They seem to worship filth, but they are crying

 

Somewhere in their minds, the Republicans know they are worshipping filth. I think there’s little doubt that had Trump been impeached a third time, or had been convicted, or had explicitly announced his aim of instigating the Capitol insurrection, or had told Black people to go back to Africa, or Hispanics to go back to Mexico and lie in the gutter with flies circling about their sombreros, or had tried to shoot someone on 5^th Avenue, or had announced on Fox News that Hillary went into politics because no whorehouse would take her, or had invited all women to get grabbed by the pussy, his adoration base (including his Congres­sional sycophants and gang members) would have been just as legion and twice as frenzied.

They know they worship toxic garbage. The more fecal, the brighter and more gleaming the gold fiberglass statue.

Setting politics aside, somewhere in their minds this should concern them.

That their spirit has become punk, that they’ve turned into their id, that the macho good-old-boy fart-joke jerk is their ideal. Not quite realizing they’ve gone this far, they have distilled out the last remnant of adult sensibility they might have tentatively possessed and are left with shit and lint.

Mitch McConnell has committed to voting for Trump in 2024. Can you see the meaning of this, that he has pledged loyalty to the purest avatar of miscreancy that psycho­logical disease has produced?

We all, or nearly all of us have a core or kernel of unhealable injury in our psyche, from child­hood, that should rail against life, shaking its fist at eternity because our potential was co-opted by our damaged parents. We do it outwardly, in crime or power or oratory or achieve­ment. Or inwardly, in quiet desperation, in self-harm, in psychosomatic dis­ease. But I’d say that most of us eventually prefer life, prefer our best. We give up protesting the crimes, our fate. We appreciate life.

Not these marchers and worshippers. They are still babies in the crib, screaming and soiling themselves. They shake their fists eternally. They think they have a hero. But actually, picture Donald Trump embracing them in their anger, in their need for a father. He cannot embrace anyone, because he needs to be held and there never has been and never will be anyone to do that. He doesn’t really want filth.

Neither do these Republicans. Somewhere in their minds, they know they need love. They are crying.

 

Get better! (that's an order)

 

Breaking News from Nevada:

What happens when you cross a lamb with a canary? We’ll see. A recent case, born of strange litiga­tion, has made me some hybrid of canary in the coal mine and sacrificial lamb. Treating a young teenager, I was unable to be the person, or to find a therapy approach, that would lead him to acknowledge his affection for his mother. I failed. He does not like his mother and doesn’t want to see her, even for two minutes of tele-visi­tation biweekly. This was not what the adver­sarial side wanted, and I was set to be­ replaced by a PhD psychologist “specialist.”

Instinct makes me concerned about presenting confidential information. As it goes, I’m sure there’s no need to worry. That’s because Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy – what the evidence, I am told, points to – is obviously so common that I could be writing about any anonymous Joe. Just kid­ding. This is an uncommon, absurd case that has resulted in one side working to keep the child safe and happy, the other side bent on forcing him into serial therapies for the purpose of changing his mind (or maybe they would say: “seeing the light”).

I produced a little argument to the social worker: “G---’s father informs me that the court, or lawyers, or whoever holds the purse strings, wishes to foist a doctoral-level therapist on the young man. This sounds to me like ‘bad cop’ in the guise of ‘better cop.’ G should not be put through this: It is incompetent. We all know that any person – adult or child – put under this type of duress will, if he has even the slightest self-esteem and self-respect, not cooperate with therapeutic coercion. You should be careful about the possibility of child abuse. Not to mention, be wary of ‘experts.’” I linked a The Pessimist Shrink blog post to the text-message as evidence of my powerful loose cannon credentials.

As of the moment, I don’t know how this will go. I’d never seen a case where a parent was pres­sured not only to send the child to therapy, but to accept the antagonist’s choice of therapist and to switch therapists several times (the prospective PhD would be the fourth) in order to get a desired confessional or emotional result.

