Mail this to your Trump-admiring family and peers (but include a return envelope)

There has been so much said about the diagnosable psychological illnesses of the president. In his case, we have the necessary exception to our culture’s worthy destigmatizing of mental illness. Trump’s ignorant narcissism and destructive sociopathy deserve all the stigmatizing that can be gathered.

Here I want to ask Trump approvers to look at themselves in a way they never have, as this would be undermining and threatening. But undermining one’s defenses, or status quo, is one of the most courageous and powerful actions a person can take for health and self-improvement.

You hear a man demean individuals he does not know, trash vast groups of people, entire countries, and this gives you good feelings and positive thoughts. You experience body sensations that you would identify as the chemicals of happiness, but that you would know, were you to sit with them alone in quiet, ruthless awareness, are not healthy joy, love, respect or benevolence. They can’t be: You cleave to a solipsistically, narcissistically uncaring and self-enclosed person. Every human being in his world is or would be only a supply to fuel his self-regard. Picture those extremely troubled women, those attorneys and police­women and guards who fall for serial killers or other imprisoned psychopaths. You are their bedfellows. There is no difference between you in your attachment to a malevolently, deliberately toxic person.

If we separate from the consensus and from the auto-pilot emotional attitudes that comprise our beliefs, we may realize we have anger or a sense of critical wrongness that sits more or less quietly at the foundation of our life. This is the damage of childhood – whether we recognize it as damage or not – that bends the path we’ll travel through our years. Splinters and anchors in our heart can degenerate love to need or anger and alter what we hope for. We lose justice and substitute revenge. Our sense of morality changes. To see real love outside of ourselves makes us feel alone. To see anger and accusation is to equalize the pressure of our internal terrain, especially in the web of the clan or the false nest of a rally.

True admiration and love are not inspired by hate or by a sense of superiority. What you think is your fondness for Donald Trump is only your childhood pain sanctioned. I know. For years I was a Republican, a libertarian. In those days, my heart would have swelled at any bully who had contempt for the gentle, the kind, the caring bond. I felt strong and happy in the cult of the bitter.

If I could grow up, so can you.