The fundamental conflict*

If we avoid psychology – as most people and pundits do – it becomes easier, or even necessary, to simmer down after the election and see ourselves as one nation, to believe that we must “come together,” and that “millions of people can’t be racist.” But if we look to psychology, we won’t fall into that desperate place of conciliation and hopeful thinking. We’ll find, instead, a different desperation, coming out of unsavory questions and their answers.

What does it mean to be a “good” person?

You can love your wife and not give a damn about “the people starving in Asia” (a pre-meme meme of the ’50’s). You can treat your African-American coworkers with respect while your “implicit bias” thinks they all slipped out of the ghetto under false circumstances. You can stop to fix a stranger’s flat tire but think that Jews are hook-nosed schmucks. You can be committed to good works while believing you’re smarter than everybody. You can hope that Hillary Clinton will spend twenty years in prison or that Donald Trump will die of a heart attack on the toilet. Or you can “love humanity” – “I never met a man I didn’t like”** – because you’re lying to yourself, are still a subservient child, are unconsciously begging for mercy, are blind.

You can read the Bible (about revenge, child sacrifice and God’s jealousy) and believe you are a good person.

Do we have to like anybody?

Depth psychology shows that childhood unmet needs for love and respect are the adult psyche’s first contact with the world and incessantly importune in the present. A “regular guy” or woman may be a deep magnet of need that compels every behavior, making everything selfish – even a giving act, even an altruistic character. All liking, then, would be a silent mental mechanism of manipulation. Needy and frustrated, we couldn’t be truly there for another person. Extend that logically, and we will dislike everyone.

People’s historical pain is often the substrate of anger, where anger is a facet and distillate of hurt, loss, need, pain, frustration. We harbor it deep in our soul, though may partly cover it with better sentiments. It emerges in misdirection because the past is buried, hidden. The female candidate has a penchant for power and secrecy and we boil with murderous rage. The president-elect wins over the country by dint of narcissism and we think he is garbage. We condemn the elite, ignorant rednecks, immigrants, the closet terrorist woman and her children in their hijabs. We are the discontented angry.

The conflict most of us have felt and still feel with the other side, around the election, is fundamentally the war within our individual self: between the adult’s survival mind and the child’s injured heart. It’s the pain of unhealing. It causes our disproportionate anger, our incapacity for empathy, our hurt magnified by the lens of our past into global fears and prejudices, and our tendentious ideas and dogmas. Until we go to that solitary inward place to heal, we will continue to be hypocritically forked, continue to have injured relationships – and will have no ability to love the other side, say what we will.

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* This post was inspired by a phrase from a Baltimore Sun newspaper article, “Trump Didn't Rally Whites,” sent me by a friend. One line that I took objection to was: “In this way the candidate did his tens of millions of well-meaning supporters an enormous disservice and exposed them to this attack.” My off-the-cuff email response to my friend was: “Why are they well-meaning? Did they choose Trump despite his ugly ideas? Does refusing to vote for Clinton make them ‘well-meaning’ for Trump? That phrase is a non sequitur thrown in in the middle of an otherwise plausible argument. The pro-Hillary Sun seems to have gotten a little too gallant post-election.” The post is a more on-the-cuff response.

** Humorist Will Rogers’ (1879-1935) heartwarming absurd remark.

Perspective as existence

Our nation has been defeated and taken over by the evil, hateful foreigner. There is terrible humiliation to have to submit to an overpowering enemy, fulsome with pride. We will not submit! But we have to.

Look, though: It’s only Trump and the idiot twisted-jockstrap conservatives sitting on the seats of power with their soiled pants, their childish id running rampant. We’ll watch the children break lamps and windows and grandfather clocks, write graffiti (“Obamacare,” “immigration,” “pussy”) on the hallowed halls, change the rules of the games. And knowing they’ll self-destruct more than they’ll us-destruct, we realize we’ve given our lives over to these false end-time matters for so many months, have replaced our heart with CNN. We pause, and we feel the good withdrawal. We turn off the television. We leave the poisonous cloud, we fall away. We come back to life.

Smell the flowers. Save money for a vacation, or for the future. The world is the symphony playing, not the audience coughing through it. The world is being home after a party, walking the dog at midnight. It’s when Facebook is turned off, when there’s no ice cream in the house and you think you need something. It’s the self alone or with a soulmate.

What do we do to make our lives work? Mostly dream stuff, I hate to say. I see mental health patients every day – Las Vegas homeless and drug-drowned – who should be writhing in their pain and seeking help for it, but are metal-stamped with daily cheer by the groups and the workbooks and the meds and the case management meetings. And the rest of us live by diversions – all the defenses and self-medications which pretty much comprise the outer-self.

