Terse and pithy explanation of Trump's win (with bonus comment)

Unlike all the pundits, apparently, I don’t have the knowledge and analytical skills to weigh every factor involved in Harris’s loss and Trump’s win. Then again, they all have differing views that are controlled by their feelings, so it’s sort of a wash. My sense, coming from a psychological perspective, is that policy preferences were not the point. I believe the essential factor was Trump’s extreme personality of angry contempt that honored the “bitter inner child” of millions of people then swayed their minds to his agenda. For example, he made them despise immigrants where on their own most of them would have had more considerate appraisals. My few Trump-voting therapy clients are different at the core of their identity from my other clients. Essentially, their deep-seated pain turned right to rage rather than left to tears. Therapists know that clients who can grieve can be helped. Grieving can dissolve the thorns that aggravate their heart. Those who cleave to rage remain unhelped, and impaled.

(Adapted comment to a New York Times published interview with Nancy Pelosi)

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Bonus Comment -- https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/4345j2?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share

I think Harris needed more dumb voters like me. I saw the prices of food going up a lot and said "That's life. It happens under any administration." Our apartment rent went up several hundred dollars and I said: "That's what lousy landlords do." I read the news about all the immigrants flowing in and felt: "The Dems won't let another four years go by like this. Nobody would." I saw a malicious and rabble-rousing ignoramus saying simple-minded things about complex events in the language of a street punk and I thought: "No way." Harris would have won with more unimpressionable dummies like me around.

Today should be named Parents Day

The least interesting and the most valid perspective: If Trump wins, blame the parents of today’s voters for giving their progeny a sense of life that features impotence, bitterness, free-floating anger and a need for superiority over others. This is the essence of it: Trump is the redeemer of victims who became bullies. (TPS published comment to an NYT article – https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/42vegc?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

This is why those errant minds aren’t changing on Election Day, why they rarely changed over the course of the candidates’ campaigns or over the last eight years, and why they were unlikely to change over the span of their entire lives. If Trump wins the election, it will be because the parents of his voters (and the parents of their parents) wrote blueprints for their children’s formative years that created angry wounds and a broad landscape where healing couldn't happen.

I see the psychic difference between those who opt for a narcissistic, sociopathic and authoritarian president and those who don’t as a factor of bereavement. Those who could grieve the critical loss in their childhood – essentially, deprivation of their distracted or disturbed parents’ love and bond – would find some sad or resigned inner peace. In that calm, they could see and feel more clearly. They would feel tragedy more than outrage in their own lives and, by extension, in the world. They would know, as Irvin Yalom’s Carlos in Love’s Executioner finally knew, that “everyone has got a heart.” Those who did not have the opportunity or courage to grieve the critical loss in their childhood would remain on fire. They would remain the bitter, defeated king on their underground throne, nursing their rageful pain and projecting it into the world. They would see, through unconscious eyes, other people as better able to flourish, as indifferent to their suffering, as their defeaters. They would find comfort in those people, and that candidate, who justified their inner pain and its projections.

Like many who are voting for Harris, I do not find her powerfully inspiring. Presidential politicians are egoists who don’t know how to fix the country or the world. They use different aptitudes and personality points as their guideposts, and we have to hope that they don’t damage our lives. One-half of the population realizes, however, that Harris is a normal person with normal-range flaws, and that this is infinitely preferable to a man whose errors are more toxic to others than to himself, especially as he vigorously endorses those errors as is the nature of personality disorder.

On Election Day morning, I’m slightly optimistic about a Harris victory. It’s not an angry optimism and is not actually focused primarily on the candidate. It’s more the underlying optimism of someone who sees life, the universe and everything (homage to Douglas Adams) in the benign and sunny way that a cared-for child – or slightly healed adult – would.

My final text during an exchange with a former client who will vote for Trump

I doubt that you’ve been reading the articles I’ve sent. And I’ll confess ignorance: I don’t know what you’ve been sending me after the first day of our exchange. I haven’t read any of it (but I did respond Pavlov’s dog-fashion to the word “cute”). It’s time to stop, I’m sure. Trump may win. He’s human garbage, but a lot of people either like that or are blind to it. In my sessions, the general political situation comes up a lot. I’d say that nineteen of every twenty of my clients are anti-Trump even if they do not love Harris. Before the subject ever turns to politics – and sometimes it just turns to Trump because most clients know he’s the avatar of human corruption – I can almost always predict which clients will be Trump people. They have a subtly bitter and cruel core under their surface, normal presentation. One such client let me know he was a “misanthrope” and would love to be alone for the rest of his life, before disclosing his Trump affiliation. A woman informed me, months prior to election talk, that she disliked “all white women in authority.” A middle-aged man whom I saw for two years raged about his child sexual abuse so viciously and so frequently that one would have thought it had happened last week not forty-five years ago. This is what it comes down to: not policy but psychology. Trump redeems the fundamentally frustrated people who, at the root of their psyche, see their childhood injuries and rage rather than grieve. They stay at the anger level and do not go deeper to the hurt level. This is why I consider them my therapy failures.

🎯

The non-judgmental approach that I bring to all clients maintains its purity throughout their term of therapy. For most of them, it continues outside of that specialized setting. But it does not last for former clients who are working to bring disaster upon this country by means of their psychological projections: the endorsement of Trump. I do, however, take some responsibility for failing to reach them.

Trump lovers are constipated, angry babies

Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, could be considered immature. Fundamental depression and anxiety are formed in a home where a child was hurt and could not send his pain to a loving and empathic caregiver. This means there is aborted emotional development – immaturity. Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, have repressed or “leaky” or overt frustration of childhood needs not met, manifesting in anger, irritability, self-blame or other-blame.

For a child, other-blame, also known as externalization of responsibility, is right. He did not cause his problems and he is right to blame those who hurt him and left him with no other recourse than to misbehave or inflict pain on others.

Many children, owing to some shard of decency in their lives, are able to grow up and face, in or out of therapy, their emotional immaturity. They are desperately needy but challenge their codependency. They see that their anger comes mostly from their past and they cease blaming it on others in the present. They have achieved adequate separation-individuation not to fall on their knees before heroes. They have achieved enough independence of thought not to form delusions about other races, ethnicities and sexes.

