Sound bomb #1: The inner bad client in some of us

(Today’s single-paragraph post is not one of my deep-think pieces. It's my Comment to today’s Salon.com article: “Defying the odds: How to flip a Trump voter using pure logic,” subtitled “A non-adversarial, respectful approach is the only way to convert Trump supporters.” The article is written by Erica Etelson of AlterNet. So much has been said about the guaranteed fiasco of a Trump presidency – including my own searchable blog posts – that I’ve wearied to the point of issuing tidy “sound bombs.” Yesterday’s comment of mine [“If this money-sucking worm wins, I will be as nauseated about my neighbors as I’ll be about him”] was, I believe, a nice example of crash, burn and walk on. This one is a bit more polite.)

I’ve been a psychotherapist for seventeen years, mostly doing individual therapy. The great majority of my clients have been people who want to deal with consequences of their pain and injury, which most of them come to understand to be rooted in their past – childhood and adolescence. Among other results, this process eventuates in their realizing that they are directing anger at wrong targets – “here-and-now” targets such as a spouse, “life,” God, or their own child, instead of source targets such as an abusive, abandoning, preoccupied (maybe Narcissistic), depleted (weak) or needy parent. These are clients who, with therapist’s empathy and education, come to grow compassion for themselves, which leads to the evaporation of anger and angry attitude about other predominantly innocent (and similarly suffering) people. I will guarantee you – though I can base it only on the past year’s work – that these are not Trump’s people. And I can assure you who are: the authoritarian spouses of my female clients (the men sometimes make "guest appearances" in session), those who contemptuously tell me “I don’t believe in therapy.” The court-ordered men and women, with a strain or more of Antisocial Personality Disorder, who don’t want to be in the room. These and other individuals who are so defended against their childhood bleeding core that anger and attitude, power and revenge have become their life force. They won't profit from gentle Socratic argument. They need therapy.

Bigotry

I don’t know any “lazy Hispanics,” but –

            Mexican men love sleeping all day in the gutter, head perched on the curb with a huge sombrero pulled down over their face, flies buzzing around. Inane mariachi music plays in the background.

I don’t know any reprobate African American men, but –

            All blacks have cheap, delinquent souls, blame-society convictions, think rap music is quality and is meaningful, can’t walk a sober or moral straight line and wouldn’t want to.

I’m familiar with only one or two very old people, but I know that –

            They all have cartoonish, curmudgeonly, hidebound and depressing ideas about technology and the “work ethic.” Their philosophy of life is musty, dusty and they simply refuse to live in the present. They embrace the stereotype of the smelly, useless, near-dying bag of bones.

I no longer know any college professors, but they are basically all –

            Unpalatable flatulent weirdos whose courage consist of pompous ivory tower-dull ideas and position papers – mothballs rather than baseballs.

I don’t personally know any adult males who wear a baseball cap, but I know –

            They are all juvenile redneck idiots who think life is using tools, working on cars, coaching their nephew’s peewee football team, drinking beer, watching the game. I know they brainlessly adopted the script of “regular guy” instead of pausing, looking inward, and finding their real selves.

I know some very fine, intelligent, struggling, thoughtful women, but in fact –

            They are all, in their bones, weepy or bubbly or mean snarly-pouty little girls who endorse their fundamental identity as sex objects, exactly as men see them and because men see them that way. They blink-blinked and bought into that self-kissing narcissism, all agreeing – “My ass is special.” Everything they think is prefaced with: “I’m female.” Men don’t do that: They’re just people; women have to “roar.”

I know every person is unique – alone and lonely in his and her soul, but . . .

            They can’t see the truth as well as I can. They all miss this or that logical step, come from an essential blindness about themselves and the world, are influenced by farcical heroes, walk lockstep to the same fads and music and politics of the moment.

We all want there to be meaning to our life, but –

I know that Jews feel superior in their glorious persecution and worship a boring abstract, bloodless God; Muslims are psychotic fanatics and subservients with their asses in the air at prayer time; Christians are virtuous closet-sociopaths who may be too ugly to care or too stupid to realize they smack their lips at blood sacrifice and eternal hellfire torture; Buddhists are ball-less pseudo-serene flakes who convince themselves that meditating for hours a day or for years in a cave isn’t wasting your life; atheists are neurotic rebels-without-a-clue who found an identity in being militantly certain about uncertainty.

