Headline: "You Elected a Psychopath"

If President Trump were a diagnosable psychotic – Paranoid Schizophrenia – shouldn’t that startling and meaningful fact be known to everyone? As he announced his candi­dacy, as he ran for president, as he served in the White House. It would be difficult to imagine living our daily lives as citizens where such a stupendous truth was hidden, or was known by some and suspected by many, but shushed in the national ether and kept out of the media.

It must be so: We are not a nation of blinkered slaves or pacified sheep. We are not a nation of delusional rally-attenders. We would need to know the worst, stigma be damned and burned away by stark reality.

So why, please tell me, shouldn’t it be broadcast everywhere that the president is a psychopath, a paragon of the extreme end of Antisocial Personality Disorder? The ruined-by-birth-and-childhood deformity without a conscience and with a need for destruction that cannot be quelled?

Many of us knew early on that Trump’s narcissism was just the ornate saddle on a shark-like, mindless predatory and corrosive force. Yet owing to a number of factors: allure, prestige, hero-worship, tradition, the eternal stage of countless people play-acting the adult – call human spuriousness what you will – we pushed our brains to settle on his gaucherie and eccentricity, his personality, his misdemeanors and felonies. We subdued ourselves to the taboo of ad hominem, declaring and reproaching “narcissism” and “sociopathy” but not screaming and stamping them into the people’s skulls. Only now, as it all ends and crumples in on itself, as more exposés are published and diagnostic truths re-, re-, reaffirmed, are our cognitive smog and our decorousness finally evaporating to reveal the monster in its full luridness.

I will admit that I have felt impotent before “the base,” those millions who use their blindness and sickness to destroy so many right things in our country. They may do it yet again: There is nearly endless power in projected pain. But at the very least they must know that they have elected a psychopath, a creature whose lair should be the psychi­atric unit, prison, or house arrest. They must know the word and its definition, hear and read it, then not be able to forget it. My wish is that some wealthy humanitarian would buy ads in every “red state” newspaper, journal and rag, stating in 72-point Helvetica Bold the insane truth. If the light can’t open their eyes, maybe the dark can.

Some more on Depersonalization

A young man, age 16, with severe Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. He said: “The feelings are getting more complicated. Like the painting (office wall) feels real but the room doesn’t.” “Me feeling detached from reality. Everything feels like a mystery, foggy, fuzzy. This feels like not me.” And, “I can’t comprehend that I’m human some­times."

Basic background: Father and older sister would fight often. Client seemed to blame his sister while acknowledging that his father “was a jerk to her.” Mother was the “peace­maker.” He would have “heavy emotional flows,” depression with, at its worst, suicidal feeling, and breakdowns. But then, the antithesis: “I see my family as strangers. It’s hard to have emotions. I can’t feel for them.”

Has anyone figured out the neurology that takes a love-bare home and years-long emotional repression and turns them into depersonalization and derealization? I haven’t learned of it. This is a different species of repression, of dissociation. I noticed in me, many years ago, a general out-of-phase with reality that would be “enhanced” by episodes of depersonalization. I’ve defeated much of the detachment but not all. Example: If I exercise for more than five minutes, I feel that I’m taxing my mind in a poisonous way by making it push around this foreign bulk that is not myself. This makes impossible the exertion.

The young client became emotionally numb to his gauche family early on, to where they were “strangers.” I described the same phenomenon in an earlier blog post:

My 1950’s family was a roll-of-the-dice assemblage of fake-emoters and sleepwalkers. Growing up, I was inert to any feeling about ‘family’ or ‘happy family’ or bond or loyalty or love or even reliance. Pick a dozen or two random words from the dictionary – ‘nostril,’ ‘bridge,’ ‘perambulate,’ ‘dish,’ ‘rally,’ ‘circumference,’ etc. I will experience more gut feeling for any of them than I do for ‘father’ and ‘mother,’ ‘mom’ and ‘dad.’ Those terms do not compute in my psyche. My placid eyes and galvanic skin response would prove it.*

Emotional anesthesia can birth a variety of offspring. Dysthymia; physical numbness – a trauma­tized nurse couldn’t feel the backs of her hands; lack of empathy; lack of goal or career interest; sense of having no identity: “I don’t know who I am”; a life of vaporous intellect that will seem powerful but is actually void. Add family sterility to this anesthesia and you may grow to suffer the lobotomy of self-unreality and world-unreality. Full detach­ment from the people who were critical to your life energy may produce a peculiar chemistry: Without that mirror, there is no reflection. It seems likely that birth trauma is also a factor: the first wound and its shock.

I found that over the years, my depersonalization and feeling of a mechanical world significantly leached out, leaving the real person. What made this happen? Feeling. Getting in touch with primal loss: Allow­ing the worst emotions of childhood failure cleared the path for other feelings, which are one’s connection to self and the world. Thirty years ago, I couldn’t smell a rose, feel a heart or see my children. Feeling is healing.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/09/transit-2-carrying-my-family-to-work.html.

Psych-Op-Ed

I got this unpleasant feeling recently, wading and soaking in the news, the punditry, the pandemic, the seasonal air currents. It was a meta feeling, which could be described this way:

We know everything.

We know Trump is a failed child, composed of impotence and injury and rage, the rat with a thorn in its paw that no lion ever extracted for him. We know contemporary Republicans are not decent, but are psychologically botched, often in the general realm of sociopathy. They easily blend the true principle of autonomy with racist exclusionism. They need their club affiliation – Trump Club – more than they need their self-worth, their self. We know that all people live on opinions based on attitudes, based on feelings that are never questioned.

We know there is now, most unpleasantly, a theme in the national sky that binds all of us liminally: We must be forcibly deferential, wearing masks; and we all know that the virus has won because American individ­ual­ism degenerated at some point to childish defiance.

We know that just as Hollywood is high school with money, government leadership is rival gangs with turf wars, enforcers, signals and group-think ideologies. The never-reached rainbow’s end is “what is right?”, “what is wise?”, “what is mature?”, “what is practical?”

All this knowledge has sapped my interest in, my ability to write comments on the daily papers such as the New York Times, Slate, Mother Jones. For me, there is nothing left to say. This will very likely revert to my old matchstick-in-the-wind argumentation when November approaches, and if Biden becomes president. My heart would then be filled, momentarily, with joy and explosive revenge. If Trump wins, I suspect my attitude will be “same projectile diarrhea, different day,” and there will be no more words. I’d wearily imagine joining my expat clients in Puerto Vallarta, then slip back to my routine, like Puff sadly to his cave.

Knowing everything is insipid these days.