These are not Trump lovers. Trump lovers have not faced their emotional immaturity. They have not done deep grief work in therapy. They continue to blame others in the present, though their perpetrators are in the past. They cling to dependencies – heroes, victimized wives, groupthink, rally mobs. They had to bury the starved need for warm benevolence in their childhood and viscerally hate it now, believing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are hateful, terrible people. Lacking a caring hand, an “enlightened witness” in childhood to guide them out of their self-breathing and self-reinforcing bubble and into the real world, they suffer global delusions about millions of individuals they have never met.

My therapy clients who are Trump admirers are self-declared misanthropes, bitter rejectors of groups of people or of all people. They are rage-filled children still drowning in adult bodies. Beneath a surface which may feel benign about small things and about like-minded people and about the families they protectively own, lies a lava field of unhealed pain and injustice. They, the child, will forever be out of sync with themselves and the world that grew up around them.

It is impossible for a healthy or healing person to admire a sociopath and narcissist like Trump.

Trauma (aka "Get real, label-heads")

Therapeutic healing should be natural, like breathing. You breathe in, you breathe out. How destructive – literally – it would be to just breathe in and not breathe out. You take in the emotional stimuli of the world and you must express them outward. You love your dog and you must pet it. To withhold that expression would be to suffer. A child is hurt by her father, she must cry and possibly rage; but the hurt and tears are primary. Trauma is simply a more powerful injury that must be commensurately expressed outward. Commensurately: You don’t “primal scream” if you spill coffee on your shirt (unless it is the latest in a long series of unexpressed frustrations), and you don’t just say “ouch” if you’re raped. If we set aside all the species of therapy that exist, I believe most people would have a natural sense of what they need to do to answer traumatic pain: Get it out by the most powerful expressions. Tame therapy cannot work. Process must be expulsive, explosive, emotional, verbal, physical.

This was my comment to a Slate.com article about a bad therapist. (In fact, I didn't read the article as I'm not a paying Slate member. My statement didn't require a reading.) Many of the other commenters showed their knowledge of this or that brand of therapy, such as EMDR, “brainspotting” and CBT, and their good and bad experiences with different therapists. I just wanted to point out what should be obvious but what remains as contemporaneously unknown as the foreplay before the Big Bang.

Choose your Trump side, or your life

This is vaporous theory, but I believe it’s true and actionable. For most Republicans who are not diagnosable sociopaths like Donald Trump, it is a matter of choice whether to live internally in a warm place or a cold place, to be an endorser and concluder of alienation or a recognizer of need and love. This would be true because most of us who grew up in emotional starvation in our home also owned a kernel of birth love or infancy bond. My own example may suffice.

My childhood was loveless and inert in feeling. I’ve never had the slightest inkling of warmth, love or even pity for either parent, yet also never any anger and disownership. But something somewhere in my origin planted, along with severe need, the potential for affection. That bloomed during a very short window in my latency years, around six to nine. I loved a friend like the sun is burning bright. That feeling faded to nothing as I approached my teens.

In high school, I was a Libertarian. Libertarianism, not far from Conservatism but more nihilistic, is an emotional attitude turned into specious logic more than it is a political ideology. We Libertarians were for the most part followers of Ayn Rand: lost, inferior-feeling, with no heart-driven loves or passions. We needed some belief to let us feel superior while alone and alienated.

I’ve done some work on myself in the meantime, over the last thirty years. A result of that work was to let me see the buried “golden kernel” that already existed – more than it was to grow that kernel. Even now, in a mood, I can feel my predominant darkness and see Trump as the perfect representative of my survival as a soul amputee. I salute him and wish his malignant agenda great success. But then I feel – a molecule to the left or maybe beneath – my seed of life, the good, the cherished bond, the best potential of life in love. And Trump is revealed to be the disease that he is.

I choose that molecule. I choose it because it is right and feels best though it brings pain. It sits alone, an ungrown seed of gold in the dark field of the past that will extend to the future, to the last day of my life. But I would rather love and be loss, than never to have loved at all.

This is the choice that most of us have. It’s the choice to be our human best not failure. And incidentally, it's the choice that would relegate Donald Trump to obsolescence.

Victim Personality Disorder

I have recently had six clients who would not, I believe, be diagnosed with a personality disorder by any rule-following therapist, yet I believe they would qualify for an unspecified one. Some of them have paranoid-like assumptions. Some meet criteria for the once-proposed Depressive Personality (DSM-IV axes for further study). Some meld both syndromes in a thick soup of negativity.

They could be called Victim Personality Disorder.

D, 43, is enmeshed in his family of origin. They are the constant headline in his life. There is a bitterness and rage against them for deprioritizing him. It is the subject of every session. E, 23, is similarly fused to her parents and older sibling. She has been the recipient of bullying and malign intent at every job she’s had. This includes conspiracies among coworkers. T, 52, with chronic baseline anger and vengeance intent, feels condescended to and harassed at work and has an EEO case in the works. Same with N, age 41, except that her discrimination case ended in defeat. K, 31, suffers extreme dysphoria, is constantly miserable, passively endures bullying by coworkers. He has a girlfriend but she doesn’t seem to bring him any happiness beyond the moment. L, 24, has lost five jobs in a row, has been bullied and made fun of at each one.

None of them has a capacity for stable happiness or even calm, though most of them are in a relationship they would call positive. This is the Depressive Personality component.

What in these clients equals or approximates a personality disorder? What differentiates them from people who have a “bad attitude”? I think you have to go geological here, down through the layers of their character history to some early place in childhood where there was either a proton or an electron, a positive kernel or a flame. Those still simmering will see only smoke in their landscape and will probably have no insight: “I am being harassed, disliked, mocked every place I work. It’s not me, it’s them.” It’s this seamless certainty without relenting that begins the diagnosis of a character disorder.

Next step is the cognitive escape from feeling. Each of them lives in thought, pessimistic thought beneath which they cannot go that covers their volcanic, childhood-origin emotional pain. Their thinking insists and argues like a cornered rat to prevent their vulnerability to the tears that belong to their youth.

A supplemental feature that I've seen in some of these clients is a blind childishness. They believe with rock-solid certainty that their fellow adults are disliking and bullying and ganging up on them, persecuting them as only immature children would do. They don't realize they are still children forlorn in their elementary and middle school classrooms.

