If Nick Cannon thinks he's healed from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, then he's, well, full of it

The vehicle of a narcissistic personality, the disturbed inner environment that forms his world, is a belief: a belief in perfection, unique specialness, a priori entitlement, absolute ascendency, and differ­entiation and alienation from all other people. The engine of that vehicle is a feeling. But it is not a feeling of perfec­tion: “Perfection” does not exist as a feeling or emotion in the human spectrum. It is a disturbing feeling that fuses anxiety, emptiness, a disabling falseness of the adult self and the dreaded reality of the never-grown child. The feeling’s engine is the truth of, and possibly the sense of, developmental failure in the first few years of life. Something – often the parents’ empty idealization (“you are the best”; “you’ll play at Carnegie Hall one day”; “you are the smartest little boy”) – plants the future means of escape from that truth. The person may have been pathologically immature at fourteen and suddenly falsely mature and intellec­tualized at fifteen. His buried feeling of still being a child will remember his parents’ attribution of specialness. It will not contain love and will feel alone. He has become the solipsist whose entire universe is a mirror.

Narcissistic personality is a delusion, which is a false belief a person is deeply invested in, making it feel true. It is a core delusion, protecting the person from feeling his lack of identity. There are other, non-core delusions that a narcissist may have. He may lose his arrogant certainty that his political party is always right (he may detach and feel that it is not a reflection of him). He may even stop believing his spouse loves him (deciding she is psychologically botched), and his ego would remain intact. But he would not be able to shed his belief that he is physically appealing or that he is perfectly expert in his chosen field. Dismantling these beliefs would cause him to descend into the all-consuming fire of infancy pain.

The most obscure aspect of narcissism is its identity of pristine perfection. Hard work and assiduous effort mean nothing to a narcissist. Excellence is intol­er­able: It doesn’t say he is above all others and it allows for inferiority. A narcissist requires absolute Godliness in one way: There is only one god.

A narcissist who moved away from civilization, who had to survive alone, would be distressed to feel his sense of uniqueness and perfection fading away. He must be unique and fundamentally unlike other people. But literally alone, any sense of self would disappear. With no one to be better than, he would feel nothing but the radical emptiness of the child he was who never grew. He would collapse in a painful void. Struggling to maintain his only sense of living, his narcissism, he might exalt feeble virtues: He walks with perfect stealth on the hunt. He designs the flawless trap. He grows the perfect crop. His thoughts are noble and stern and master his world. Only these conceits could keep him safe. He would eventually, in a terribly lonely moment, give in to the wish that he could just be a person, a feeling person who could lean on someone, cling to someone, fall into someone, a caring nurturer. But there has never been that person. So he had to be alone, not needy, not dependent, unique and impervious. He could only feel pain so he had to become a thought, a belief. Pain became deluded to pleasure. Failure became deluded to success. Inferiority became deluded to superiority.

In sum: Feeling is pain to the future Narcissist, the pain of never becoming. To have human feelings is that early abort. He had to be beyond the human: perfect.

Terse and pithy explanation of Trump's win

Unlike all the pundits, apparently, I don’t have the knowledge and analytical skills to weigh every factor involved in Harris’s loss and Trump’s win. Then again, they all have differing views that are controlled by their feelings, so it’s sort of a wash. My sense, coming from a psychological perspective, is that policy preferences were not the point. I believe the essential factor was Trump’s extreme personality of angry contempt that honored the “bitter inner child” of millions of people then swayed their minds to his agenda. For example, he made them despise immigrants where on their own most of them would have had more considerate appraisals. My few Trump-voting therapy clients are different at the core of their identity from my other clients. Essentially, their deep-seated pain turned right to rage rather than left to tears. Therapists know that clients who can grieve can be helped. Grieving can dissolve the thorns that aggravate their heart. Those who cleave to rage remain unhelped, and impaled.

(Adapted comment to a New York Times published interview with Nancy Pelosi)

Today should be named Parents Day

The least interesting and the most valid perspective: If Trump wins, blame the parents of today’s voters for giving their progeny a sense of life that features impotence, bitterness, free-floating anger and a need for superiority over others. This is the essence of it: Trump is the redeemer of victims who became bullies. (TPS published comment to an NYT article – https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/42vegc?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

This is why those errant minds aren’t changing on Election Day, why they rarely changed over the course of the candidates’ campaigns or over the last eight years, and why they were unlikely to change over the span of their entire lives. If Trump wins the election, it will be because the parents of his voters (and the parents of their parents) wrote blueprints for their children’s formative years that created angry wounds and a broad landscape where healing couldn't happen.

