Hasty draft: Let's hope the cancerous scumbag is gone

 

Here is my comment to a New York Times op-ed piece:

Mr. Bruni’s article is superb for what it says, and for what he had the nuance and discretion NOT to say: Maybe this 46 percent of the voting population are flawed in a special, different way from the ways all human beings are flawed. Maybe there’s a splinter deep at the bottom of their heart that circumstances have turned to angry pain, not just pain more maturely managed as other people do.

We can’t avoid the fact that while everyone contains embedded emotional injury that cannot manifest perfection in their lives, there is something uniquely wrong in people who admire a heartless, malicious and solipsistic man. This wrongness materialized in a client I’ve worked with almost weekly for over a year. I only saw it now, when it appeared under the lens of Trump’s malignancy.

A long time ago, she had rejected the only man in her life she knew to be decent, loving and respectful. She lived in an abusive relationship, and later married a vicious socio­path. She came across as both victimized and childlike, or maybe childish. Divorced, she raised her three children whom she would describe as angelic then demonic. Cooperative and warm then berserk. Loving then psychopathic. How could this be? Months on, I finally saw the Borderline personality (I am purposely and lazily slow to label). She was fun then cruel, caring and trashed their soul. In time, she became engaged to a new man whom she described, in ongoing sessions, as wonderful then childish, solicitous then cloyingly needy, generous then reclusive, different from then like her ex-husband. Conflict and contempt pervaded their new home. I realized that there was no love there.

I had never, in all this time, wondered about her political affiliation. After all, she was a thirty-something mother who enjoyed our therapy, who listened to caring and unpleas­ant confrontations, who had never named any prejudices. Suddenly it came out: She was “extremely conservative” and had a Trump sign on her lawn.

Her nature became clear, or at least clearer. This marriage would either not happen or would fail, and the bond would become progressively toxic. I applied my Bruni concept: Has the unhelped pain in your childhood transformed to anger? Will you snarl or gripe and have discontent on your deathbed, or feel love, loss, sadness, peace? Did you reach a conclusion, when you were forced to become an adult, of condemnation, of a world out of your reach? Have you ever settled, or are you an unsettled person?

I left her with the assignment to look inside, to see what was down there, at the very bottom. I am sure that the best she might find is a primordial ambivalence: fire burning forever or mitigated by some dream of love. For now, though, the ambivalence has landed Trump-side up, and I am hoping my vote defeats her.