I don’t doubt that some of these individuals have both flame and calm at their core. These are the ones who can grudgingly accept that there may be reason for hope, the sun may come out, but they can’t live in that place.

Therapists know (or should know) that personality disorders are next-to-impossible to dispel. Dialectical Behavior Therapy and other Cognitive approaches do not attempt to get to the root of Borderline Personality in Masterson's "abandonment depression." A Narcissist would disintegrate were he to somehow lose his sense of special perfection. We can’t make a Dependent Personality want to have initiative, be independent and alone. We can't give a sociopath a conscience. And my lesser afflicted clients? Is there a way to break through their suffering and thinking and victim-mind that protect their pain from exiting?

Why most of my therapy clients are wiser than all the pundits’ and psychologists’ printed words

(Article submitted to a journal which will bury it then expunge it from memory.)

I’m not a happy adult, but I am a joyous infant. I was also an unhappy, anxious and depressed child and teenager, but the infant remains permanent. I can feel him any time I’m not distracted by my present successes and failures. Absent the distractions, I feel something joyous at the molecular level. It may be only three or five or ten molecules, like the surface of a tiny lake, delicate and poignantly sweet, but it seems to be the foundation of my life. Now – if I tried to find what the arcane psychologists call cellular memory pre-birth, there would probably be a mess of trouble down there. I was born premature and kept in an incubator for a long time with no bond with anyone. So it’s probably the post-birth molecules I feel, let’s say, much of the time.

Examples: I take a tissue from the box and feel a split-second beautiful high and the subliminal thought: “I can have this! It’s free for the taking!” I walk outside the apartment door, down the walk to the dumpster, and feel the enchantment of the world. I grab a small Fiji water bottle: I feel like a prince sitting on a voluptuous cushion on a throne. A honey bee hovering around a bud: a sensation of love of nature. It goes even more quiddity than that. I pick up my wallet before leaving for work. “How am I so privileged?” is my chest sensation. My wife has bought me two different brands of fancy toothpaste. I feel blessed.

At different times, I have interpreted this phenomenon in a diametrically opposite way. By “interpreted” I mean that sometimes the joy feels sad. That is because the dark weight of my adult life pollutes it. But it really can’t be polluted. It’s always at the base and is frequently invoked by itself throughout the day. I know that on my death bed, which is not unlikely to be in poverty, the early toddler’s wonder and shock at the free gifts of life will be there.

I know, and I teach my clients this, that this positive core may exist but doesn’t exist for everyone. Look for it by quieting absolutely everything. They also learn that childhood pain and spirit-amputation become their more powerful foundation, above the earlier one. They learn that we are what we were, that positive thinking and forgiveness and grace and rationalization and religion and futile hope for an emotionally dead parent won’t change that foundation. They learn the difference between their façade, their persona and their fundamental self which is their alpha and omega.

I’m sure some of the psychotherapists and pundits have felt all this both before and after they’ve written their words. They probably chalk it up to indigestion or depression or an ignorable quirk. They write happy or hopeful, invariably. Cognitive and “spiritual” therapists and Arthur Brooks and David Brooks and Anne Lamott. They know, I suspect, that all of one’s experiences from pre-birth to now add up to an internal wash: meaninglessness. But for their readers, they are impelled to paint good and hopeful. What does this really mean? That the answer is to live and die in dogged and perpetual pink thought, which we must force. If we do that, we will never notice the joy of the infant, the eternal template.

Double feature: Social Depression, Silent Empty Chair

Social Depression

From an earlier TPS blog post: “For some (dysfunctional) people, it can be painful, though subliminally, merely to entertain the consciousness of another person.” By a very strange coincidence, within a recent week I saw three clients who named a peculiar phenomenon featuring this uncomfortableness with another consciousness. Not in the twenty-five years prior to that week, as far as I recall, had a client ever described it. Two of them, one a twenty-year-old woman, disclosed that it is “draining” to be among people, even for five minutes, to be expected to and proceed to talk. The third client described it as "a drag." A single person’s presence, it could even be a family member, would be enough to distress, numb and pain her mind.

This is not “social anxiety.” It is “social depression.” I know the essence of it because I am the fourth person on that list. In my predominant adult persona, as therapist, I am invigorated by a client’s presence, his thoughts and feelings and challenges. In my secondary persona, as husband to a compatible, former-therapist wife, I am comfortable with our mutual familiarity with my preconscious* psyche and its easy translation into conscious talk. But outside of work and marriage, I find it painfully and heavily burdensome to be silent with or talking to a stranger or a neighbor or to one of my wife’s friends, small talk or ‘medium’ talk. (Deep subjects would invoke my adolescent-stage narcissism fused to my professional garb.)

This is not because the more real self of me is too murky – complex and historical – to know which words to pull from the deeps. It’s because without the appropriate context for my (professional) conscious and (marital) preconscious selves, there is only left the inner child – the unformed and ungrown self – that has only fear, oblivion, and no words. Were there no behavior controls that must fall into place, in an “adult” context with stranger, neighbor or friend, the needful urge would be to collapse and become fetal.

My three clients are also this person. We don’t really go to that inchoate darkness but to recognize how recondite we are and to offer therapist’s empathy and care for it.

 

Silent Empty Chair

This is a slight idea but one that I find meaningful. I don’t know if many or all therapists who use Perls’s Empty Chair exercise bastardize it as I do. To me, the client needs to feel her internal ocean of “all the unsaid”** between her and a parent. But to feel this and then try to talk it, put it into words and concepts, is like painting the surface of the ocean. It's reducing the immeasurable to something temporal.

So sometimes a client’s failure to have the nerve to speak to an agelessly frightening father or an unloving mother can bring her to an even deeper place, beneath words. In her silence she is starting to feel and know parts of her history, aspects of her true character, and feelings that she never experienced but for a glinting moment in childhood. The look on a silent client’s face as she stares in the direction of the empty chair shows that she is changing on the inside, is finding and reclaiming more of the real childhood self that was banished early on, more of her self as left open and empty of her parent. I can’t assume, but hope that this internal change will manifest in new eyes, new seeing, new acting in the world.

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* Look up Freud’s notion of the “preconscious.”

** Term taken from Nathaniel Branden’s “Death Bed Situation” exercise. See blog post "The antithesis client," July 16, 2024.