I see the psychic difference between those who opt for a narcissistic, sociopathic and authoritarian president and those who don’t as a factor of bereavement. Those who could grieve the critical loss in their childhood – essentially, deprivation of their distracted or disturbed parents’ love and bond – would find some sad or resigned inner peace. In that calm, they could see and feel more clearly. They would feel tragedy more than outrage in their own lives and, by extension, in the world. They would know, as Irvin Yalom’s Carlos in Love’s Executioner finally knew, that “everyone has got a heart.” Those who did not have the opportunity or courage to grieve the critical loss in their childhood would remain on fire. They would remain the bitter, defeated king on their underground throne, nursing their rageful pain and projecting it into the world. They would see, through unconscious eyes, other people as better able to flourish, as indifferent to their suffering, as their defeaters. They would find comfort in those people, and that candidate, who justified their inner pain and its projections.

Like many who are voting for Harris, I do not find her powerfully inspiring. Presidential politicians are egoists who don’t know how to fix the country or the world. They use different aptitudes and personality points as their guideposts, and we have to hope that they don’t damage our lives. One-half of the population realizes, however, that Harris is a normal person with normal-range flaws, and that this is infinitely preferable to a man whose errors are more toxic to others than to himself, especially as he vigorously endorses those errors as is the nature of personality disorder.

On Election Day morning, I’m slightly optimistic about a Harris victory. It’s not an angry optimism and is not actually focused primarily on the candidate. It’s more the underlying optimism of someone who sees life, the universe and everything (homage to Douglas Adams) in the benign and sunny way that a cared-for child – or slightly healed adult – would.

Trump lovers are constipated, angry babies

Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, could be considered immature. Fundamental depression and anxiety are formed in a home where a child was hurt and could not send his pain to a loving and empathic caregiver. This means there is aborted emotional development – immaturity. Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, have repressed or “leaky” or overt frustration of childhood needs not met, manifesting in anger, irritability, self-blame or other-blame.

For a child, other-blame, also known as externalization of responsibility, is right. He did not cause his problems and he is right to blame those who hurt him and left him with no other recourse than to misbehave or inflict pain on others.

Many children, owing to some shard of decency in their lives, are able to grow up and face, in or out of therapy, their emotional immaturity. They are desperately needy but challenge their codependency. They see that their anger comes mostly from their past and they cease blaming it on others in the present. They have achieved adequate separation-individuation not to fall on their knees before heroes. They have achieved enough independence of thought not to form delusions about other races, ethnicities and sexes.

These are not Trump lovers. Trump lovers have not faced their emotional immaturity. They have not done deep grief work in therapy. They continue to blame others in the present, though their perpetrators are in the past. They cling to dependencies – heroes, victimized wives, groupthink, rally mobs. They had to bury the starved need for warm benevolence in their childhood and viscerally hate it now, believing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are hateful, terrible people. Lacking a caring hand, an “enlightened witness” in childhood to guide them out of their self-breathing and self-reinforcing bubble and into the real world, they suffer global delusions about millions of individuals they have never met.

My therapy clients who are Trump admirers are self-declared misanthropes, bitter rejectors of groups of people or of all people. They are rage-filled children still drowning in adult bodies. Beneath a surface which may feel benign about small things and about like-minded people and about the families they protectively own, lies a lava field of unhealed pain and injustice. They, the child, will forever be out of sync with themselves and the world that grew up around them.

It is impossible for a healthy or healing person to admire a sociopath and narcissist like Trump.

Preface to a barely conceived future second book (not a joke, probably)

In America’s present psycho-culture, the term “evidence-based” has become the favored hypnotic buzzword of my hypnotized profession. Implying rigorous science, it is the imprimatur of instant trustworthiness and value. It is applied primarily to various species of “cognitive therapy” including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), rational emotive therapy, EMDR (“Phase 5: installation of new cognitions”), reality therapy, existential therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy. What is the nature of this evidence that equals tacit proof of effectiveness? During or after their therapy, clients and former clients tell someone they feel better.

