A bit of a lie: Trump redux

 

Here, I have lied. I’d said at https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/11/tps-final-trump-statement.html that I would write no more about Trump. Below is my recent NYT comment to Maureen Dowd’s brother’s guest op-ed. This is a tradition of Maureen’s, to give her Repub­li­can brother a Thanksgiving dogma soapbox – slippery soap consid­er­ing the mass of thought­ful comments against him. My target was not primarily Trump, but his followers’ depth psychology error in self-awareness.

https://nyti.ms/33nfmWP#permid=110333423

One of my focuses in therapy is clients’ endorsement of con­cepts that, below the surface of their thinking minds, are contra­dicted by their real feelings. The roots of these errors are in childhood. Examples: Many people, particularly women, claim to feel “guilt” for acts or inaction where they absolutely did nothing wrong. Go back to child­hood: They were shamed and made to feel bad about themselves. Count­less people claim to “forgive” their long-term abusers. What does it mean to utter that easy incantation if you are still bleeding to death, drowning in depression? And there is “love.” The “inner infant” in adults may indeed be umbilically attached to their awful parents, but to call it love when there’s been nothing but later decades of abuse, terror and neglect, is to be self-delusional.

I am telling Kevin that he and his millions do not feel what they think they feel. Love is not angry. It does not minimize entire ethnic groups. It does not admire a sociopath who likely never had a kind or giving thought in his head. You cannot simply say a word and make it so.

I’ve written about this idea many times, but it’s worth saying again that our thoughts are often self-deceptions which, among other defenses, prevent us from knowing what we actually feel, who we actually are. A responder to my comment suggested that “what is needed is a mass coun­sel­ing session for Trump followers.” I can parse that notion this way: People – Trump loyalists – who project their buried formative pain into disliked pop­u­lations and socio­pathic heroes may seem to have relieved them­selves of depres­sion. Using de Mause’s concept, they have made others their “poison container.” From that perspective, these energized millions may not seem to need therapy as much as the more observ­ably distraught Democrats would. But it is those righteous and wounded millions who have been destructive of civility and humane values, and now, of democracy itself. I would make their therapy the overwhelming priority.