The sound of labels makes me ill

I think it would be great if all of the thousands of YouTube and Instagram and TikTok (and whatever else there is) psychology videos were to disappear in a flash, electrocuted in a painful instant. Millions of children’s, teenagers’ and adults’ heads would no longer be toilets of wisdom, giant billboards of diagnostic labels shoved into their brains like Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head. Fourteen-year-olds wouldn’t be saying their father is a Narcissist with an Avoidant Attachment Style. Teenagers wouldn’t be told by their parents that their grandfather cheated on their grandmother and that’s why . . . . Twelve-year-old girls wouldn’t call their mother Borderline Personality (when, factually, both of them would be). The entire world minus five people wouldn’t have the middle name “Trauma.” Therapy clients wouldn’t prefer Rod McKuen-like couplets of profundity in melodramatic typefaces to the powerful work of therapy.

We would also remove many psycho-nouns and adjectives from the public domain. We’d make them private feelings that only the individual would discover in himself. “Abandonment,” “depressed,” “people-pleaser,” “codependent,” “gaslighting.”

People are deeper than, other than, the labels, but as soon as they buy one or two, they become them. They will evermore have trouble feeling the feeling underneath, far underneath to their buried history of meaning.

Imagine that even therapists didn’t have the labels, like John Lennon’s Imagined world without religion. Clients would still be describing – vaguely and poignantly and accurately – their distress, pain, emptiness, lack of a sense of identity, soul sickness, chronic hurt-frustrated-angry wrongness. And with their clients describing injury and hurt, therapists wouldn’t be focusing on their thinking, trying to change their thinking – the sick domain of Cognitive Therapy. They would help the client go to where they were wounded and pour their pain out.

Therapy without labels would enable so much more healing, it would be a phenomenon.

I’m thinking of “trauma.” Trauma is rape and being in war and watching your buddy’s head blown off. But even more, because the consequences can be so much deeper and longer, trauma is being a child of divorce, feeling unloved, being regularly left with a babysitter, being bullied and having no one at home who knows how to listen. I’m thinking of “abandonment.” My clients’ mothers and fathers left when they were two years old, seven years old, twelve years old, left and never returned. But abandonment is also telling your parent that you’re sad and hearing “you’ll feel better.” Or in my case, telling my father that and seeing him flinch. It’s saying the teacher was unfair and being told “I’m sure she was just having a bad day.”

Please join me in wishing all these labels, brain candy and brain poison, gone.

The antithesis client

This is Nathaniel Branden’s “Death Bed Situation” from his book, The Disowned Self. I use this drastic evocative scenario a dozen or so times a year with clients who need to break through their adult persona:

Now, I want you to accept the following situation. You are lying on a bed in a hospital and you are dying. You are your present age. You are not in physical pain, but you are aware of the fact that in a few hours your life will end. Now, in your imagination, look up and see your mother standing at the side of the bed. Look at her face. There is so much unsaid between you. Feel the presence of all the unsaid between you – all the things you have never told her, all the thoughts and feelings you have never expressed. If ever you would be able to reach your mother, it is now. If ever she would hear you, it is now. Talk to her. Tell her.

Let’s say that we want to know if a client has any chance of being a person, of having self-esteem, of actually caring for himself or herself, of having a fundamental sense of self-value. We want to know this because only this person can be helped in therapy at a real and enduring level, not in a superficial, “cognitive” and ephemeral way.

Let’s say we want to know if we are even aware that there are individuals who come to therapy, an ostensibly self-caring act, yet have no “self” that can accept help. We may not be aware that such people, and such a problem, exist.

The Death Bed Situation will be a good diagnostic tool of identity and nothingness.

Clients with at minimum the rudiment of Being will say to their mother (or father) in their final moment of truth:

“You were never there for me. You may have believed you did your best, but you only did your feeling, your own pain, your own needs, your own purpose. I needed your love. I needed you to see me – me – with nothing else on your mind, with your eyes clear and with eternal patience for a child. I have been a ghost in my own clothes, wandering the world without that touch of love that would have given me life. You failed me, Mom.”

That is someone who can grieve and move on.

The clients who cannot be helped will say:

“Mom, I’m sorry I disappointed you. I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough. I failed you.”

These are antithetical people, who never became anything other than their parents. They never individuated. Their parents continue to be all powerful, always more powerful than them. They would rather die than try to matter – to their parent, to themselves. As a client said, “I wouldn’t want to say anything on my death bed that would make her regret knowing me.” This is clinging to starvation because it's their only identity. There was never the connection of love, the psychological birth of the human infant.* They have never been given to understand that they should be loved, not required to be something to satisfy their parents.

They are not able to feel and exorcise their own pain because that would make them sense the person they never were.

Therapy that works at depth will lose clients who remain in their parent’s cupped hand. That would, I thought, be the case. But I’ve seen a strange consistent phenomenon: Clients who need to remain killed children are pulled to the idea or the wistful or dear or quixotic feeling of being a self, maybe of being born for the first time. They stay longer than many others do.

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* Margaret S. Mahler's book by that name.

Speedy sniper shots triggered by the presidential debate

Three Comments to articles, and to others' comments, in the New York Times and the Washington Post:

Here are Democrats and liberals assuming that most of our citizens are so impressed by Trump's lies, delusions, and narcissistic bravado that they will make him president again. This is the worst cynicism possible in this country. And unfortunately, it is probably justified.

Pretty much the only way to defeat a thug-like, malignant narcissist is to have or adopt an even greater level of narcissistic-style self-confidence, but armed with facts. The opponent would have to understand and project that Trump is a pitiful, abortive child with an imperious façade that doesn’t fool or cow her one bit. Knowing this "in her bones" would give her the strength to look down upon the child with legitimate superiority, rueful contempt, and magnanimous pity. It’s that approach that has been missing in all of Trump’s opponents, leaving them wilted, babbling, emasculated. A "good" narcissist could make Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare feel like bumbling boobs.

