The myth of normal, p.34
The Myth of Normal, page 34
When trauma manifests on the political stage, the consequences for people and the planet are massive. Politicians make policy, after all, and policy creates or cements the very cultural conditions we know are antithetical to our health. The level of trauma awareness or blindness they and we bring to the political conversation can’t help playing itself out in the world we end up living in. If disease is the individual body’s way of alerting us to something out of joint, something contrary to what our nature intends for us, then surely social maladies like addiction and global catastrophes like climate change are all signs of something amiss in the body politic. So, too, is the mood of resignation and cynicism that surrounds politics in general, and the sometimes ludicrous levels of suspicion and venom that infuse public discussions of everything from elections to abortion to how we should handle health pandemics.
Phantasmagorical vaccine paranoia, for example, is not the same as healthy skepticism. Nor is contemptuous, self-righteous scorn toward vaccine or lockdown dissenters equivalent to responsible citizenship. In my work on trauma, I have observed that it is not merely the ideas people hold but, even more, the emotional resonance of how they speak and act—of who and how they are being—that reveal their inner psychic life. When we try to address the content of their speech or their beliefs without attending to the energetic fuel, we miss the mark. The same is true in the sociopolitical sphere: if we want to understand why individuals and groups believe and behave as they do—and we should want to, if we truly care about the consequences—then we need to be willing to see the traumatic scars underneath the extreme emotional reactions. This can be difficult when we ourselves carry strong points of view about our rightness and their wrongness—which is yet more reason to take it on.
All this is more than speculative. Traumatic childhood experience has been shown to bear very directly on adult political orientations. Michael Milburn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, found that the harsher the parenting people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they become to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws, and the death penalty. “We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of a dysfunctional family environment,” he told me. “There was significantly more opposition to abortion, and more support for capital punishment and the use of military force, particularly among males who had experienced high levels of physical punishment, especially if they had never had psychotherapy.” I was intrigued by that last finding. “Psychotherapy,” Milburn explained, “speaks to a potential for self-examination, for self-reflection.”
The confluence of politics and trauma is not a new concept. Decades ago, the great Polish Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller pointed to how the harsh child-rearing practices long fashionable in Germany helped prepare the template for Nazi authoritarianism. She also argued persuasively that the intense suffering and oppression in childhood of the German fascist leaders, most especially monstrous psychopaths like Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, played a decisive role in shaping their mental-emotional lives and, necessarily, their political inclinations. “Among all the leading figures of the Third Reich,” she wrote in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, “I have not been able to find a single one who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing.”[5] For “strict and rigid,” we can substitute “traumatizing”: Miller was not, after all, speaking about homes run by kindly parents with firm curfews but the sorts of environments that would imprint on a child a fear-tinged view of the world and/or require of him to go numb in the face of suffering, starting with his own.
The subliminal beliefs leaders hold about human nature, the world, and their position in it, and the unconscious impulses that motivate their actions, are of great consequence for their politics—which is to say, for our lives and our world. The worldview they developed early in life under the impact of misfortunes they did not choose and could not control imbues how they feel about, interact with, and act upon the universe and their fellow beings decades later. And yet, as the British psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt points out, “We rarely address the underlying psychological and emotional dynamics of our public figures, or our culture as a whole.”[6]
Let’s briefly examine two pairs of political nemeses—first in Canada, then the United States—all four of whom have convinced millions of people to entrust them with great power. What makes each of them so appealing and so appalling, depending on who’s observing, owes much to personality traits forged in the crucible of early trauma.
In my own country, former prime minister Stephen Harper was much admired by conservatives for his icy, tough-on-crime, climate-science-is-irrelevant, addiction-is-a-criminal-choice views, and reviled by progressives for the same things. Harper has recalled an idyllic childhood, despite growing up under a stern “stickler” of a dad whose own father had disappeared mysteriously years earlier and was never located. I resonate completely with Toronto Star journalist Jim Coyle’s aside that, contrary to Harper’s recollections, it is “not difficult to imagine that life under such a patriarch might have been stifling.”[7] This, after all, is a man characterized by his biographer as “autocratic, secretive, and cruel,” and whose former chief of staff reported him to have been “suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia.” A Canadian columnist once wrote about Stephen Harper’s “dead, sociopathic eyes,” while another journalist described him as “chilly and inscrutable.” No child is born with dead eyes: such a look bespeaks a recoiling from seeing what is dreadful to a young soul.