I submit that they do not tell themselves they feel better, not for long, not within themselves at the deepest root of their sense of self. This is because thoughts – the medium of exchange of cognitive and most other therapies – can’t change the physical history of the body and mind and feelings. Thoughts impotently, fickly, restively color then pass through the cloud of the head. One has to force, over and over and over again, positive or “rational” words into consciousness to believe one has improved, become a different person.

In psychotherapy, the only true evidence of improvement is inner experience. No one outside of you can fully know who you are or how you are, even while analyzing you, even while knowing you for years, even if you are rich and full of laughter and surrounded by friends and love, or poor and alone. No one else can know. To understand your psychic status is to feel yourself, not just your surface changeable feelings, but those embedded in your inner childhood, the emotional themes of your existence.

My previous book, ‘I Forgive’ and Other Delusions, is a collection of ten years of therapy blog articles based on established principles, client work and brutal introspection. It features many case histories and, admittedly, a title that is bound to separate the men from the boys, or more accurately, the seekers from the hiders. Illustrated Dictionary of Contrarian Depth Therapy aims to establish a foundation of insights about the human psyche that I believe can only be contested by wishful thinking. I am disgusted that people’s need for healing has been turned into smiles and brute-force hope by a profession that should be intransigently reality-based. Psychotherapy has become the most deceptive of self-medications, a bait-and-switch where hurting people may initially be profoundly heard, possibly for the first time in their lives, but then quickly guided to bright-paint and spin (“reframe”) their lifelong pain, pain that needs, above all, to be expressed exactly as it is to a caring person.

Stacked deck: The Colt Gray matter

Response to Megan Stack’s September 6th New York Times article, “Blaming a Parent, Again, for Failed Gun Laws.” The article’s title itself (which she may not have written but doubtless inspired) is an étude in tendentious illogic. The article shows that Ms. Stack wants to understand nothing about mental health and illness. (Comment is actually at The Washington Post as Ms. Stack's article didn't include the comment function.)

It’s adults, not young teens, who are prone to turn their childhood injury, such as parent’s shaming or physical abuse, into an emotional illness of global hatred and destruction: “All (ethnicity or color or age or sex of choice) should die.” Children haven’t experienced the cumulative years of injustice to degenerate into such a global delusion. So imagine what this boy must have gone through by age 14 to be so full of hatred for self and others that he must kill random people and end his own future. Warning signs? Probably every single day of his young life.

Yes, it probably takes a motley village of abusive, and blind, and overburdened, and impotent, and distracted, and uncaring, and ignorant adults to produce a child murderer (with the possible exception of the “callous and unemotional child” turned psychopath). But the line of acceptable disconnection and irresponsibility must be drawn somewhere. In the case of Colt Gray, the father appears to be well over that line.

Trauma (aka "Get real, label-heads")

Therapeutic healing should be natural, like breathing. You breathe in, you breathe out. How destructive – literally – it would be to just breathe in and not breathe out. You take in the emotional stimuli of the world and you must express them outward. You love your dog and you must pet it. To withhold that expression would be to suffer. A child is hurt by her father, she must cry and possibly rage; but the hurt and tears are primary. Trauma is simply a more powerful injury that must be commensurately expressed outward. Commensurately: You don’t “primal scream” if you spill coffee on your shirt (unless it is the latest in a long series of unexpressed frustrations), and you don’t just say “ouch” if you’re raped. If we set aside all the species of therapy that exist, I believe most people would have a natural sense of what they need to do to answer traumatic pain: Get it out by the most powerful expressions. Tame therapy cannot work. Process must be expulsive, explosive, emotional, verbal, physical.

This was my comment to a Slate.com article about a bad therapist. (In fact, I didn't read the article as I'm not a paying Slate member. My statement didn't require a reading.) Many of the other commenters showed their knowledge of this or that brand of therapy, such as EMDR, “brainspotting” and CBT, and their good and bad experiences with different therapists. I just wanted to point out what should be obvious but what remains as contemporaneously unknown as the foreplay before the Big Bang.

Choose your Trump side, or your life

This is vaporous theory, but I believe it’s true and actionable. For most Republicans who are not diagnosable sociopaths like Donald Trump, it is a matter of choice whether to live internally in a warm place or a cold place, to be an endorser and concluder of alienation or a recognizer of need and love. This would be true because most of us who grew up in emotional starvation in our home also owned a kernel of birth love or infancy bond. My own example may suffice.

