowd. Don’t ask me to parse numbers. It was a hideous sight of hideous people. It’s practically treasonous to count them. I heard their roar. The phenomenon is what is true; it was evil and therefore was not small, was not the “exception.” Thousands means power, and power means thousands. It was all or nothing, and it was not nothing. I am right.’

(Lie-ish) ‘When I say that I saw droves of Muslims, no little shit has the goddamnedest right to question it. Your point of view is a politically correct dream. I wake up each morning and I see the world that I live in: It is the world that has to resonate** to my needs to be the fine, great and perfect man. If it ignores those needs, then I do not exist. Therefore, the world and I are one.*** Obama is not an American because that view fits my need to be a contemptuous, superior man. Mexicans are rapists because inside, I fear and hate people who are different from me. (This is actually everyone, except my family, who are appendages of me.) I stand apart, elevated above them. And if they were “good” people, I’d have to see that goodness and love exist in the world, and again I wouldn’t exist because that is not my world. If there were empathy and real love, I would melt, return to childhood to die, become the child who starved because it was he who needed those things.’

The Narcissist occupies his own world because he failed to live, in the real one.

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* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUYKSWQmkrg&spfreload=5.

** “The successful narcissist is the one who can make the environment continuously resonate to his narcissistic needs. People respond with praise and admiration; work provides a stunning showcase for the narcissist's talents and abilities; his possessions, hobbies, and pastimes keep him buoyed up emotionally and help him sail through life.” The Search for the Real Self, James F. Masterson, M.D., The Free Press / New York, 1988, p. 100.

*** Another way of expressing this solipsism is: “The world is a mirror. Any place in it where I don’t see myself, where I don’t feel the milky warmth of myself, where my Self is not reflected and I am not bathed in glorification, I am alone in my endless botch.”

Addendum – Another approach to the Narcissist's conviction that the feeling is the fact

Why does the Narcissist’s feeling and felt need supersede fact? Remember that the Narcissist is primarily shut off, by repressive and other defensive barriers, from his deep, raw feelings – the original pains and critical losses of identity-making mirroring and bond that formed him. This shutting off, though, does not mean he has left the pain behind; it means the pain is constantly working on him: He has “ignored” it, therefore it cannot heal. He embodies the Danish proverb quoted in T. Sheppard Alexander: “You can't run from the wolf because the wolf travels with you,”* as he runs away within his entrapment. Picture an infant in an extreme helpless tantrum state. This child cannot connect to anything in the world, cannot care about a doll or a soothing word. He is fully self-enclosed, in crisis. If you hold up an action figure toy for him, he will throw it, he will hate it with a deeper than normal hatred because through it, you are trying to ignore his pain. If you say soothingly that “It is not so bad” or “It will get better,” he will hate these truths, because you are trying to ignore his pain. This is exactly where a Narcissist is. We don’t see this core in him, this direct connection to his history, because of the extremely deceptive intermediary of thought. Thought, used by his necessary escapism, must become anything but the truth. It may be Freud’s “reaction formation,” the defense mechanism of feeling the opposite of the real feeling. It may be denial, a rationalization, cloudy intellectualization, a lie. If he were to replace thinking with utter silence even for a short time, he would feel the sludgy mess of the bowels of his history – a feeling that might be distilled to: the living dead in a live world. Thinking, and its emotionally weighted form – attitude – are especially powerful escapes for the Narcissist because idealization (by a parent) then self-idealization replaced his identity early on, and self-idealization can’t be maintained without the mental fuel of identifying thought.

The Narcissist is averse to objective fact, now, because (1) it jerks him off his thought cushion and makes him feel his history, and (2) it ignores his truth: the pain he suffers, runs from, but that always reaches for help.

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* Theresa Sheppard Alexander, Facing the Wolf, Plume, 1997.

A different police state of mind

Could police men and women be recruited and trained as humanitarians? That is, a different approach to their career, a more ingenuous heart, a different way of seeing? In this sociological alternate universe, police would believe the struggling decent heart within the person, would assume the best, with clinical not attitudinal vigilance. Would there accrue more or fewer tragedies – to them and to citizens – than result from an errant-citizen, suspect-oriented philosophy?

