Tuesday, October 8, 2024

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.


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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.