A variation of the above:

A narcissist with an average (100) IQ would beat a genius in a debate because of the nature of the disorder. The person's identity is completely dependent on * his delusional self-confidence of perfection and ascendency, * his gyroscopic need and therefore ability to defeat the other by any means possible, such as lies and shaming, and * his wounded animal-based relish for cruelty and contempt. Yes, it's possible that a sincerely decent (not just politically decent), extremely articulate person could make the narcissist look like the rageful child he is. But the most likely victor would need to come from a place of deep psychological understanding of the narcissistic disorder, its pitifulness, and would then automatically project as the only adult in the room.

The never-serene self

Twenty-nine-year-old married mother of an infant and a toddler. Excerpts from two progress notes:

“Client said: ‘I may have anxiety or depression. I'm not sure what is causing it but there are many days that I wake up with no energy to do anything or there are days that I can't stop feeling anxious. I have noticed that I have bad mood swings when I am feeling this way so for my family and work I wanted to speak to someone to get help.’ She said: ‘I have no motivation,’ a problem that comes ‘at random. I don't want to get out of bed.’ She described the depressive feeling as ‘empty, nothing.’ She said she has ‘no reason to be feeling like that.’”

“On two separate but related occasions, she informed her father that ‘I'm your daughter. You should care about my feelings more than your own.’

“Client was asked to look at her assumptions about her relationship with her father, whom she has feared from childhood to now, from a different perspective. She had told him that he should care about her feelings more than he cares about his own because ‘I'm your daughter.’ I suggested that he should care about her feelings because ‘you're an adult and should be respected by him as an equal.’ It was pretty clear that she is not comfortable with the idea that she is an adult of equal status, and that she would prefer to remain her father's 'little girl,’ in fear and injustice.

Which perspective, which principle, is right? To be the adult-child whose parent should be in perpetual reparations mode for all the past harm he’s done: the accepting, empathic and self-sacrificial “bigger” person? The adult-child who should finally be important to her parent, who is owed love long delayed? To have a parent whose own never-met childhood needs for understanding and respect must be set aside for his daughter’s long-delayed justice rather than immaturely imposed on her?

Or to be the ascendant adult who survived her nearly killed childhood and will not be victimized and needy anymore? The adult whose natural self-esteem could not form in the poisonous air of abuse but who has adopted logical self-esteem: knowing with brittle conviction that she is her parent’s and anyone else’s equal in dignity and mentality and autonomy, and that she must be treated so?

Are both inner child and adult valid? Do they both exist in the same person? Can one be invoked, then the other, by chance or intent? Or must they coexist simultaneously in some way, some strange fusion that can only reconditely be expressed?

Should my client both make demands of, and prostrate herself before, her father? Or should she show herself to be the real adult, the fragile adult who rejects him for his endless failure of unconditional love? Should her father always care for himself as a wounded soul who was never given nurturance and healing, see this as his ineradicable truth? Or should he once again bury his real self, as he had to in his childhood, for the sake of his daughter?

This is the unsolvable paradox of the person and of therapy.

Notice how quantum gravity physics is identical to psychology

This is the story of a superstring, the smallest possible and only constituent of existence comprising everything and nothing. He doesn’t know what he is, what he’s made of. He is hemmed in by other superstrings. He doesn’t know why he vibrates, constantly bumping into others. He wonders Why all are identical and when did this happen? He notices that it feels implicitly right to move as he moves, to go where he goes, exactly as if he willed himself. He remembers that during random moments spread across trillions of millennia he would realize that questions have no answers, but the insight was jostled out of him time and time again. He feels trapped – there is no escaping this crush of strings and no escaping the circle of the universe – yet free. He wonders how many there are like him.

He would be unmanned to know that he is not made of anything – he is the quiddity and the general, the irreducible fact, the answer that has no question – and that he has always existed.

By nature, he is impressionable, is influenced by the other one-dimensional particles. This gives him material for thought and imagination, hiding the ultimate eternal boredom that his existence is.

He is lonely in a crowd. 

The universe, he guesses, is eyes, and eyes only see what they are. Limitless time and space, he senses, are inevitable jokes.

But in his vibration that never ceases, there is music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0VhKERbhkE.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIDQrU9kzhQ.

Clients who need a Weiss's pastrami sandwich shoved up their arse

I wonder if there is a company that produces robots that are sent to therapy to spew stories, brook no interruption, have no capacity to listen, project universal wisdom, and cannot conceive, in any way at all, of changing anything about themselves.

They are here to “F” with the real world.

These robots show up at my office not infrequently. I’ve seen enough of them and am ready to throw some moderately heavy, dull-pointed metal object at their forehead, chest or crotch – their “off switch” – to get them to shut up and to discombobulate their “zero insight” subroutine.

Since they are actually people, the best intervention would be to say to them: “You are talking, not listening, you are acting as if you know everything, and it is clear that you have never thought of changing anything about yourself. Or possibly you did think of it once in the privacy of your mind, but as soon as you came into this room that flew out the window and now you want to give speeches. You will need to stop that immediately, if you want help.”

The robot-person is now disturbed – sudden silence – as their inner Twilight Zone reveals the heads of ghouls and the twiddling toes of their inner infant, as I begin my end-stage renaissance as a therapist.

Reparenting

I suspect that the last theory most therapists would want to accept is that our job is to reparent our clients. This is in no way the meaning of Cognitive therapists’ paternalistic (but secret) sense that genuflecting at the altar of Albert Ellis bestows upon them the ability to think more logically and rationally than their clients do.

Reparenting assumes a depth therapy of pain discharge and degrees of healing of the past. Our clients are injured in time just as physicians’ patients are injured in body. Thinking is their present palliative of old pain – their drug, their band-aid, not their medicine or surgery. When we help a client regress to her childhood disaster we must be there as the parent should have been, to be the ultimate strong and caring listener and believer of her real self. The person she can finally lean on, crash into.

The notion that we are just a discussant, feeling facilitator or teacher is so wrong because it assumes our client is his adult character. He is not that: He is still a child. As are we, but it is our time to help.

Sensitivity alert: Don't read this if you're a baby

Congratulations to my three clients this year who have disowned their toxic parents and family or are “in process.” Yes, this sounds ugly. But look at the alternative: those who remain stuck in their childhood bedroom in spirit. It matters not that they have careers and partners and children and friends. They have converted a sordid past into the rotten present, despite what bells and whistles and nice rationalizations they have attached to it. None of them has the feeling of being their own person. Part of them is always sitting, unmanned and soft, on their father's lap. Giving parents money, listening to sister’s terrified beg to pretend to be a happy family, “needing” their children to have grandparents, malignant as they are, having an “adult” relationship now with an always cold, intellectual parent, taking their money, caretaking them, telling yourself your childhood was great, remaining afraid of a Nazi-like father who should spend his life in prison, contemning while catering to them.