I will leave it to the reader to judge if the following is a good analogy:

Mental health clinicians, especially those in crisis intervention, deal daily in pain, misshapen personalities and uncontrolled emotions. We realize people are hurting, but this doesn’t mean we assume they will be nice, with good intentions: Many will project pent-up – even lifelong – frustrations onto innocent people and property. But our underlying approach or sense of life (that is, those of us who aren’t botched or burnt out) is that hurt, struggle and some openness to be helped are primary, are the deeper or “real” self that deserves our benevolence.

Based on the premise of good will, we are taught safe restraint and verbal de-escalation of irrationality and anger and early-stage violence (a client feeling disrespected by office staff may slam his fist on the table or pick up a chair and threaten to throw it). The client is enraged, we know the feeling is legitimate from his perspective, and we want to put out an empathic hand. “Man, this is powerful anger. What happened?” “The receptionist ignored you? I wouldn’t like that either. What was the whole situation?” We know the client’s energy is imperative, must be given an outlet. And we understand that very likely it was her earlier, childhood-wide victimization by authoritarian power that contributed to the disorder and its crisis, and that the last thing she needs is to be, again, a victim over-powered by our authority.

Can police evolve to these giving people? In some communities they have, in miniature. C.I.T. (Crisis Intervention Team) officers (https://sheriff.franklincountyohio.gov/About/Divisons/Support-Services/Community-Response-Bureau-Units/Community-Intervention-and-Diversion) voluntarily train to help their community’s residents in crisis. They recruit themselves to the program because they see the misbehaving person as wounded, not criminal, and train to know better how to respond. I’ve accompanied C.I.T. officers to the scenes – a barricaded apartment with a delusional man starving himself, a violent Bipolar. It’s been fine to see them place their authoritative power behind their calm concern and interest. The power is still there – I don’t feel I’m standing in a havoc setting with a fellow social worker or “reflective listening” counselor! But it’s more akin to a parent’s thematic strength, where power is infused with benevolence.

Right now, with this week’s hair-trigger shootings of two innocent black men and the revenge or opportunistic sniper murders in Dallas, it may seem gauche or at least untimely to draw this fantasy: the police turning their heart white, like a flag, becoming therapists in danger zones. But I think it makes sense and even has a certain inevitability, because it’s a fantasy based primarily in human nature and character, not strategy. That's to say, it is right to be good, wise to be caring. There is also the logic that just as a parent should make the healing move in a parent-child conflict – he is the teacher and helper and bigger person and is not there for revenge or to “win” – so should the ultimate legal power of the police embody the fundamental benevolence of family, seeing “the children” as good, though often mistaken; angry, though for true reasons; manipulative, though to get some legitimate need met*; prone to miscommunicate their needs and feelings. I really think the effect, in the long run, will be to leave our officers less often blindsided, less victimized. The atmosphere will be like a good home where all members feel heard, respected, equal.


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* Homage to my old counseling professor's (Dr. Thomas Rueth) maxim – Manipulation is the client's effort to get a legitimate need met, in a way that I happen not to approve.

Anger in (and not in) the time of Trump and Brexit

Anger is our most neurotic emotion. That means several things: People have high or explosive anger far beyond what a situation warrants, yet they may justify it as normal and appropriate. They call a complex feeling – whose roots, trunk and branches are fear and pain and sad hurt – “anger” (which is pretty much the leaves). They feel anger about the wrong person. And they feel it about reasons that are not the reasons.

People do sometimes have right and true anger. If a friend or stranger were to call your wife an ugly whore, you’d be right to be angry. If you reacted otherwise, with pity or fear, humor or compassion or saintly tolerance, you would probably be a very mentally sick person, out of touch with your body feeling and numbed by repression and ideas that warp your truth.

Some examples of neurotic anger:

Beyond what a situation warrants 

 

In slow-moving traffic, a distracted driver veers a few inches into your lane. You grab a handful of pennies from the coin cup and fling them at the car.

