The primary reason we loathe the president

This short post looks at the issue addressed in the February 8^th post – ”Why do so many people feel no revulsion towards Trump?” – from a different angle.

Let’s interview two Nevadans as they exit the Smith’s aka Kroger in Henderson, the more pampered community abutting Las Vegas. The two are similar in appearance with the overweight, plebeian vibe, light beer and bulk foods and half-gallons of Oat Yeah beverage in their carts, proving that average folks are formidable and exotic. The interview is very simple. First, we learn that one of them likes Donald Trump and the other abhors him. The second and final question determines that the admirer likes Trump’s policies and, frankly, his fears and hates, while the abhorrer is outraged by the president’s heartless, mocking and predatory character.

We could be deliberately silly for a moment and suggest that the first shopper is a sophisticated or at least serious thinker, while the second is just fueled by emotion – how immature. But we – those of us who can’t stand Trump – know this is not true. We are aware that evil people hurt our feelings, cause us actual pain and sometimes actual trauma. This, in fact, is the primary factor in our reaction to Trump. Not his policies, not his wealth, not his party affiliation. Our injury. We see more clearly, and possibly for the first time, that we live lives where human heart is the foundation, the theme song of the world. We see that action and results aren’t enough, otherwise we’d be machines. Action has to come from who the person is.

And we realize that the people who are in harmony with the president may not be heartless, but their heart is callused in certain places and in certain directions: where there is abuse, power and control, feeling of superiority and intolerance, contemptuous sarcasm. They are numbed to these poisons, cannot be traumatized by them. So we shop with them, live next door to them and don’t realize how tough they are that their sensibilities won’t be hurt where ours will.

It's an illusion, though, an irony tied to the thinking-and-feeling one. The others have calluses that have kept the poison living underneath. That’s where poison does the most damage. That’s where pain may never leave.

Cynical take #1 (when pessimism isn't enough): It doesn't really feel good to do good

From time immemorial, until today’s post, human beings have accepted the following psycho-meme:

“We feel good when we do for others.”

I believe this is a delusion, a misreading of what people really feel – in their body – when they perform a giving act. “People” is specified to mean those with any amount of a troubled history.

The psychological law that belies the meme is:

“A benevolent, other-centered act triggers inside us an opposite, fundamental truth, a deeper wound: one’s past deprivation pain.”

This law is actually a corollary of a broader principle encompassing almost any productive act, personal good or accomplishment. That is, any behavior that “should” make us happy.

“An act of fulfillment or success is likely to trigger a deeper truth – one’s deprivation pain from childhood.”

I have seen an extreme example of the corollary in a client who schedules sessions whenever his one crisis cycles back: vitriolic, hateful Revenge Wars with his wife. She remarked to him one day that following any generous act by him, he will get angry. Mostly, the paradoxical unearthing is more subtle. It can be seen in these examples:

Ψ A 1950’s-era housewife cleans the entire house, should feel the satisfaction of accomplishment, but instead is deflated: “Is this all there is?” she feels.* Ψ Codependent women or men follow Robin Norwood’s psycho-logic: “Almost nothing is too much trouble, takes too much time or is too expensive if it will ‘help’ the person or project you are involved with.”** Being an inveterate caregiver, or doormat if you will, does not come from a place of health or happiness or even benevolence. It comes from need and an emptiness to be filled. Ψ Many troubled clients tell me they give good advice, that people often come to them with their problems. We’ve all heard it: “I’m good at helping other people, but I can’t help myself.” The “molecules of emotion”*** these wounded healers feel are not the element of “positive” on the Periodic Table.

Even giving a small gift, or giving of our time, will trigger the truth of our critical losses in childhood.

Why is this so? Picture a sixth- or seventh-grader whose parents fight much of the time, where the home atmosphere is often frightening and depressing. He has a room full of toys and video games, good food, friends. He is intelligent. His mother tells him he has nothing to be depressed about: Look at our great family and nice house and our vacations. And yet he will not do well in school. He may sometimes complete the homework but “forget” to turn it in. Picture him – not his thoughts, but his feeling which he cannot name either to himself or to his parents: “I’m not going to pretend to be happy. I can’t be better than my family which is sick. I can’t leave my pain behind, forget about it.”