Maybe my reaction is a bit strong, but as I see it, if there were ever a good time for the San Andreas Fault to budge, causing California to fall into the ocean, this would be it.

Borderline couple: Relax the facts

 

I learned a lot about Borderline Personality from the master – James F. Masterson, M.D., author of The Search for the Real Self and editor-author of Psychotherapy of the Disorders of the Self. Master­son discovered the origins of Borderline by contrasting the mental nature of his inpatient unit acting-out Borderline adoles­cents with the normal growth of the individ­u­ating Self as described by Margaret Mahler. Along with all the details of Borderline for­ma­tion and symptom­atology that Masterson imparted, I learned that it isn’t enough to perceive a palette of symp­toms and signs in the here-and-now client to make the diag­nosis. One has to learn about her birth, infancy, mother’s character, and early mother-child interactions extending into early adolescence. It doesn’t hurt to also see the father’s typical contribution of willful distancing (abandoning the child to the maternal symbiotic relationship with­out the counterbalance of external reality). So, you look at the “fragile extreme” character before you, and you see her troubled beginnings in withdrawing (WORU) and rewarding (RORU)* dynamics, the immature parents, the contemptuous adultified twelve-year-old daughter. Diag­nosing Borderline without that holistic background may prove accurate, but it will be lazy and more prone to error.

But sometimes you put those facts aside and see a woman who flip-flops with her boy­friend like a strobe light carried by horseback across quicksand. I can say to her that “Both of you are Borderline personalities bouncing off each other.” I can see and name the “idealization versus devaluation” and the “abandonment-engulfment” dynamics as consistent as the sun’s cycle, and nothing changes. Including a certain blindness:

She: “This stuff is overwhelming.”

Me: “I don’t know how obnoxious he has been and can be, but I’m pretty sure you have intrapsychic ‘guards’ up that protect you from feeling deep affection.”

S: “It’s not that he is being obnoxious or even difficult for that matter. I am just really understanding how badly I treated him and how hurt­ful I was to him. . . . I am unsure I can ever be better than I was but the other side of me feels like I owe it to him to be better because he really was a great guy.”

(Note: He has, by her earlier reports, been very obnoxious and demanding.)

M: “Looks like you’ve fallen back into the ‘he’s all good’ Border­line position.”

S: “No, I know he has faults and issues but I feel he is worth the effort because everyone will have something, don’t you think?”

(Note . . . .

S: “It is non-stop conflict. I know I may have expected a lot from the relationship but this is far worse than what I could have imagined occur­ring. It started about three weeks ago when things began to feel off and he began to act so childish. He would throw a tantrum when I didn’t pay atten­tion in a timely fashion or if I didn’t stop what I was doing to pay full attention to him. . . . . I couldn’t hear any­thing but his BS excuses of how I don’t give him enough attention, I don’t hold his hand when in bed, I don’t sit next to him on the couch, or so many other things that all seemed a bit crazy for a grown man to be acting so irate over.”)

Many clinicians, treating Borderlines, have waxed poetic about the intestinal constriction trig­gered, the toxic black tar of masochistic despair they inject into our heart, the sense of impotence they seem to purposely produce. And so it goes with her and me. The real answer, to return to child­hood, is theoretic­ally valid but impossible. A small girl, she had to be her own “attorney,” defend­ing herself before her sib­lings’ program of persecution and her parents’ neurotic acquiescence to it. This was not a childhood she could grieve. Calling for “Mommy” and “Daddy,” as one does in Primal Therapy, would only reach futility, the realization of loneliness.

Each return to her boyfriend – at least half-a-dozen times – the fighting has restarted immed­iately. She is a blocked forty-year-old, a needy and angry three-year-old. His neediness is a bit sick, his love too much for her. I don’t think there is anything to be done but hope that her messy kaleidoscopic turns to reveal some decision, and gets stuck there.

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* Masterson's interesting terminology: Withdrawing and Rewarding Object Relations Part Units.