The one, single, only, unique factor that differentiates psychic adults from psychic adult-children is this: Have they put their parents in their place or do they drink from the empty teat of neediness. All else may look the same about them in the outer world, but in therapy (and in their own constructed family), their depression, anxiety, failure to thrive permeate the air in the room and all come from one source: their family that didn’t live and won't die.

My first lazy post of all time: Mid-life crisis

In response to today’s Washington Post article, “Middle age shouldn’t be a drag. How a 'chrysalis' mind-set can help.” Subtitle: “Author and hospitality guru Chip Conley wants to replace the midlife crisis with a midlife renaissance.”

I’d recommend not listening to fake-happy fools who tell you how to goose your mind into feeling better. If you’re facing the ‘crisis’ of being 50 or 60, it’s likely to be an identity issue – a dormant depression issue – that has roots all the way back to childhood. Many people wake up in middle age and realize they ‘don’t know who they are’ or feel like imposters or lack a sense of meaning. It’s not because half their life is over or they’re spooked by a number. It’s mostly that by then, the big challenges of life (college, career, marriage, house, kids grown, savings) have been met or normalized, there is no next-big-thing to distract them, and they’ve plateaued. The past is opportunistic: Without distractions in its way, it will percolate into the brain and materialize its dormant depression. A good time for therapy.

The past is opportunistic. It will always catch you, despite your aluminum foil hat, your Cognitive Therapy, your halcyon here-and-now life. Face it or be replaced by it.

Sniper shot developmental dynamic #1: For those to whom this hasn't yet occurred

Adult clients say that their parent was cruel or neglectful to them but warm and benevolent to friends or needy strangers. My first wife would be abusive to her teenage daughters but empathic and delightful to her daughters’ teenage friends. Clients tell me that their mothers, hospital nurses, were doting on their patients but monsters and starvers to them.

Don’t be shallow, my peers, and think this is duplicity or hypocrisy.

What you are looking at (or hearing about from your clients) are parents who are still children. This isn’t the “inner child” meme, which is an old and fallacious concept. The true concept (which I’ve explicated in hundreds of earlier posts) is that people don’t have an “inner child,” they are their inner child while the adult character they cherish or deplore is the façade, the mirage.

These parents did not become adults. They did not succeed the psycho-developmental stages owing to the thousands of possible influences that shut down their feeling core in childhood. This includes abused children and those who “grew up too fast.” Now, thrust into the permanent masquerade of utilitarian adulthood, they are nothing but starved, empty vessels of need.

From this perspective, what may seem like inexplicable or sociopathic hypocrisy makes perfect sense: The child-mother can’t mother her own children: She is too young and needy: They are there for her. She is enraged. But the child-mother must supplicate and impress and seek approval from others, who unconsciously are her betters and superiors whatever their age.

My clients see this quite quickly when I describe it to them. I can’t say that it makes them feel better, as the knowledge leaves them even more unparented than they had been. And yet it helps them grow.

The strangest Mother's Day: Follow-up to a pathologically existential client (see previous post)

Adapted from progress note:

As my client has been working on, or at least thinking seriously about, his existential distress – identity and personal and career meaning – for several months with no relief from its desperate poignancy, it seemed necessary to dive into the radical ends of intervention. Intervention #1: He has remained toxically regressively attached – in slavery and hope – to his shaming and physically abusive (and complicit) parents and cannot feel himself, cannot feel free. His starved bond with them has served as anchor and quicksand, making him incapable of feeling, in his bones, autonomous. He would have to “say goodbye and good riddance” to them, reject and disown them, turn away. Only that could make him feel that he could make a clean, fresh start, breathe the air and see a horizon not polluted by them. Intervention #2 was the exact opposite, contingent on the nature of his relationship with his mother. (Father is understood to be a lost cause.) If he can remember any moment from his childhood where he felt his mother’s selfless love, and can remember her clear expression of it, then going to her, in regression and a child’s need, for a re-supply (as it were) of it, could enable him to move on into his adult life. “If it exists, you would need to rejoin your mother’s love.” Internalized, late but forever, that love would make you free.

Neither intervention would apply to individuals whose self-esteem was highjacked but not killed by their parents: Those who live and struggle for the smile of contingent approval their entire lives. While much more successful in prestige and material, these individuals won’t be helped. They have survived on false love while the others have survived on no love. They could only fall and crash, in therapy, the latter could only climb.

General and specific observations in retrospect

A surprising number of clients say they have no identity, don’t know who or what they are, lack a sense of self-meaning, have not the slightest feeling of a true or right occupation or career. None of them could be helped by Existential Psychotherapy – Yalom or any of the others. Presently, one forty-year-old man is in a state of depressive panic about this. The others say it but don’t feel it deeply. I could throw a hundred college catalogs at them and they would find not a single subject of interest on which to build a next phase of their life. Though I do try this, and think of various approaches to stir their potential or their original core, I know I am not a good inspiration for them. That’s because the profession of psychotherapy was not a true north of mine but was the unexpected heroin – self-medication – that saved me and replaced me, thirty years ago, at the very moment of my crisis of being. On a walk, I had found self-awareness for the first time in my life and saw that I was nothing. Rather than collapse in the truth and in help, which would have been right, the idea of helping others as unmade as I was struck me exactly as God suddenly appears to the most wretched of souls in their despair. It was my salvation. Becoming a therapist became both my forever meaning and my forever self-loss.

I can’t wish this on any of my clients, and none have found it on their own.

Theory and practice have proved very divergent. The way of healing is not to make yourself think different or to open your eyes and see a truth. People love to, need to, believe that a new idea or fact will change them, will rewrite their chemistry. It can’t be. We need to return to our sick roots in childhood, grieve that pain and give it to a parent-figure. True therapy is reparenting.

I don’t know anyone who has done this.

