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.

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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.