My childhood was loveless and inert in feeling. I’ve never had the slightest inkling of warmth, love or even pity for either parent, yet also never any anger and disownership. But something somewhere in my origin planted, along with severe need, the potential for affection. That bloomed during a very short window in my latency years, around six to nine. I loved a friend like the sun is burning bright. That feeling faded to nothing as I approached my teens.

In high school, I was a Libertarian. Libertarianism, not far from Conservatism but more nihilistic, is an emotional attitude turned into specious logic more than it is a political ideology. We Libertarians were for the most part followers of Ayn Rand: lost, inferior-feeling, with no heart-driven loves or passions. We needed some belief to let us feel superior while alone and alienated.

I’ve done some work on myself in the meantime, over the last thirty years. A result of that work was to let me see the buried “golden kernel” that already existed – more than it was to grow that kernel. Even now, in a mood, I can feel my predominant darkness and see Trump as the perfect representative of my survival as a soul amputee. I salute him and wish his malignant agenda great success. But then I feel – a molecule to the left or maybe beneath – my seed of life, the good, the cherished bond, the best potential of life in love. And Trump is revealed to be the disease that he is.

I choose that molecule. I choose it because it is right and feels best though it brings pain. It sits alone, an ungrown seed of gold in the dark field of the past that will extend to the future, to the last day of my life. But I would rather love and be loss, than never to have loved at all.

This is the choice that most of us have. It’s the choice to be our human best not failure. And incidentally, it's the choice that would relegate Donald Trump to obsolescence.

Victim Personality Disorder

I have recently had six clients who would not, I believe, be diagnosed with a personality disorder by any rule-following therapist, yet I believe they would qualify for an unspecified one. Some of them have paranoid-like assumptions. Some meet criteria for the once-proposed Depressive Personality (DSM-IV axes for further study). Some meld both syndromes in a thick soup of negativity.

They could be called Victim Personality Disorder.

D, 43, is enmeshed in his family of origin. They are the constant headline in his life. There is a bitterness and rage against them for deprioritizing him. It is the subject of every session. E, 23, is similarly fused to her parents and older sibling. She has been the recipient of bullying and malign intent at every job she’s had. This includes conspiracies among coworkers. T, 52, with chronic baseline anger and vengeance intent, feels condescended to and harassed at work and has an EEO case in the works. Same with N, age 41, except that her discrimination case ended in defeat. K, 31, suffers extreme dysphoria, is constantly miserable, passively endures bullying by coworkers. He has a girlfriend but she doesn’t seem to bring him any happiness beyond the moment. L, 24, has lost five jobs in a row, has been bullied and made fun of at each one.

None of them has a capacity for stable happiness or even calm, though most of them are in a relationship they would call positive. This is the Depressive Personality component.

What in these clients equals or approximates a personality disorder? What differentiates them from people who have a “bad attitude”? I think you have to go geological here, down through the layers of their character history to some early place in childhood where there was either a proton or an electron, a positive kernel or a flame. Those still simmering will see only smoke in their landscape and will probably have no insight: “I am being harassed, disliked, mocked every place I work. It’s not me, it’s them.” It’s this seamless certainty without relenting that begins the diagnosis of a character disorder.

Next step is the cognitive escape from feeling. Each of them lives in thought, pessimistic thought beneath which they cannot go that covers their volcanic, childhood-origin emotional pain. Their thinking insists and argues like a cornered rat to prevent their vulnerability to the tears that belong to their youth.

A supplemental feature that I've seen in some of these clients is a blind childishness. They believe with rock-solid certainty that their fellow adults are disliking and bullying and ganging up on them, persecuting them as only immature children would do. They don't realize they are still children forlorn in their elementary and middle school classrooms.

I don’t doubt that some of these individuals have both flame and calm at their core. These are the ones who can grudgingly accept that there may be reason for hope, the sun may come out, but they can’t live in that place.

Therapists know (or should know) that personality disorders are next-to-impossible to dispel. Dialectical Behavior Therapy and other Cognitive approaches do not attempt to get to the root of Borderline Personality in Masterson's "abandonment depression." A Narcissist would disintegrate were he to somehow lose his sense of special perfection. We can’t make a Dependent Personality want to have initiative, be independent and alone. We can't give a sociopath a conscience. And my lesser afflicted clients? Is there a way to break through their suffering and thinking and victim-mind that protect their pain from exiting?