A complex feeling mislabeled

A “cyclical batterer,”* you see your wife with a stylish new hairdo. Engulfed in terrible feeling that you label rage, because you “know” she must be wanting to look good for some other man, you shove her against the wall and hurl venomous accusations at her.

The wrong person

In childhood, you were a victim of your father’s extreme physical abuse and shaming. Because the shame and abuse dissolved your self-esteem and braked your psychological maturing, you continue into your adult life needing to be “something” in his eyes and remaining covertly petrified of him, making your repressed pain and rage leak out in wrong directions. Home from work, you throw a man-tantrum – stomping about the house and ripping your shirt off – because your wife and kids have left the living room un-picked-up from the previous day. In the middle of the tantrum, the phone rings. You hear your father’s voice, something in you turns, and in a calm, subtly younger voice, you respond: “Hi, dad . . . Sure, I can come over and help you work on the truck.”

Reasons that are not the reasons

* You feel mocking, contemptuous anger toward “New Age” interests such as yoga, reiki, meditation, chakras, “spirituality.” You “don't believe in” therapy. * Someone tells you that “they’re rioting in Myanmar” and you get angry about the “ignorant armies clashing by night” in Third World countries. * You are angry at God or “life” that children get terminal diseases, that your marriage is unhappy, that your adult child doesn’t write to you. * Like H. L. Mencken’s puritan** who suffers “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” you rail against victimless crimes such as gambling and recreational drug use.

Anger seems like a monolith – a single experience, and a self-justified one, when it is so often smoke-and-mirrors and a veneer that covers other, deeper meanings in our life. Nowadays it is even a daily headline, where so many people are angry in their world, with their world that they want to use the democratic process to bend entire countries to their will.

I will propose a casual principle, to help us understand a lesser grasped nature of anger. Most of our anger is hurt that has never healed. And as it’s never healed, it is past pain that is carried into the present. It is the power and success that our childhood powerlessness and failure became.

It is not hard to know this if we sink inside to the sensation we call anger. In this feeling will be history. Were you enraged at the moment your father broke a promise to take you somewhere or buy you something? No – you were hurt. If that eventually semi-morphed to anger, it’s because disappointments became normal in your home, an unhealed wound. Were you initially angry to realize that your parents enjoyed your sibling’s personality more than yours? No – you were drowning, and anger may have been the feeling that pulled you slightly above the waves. Hurt and anger remain fused as we get older, in various blends that sometimes seem only like hurt – we believe we have no anger – sometimes only like anger: The tough guy thinks he’s just pissed off when his wife gets a higher paying job than he. Christine Lawson’s “waif” borderline personality*** may be a piteous, weepy girl-woman in the therapist’s office for an entire year before the claws come out.

Past in our present, weakness behind our power, pain and injury that lives and disappears in our anger. We think we are in the “here-and-now,” in the moment, but can you feel your child’s hand if yours is scarred? Can you see the world clearly if your eyes have been scarred? There is a secondary principle. Our thoughts are so often the polluted smoke from these underground forces. They carry lost messages from the past. This is most obvious when anger is most disembodied, attaches to everything and nothing – to words like “liberal” or “the rich”; to other people’s religions or tastes, to wholesale prejudices, the “different,” or when it is simply one’s sense of life. A happy-go-lucky teen, whom I worked with at a Residential Treatment Center, came to see that under the surface he “was always angry.”

As a therapist I’ve come to live a paradox: I touch people’s blood and soul most every day but outside of the office feel unconnected and unheard and not a full member of their world. I cannot help but see what I believe are underlying motivations to what they do, but their eyes and words are high above the surface on a plane of clouds, symbolic ideas, screen feelings. Don’t they want to know where they come from, what their feelings really mean?

Why they think they hate?

Anger can be real but is mostly a body delusion, so often meaning other than what it seems. Amazing, the power such a delusion has in the world.

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* Cyclical batterer – a type of domestically violent abuser. See Donald G. Dutton, Ph.D.’s book, The Batterer – a Psychological Profile. 

** One of many of Mencken’s trenchant quotes: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke125197.html.

*** Understanding the Borderline Mother, Christine Ann Lawson.