…the question for the therapist is really ‘what do i(we) do with my(our) anger?’… & it’s not so much the anger at Drumpf/Musk but the angst with the 40+% of our voting brethren who believed the BigLies…
The most effective thing we can do with what we feel is justified anger or even rage, is to recognize that this emotion is a form of energy. And we can use it and transform it.
Our work is to transform that unuseful energy to useful energy; then we can use our elevated energy to influence our immediate environment and have a ripple effect outward to bring sanity, justice, compassion and wisdom. (see www.holdenqigong.com for practices to work with, elevate and transform energy-emotional, physical…)
This is what invoking heroes can help us do… those who have been at terrible junctures throughout history and have shown courage and wisdom in the face of monsters and at great personal risk…Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, the Buddha, Jesus…many, many known and unknown folks; many quiet heroines and heroes who change the world for the better inn some way- small, medium, large. Results sometimes seen in one’s lifetime, but often not.
We’re seeing many heroes stepping up now, sacrificing their careers and personal security for the benefit of the whole. Support and thank them. Ask ourselves how we can use any possible personal influence- however small it seems. We can do it.
Throughout this world’s history, we have continually had injustice, violence, hegemony, Greed, Jealousy, insanity, neurosis, sociopathology and psychopathology.
And we have clearly had great teachers, leaders, friends, family members, community members, who have inspired us to reach greater heights of courage, curiosity and compassion to evolve into the best humans we can be.
Nobody wants to admit that they are wrong about Trump because that makes them feel even more “worm” like. I spent years in therapy before I believed that my narcissistic father was not my friend. And like the cult of Trump I could not separate from my dad but had to straddle my connection to his insanity and pursuing my own path at the same time until his death freed me from his toxic influence. I’m now seeing that my eldest sister has the same narcissistic personality and that unbeknownst to me has had a detrimental impact on my life. Painful as it is I have now been estranged from her for three years and am in the process of trying to save my relationship with her son. Mental illness is the last frontier in medical understanding and it is pervasive and intractable and terrifying.
Thank you. Please keep writing and advising. Traumatizing Narcissist is a new term for me but very understandable.
We must stay connected with the things that have brought us joy in the past-I am a maker and writing/recording songs, making clothing, etc is a way for me to stay in the here and now.
We do need ways of identifying children who need help overcoming their trauma so they don’t grow up to be like these people and we need better ways of handling the narcissists in our lives. Most often they are enabled which allows them to perpetuate their nonsense.
And Curtis Yarvin? A crackpot fringe weirdo? This is the tragedy of the 21st Century that he has any influence at all.
In explaining this to my wife a couple of more points stood out. I find confusion in allen frances' laying out of Trump's personality. One feature of a failing defense mechanism in personality disorders is decompensation and we saw that during the campaign; while pundits remarked on Biden's hesitation and weak articulation, Trump was incoherent, a sign of decompensation. You could see Trump's distress yesterday with the Musk boy in the Oval Office; somebody was taking attention away from Trump and even trying to approach him! Trump turned away, on a four-year old (Lawrence O'Donnell covered that well last night).
Next, paranoid is a matter of being the center of attention; as a psychiatrist I worked with analogized it, a person walking across a packed stadium before the game, just another guy walking around, and he believes everyone is watching him, he is paranoid; it doesn't necessarily mean you feel under threat. By that measure, Trump is surely paranoid as aides last term evidenced by slipping his name into anything they wanted him to read.
Re 'superior race of people': that fits Nancy MacLean's description of the early Libertarians whose monumental work over seven decades has given us Project 2025; they were either racists combatting school integration or using that issue to climb to power, just like the GOP has been fattening themselves on racist sympathy since Goldwater's Southern Strategy.