I think we need to go out walking, and on the walk not think much, just be quiet and look, and let our insides orient to time and say who we are. If we’re centered in ourselves better, we won’t lose ourselves to elections or other drugs.

The new president will be a silly guy with a job.

The imposter president, the imposter man

Initially I criticized Hillary Clinton for the fakeness of her manner, affects and words. Later on I was “formally” with her, and voted for her as the better choice, though I drank none of the elixir of her goodness and humanity. For most of fifty years I had been closer to Libertarian ideals while knowing they lived and died in the armchair.

As a liberty sort, I might have voted for a decent capitalist, one who compromised righteous individualism with necessary charity (welfare, medical care, anti-discrimination laws). (Though . . . I may have given in to my complacent hypocrisy and run from any rightist who cast even a cautionary frown at that Social Security check I will need.)

But Trump, now president-elect, was not that candidate. It doesn’t take a liberal – but maybe it does take an experienced clinician – to see that his life as formed and lived has made the worst of narcissistic pathology, at least in the public realm. He never informed the platinum-gold ego with skills. He never thought – that is, introspected – about his difference from the adult world of ideas, deeper motivations – even toward being a good con. Dumbly, he simply assumed his simple mind and contents were right and admirable. Assumed, therefore, that money and prejudicial views – bigotry, misogyny – were the entrée to transcendent success.

Accidentally, he was right.

The future president is psychologically a failed, never-grown person. Alice Miller, great thinker who understood children’s needs better than most, once wrote of the therapist’s requirement to ‘know what it is like to have been killed in childhood’* in order to deeply see and help the client. Trump’s young self was aborted, drained, replaced. Love was replaced by money. He could not grow but on a base of pain and absence. Aggression, bullying, besting of others, contempt for his teacher, for the weak, low, black, brown, different. The search for glory** is the dialectic of the absence of self, like a schizophrenic who thinks he’s Christ, like the psychopathic ruler who can charm an entire nation.

We have a non-man who will occupy the White House. Some apparently sterling characters are pedophiles. Some Borderline Personality Disorders – already immature – are the mothers who kill their children.*** Some clients with success in the material world say they feel unreal, like imposters, like a child wearing adult’s clothing. And some, like the soon-to-be president, are carcasses surrounding an atavistic corpse.

Unless he declares war, is impeached, announces his resignation or becomes my client, I will not be able to look at his face or hear his voice over the next four years.

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* Probably an inexact memory of Miller’s statement, source forgotten.

** See Karen Horney, M.D., Neurosis and Human Growth, 1950, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Relevant passage, though without necessary context – “He does not feel weakened in a vacuum, but feels specifically less substantial, less well equipped for life than others. If he had a sense of belonging, his feeling inferior to others would not be so serious a handicap. But living in a competitive society, and feeling at bottom – as he does – isolated and hostile, he can only develop an urgent need to lift himself above others” (p. 21, italics in original).

*** Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother, specifically the “Witch” persona and its “Medea” subtype, p. 127.

Cognitive therapy is garbage

I’ve noticed that my blog is winding down. I’m not really sure why, but it doesn’t feel wrong. I do have a “swan song” sense which is not angry – despite the title of this article. The idea is inspired by a positive not negative happening: my Diagnostic Assessment session with a client who wanted to know what “primal-related therapy” is.

He was one of those not too rare individuals who had tried Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and found it worthless. In his early thirties, he had been worn down by all the years of abuse and unlove from early childhood through his passing into adulthood, was suicidal, was a substance abuser, was a husband and father. Life was painted terribly dark and heavy. He was looking for a therapist and was serious enough to leaf down through all the smiley and model-looking young women in the Psychology Today ads until he got to my more sober (and less pretty) one. It mentioned how most therapy addresses only the persona that covers our real, utter lonely self, and doesn’t know the difference.

You can’t help people by getting them to change their thinking. I don’t even know that you can accomplish that: Are people really that shallow, impressionable and stupid that we out-logic them and get them to change a belief? And look at all the examples from this election season, all these surrogates and pundits with their absurd agreement with a Narcissist’s immaturity and bigotry. You can’t change ideas that they like. What makes therapists think it is any more possible to change negative ideas that have grown from the person’s life?

There is a line from an old Intro Psych text (Carol Tavris was one of the writers) that is relevant here: ‘The fact that aspirin can cure a headache doesn’t mean that headaches are caused by a lack of aspirin.’ (The passage, I believe, offered the reader a serious questioning of the idea that psychological problems are chemical imbalances.) The fact that we try to think our way out of bad feeling doesn’t mean we feel bad because we don’t think good. As my father used to joke, “It only hurts because of the pain.” We hurt because of pain. Jesus H. Fucking McGillicuddy. You have to go to the pain.