A question to Republicans: Why so damned anal?

"In promoting depth therapy to clients, I explain how our ideas, beliefs, convictions may be guided by analytical thinking, but that analytical thinking is bent by the gravity of feelings planted deep in their history. I have them imagine two men age 50, both the epitome of physical health, both from the East Coast, both 200 IQ polymaths with doctorates in arts and sciences, having lived among the rich and the poor, oppressed and elite, both worldly in travel, reading, experience. One is a Democrat and the other a Republican. Is it rigorous thinking that has made them different? No: They are both eminently capable. It's the psyche, the way that early, formative emotional pain has been caused and treated by their caregivers that determines what ideology eventually forms in their brains. Pain is expressed and mitigated, or it is internalized to become the lens through which the person sees self, others, the world. These Republicans are the cornered rat; they are the lion with a thorn in its paw that no one ever caringly pulled out. Their passions are failure-based. One would sooner heal them by the arcanum of Freud or 'primal scream' therapy than see them change on their own." (Comment to a NYTimes op-ed – https://nyti.ms/3BdmzKY#permid=119465067)

This was a "for popular consumption" comment, lacking in some essential detail. * For childhood pain and injury to be "mitigated," it must be expressed holistically (words, feelings and gestures in sync) and held by someone else at the same time. This is historical pain that still lives in the child who still lives in the adult, and children need a savior, a believer, a parent. * When pain is "internalized," it becomes a lens not immediately but through time, the time of caregivers' neglect when scar tissue grows over it to protect the child. The scar tissue is the double-sided lens that warps feeling and perception.

David Calof, in his published interview, "Multiple Personality and Dissociation," noted that the so-called "inner child" is not the cute tyke described by John Bradshaw and other writers of the time. It may be full of rage. A worthy question is: What makes one lion with an impaled paw rageful, destructive and delusional, a different one hurt, wise and amenable to help? Why have so many Republicans, forcibly adult owing to their age, opted for anger after their childhood injury? Why do they clench their body, their throat, their fists as a form of self-protective power rather than exhale, release the tension, collapse in the truth of their hurt? Almost anyone (barring birth psychopathy) would be capable of this. I know it's not necessary to become hardened. In my late teens, I was that angry Libertarian with contempt for many, fear of the rest, alienated, ego-syntonically insular (the "self-made man"). I could find my buried, burning self. I could cry. I could read good psychology. Why can't they?

Why, even with the gift of therapy, even with a loving spouse, can they not finally lean on someone, relent to the deeper person within them?