I recently asked a college senior to stop smiling and being her snazzy bouncy self when we both know there is a dark underground in her. How can such a helium-filled persona feel right? I asked. She gave me an explanation having to do with women’s debased status in specific sciences. My oafish reply was that most young people already have to be fake to convince themselves that they want to be adults with forty-hour work weeks and a level of initiative and unsupportedness that will never feel right. Why add another layer of unreality to that? Then I remembered that reality would have killed me at 22.

We let the matter rest.

Adapted from a Progress Note: “‘Sal,’ a pleasant, intelligent client of four months, actually exists on a different plane of reality that completely blocks emotional awareness and the reception of psychological information. He provides copious facts of the world (religion, sociology, etc.) for unknown reasons and acts as if everything introduced by this clinician is something he already knows. The different plane of reality was forged in his pathologically adultified childhood, where he was both hard worker and caregiver to almost a dozen children in his blended family. He has grown, self-medicatively, a mindset and philosophy that knows nothing of children’s reality but is goal-, work- and spirituality-centered, which he has instilled in his children. Though they are hard workers and players, “successful,” there are apparent flaws in his system. As examples, he acts as wise guru, not victim, to his Borderline Personality-disorder wife, does not let himself feel her poison which has pervaded the family for two decades. His daughter ‘doesn’t care for’ gay people, but has been inculcated to have rote respect for their rights as individuals.”

One of my most decent and engaged clients who will never be reached.

Why do these clients keep returning, week to week, month to month? One might think they’d be scandalized or too bored. I believe they feel the warmth of my optimism rooted in the pessimism of human nature.

What's with grieving?

There can be a number of reasons why a person can’t grieve well. Many people are emotionally repressed and they can’t break through that repression. A feeling that should be poignant – tragic or sweet – remains dull, stifled, dissociated. Another reason for poor grieving is that the expression of dear feelings – what the griever wants to feel – is sabotaged because those feelings are chemically tied to negative (even angry or hateful) feelings that are more hidden and that the person would rather not feel. The negative taboo feelings hold them all under water.

Another reason for aborted grieving is guilt – valid or false guilt. One middle-aged woman was able to pour out a lot of grief pain, love, need when she could acknowledge and express her mother’s abusiveness. What kept her from successfully grieving was her sense of guilt for having taken her mother out of the old family home so she could caretake her better. It didn’t work: Her mother never got over losing her house, being removed to a bedroom, being disliked by her daughter’s husband.

One more preventive of grieving that I’ve never seen described anywhere may be called “temporal resonant grieving.” When my mini schnauzer died in 2002, I was living alone in a state (Colorado) I had moved to to get away from a sad relationship. Alone after midnight with my euthanized pet, I knew – knew to the depths of body and time – that I would never get over her death. What I felt was Loss itself, all my critical and unfair losses through time, feeling lost in the present day, the state of never-had from my beginning. The loss of childhood, the loss of love then, the loss of youth. Simply because I can’t be the only “resonant” person, I believe that our deepest truths may return with a present death. We are holistic in mindbody and time.

With this being true, we would have to grieve everything sad and wrong, from beginning to now, at any given death or abandonment. To do that, we’d need to be very in touch with our unity in our time: certainly not something most therapy clients will experience until they’ve been talked to for a little while.

Then they may be able to move on.

Sing a paean to Singapore and, well, Hallelujah to Hong Kong

This is to express my quiet appreciation and louder bemusement to the people of Singapore and Hong Kong who have been clicking on this blog two hundred to four hundred-plus times each day for a while now. (Google Blogger provides stats per country.) I don’t know what it’s about as, per usual, no one ever – and I mean evvverrrr, sends me comments about my articles. The mass click appears to happen during my bedtime, which is awake time in Singapore and Hong Kong. My guess, which is wishful thinking, is that these are Psychology classes (with brilliant professors) that have grasped the iconoclastic and food-for-thought nature of many of my pieces. Congratulations! You are right. I have been applying acid to scar tissue and nutrients to sick Cognitive Therapy bodies for ten years. I’m glad someone out there is appreciating my contribution. However, a client to whom I mentioned the mystery suggested that “classes” may be right, but thought they might be for ESL (English as a Second Language) students. In that case, the articles would be held as examples of purple prose poison which students would be taught to avoid.

If my hypothesis is right, I would welcome Singaporean and Hong Kongese comments, critiques and questions addressing specific posts or general ideas described. I appreciate bright students who are willing to face heresy and consider its value.

"This is what I believe!"

A 43-year-old client says that he has found a way to “defuse” conflicts with his wife. He’ll say: “I see what you’re trying to do. I’m just going to step away.” His ten-year-old daughter is distracted when he is trying to teach her math that she didn’t grasp in school. He believes there should be “consequences for her being disengaged.”

A 54-year-old client states that he accommodates his mother’s self-centeredness because he wants to be “a good son.” He can’t bring himself to criticize or get angry with his torturously mentally abusive father because “he’s not here to defend himself.”

A 35-year-old man asserts that his parents had “a very good divorce” when he was five years old.

I described my socially-incorrect ideas about “forgiveness” to a 58-year-old client. He said that “there’s nothing to forgive” because his father’s domestic violence and alcoholism didn’t affect him.

A 21-year-old Asperger’s client says “I hate myself.”

Let’s pour some acid on these clients’ custom-made beliefs.

The 43-year-old believes he has “defused” incipiently volatile conflicts with his wife by accusing her of being sly and manipulative and walking out of the room (Gottman’s famous “stonewalling”). He’s actually made the conflicts worse. He believes his daughter should be punished for not being able to focus on her math and on him. She may have ADHD, may be depressed because of her parents’ continual sniping, may be turned off by her father’s disciplinary “three strikes” mentality. Punishing a child for being hurt or injured is destructive.

This client's beliefs are just threadbare clothing over feelings of revenge for a childhood which he perpetuates by remaining in thrall to a pathological, authoritarian father. Beliefs are adamant, until they crumble into the greater hurt that formed them.

The 54-year-old believes that he must be his mother’s doormat, her eternal accommodator to be a good son. Does it make him a good son not to have any self-care, to back himself away forever? He has adopted some strangely-derived justice not to criticize a father who isn’t alive to “defend himself.” What can that mean? Do we not condemn Hitler because he can’t argue back? Do I not criticize Trump the sociopath because he’s not in the room with me?

He believes he is a good son. What he means is: He is a good little boy.