All of this is right on the money, so much so that I almost wrecked my retired therapist's aging neck nodding right along. Which brings me to a sincere question: HTH do we who have spent a lot of time with people who have been traumatized by narcissistics (which includes almost all of the poor and all people of color, and also maybe half of all women) find a way to be heard, or more accurately, to have what we know become part of the understanding of non-therapists? An old joke that floats around is that if a therapist should start talking 'psychological stuff' on a train, half the people within hearing range will get up and move to another car. Same can happen at parties, in my humble experience. It's frankly maddening to see how dangerous the MAGA cult is,and how pathetic, and to know that its members are so clueless about the grooming, the gaslighting, the engendering of fear necessary to keep it going. Sometimes you feel like Cassandra on the walls of Troy..
I achieved fame among my two friends who listened to me when Trump came down the escalator: personality disorder. Over all these years, as you mentioned, a few professionals, including Trump's niece, Mary, have stepped forth on this but the media treats them as opinions rather than diagnoses. A friend treated his doctors' diagnoses as opinions until he couldn't walk anymore. Those last few paragraphs of this piece need to be tatooed on everyone's forehead.
What preceded the trip down the escalator was a year of actual research. Trump assigned one of his harem of lawyers to listen to right-wing radio all over the country and report back on what got them most outraged. The answer was immigration, especially at the border, the reason these listeners could not be successful themselves. He already knew how potent hatred of blacks could be when it was frankly stated. And he had the fantasy of himself as the very successful tycoon, thanks to his TV image, with the thrill of "You're Fired!" With Roy Cohn as his mentor. Personality disorder helps, certainly, but there's a lot of both luck and cunning in his rise.
Seeking safety is an understandable survival drive. As we are experiencing, some people attempt to feel safe by wielding power over others. As Shaw indicates, the humane individual’s task is to develop an internal equilibrium that supports a sense of safety. Dr. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist, said. “Our nervous system is always trying to figure out a way for us to survive, to be safe.” He developed the evidence-based Safe & Sound Protocol, a non-invasive acoustic intervention which allows the nervous system to adapt and find safety more quickly. Porges is working to see that organizations and our medical system embody safety as an essential basis for nourishing health and survival. The Safe & Sound Protocol can support those of us who are committed to staying strong in this fight for Democracy.
The thing about most psychopathologies is that there are usually some sort of limitations that are put on them by some force, be it family members, friends, the law or some other impactor or imposer of consequences. Trump literally is the most powerful person on the planet, has regularly avoided accountability for his behavior and is totally surrounded by knee benders who protect him and tell him he’s great. I liken this to a person with severe alcohol use disorder who is surrounded by unlimited liquor and people who will enable him to keep drinking and tell him he doesn’t have a problem. I think this will either end with some implosion of him, via his actions or health, or his behavior will grow so uncontrollable that even his stooges will choose to intervene. Unfortunately, most of the ones he has historically had while in office just resign and try to save themselves without pushing back on him. The question for all of us is how much damage will be done in the meantime. I predict an eventual call for martial law.
What I find eerie about the Trump entourage is their similarity to Hitler's inner circle. Most of them were broken men---emotional and mental misfits with toxic masculinity fantasies they tried to instill into German culture, e.g., Aryan men with subservient Aryan women and eliminating the weak. I've come to the conclusion that fascism, German or American style, at its core fueled by a malignant form of misogyny. The performative and destructively performative features of these early days of Trump are like rouge bull elephants or, closer to home, like an adolescent gang bent on violence, territory and women they can push around. The psychology behind this phenomenon is just this: early in their development, these men were severely abused or severely neglected and probably both. Yes. we can point to that being true for many people; they don't necessarily become abusers. That's only partly true as domestic violence statistics show. But how are "individuals" like Trump created? They manage to bypass normative social, institutional, and societal accountability tests. Somehow, some way, these folks, with their personality disorders, got a free pass to the top. Not enough of us held them accountable for their behaviors at any rung up their ladder; in fact, they may have been rewarded for their behaviors.
Big picture---how is this possible? The lubricant is white, male, heterosexual privilege. It's been a longstanding reality in the United States that some people (of color, for example) have to prove their "innocence", because they are preemptively (and unconsciously) seen as guilty (of driving while Black) in the eyes of law enforcement, our institutions and the general public. While others, like Trump, continue to get a free pass. In our November election, some 77 million Americans said loud and clear: "Mr. Trump, you don't have to go to jail. You can pass Go."
