Saturday, January 7, 2023

Spontaneities #1: Love of hate


A therapy client of mine has an underlying "infrastructure" of rage and injustice, which feels supported by and comfortable with others' rage and injustice, and feels very uncomfortable with warmth and benevolence – because he never received those benefits in the critical years of childhood. That's to say, he loves Trump and feels apoplectic hate for Biden. I assiduously avoid getting into politics in his sessions, but I did propose to him, as the hour ended, that he ask himself why, as he'd said, he likes a president who is "a bull in a china shop." Introspecting on this could, if he is capable, carry him down the rabbit hole, at the bottom of which is a snake.

This was my comment to a recent Washington Post article on Kevin McCarthy's ignominious ascent to Speaker of the House. It's worth repeating (I've discussed the psychology of the Trump loyalist before) that to admire a narcissist and sociopath such as Trump is to be an extremely troubled person alpha and omega, at the foundation of the psyche. In that place, is there a predominant or ultimate kernel of love, or a predominant or ultimate kernel of fire, burning up, anger? There will be one or the other, though I suppose in some people the balance may be near-perfect. This fact is so axiomatic that even those who came from abuse, terror and defeat who grow to be saintly and wise will be found, at the bottom, to be raging. Their saintliness is a cover.

Were my client to trace, down the taproot of his feeling-memory, being tickled and gratified by a "bull in a china shop" president, he would find childhood feelings of redemption at destruction and defiance. He would find nothing sophisticated, nothing civilized, but rather psychological anarchy pure and simple. What makes his, and others', blindness to this guaranteed is that injustice anger feels right and powerful. It obliterates the past and becomes the present. It becomes amnesia for the hurt child who remains cowering at the antipodes of the spirit.

Any devotee of Trump or the other sociopathic snakes in suits* in today's Republican Party would lose their belief, their love for hate, if they could engage in feeling-centered depth therapy. They would exorcise enough pain to reverse their psyche's balance.

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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.