Micro-Manifesto: Trump people

When Trump is gone, like an elephant fart in a slow breeze, his erstwhile followers will still be bent and burnt people. You don’t have to be a whale-saver, a saint, a liberal to be more real, more whole than they. You simply need to not project your burnt heart into the world, seeing people as empty vessels of your projections. You simply need to not misinterpret your own pain as poisonous ideas. Fans and respecters of a sociopathic narcissist: Your feeling, mirrored and redeemed by him, doesn’t have to go beyond you. Feel it. Know it, and know yourself. If you share it with anyone, share it with your parents.

People outside your childhood home didn’t do this to you.

Just be yourself

I recently received a transfer client from a clinician leaving the group practice. Interesting young man with a historical bipolar diagnosis which we determined to be valid. I perused – aloud for both our use – the other counselor’s progress notes. A phrase stuck out, hitting me in the eyeball and intestines simultaneously: “We discussed how feelings come from thoughts.” The majority of my previous articles over the past five years have proven the trashiness of this utterly blind and ignorant notion, that people are psychologically damaged because of their thoughts. I won’t go over this again now but to ooze upon you, readers, my cosmic violent contempt for the idea. Look at it this way: Imagine you are one of a lonely scattering of physicists who accept the atomic theory of matter, while the predominant belief among your peers is that Tinkerbell created all Substance, gave all the tiny balls their spin, and that the universe is what it is by magic, music and smiles. That’s akin to what my cohorts in this fine profession believe about the nature of their subject. Thinking is our escape from feeling, injury, and sickness, not the cause of them.

But this is how the world is. There is no consensus about the best knowledge. Everyone adheres to their own delusions – in the Trump era and before. And that is, sadly enough, actually better than all the agreement that exists in different domains. People agree, like children fed candy and stories, in political goals and ideologies that require physical force (punitive consequences and expropriation) to realize. They enrich artists of schlocky songs, while teenagers have never heard of or listened to Bach or Brahms or Samuel Barber.

It shouldn’t be different than this – we are just organisms – but I find it disappointing. I know that a part of my work is to try to effect a communing with my clients, where we are in the same deep place of childhood hurt and loss and adult wisdom and need. Sometimes this urge leads me to play a tune for them that they don’t know. I have found that certain principles of psychology are actually startling to them, and opening to some gold in the bowels of their life.

Instant relationship fix

My archives remember a rather messed-up guy who, in his teens, made the desperation mistake of adopting an immature joker archetype, then continued to endorse and feed it well into his late thirties. He still tried to be popular, tried to be the funny man, wanted to be extra-special, even using the word “glory” to describe his ideal. As you know, some childhoods are stamped in as trauma and the child never leaves. You have a man-boy, a woman-girl who can’t see beyond their early feelings and needs because the past is where they live, their ocean, while the present is the waves and whitecaps.

His relationship of three years was sick, like indigestion. He would actually cringe when she walked in the door. I don’t know what she saw in him. But he wanted it to work and I drew the line:

“You can end the hurt and destructiveness immediately, absolutely immediately, by putting your needs aside. If you really care about her, you can just be hurt, not angry. ‘That hurt me,’ not ‘but you do worse.’ Here is where this comes from: One of my first clients was a young mother who was unique. She said at her first session, ‘I mistreat my daughter. I’m the most important person in the room. I’m not going to be able to be a good mother until I heal from my own past, my own baggage.’ And she was right. Why shouldn’t that apply to marriage, to committed adult relationships: ‘I can’t be a good spouse until I deal with my own past’? Why do adults think they’re fine? Or troubled in their own life but worthy in their marriage? But like that mother, who can’t afford to wait until her demons are exorcised to stop abusing her child, must quickly do right, you can stop being poisonous immediately, while working with me into your foundational injuries. Your father left you and your mother, then returned five years later with a new young wife and children, and your mother put up with it. Breakdown after breakdown, she put up with it. And you lived in that swamp and that tear gas.”

In his partner, a man wants corrective justice for his past, but he doesn’t know it. He wants pure respect and love and accommodation just as the child he still is needed them. I’m very sorry. You get that from your dead mother and father, in here. Your partner gets your care.