I’ve seen it countless times, where someone sabotages himself to be true to himself. It happens when a future schizophrenic finishes high school and enters college. He drops out early, part way through the first year or the first semester and cannot say why. The gravitational pull of cumulative crazymaking in his childhood has tug-of-war’d with the imperatives of adulthood and he has broken. “I’m not able to move on,” his spirit says. I’ve read that many students working toward a doctoral degree struggle most on the last leg. “Success is wrong,” their psyche says. I’ve heard that my father quit Johns Hopkins University medical school just before he would have graduated.

What ties the corollary to its law? The body wants to heal. Splinters, bullets, diseased organs, snot, tears need to come out. Emotional pain needs to come out. When we are hurting, we must know it, say it, feel it, express it. Anywhere along that continuum will help at different levels, just as anywhere on the opposite continuum – denial – will do harm. To say “something’s wrong” in response to an inflamed appendix is better than saying “I’m sure everything is fine.” To say “I’m needy of the love I never received” in the face of childhood devastation is far healthier than saying “I have no needs and I will serve you.” The body’s and psyche’s injuries know when we are calling them a liar, when we try to sail over them. They will let us know the truth.

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* The Primal Scream, 1970. Arthur Janov died on October 1, 2017 at the age of 93.

** Robin Norwood – https://ta-tutor.com/sites/ta-tutor.com/files/handouts/ram167.pdf.

*** Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion – https://www.amazon.com/Molecules-Emotion-Science-Mind-Body-Medicine-ebook/dp/B003L77V74.

TGI English class

I am happy to write a tidbit about a nice and fine occurrence, as most of my stuff is dark, tar-like painful good medicine that the New York Times will never print, though I’ve tried. Two nights ago, on a lark I emailed my 10^th grade English teacher, Don Killgallon. Weeks or months before that, googling for haunting memories, I had seen his name attached to some very specialized books, so I knew he was still around and proliferous. The next morning, there was his reply! 10^th grade was fifty-two years ago. And yet presto – his gracious hello!

Because of my constitution and basic dismality, one beer will give me (only) a 15- to 20-minute lovely buzz; two beers, the same then I’ll feel sick. This nostalgic yet here-and-now rendezvous was five 12-packs of golden high!

My teacher and his wife have created an enduring name for themselves with a series of books for high school and younger students: a fun and non-stodgy way to learn good writing by focusing on the single sentence. If I weren’t feeling so warm over all this, I’d be jealous! Really – good feelings can replace the grumbly ones (but not at the really deepest level, otherwise I wouldn’t have a job!). My benefit is palpable. Our corre­spon­dence has connected my past to my current self in a private way that is redeeming, like the soldier’s moment at the end of Salinger’s story, “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor.”

It was a long time before X could set the note aside, let alone lift Esmé’s father’s wristwatch out of the box. When he did finally lift it out, he saw that its crystal had been broken in transit. He wondered if the watch was otherwise undamaged, but he hadn’t the courage to wind it and find out. He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac- with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

How did Salinger know this feeling, pregnant with time, where a part-ruined American soldier is healed in all ways that count by a precocious girl in a tearoom?* (You must read the story.)

Dysthymia (see my earlier post with that title) tends to make one a-historical and homeless, wandering insular throughout life. Owing to Mr. K, I feel the distant vibes of a home.

And it doesn’t hurt that we have appreciated each other’s work. In Mr. K’s class, I could ignore all my developmental regressive injuries – my bad neurosis – and crow my good one, a desire to write saucy and brilliant stuff. This man, God knows why, did not disenchant or dethrone me. My stilted and not brilliant assignments were appreciated by him, even lauded over the class occasionally. Look: Therapy can have the perverse effect of doing good by destroying ties to a toxic parent. We become undermined and then almost necessarily stronger. But won’t we then need some replacement for that loss of roots? The therapist, if he’s got a clue, wants to be that replacement. But really, how much of that can he accomplish, can be accepted by the “purged” client? And can his partner fill that role? I am doubting it.

Maybe what the client needs is a voice from the past, that stands alongside of where the parent should have been. Maybe that redeems the past, which may have been terrible, revisits the grief and defeats it with the good. Positively, that’s what my encounter with my teacher has done for me. I don’t think therapy can do that.

Thank you, Don.

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* Something like this:

“Conway went to the balcony and gazed at the dazzling plume of Karakal; the moon was riding high in a waveless ocean. It came to him that a dream had dissolved, like all too lovely things, at the first touch of reality; that the whole world’s future, weighed in the balance against youth and love, would be light as air. And he knew, too, that his mind dwelt in a world of its own, Shangri-La in microcosm, and that this world also was in peril.” My emphasis. James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, at Project Gutenberg Australia, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500141h.html.