___________

Schizophrenics have auditory hallucinations, voices that are almost always critical, shaming, demeaning of them. “You’re worthless. You’re stupid. You should kill yourself.” The rest of humanity, or most of us, have delusions that are critical, shaming and demeaning of others. These are the bigotries and stereotypes that are as pervasive as the air: Mexicans are criminals, rapists. Muslims are terrorists or fellow-travelers. Foreigners are takers, unusual suspects. The rich are sociopathic narcissists; poor people are sad, impotent and angry. Both of these disorders, hallucinations and delusions, have roots in the same patho-dynamic: the person’s distance from instant experience, a dissociation caused by psychic pain in childhood that has remained buried within. Emotion is acute: It is evoked by specific stimuli. Suffering – the inner toxic cloud born of repressed feeling and the loneliness and pain, through time, of remaining invisible – turns the mind to cloud, attaching not to specifics but to nothing and everything. We don’t see a person: We feel our inner wrongness and we project it into the world.

We can see this process at work when we may be in a moment of feeling good, happy, fulfilled. The stereotype then instantly evaporates – The Syrian family helped by that church in New Jersey. They have so suffered. Gosh, I wish them the best – before life and mood return and we recognize them as foreigners with twisted brains who would rather throw a bomb than be Americans. Why are Cuban refugees such clean people? They’re always washing up on shore!

How do we not see the abysmal, colossal absurdity of judging and condemning people we don’t know? Of dehumanizing an entire group or population by one example or by no example? It’s not just the big, ugly canvases such as Donald Trump paints, but also the small, secret, biting prejudices that blink in and out of the mind. “For Christ’s sake – blue hair? What a nut in sheep’s clothing!” “‘Manager of Dual Diagnosis Services’: Who loves that career? What a permanent loser.” How have people come to normalize rank irrationality, an actual kind of blindness to real human beings? This flaw is part of what may be called the Adult Delusion, the implicit belief we all have that the mind’s content and process are valid. We can’t let ourselves notice the child informing these thoughts, the regressive mood-bath we’re in. We can’t let ourselves feel that hurt is behind this bitterness about others. And the irony is that living on this adult plane, we maintain the imprisonment and loneliness of the child inside us, who has never received the justice of being heard and believed. With time passing our suffering grows. It putrefies inside us. We direct it to the world.

This is how to know if we are really happy or content, not just full of ourselves or in a revenge place: We care about other people, the individual and the many.

Mood

September 4, morning

I’m in a stagnant pond of mood, or maybe it’s an ocean, but I’m only aware of the shallows. That’s the damned “here and now” that the more simple-minded psychotherapists love.

Actually, I know the mood is sourced in the beginning and formative years of my life. I’ve felt and studied that well. The knowledge helped me realize, while bitterly walking the dog this morning, that without an artificial good feeling or Novocain-like thought, there is either only a bad mood or no identity.

I’ll use Simon as a part-lesson. I’m an affection-needy guy, and I also love that mini schnauzer. But he was rescued by my wife from six months’ sad solitude in a PetSmart cage, and bonded to her like God to brilliance. To Simon, I’ve always been second-fiddle. So one moment I feel love, the next hurt and bitterness and if I think about it, lifelong desolation (I think the feeling would stay shallow, here-and-now, without the thought added to it). I’ve named the key, above: identity. Some people have organic identity that grew in their early childhood. Most of us have a more manufactured identity that comes when thought has to replace a hole where self should have been. Be aware that thought can create feeling, as the Cognitive therapists say. But they so screw up, because it is true only in a bad way, an escapist way. A Narcissistic personality disordered man was an empty boy who, under idiosyncratic influences, thought himself into feeling superior.

I won’t give you the ingredients of my present mood state, but for a few parts. I have a job now and a boss, while for the previous five years I was an independent contract therapist seeing clients per my hours, per my days, with no boss. While it felt good to be helping people, it felt better to be disconnected from the false family of a workplace. The antisocial part of my ego felt better that way. But I’m helping people now: the ambiguous blue and rose-red mood. I’m part of a false family: the warm teal mixed with the shit brown. I may yet become independent again: the Novocain of hopeful thought. And I’m still “the therapist”: the gold-plated throne that, for example, narcissistic Trump sits on. Then there is my marriage, with all its parts.

Someone with a late identity will always feel the emptiness whenever thought and positive mood fail. A healthy person will have, so to speak, the wave and whitecap moods in a firm ocean. The rest of us will only have the waves and whitecaps, and our sense of self will change with the weather, but also with the demonic forces that injured our childhood. Our moods will not be grounded in a man or a woman.

September 4, late evening

I completed two crisis interventions – teenagers – at local hospitals. Both young people were the present moment of telescoped histories; one, buried trauma, the other, years of grandparents’ abuse and mother’s passivity. It took unusual information, delivered in an unusual empathy, to move them enough but not too much so they would not need inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. My mood is good. But the weather will change soon.