"My son is being a fuck*ng pain in my ass"

 

I have had four clients whose hearts are one with Donald Trump. Two of them were bad parents, one has no desire to have children, and one parents paradoxically. His love for his little boy is so fierce that it keeps him alive through his trauma darkness. But his unconscious, unaware father­ing is sometimes authoritarian and even threatening (‘bad grades will get you taken away’). He was slightly stunned, and educable, when I noted that this kind of discipline could collapse his son’s happiness and fearlessness.

I know it seems like pure emotional drama to generalize about all Republicans, or all Trump loyalists, as it would seem regarding all Democrats and liberals. But it is a fact that people who are loyal to this president have a defining “specialty” disturbance: an unremitting, unresolved pain at the seat of their life that has formed, through their early years, more as anger than as hurt. This anger is always there, beneath everything else that may look different from it, that may be different from it, throughout their lives.

Where is this anger going to show inexorably? In their responses to their children. Children are triggering. They are consciously or unconsciously reminiscent. Their promise “means” one’s own unfulfillment. Their spirit summons our lack of self. They are the lock on the vault door of one’s own loss of childhood.

We can’t “diagnose” all bad parents as Trump followers. But we can assume all Trump followers are problematic parents. Anger embedded in the soil poisons what grows in it.

No more Ms. Nice Guy

 

A logical chain of therapy process led to my asking a 36-year-old client: “Can you permit yourself not to be a nice guy?” She came in with the standards: depression and anxiety, and with a new appendage she called NVLD, “non-verbal learning disorder.” The symptoms, as she and the literature described them, were basically those of Asperger’s social ineptness, so we pretty much settled for the latter. No need for silly new “disorders.”

She knew even as a child that people didn’t seem to like her. A babysitter was abusive. My client, while not exonerating the abuse, wondered if it had been her “hyper” nature that had offended the babysitter. Her mother had what I could call Toxic Nurse Syndrome. How many women become nurses to sublimate, in a twisted way, their own childhood mess? Who are lovely to their patients and abhorrent to their children? Plenty. Her daughter was invisible to her. She would be “displeased” to hear her child’s “truth”: Stepfather, who entered the scene in the client’s early twenties, was mentally and physically abusive to her, and yet her mother married him and asked her to move on, get over it.

“Betty” had grown a defense mechanism that was similar to the “euthymic defense,” my term for fake happy – clients smiling, laughing, chipper, sweet, bubbly, joking when talking about situations that were not happy or funny, about people who had been abusive. Her defense was to be the consistently “respectful” child, the “goody two-shoes” (it disturbs me to hear a client use that phrase which was already wince-worthy in the 1950s). We came up with a theory. With such a manner, why would people – children and adults – not like her when she was young, and why would the same problem continue in her adult life? It was the pain of the historical abuse seeping through, sabotaging her. We knew she needed to get the pain out from beneath its benign cover, find her anger and give access to it, reclaim her underground continent of unhappiness and knife wounds of frustration. Release encapsulated injustice.

I’ve worked with clients in this vein for two decades, but I don’t think it ever occurred to me until now to take a step back and ask my question: Are you ready to become a heavier, darker person, not nice, who stands resolute before thirty-plus years of abuse, brooks not one more second of false diplomacy by parents or siblings? Are you ready to feel harder, see the world through x-ray eyes? Are you someone who could become a different person, a different personality, even though that would shift all relationships, probably kill some of them?

I think that’s a question prominent as the sun, but I’d never seen it clearly enough to name it to clients. Do we assume they are ready to change at this level? This is very, very different from “ameliorating” depression, “stabilizing mood,” palliating anxiety, excising some OCD behaviors. This is to become unself, which we could euphemize by calling it “your true self, who you should have been,” but which would be alien. And unknown to the person who’s always lived her life.

Dry humor, or wet seriousness for the new year #4: Hold everyone’s hand, Part 2

 

I imagine a nicer world where no one respects what anyone else thinks. Absence of the hypnotic consensus that has perennially gotten the world in trouble. Some philos­opher writes about the significance of Beauty or about Morality as duty, and we’d think: “Why should we care about that person’s ideas? I will conceive my own.” A physi­cist derives, from theoretical mathematics, some fantasy about super­string’s eleven dimen­sions, and we laugh: “Thanks for the joke.” Nix the musi­cian who assumed the legitimacy of punk rock – which arose from some neurotic camps’ mindless acceptance of some rebel-without-a-clue’s defiant mood – then branched off from it to create something even more false-derivative and effete. It tickles your fancy – that’s nice. But then you commit the error of joining a Stepford community that wants to believe there is some­ cultural value to the latest artifice.

Picture these independent souls in this new world! No slave-chains of assump­tion, no fanatical beliefs rammed up a mass rectum, no mobs, no movements, no genocides. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck claim, boobs that they were, that we feel because we think, and listeners say “Forget that. I can see in myself that’s not true.” Boys and men don’t have the macho attitude, which they would never have accepted after mid-adolescence. No one loves and believes and follows a Hitler or Trump botch.

What makes human beings’ urge to live the collective, the groupthink, a passiv­ity where there might instead be pause and consideration and the originality that is the essence of the human? Psycho­path­ology is the fundamental cause. A child must grow in the parents’ soil and may never, then, be strong enough to deeply question their gift of poi­son. Her mind and feeling core in hiber­nation, she will no longer be the “central actor”* of her life. Others’ thoughts will become her ground, her authority.

There is really little humor here, dry or otherwise. Our species has a second nature, as deep as the first, of the hive mind. Hundreds of thousands standing together falling to limitless siren calls. “U.S. criticizes Israel,” as if entities instead of individuals exist. A majority of Republicans, slaves of Oz, reject reality, reject their minds, which is the meaning of their lockstep delusion about the election. Are we all one? Is there a universal common bond? The idea has long been implicit, but I believe it needs to be rethought, down to the marrow.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/10/spartacus-was-odd-oppositional-defiant.html. Footnote.