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.