Coronavirus anxiety (at the cosmic level)

I asked myself: What could a therapist do for someone with high coronavirus anxiety? Therapy is not very effective against anxiety, despite what the books, TED Talks, PhDs, psychiatrists, researchers with their chemical imbalances and wonders of neuroscience, drug commercials and pharmaceutical reps, CEU workshops and therapists say. Those whose pandemic anxiety is extreme and debilitating are those who have already been – have probably always been – “good at” anxiety. It’s part of their neurochemical structure. And that means it’s part of their history.

Do your pseudo-scientific breathing exercises with their four seconds in and seven seconds out, your progressive muscle relaxation, your self-talk and Cognitive Therapy, meditation, mindfulness, take your anxiety meds and use edibles. If you were emotionally pulverized in childhood, none of this will help but evanescently. However, if your historical complexity contains some small oases, some real moments of love and care, then self-talk may call forth those real parts of your past and grow late girders of strength (intertwined with the damaged roots).

I adhere to my “faith of the obvious,” believing that the original, discrete fears from which anxiety grew can be ejected from our holistic system, leaving us recovered persons. We return to childhood and cry and rage where we couldn’t then. We become true to our child feeling selves for as long as it takes – not rushed to move on, as children always are, and join the ticking clock that adults follow.

But this healing is very rare: We have too many cells and memories filled with the chemicals of emotion. And we have an identity that grew from fear, and wouldn’t be the same identity without it. Without our formative shocks and hurts, how could we continue to be the codependent server of others, intertwined in their lives, be the good wife or good son or cheerful do-gooder or liberal? We would be a different person, going in a different direction.

So I would take a person in dread of the sometimes fatal virus and I’d say, Let’s look at your childhood. But be aware of the ramifications: There’s a slight chance you could become fearless.

Sniper inoculations #1: Trump's revenge

David Corn of Mother Jones, at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/beyond-narcissism-trumps-other-personality-flaws-are-putting-americans-at-risk/, describes “two other fundamental elements of Trump’s character” besides his Narcissism, one being his “obsession with revenge.”

In fact, Trump's revenge need is a facet of Narcissism, which also features contemp­tu­ous anger toward people (including even Putin, if it came down to a two-man compe­ti­tion). After all, a Narcissist is a solipsist: The world is only mirrors, he sees only himself as real and meaningful. Therefore no one else's opinion can possibly have any validity. As a Narcissist has no "real self" (a time-honored psychological concept) and exists only as a mental self-concept of self-regard (his sense of superiority is just his sense of being the “only” actual person*),** any meaningless person's questioning of him is the questioning of an idea, the denial of it, the disintegration of his identity. He must then strike back five times,*** ten times,**** fifteen times harder,***** literally to save his life.

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* A Narcissist doesn’t think he is merely superior to other people. Essentially, he is not comparing himself to other people at all. He is differentiating himself from all others. He is alone. He is the One, the rest are Zero. That’s in the nature of Narcissism.

** A mental self-concept and the ‘chemicals of emotion’ that associate with it: https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2019/05/trump-chemistry-of-bad.html.

The following quotes are from the above-referenced David Corn article.

*** From a 2012 Trump speech: “If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit ’em back five times harder than they ever thought possible.”

**** Trump’s 2011 speech to the National Achievers Conference in Sydney, Australia: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe that.”

***** Trump’s 2007 speech: “It’s called ‘Get Even.’ Get even. This isn’t your typical business speech. Get even. What this is is a real business speech. You know in all fairness to Wharton, I love ’em, but they teach you some stuff that’s a lot of bullshit. When you’re in business, you get even with people that screw you. And you screw them 15 times harder.”

We are noble failures

I conceived this scorched notion out of an observation that will help my client feel better about herself. We had been talking about her self-sabotaging baseline of ambivalence. This was planted, most likely, in an insecure mother-infant attachment. It grew in a little girl’s desire for her narcissistic older brother’s “approval.” Critical need and psychological health began to conflict with each other: need for bond, un-need for a toxic bond. Her root of ambivalence later polluted two relationships: with her malicious ex-husband and her clingy, nearly stalking, boyfriend. She despised them both, but couldn’t reject them. Her explanation was – as are so many people’s self-understandings – wrong: She could not cut these men out as that would mean she had once again failed. Another failure would be intolerable.

Why was this a wrong explanation? Because “failure” is not a feeling, sensation or emotion, and therefore can’t be a fact of self-indictment. “You are not feeling like a failure, because failure is not a feeling. Throw the word away. Sink into your holistic state, your body feeling, when you image the severing of ties with your ex-husband and your boyfriend.”

While that process was left for homework (she had a teletherapy audience: Her son was ambling about in the background), the idea of failure as a mis-identified feeling led to a stranger and contradictory insight:

If we are psychologically dysfunctional, “neurotic,” we will be a failure in everything we do. But since dysfunction is ubiquitous, we can yet redefine failure as “human nature.”

A Narcissistic Personality-disordered man may make a billion dollars a year. But he will be a failure. With no capacity for empathy and selfless love, he will fail in every relationship, as he will corrupt it while being unable to join it. His partner will feel dehumanized, treated like a supply. His children, like President Trump’s, will bond with him by fusion: molded to be his reflection, molded to be him. He will succeed at accumulating wealth, but happiness will be alien: He lives on a delusional shell, beneath which is “the underlying rage and depression associated with an inadequate, fragmented sense of self.”*

A dysthymic (long-term depressed) individual will have such a constricted and drained palette of feeling, and such a paradoxical fusion of symbiotic need and discon­nected­ness, that he will inevitably join another wounded person. If she were emotionally healthy, his vacuum would suffocate her. If she were not, they would starve each other: two failed need-meeters.

Any person who grew around her unmet critical needs for visibility (mirroring) and love will find no truly right work, no resting place on earth or by someone’s side or in her mind. “Failure” could be the name of the never-given, the unanswered question that she is.

We should accept this logic: We can’t be sinners if it’s Original. We can’t be a failure if it’s our crown of thorns.

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* James F. Masterson, M.D., The Search for the Real Self, “Portrait of the Narcissist,” p. 90.