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.