Thank you for this excellent interview which I especially valued because of Dan's advice of "Stay sane. Stay humane. Don't isolate." I've had to limit my intake of national news to mornings only and then what is reported by people and organizations whose skill in reporting I value. For two weeks I was consuming much more and it was already effecting my sleep (I was losing it), my interactions with others, my health physically and mentally. These three things are what I discovered I needed to do not just for my well-being but if I am to respond in any kind of effective way to the madness unfolding in this country.
I very much appreciate this interview as I remember the writing by many therapists before Trump’s first election warning us about his narcissism, while in contrast this time therapists have been mostly silent about this issue. I have imagined that like so many people fearful of our current President and his sycophants that therapists have not been willing to share their expertise on Trump’s narcissism and risk retribution, an understandable position. Yet, now is just the time when the voices of therapists are particularly needed to provide deeper understandings of our President and his drive for power.
The description of his followers, afraid of freedom and needing to feel protected by orange daddy, appears to parallel Christian evangelicals’ iron clad belief that god is all powerful and will take care of all worries. Perhaps this applies to all religions?
We aren't going to win this or successfully push back just by understanding the abusive relationship with a narcissist. It may make us feel better, but it won't get us out of this pickle by pointing a finger at Elon and saying shame. What may make a difference with the people who CAN do something (congress) is this.
During WWII, after Hitler (another narcissist) invaded France, an "official" government that was loyal to Der Fuhrer was set up called the Vichy Government which collaborated with the Nazis. We have a similar situation going here where so much of Congress and some other agencies are collaborating with Trump and Musk in this unlawful coup.
Maybe it's time to call it like it is politically and tell Congress and ICE and any other agency that is bowing in collaboration with Trump and Elon and that they, too, are collaborators.
…the question for the therapist is really ‘what do i(we) do with my(our) anger?’… & it’s not so much the anger at Drumpf/Musk but the angst with the 40+% of our voting brethren who believed the BigLies…
The most effective thing we can do with what we feel is justified anger or even rage, is to recognize that this emotion is a form of energy. And we can use it and transform it.
Our work is to transform that unuseful energy to useful energy; then we can use our elevated energy to influence our immediate environment and have a ripple effect outward to bring sanity, justice, compassion and wisdom. (see www.holdenqigong.com for practices to work with, elevate and transform energy-emotional, physical…)
This is what invoking heroes can help us do… those who have been at terrible junctures throughout history and have shown courage and wisdom in the face of monsters and at great personal risk…Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, the Buddha, Jesus…many, many known and unknown folks; many quiet heroines and heroes who change the world for the better inn some way- small, medium, large. Results sometimes seen in one’s lifetime, but often not.
We’re seeing many heroes stepping up now, sacrificing their careers and personal security for the benefit of the whole. Support and thank them. Ask ourselves how we can use any possible personal influence- however small it seems. We can do it.
Throughout this world’s history, we have continually had injustice, violence, hegemony, Greed, Jealousy, insanity, neurosis, sociopathology and psychopathology.
And we have clearly had great teachers, leaders, friends, family members, community members, who have inspired us to reach greater heights of courage, curiosity and compassion to evolve into the best humans we can be.
LET’S DO THIS
I was agitated and uncomfortable before reading the therapist piece. Utterly terrified now.
Nobody wants to admit that they are wrong about Trump because that makes them feel even more “worm” like. I spent years in therapy before I believed that my narcissistic father was not my friend. And like the cult of Trump I could not separate from my dad but had to straddle my connection to his insanity and pursuing my own path at the same time until his death freed me from his toxic influence. I’m now seeing that my eldest sister has the same narcissistic personality and that unbeknownst to me has had a detrimental impact on my life. Painful as it is I have now been estranged from her for three years and am in the process of trying to save my relationship with her son. Mental illness is the last frontier in medical understanding and it is pervasive and intractable and terrifying.
Thank you. Please keep writing and advising. Traumatizing Narcissist is a new term for me but very understandable.
