Pity the Trump voter

I’ve known three clients who voted for Trump and still favor him. All three are intrinsically angry people. One violently. One smolderingly. One confusedly. The blatantly angry man knows his childhood was a million kinds of hell and he has expelled a lot of vomit, but has not cried at the child level. The smoldering, attitudinal one, a woman who was a child sex abuse victim, is too tough to cry. Every word out of her mouth is cynical, her eyes are hard. The quieter man is self-contradictory, hazy and deep like a polluted ocean. He feels, in one and the same thought, that his childhood was halcyon, family-bonded, adventurous and fun, but also that his father made him feel like dirt, like he would probably never be good enough.

It's the calluses and contradictions, and the poison they are smothering, that make these people like Trump. There is a victorious feeling that is serene and resolved, accepting, caring and good that they cannot experience. It comes from having grieved for oneself in arms. Caring and empathy can only come into existence if the inner child has been held.

All the Trump people you’ve seen at the rallies, all those voters, are children whose damage was never mitigated by therapy or epiphany. There is nothing more dangerous than adult children who are forced to slouch toward death, old age, when their young blood has never been stanched.

In-house #13: Teens with OCD

I am challenged by two Obsessive-Compulsive teenagers who think all the time. All the time. This is the undercurrent, for most or all OCD sufferers, to any particular compulsive thought or act. Always thinking about something. The girl thinks above the lyrics of songs. I am about to learn if she must think even when listening to classical instrumental music. Shouldn’t it be enough just to feel this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhLunFajgwg.

Beneath the thinking and beneath the self-soothing and depressing felt-need-turned-ritual is fear and insecurity planted in earlier childhood. All people tend to have an active head. Some of those who have fear or a natural-born bad feeling will run away from that feeling into word-thought explanations. Feeling is to be stabbed, gutted and drowned. Know­ing and solving is to be on elevated dry land, a safe little desert island, like children leaping to or touching a safe place during tag.

One difference between teens and adults with OCD is that the kids, frustratingly enough, really endorse all the thinking. It feels right and necessary, and may be their self-esteem, and they are not sick and tired of it yet as one would have to be in his thirties or forties or fifties. And beyond that, imagine what it would be like for a teenager – troubled, unsolid – to evacuate her thinking. She would collapse back into the inchoate, shell-less egg of her pre-self, her clueless infant.

As I see it, there is hope in the child’s incompletion, her still being in formation. Try to smell some roses without thinking about them, simply breathe in their meaning. Lie back and let only the heart part of your mind know the music. Feel a friendship, hug a friend, only with the wordless emotion, not with anxiety or self-consciousness or worries about her loyalty. Let yourself be confused about the state of the world, not cleaving to the news stories and the immigrant cause or the prefab disdain for white privilege or carrying banners about reparations or climate change or bad Supreme Court decisions. And let the confusion be a feeling. A teen, you will be able to sink in many emotional states without drowning. This will give you back your life. It’s not too late for you.

Interim report: Seventy come Tuesday*

In sixteen months I’ll be seventy years old. My wife and I don’t have a retirement cache and I’ll still be working through that birthday, and on. The number – seventy – feels prohibitive to me, but momentum will happen and necessity will rule. Wouldn’t I need to be a superlative gem of a therapist, to be helping people in my decline?

One of my aggravating flaws as a therapist has been to offer this completely unneces­sary disclaimer at the beginning of some Intake sessions: “I believe I’m the oldest therapist here: I’m 68. However, I haven’t been in the field as long as one might expect consider­ing my age. I’ve been seeing individuals and couples for around twenty-one years, and doing crisis intervention for some years before that, in clinics, hospitals, homes, jails. However, it’s been very intensive work, often six days a week, with an awful lot of thinking and writing about psychology.” I’m not sure why I feel an urge to bare my chest like this. It sounds like insecurity, but I don’t feel insecure. I do know it’s complicated, just like my clients.

In other respects, everything is simpler. The diagnostic names? Who cares? Everybody has depression and anxiety. Love and marriage, horse and carriage.** I see people as earnest false lives which are their escapes from early loss and pain. Almost every word I hear from clients is ignorance: They think they know themselves but don’t, or they know things but not the root and reason of the things. Therapy is a compromise because we can’t cleanse out all pain and go back to the unformed or incompletely formed atavistic identity we ran away from. We have to remain somewhat defended, false.

I continue to have the narcissistic feeling that almost everybody is helped in my office, even most of those who quit fairly early. They learn that they are not symptoms but history; they are not defective but were injured; and they have the opportunity to bond with someone who casts eyes on and touches their three-dimensionality: psyche, body and time. Even if they run away from this scandalous information, this offering, it’s too late: They know, and they have felt some stirrings. They are now heavier, better grounded.

There’s a part of me that wonders, quixotically, if there is another breakthrough to be had, some new way to conceptualize clients to themselves, some different tone or gravity. But I know this is a childish projection of my own desire for transformation, or to be, frankly, not-me. On Thursdays, I jones for Saturday. On Sunday, I smile upon Monday.

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* “Wok fol air didle i-do” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlF7t_WcXnY. 

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRDBvKGc1fE.