The 35-year-old man believes his parents had a “very good divorce.” Can he feel what that divorce did to him at age five, how “very good” it was?

The 58-year-old has nothing to forgive as he has banished his real childhood with a violent and drunk father. Hovering above that, he may believe anything he wants.

The 21-year-old “hates” himself because it’s less painful to grow the callus of self-hate – more an idea than a feeling – than to feel the pain of being an unloved child.

I don't know if other therapists believe their clients’ theories of life. I’d advise them not to. A good rule of thumb is: “The feeling is the fact, the thought is the escape.” People will often cling desperately, time immemorial to a belief which could be some airy-fairy, cockamamie conjunction of words their humiliated inner child came up with. What they don’t want to do is feel. Feel the radical truth that defined their childhood. To go there would be to burn away the bland mantra in black, boiling tar. But the mantra is a straitjacket and the tar can be poured out. That’s when therapy happens.

Paperback "I Forgive" and Other Delusions

My book is now in paperback form. (The Kindle ebook has been out in the world for a couple months.) I had tremendous difficulty with the professional formatter. The simplified reason is that I paid $149 to Word-2-Kindle instead of the $1,200 that Wordzworth Books asked. I’m a retired typographer and know that a book that’s already ninety-eight percent meticulously formatted at Microsoft Word (for MacBook Air) should not need a thousand dollars-worth of finishing touches.

 

A consequence, though, is that I uploaded the paperback to Amazon from a state of exhaustion not confidence, and I can’t help but fear that I missed some substantive errors in line spacing, indenting, indexing, page numbers, etc. I’m half-afraid to look at the final product.* So I am encouraging readers to purchase the paperback “I Forgive” and Other Delusions in order to look for embarrassing goofs to throw in my face (by email and blog comments).

 

Of course, there are other reasons to own. How can people – including potential clients and therapy students and their teachers – not be sick of the cognitive-therapy fluff that has covered the earth worse than covid? Thinking does not heal wounds; it only burdens them with falseness. Therapy must go to the source of pain and let that pain out by the tools of justice: remembering, weeping, raging in a room where someone finally hears and cares.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Follow-up: I purchased two copies of the book and have found two blatant flaws. The text blocks are not centered on the pages but are shifted toward the inside of the book (the spine: too little white space) and away from the open end of the book. To me it's an eyesore and necessitates almost cracking the spine to read easily. Also, the type, which should be black, is a washed-out-looking gray. Despite my haranguing everyone, neither the book formatter, nor Amazon Customer Support, nor Lulu (the publisher that apparently sometimes prints Amazon's books) has accepted responsibility for the flaws. I continue to email these sources in search of an adult.

Know thyself before it's too late

I’ve encountered many, many people who do not know what it means to understand themselves. They believe that if they have a feeling as a reaction to something that happens, or as companion to a thought or a belief, that feeling is “who they are” and has no deeper cause or reason. The feeling says what it is and all that it is.

 

This error is understandable by the nature of feeling. It seems like identity. But if we cry at a happy moment, or rage at a tangled computer cord or a slow driver, or get anxious if our fourth-grader brings home a “C,” we should wonder who we really are.

 

Of course, people also believe that their assumptions and convictions, as well as their feelings, are who they are. They are often disabused of that notion in therapy where mantras like “I love my mother to death” and “my parents did their best” and “I’m never good enough” evaporate in a bleak epiphany.

 

It is rare for a parent to say to herself: Why do I want to punish my child? What is this feeling inside me that wants to deprive or hurt him? It is rare for an adult to ask himself: Why do I enjoy being sarcastic, even when I can see that it hurts someone’s feelings? It is rare for a person who says “I don’t trust people” to ask himself: What is going on inside me that makes me think that most people are untrustworthy? It is not quite so rare, but still rare for “people-pleasers” to wonder if they really care about the people they serve, if there may be something self-serving and self-preserving behind their altruism.

 

These and countless other feelings should be explored. They may not be what they seem.

 

Right now I am most concerned about all the people, millions of them, who feel good when they think about the psychologically disturbed and morally malevolent Trump. It is rare to nonexistent that any of them wonder what makes them glad about violence; why their intelligent discernment is not embarrassed by Trump’s fatuous ignorance; why a hating person makes them feel redeemed. If they could look inward, they would find the life they had to bury in their adolescent years if not earlier: injustice and unhelped loneliness and a need for some kind of revenge. This would still be boiling and churning deep below, a turbulence that they cannot see through. Were it to subside, by the gifts of care and self-compassion, their vision would be cleared and they would see a sick man whose medicine is hate and delusion.

Comments to bad news

In response to a recent George Will article in The Washington Post.

 

What a silly George he is. I recently told a Trump-defending client the following: If Biden manipulated the economy in such a way that I got an extra dollar, and Adolf Hitler manipulated the economy in such a way that I got two, I’d still opt for Biden. Psychopaths aren’t a good bet, regardless of the ephemeral prize. Everyone who claims to prefer Donald Trump over Joe Biden because of a given policy or ideological principle is showing the world that he prefers a narcissistic psychopath over an imperfect though normal person. He is revealing a special wound: that the bottommost part of his soul is retaliation pain.

🌀

In response to a New York Times article.

 

In this poisonous Trump climate, a paradox has emerged: The mentally healthiest among us have anxiety, verge on “learned helplessness,” and suffer the insidious trauma of crazymaking (as sociopathy and delusion gain great status), while those  – the Trump Republicans of today – whose fragile balance requires projection, delusion, hate and infantile dependency feel powerful and “happy.” How, The Times asks, do we support our mental health? Go to therapy. Preach to the choir. Know sanity and know that any individual MAGA child-in-adult's-clothing could be undone by a simple Socratic dialogue, that it’s only the epoxy of the masses that makes them strong.

📝

In response to Maureen Dowd's New York Times article, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman."

Maureen writes: "I'm puzzled about why his devoted fans don't mind his mean streak." They don't know it now, but on their death beds, today's Democrats will say: "I'm at peace. I loved life as best I could." Today's Republicans will say: "I'm angry." At the seat of people's souls is – reaching into the quiddities here – what good was given in their childhoods and what pain was never healed. It becomes a turn of mood. "I made it work" versus "I remained a victim seeking revenge."