We must stay connected with the things that have brought us joy in the past-I am a maker and writing/recording songs, making clothing, etc is a way for me to stay in the here and now.
We do need ways of identifying children who need help overcoming their trauma so they don’t grow up to be like these people and we need better ways of handling the narcissists in our lives. Most often they are enabled which allows them to perpetuate their nonsense.
And Curtis Yarvin? A crackpot fringe weirdo? This is the tragedy of the 21st Century that he has any influence at all.
Stay sane, stay humane and don't isolate, great advice by the person whom you interviewed. Let us all remember these words in the next 4 years.
In explaining this to my wife a couple of more points stood out. I find confusion in allen frances' laying out of Trump's personality. One feature of a failing defense mechanism in personality disorders is decompensation and we saw that during the campaign; while pundits remarked on Biden's hesitation and weak articulation, Trump was incoherent, a sign of decompensation. You could see Trump's distress yesterday with the Musk boy in the Oval Office; somebody was taking attention away from Trump and even trying to approach him! Trump turned away, on a four-year old (Lawrence O'Donnell covered that well last night).
Next, paranoid is a matter of being the center of attention; as a psychiatrist I worked with analogized it, a person walking across a packed stadium before the game, just another guy walking around, and he believes everyone is watching him, he is paranoid; it doesn't necessarily mean you feel under threat. By that measure, Trump is surely paranoid as aides last term evidenced by slipping his name into anything they wanted him to read.
Re 'superior race of people': that fits Nancy MacLean's description of the early Libertarians whose monumental work over seven decades has given us Project 2025; they were either racists combatting school integration or using that issue to climb to power, just like the GOP has been fattening themselves on racist sympathy since Goldwater's Southern Strategy.
All of this is right on the money, so much so that I almost wrecked my retired therapist's aging neck nodding right along. Which brings me to a sincere question: HTH do we who have spent a lot of time with people who have been traumatized by narcissistics (which includes almost all of the poor and all people of color, and also maybe half of all women) find a way to be heard, or more accurately, to have what we know become part of the understanding of non-therapists? An old joke that floats around is that if a therapist should start talking 'psychological stuff' on a train, half the people within hearing range will get up and move to another car. Same can happen at parties, in my humble experience. It's frankly maddening to see how dangerous the MAGA cult is,and how pathetic, and to know that its members are so clueless about the grooming, the gaslighting, the engendering of fear necessary to keep it going. Sometimes you feel like Cassandra on the walls of Troy..
I achieved fame among my two friends who listened to me when Trump came down the escalator: personality disorder. Over all these years, as you mentioned, a few professionals, including Trump's niece, Mary, have stepped forth on this but the media treats them as opinions rather than diagnoses. A friend treated his doctors' diagnoses as opinions until he couldn't walk anymore. Those last few paragraphs of this piece need to be tatooed on everyone's forehead.
What preceded the trip down the escalator was a year of actual research. Trump assigned one of his harem of lawyers to listen to right-wing radio all over the country and report back on what got them most outraged. The answer was immigration, especially at the border, the reason these listeners could not be successful themselves. He already knew how potent hatred of blacks could be when it was frankly stated. And he had the fantasy of himself as the very successful tycoon, thanks to his TV image, with the thrill of "You're Fired!" With Roy Cohn as his mentor. Personality disorder helps, certainly, but there's a lot of both luck and cunning in his rise.
Curtis Yarvin thinks that poor people can be turned into fuel to power industry? Shades of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal!" Or *Soylent Green*.
Seeking safety is an understandable survival drive. As we are experiencing, some people attempt to feel safe by wielding power over others. As Shaw indicates, the humane individual’s task is to develop an internal equilibrium that supports a sense of safety. Dr. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist, said. “Our nervous system is always trying to figure out a way for us to survive, to be safe.” He developed the evidence-based Safe & Sound Protocol, a non-invasive acoustic intervention which allows the nervous system to adapt and find safety more quickly. Porges is working to see that organizations and our medical system embody safety as an essential basis for nourishing health and survival. The Safe & Sound Protocol can support those of us who are committed to staying strong in this fight for Democracy.
