The Trump fan is still alone

A Trump supporter at a rally or in the voting booth triggers my strong disgust and contempt. Trump supporters on my office couch inspire different feelings: mild distaste, or wonder or weary resignation, or caring acceptance of the person’s complexity. Client status meat-tenderizes the caricature.

I saw one middle-aged man for a little over a year. He had survived more traumas – quantity-wise and often quality-wise – than any ten clients I’d known, and this includes those whose daily “prison life” qualified them for the dreadful Complex Post-Traumatic Stress diagnosis. He was the best client I’ve ever had in his ability to heal by outletting pain direct from the depth of its original childhood home, not refined through the here-and-now filter that displaces most people’s feeling expression. He loved me, believing I had opened him up to this deep healing, when in fact I mostly sat mute, stupid and stunned before his devil-given photographic memory of every rape, starvation, pet murder and scum character he had experienced or witnessed daily for fourteen years. So he had me to cling to, but much more than that, his young son, the fiery love of his life. Picture a future shocking newspaper headline of a mass shooter. He was not that, but I assumed he would be if anything were to happen to his boy.

A year into therapy, I was surprised and, admittedly, un-therapeutically-manned when he showed me his new dating profile that included this proviso: The woman “must love Trump.” This much respect for me, who he knew had a different politics? This capacity for gratitude to therapy and God? This beautiful fathering – kind, patient, generous, the opposite of everything he had lived growing up? How could he feel right about the narcissistic, sociopathic, cruel, dogmatic and dim president?

I remembered an earlier client. He, too, manifested something akin to what biologists call “saltation,” a sudden evolution. Both had been raised in war zones by immoral, sociopathic, failed mothers and fathers. Both were forged to be angry and predatory survival machines from their beginning, had lived criminal lives through their teens, twenties and thirties, and then – changed, turned one-hundred-eighty degrees. In session, the one bawled his pain, his regrets, his abject dedication to a cold and cheating wife. The other, who had for a time been wealthy by criminal brilliance and the energy of a thousand swallowed traumas, joined the world of workers and fathers with dreams and futures.

What is deeper inside people? What was deeper in my client who could love, but who appreciated, in this president, character features he had wanted to kill in his father? Therapy with its week after week, month after month of continual white-hot upsurging of devastation, didn’t reach everything. I think I might have needed to hug my client, be a good father. Without that, could he really descend to the infant, the toddler, the little boy melting away his grief in someone’s arms? Without that, did there remain the solitary boy who could never feel healing love?

Therapists – not those who resort to EMDR with its “installation” of nice thoughts – refer to trauma reliving: returning to the original event and this time not freezing but purging everything. But if there’s going to be reliving, maybe it has to go all the way,* not just to the loss but to the need, the one healing environment of the babe-in-arms,** the parent who cares.

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* Bukowski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6_QUhUPrF4.

** Liedloff, http://www.continuum-concept.org/reading/in-arms.html