A twisted good

I knew a therapy client who survived the Las Vegas October 1st mass shooting. He was an emotionally compelling guy. You felt warm feelings for him. Still traumatized a year later, he grieved loudly for the injured and dead, raged quietly and righteously at the shooter, and was horrified at the mere thought that he might have had his daughter with him at that terrible scene, though he hadn’t. He worked hard every day to support her. He loved Trump – “a great man.” This client had also been a childhood victim of the most outrageous multiple-perpetrator incest and physical abuse I’ve heard of in over twenty years of helping troubled people. For many souls, being “good” and “decent” has an extremely different meaning from the sense of those virtues that others have, others who early on got some help from pain, even if it was just from one person (an “enlightened witness,” Alice Miller’s term). “Good” means something different to people whose foundation was to be alone in their pain and despair and who, deep inside, remain there. They are not soft: They can never afford to be. They cannot really see the idea of humanity as holding hands because that tortures their loss, because humanity had empty hands or clenched fists, its back turned away. Their good will be protective and stern, distant father- and fatherland-needing, defiant, with locked-away bullets of rage. They will love (a word whose meanings are so, so complex) a hard president informed by anger and a fundamental alienation.

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This post is an amended comment to Frank Bruni’s New York Times opinion piece – https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/midterms-democrats-trump-2020.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists.