Why Trump must fail at everything

Trump must fail at everything, in his presidential duties, because any success would require being part of humanity. But the feeling of being in humanity is beyond anathema to him. For him, to get even a sense of bond and benevolence is to be forced to feel the complete absence of love in his childhood. And to feel that loss is to feel unhuman, his utter aloneness, a being that never left the starting gate of birth, a waste of body and soul.

So every single thought or path must veer away from the known good, the caring. In the same way that a Reactive-Attachment child, broken from her mother at birth and institutionalized and adopted, must lie unnecessarily, must lie always and primitively not to feel reality, the reality of her initial failure, so Trump must never touch the good, the holding of others’ hands in love and life. He is the magnet only bonding negative to positive.

Immigrant children. Allies. Truth-reporting pundits. Medicaid. Pardoning of reprobates. The Kurds. NATO. Dismantling of the civil service. Budget cuts devastating rural America. White supremacists. Love of Putin. Disaster response. Firing the pandemic response team. On and on and on and on. The coronavirus. How could a president act incompetently and stubbornly in the face of a pandemic? He must. He cannot allow himself to be good. It’s too terrible a reminder.

A human being, not a human doing

Somehow, I have never presented, in twenty-two years, the following choice or directive to a client, until this afternoon*:

We understand now where your chronic stomach pain, distress, dysfunction comes from. It’s anxiety that became embodied in the repressive, topsy-turvy, frustrating, strange atmosphere of your childhood home. You remember your father being angry every day. You remember your mother’s bizarre, dissociative, escapist happy whistling and inane singing, every day. Your sister, with her suicidal depression, recently returned to you the memory of your mother’s sudden flipping to rage, cruelty and violence. She would push you away in revulsion, shove you. And then the next second, switching compartments, sweet smiles and nonsense tunes again.

In that setting, you had to go a little crazy by smiling, too, shoving all your feelings beneath a fake happiness. Lack of cheeriness would unleash your mother’s fury. Everything you couldn’t live or scream went into your gut.

If you decide you want to care about yourself, do something to stop being the stomach prison of anxiety, you will have to know consistently that your body symptoms are really emotions, feelings. You will have to know that that’s what you are and you’ll see that picturing these feelings is picturing your family that made them. You will have to become someone dedicated to your emotional healing. This would have to become your predominant way of living – not one hour a week, but your new purpose in life. You’d carry therapy outside of this office. At home you might write in private. At work, you already aren’t bothered by coworkers’ anxious solicitations to you to return to your smiling personality. To get better, you would have to become a different, darker person, and watch your family shake, be alarmed, storm around you. All of this would have to happen.

While readers might think this is an absurd intervention, what puzzles me is that most clients should be informed that healing requires a nearly preternatural commitment to it, to living from the new feelings and knowledge arrived at, until the old self mostly fades away – and that somehow I’ve never stated it this clearly to any of them before. And yet I’d heard about it, or something like it, in the past: Yalom once said (source forgotten) that therapy should be ‘the most important crisis in the client’s life.’

Barring unforeseen circumstances, this will be my next development.

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* Or if I have, I don’t remember.

“The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.

“I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, 1957, pages 9 and 10.

Clients who did things

Only late in my career did I start to dedicate deliberate focus to clients’ doing things in the real world as a result of their depth therapy. I supposed I had always just assumed the magic of regressive process to change lives. Taking productive action is obviously not an original idea, as it’s the sine qua non of any behavioral therapy and to a great degree, cognitive therapy. (I remain amazed by Albert Ellis’s recommendation that persons with social phobia should break the fever of their inhibition by farting in a crowded restaurant. As it went, the result of this strategy was that nothing ever healed Albert’s wholesale idiocy. Rest in peas, corn and lima beans, Smile-Without-A-Man!)

Basically, the core tenets of feeling-centered regressive therapy are that deep feeling-expression is healing, and that people change organically (not transiently as they might by cognitive brute force) when they feel different. In this approach, then, behavioral change happens because the client actually becomes a different person: Her chemistry – the feeling through which she sees and knows the world – changes. The euthymic (fake happy) individual has lifelong laughed and smiled away his true feelings, his autonomy, his emotional backbone. He remained imprisoned: the family goofball, the family inferior, the codependent server of others, the complaisant employee. Question that smile each moment it tries to happen, squelch that bubbly self-effacing laugh completely to feel what’s underneath, and he instantly gains psychological weight. He is grounded, no longer a leaf without roots. “Smile!” urge his prison guard parents and siblings. “Screw yourselves,” he now replies, stern. Or if he maintains politeness: “Considering this crappy family, which my eyes have only recently opened to, there is nothing to smile about.”

Here are some changes recent clients have made because of their greater gravity, less-polluted spirit, sharper eyes:

* S.L. will attend some Meetup activities, against the proscriptions of her boyfriend living in Belgium, who checks in with her every half-hour to make sure she is safe at home.

* E.T., 16 years old, has required her mother to keep her father at a distance, possibly forever.

* S.W. has closed the door to his boyfriend, has begun to move on.

* K.R., 15 years old, has understood that her Reactive-Attachment Disorder-based lying and clandestine antisocial behaviors come from her killed-at-birth self-esteem, requiring her to do and say anything to avoid feeling her bleak truth. She is now open, much less deceptive in therapy.

* A.C., 22, Asperger’s, is branching out. Flashy pepper spray necklace, fending off a dirty old man by means of a curt and grammatically punctilious epistle, attending events relatively far from home, even considering wearing something somewhat feminine and revealing.

* “Focus was on client’s disclosure that following previous session, she talked to her mother about the complete absence of mother’s empathy throughout her formative years.” While I “warned” the 17-year-old that this renaissance relationship will not in itself heal the past, and she will continue to have some oscillatory dark and puzzling moods, this development will strengthen her here-and-now and her future. (More work to be done.)

* J.W. has almost written off her father and has come close to dropping the ax on her mother-in-law. Terribly enmeshed and cut-off at the neck by her vicious father and obsequious mother, she is at the stormy vacillation stage.

* D.B. has almost ceased excoriating his wife and ruining their children. Still, it remains very hard to fall into the utter starvation and contempt of his childhood. And so he projects.

* K.L., 28, Filipino, has decided to move out of his family-of-origin home. He is the youngest of several siblings, and the first to do it.

* V.A., incipiently healed by emotional insight (needy inner child; “splitting off and projection”; “moral defense against bad objects”), he no longer idealizes his mother, doesn’t call her; doesn’t neurotically pamper his adult son.

* G.P. – I am waiting to see if the attenuation of his depression, over the course of seventeen sessions, has led to change. He has changed – “unfriended” his Trump-loving family, finally asked his mother painfully difficult questions about his father. But I cannot yet determine if this is related to his therapy.

I have not, obviously, named any of the clients whom I cannot move or have not moved. There is no doubt, though, that we must go to where we are wounded to change. Dragging someone along by their thinking head cannot be kosher.