The thing about most psychopathologies is that there are usually some sort of limitations that are put on them by some force, be it family members, friends, the law or some other impactor or imposer of consequences. Trump literally is the most powerful person on the planet, has regularly avoided accountability for his behavior and is totally surrounded by knee benders who protect him and tell him he’s great. I liken this to a person with severe alcohol use disorder who is surrounded by unlimited liquor and people who will enable him to keep drinking and tell him he doesn’t have a problem. I think this will either end with some implosion of him, via his actions or health, or his behavior will grow so uncontrollable that even his stooges will choose to intervene. Unfortunately, most of the ones he has historically had while in office just resign and try to save themselves without pushing back on him. The question for all of us is how much damage will be done in the meantime. I predict an eventual call for martial law.
What I find eerie about the Trump entourage is their similarity to Hitler's inner circle. Most of them were broken men---emotional and mental misfits with toxic masculinity fantasies they tried to instill into German culture, e.g., Aryan men with subservient Aryan women and eliminating the weak. I've come to the conclusion that fascism, German or American style, at its core fueled by a malignant form of misogyny. The performative and destructively performative features of these early days of Trump are like rouge bull elephants or, closer to home, like an adolescent gang bent on violence, territory and women they can push around. The psychology behind this phenomenon is just this: early in their development, these men were severely abused or severely neglected and probably both. Yes. we can point to that being true for many people; they don't necessarily become abusers. That's only partly true as domestic violence statistics show. But how are "individuals" like Trump created? They manage to bypass normative social, institutional, and societal accountability tests. Somehow, some way, these folks, with their personality disorders, got a free pass to the top. Not enough of us held them accountable for their behaviors at any rung up their ladder; in fact, they may have been rewarded for their behaviors.
Big picture---how is this possible? The lubricant is white, male, heterosexual privilege. It's been a longstanding reality in the United States that some people (of color, for example) have to prove their "innocence", because they are preemptively (and unconsciously) seen as guilty (of driving while Black) in the eyes of law enforcement, our institutions and the general public. While others, like Trump, continue to get a free pass. In our November election, some 77 million Americans said loud and clear: "Mr. Trump, you don't have to go to jail. You can pass Go."
Thank you for this excellent interview which I especially valued because of Dan's advice of "Stay sane. Stay humane. Don't isolate." I've had to limit my intake of national news to mornings only and then what is reported by people and organizations whose skill in reporting I value. For two weeks I was consuming much more and it was already effecting my sleep (I was losing it), my interactions with others, my health physically and mentally. These three things are what I discovered I needed to do not just for my well-being but if I am to respond in any kind of effective way to the madness unfolding in this country.
I very much appreciate this interview as I remember the writing by many therapists before Trump’s first election warning us about his narcissism, while in contrast this time therapists have been mostly silent about this issue. I have imagined that like so many people fearful of our current President and his sycophants that therapists have not been willing to share their expertise on Trump’s narcissism and risk retribution, an understandable position. Yet, now is just the time when the voices of therapists are particularly needed to provide deeper understandings of our President and his drive for power.
The description of his followers, afraid of freedom and needing to feel protected by orange daddy, appears to parallel Christian evangelicals’ iron clad belief that god is all powerful and will take care of all worries. Perhaps this applies to all religions?
We aren't going to win this or successfully push back just by understanding the abusive relationship with a narcissist. It may make us feel better, but it won't get us out of this pickle by pointing a finger at Elon and saying shame. What may make a difference with the people who CAN do something (congress) is this.
During WWII, after Hitler (another narcissist) invaded France, an "official" government that was loyal to Der Fuhrer was set up called the Vichy Government which collaborated with the Nazis. We have a similar situation going here where so much of Congress and some other agencies are collaborating with Trump and Musk in this unlawful coup.
Maybe it's time to call it like it is politically and tell Congress and ICE and any other agency that is bowing in collaboration with Trump and Elon and that they, too, are collaborators.