"My son is being a fuck*ng pain in my ass"

 

I have had four clients whose hearts are one with Donald Trump. Two of them were bad parents, one has no desire to have children, and one parents paradoxically. His love for his little boy is so fierce that it keeps him alive through his trauma darkness. But his unconscious, unaware father­ing is sometimes authoritarian and even threatening (‘bad grades will get you taken away’). He was slightly stunned, and educable, when I noted that this kind of discipline could collapse his son’s happiness and fearlessness.

I know it seems like pure emotional drama to generalize about all Republicans, or all Trump loyalists, as it would seem regarding all Democrats and liberals. But it is a fact that people who are loyal to this president have a defining “specialty” disturbance: an unremitting, unresolved pain at the seat of their life that has formed, through their early years, more as anger than as hurt. This anger is always there, beneath everything else that may look different from it, that may be different from it, throughout their lives.

Where is this anger going to show inexorably? In their responses to their children. Children are triggering. They are consciously or unconsciously reminiscent. Their promise “means” one’s own unfulfillment. Their spirit summons our lack of self. They are the lock on the vault door of one’s own loss of childhood.

We can’t “diagnose” all bad parents as Trump followers. But we can assume all Trump followers are problematic parents. Anger embedded in the soil poisons what grows in it.