The man who succeeded Harper on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill exudes a very different vibe, one of terminal likability. Justin Trudeau is known for speaking in warm tones and inclusive language. He has shed public tears of sorrow at more than one press conference, including when a Canadian rock music hero died of brain cancer in 2017.[8] There is nothing wrong with a politician showing their vulnerable side—would that it were more normalized—but, as many have noted, there is also something inauthentic, even unctuous, about Trudeau’s nice-guy persona. Recently, he has had to abjectly apologize for indulging in a private family excursion on a national day created to commemorate the trauma inflicted on our native peoples, a history about which he has waxed contrite in the past.[*] Such ethical and emotional obtuseness bears the imprint of a trauma-inflected childhood. Justin grew up in a home where the father—Pierre, the eminent and irascible prime minister of the 1960s and ’70s—was consumed by work, status, and virility. As a boy, Justin was under the care of a mother three decades younger than her womanizing husband, with whom she was often in conflict, her gloom deepened by bipolar disorder. At times she was given to manic high spirits and embarrassingly public sexual hijinks with the likes of Mick Jagger. The current prime minister has recalled being “desperate . . . to inject a sense of magic into every moment we did have together as a family.”[9] I am speculating, I’ll admit—neither Trudeau nor any politician has ever sought me out for counseling—but I see it as no stretch to say that his fraught upbringing likely primed him to make cloying sweetness and shallow ingratiation his métier.
According to the popular narrative, there could have been no more diametrical opposites in American politics, whether gauged by demographic appeal, ethical values, or personality, than 2016 presidential opponents Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The differences are easy to spot, the similarities subtler but instructive. It may come as a surprise to supporters of both, for example, to read a Scientific American analysis published in 2016 that pointed out how many qualities that define psychopathy are routinely found in top politicians. One was “coldheartedness,” a trait on which both Trump and his then opponent Clinton scored in the upper quintile.[10]
Donald Trump’s cartoonishness, the havoc he wreaked on the U.S. political system, and the cultural tumult around his ascendancy can too easily obscure what a sad, thoroughly wounded person he is. It took one who knows him better than most, his psychologist niece, Mary Trump, to cut through both the hoopla and the opprobrium to the dark heart of the matter. We now know from Mary’s revealing 2020 biography, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, that the young Donald had plenty of cause to push reality out of mind and sight; to become grandiose, narcissistic, combative, and utterly opportunistic. “Deep down I have no problem describing him as a sociopath,” Mary has said of Donald’s father, Fred, the paterfamilias. “He had no real human feeling, and he treated his children variously with contempt.” Her own father, Fred Jr., Donald’s older sibling, was driven by childhood trauma to alcoholism and an early death at age forty-one. The world has seen what Donald has been driven to. It oughtn’t to have required Mary Trump’s revelations to uncover the suffering behind the huckster-president’s persona, but, in our trauma-blind world, it did. “He is a poster child for trauma,” the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk told me.
The journalist Tony Schwartz got an up-close view when he ghostwrote Trump’s bestselling The Art of the Deal. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told the New Yorker years later. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”[11] “Second nature,” as we noted before, is nobody’s real nature. No one’s original nature impels them to lie; there are plenty of congenial liars, but no congenital ones. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote somewhere that people lie their way out of reality when they have been hurt by reality, and this is eminently true of Donald Trump’s origin story. Lying, automatic or deliberate, first insulated him from devastating rejection in childhood, and later served him in the realm of political power.
Hillary Clinton is still admired and pined for by many as a tenacious survivor and the rightful winner of the 2016 election. Compared with Trump, at least, she is a paragon of poise, grace, empathy, hard work, and reason. What almost never gets asked is, Where do such relentless ambition and “tenacity” come from, and at what cost? Ought we really to celebrate it, or is it in its own way also an unhealthy norm, even if not to the same degree as Trump’s bloviating bluster? Such questions were completely bypassed in the hagiographic haze of Clinton’s campaign, in ways I found literally incredible. One moment in particular stuck with me; it demonstrates how readily we normalize and lionize the “winning” personalities of our leaders.
On the evening of her nomination, a video celebrating Hillary’s life and achievements was broadcast to an international audience, narrated by the actor Morgan Freeman. In it, the candidate quoted a life lesson imparted to her in childhood by her stern, exacting father: “Don’t whine, don’t complain, do what you are supposed to do, do it to the best of your ability.” By all indications, this was a whitewash. As we know from biographical accounts, the father could be capricious and cruel. “He hurled biting sarcasm at his wife and his only daughter and spanked, at times excessively, his three children to keep them in line.”[12] In the video Secretary Clinton also shared, “My mother wanted me to be resilient, she wanted me to be brave.” She then related an instance of how this “resilience” was inculcated. “I was four, and there were lots of kids in the neighborhood. I would come out and have a bow in my hair, and the kids would all pick on me. It was my first experience of being bullied, and I was terrified. One day I ran into the house, and my mother met me and she said to me, ‘There is no room for cowards in this house. You go back outside and figure out how you are going to deal with what those kids are doing.’” That isn’t a call to resilience but to repression. The message a young child receives in such a circumstance is “Vulnerability is shameful in this house, there is no room for your fear. Do not feel or show your pain, suck up your feelings, you are on your own. Don’t expect any empathy here.” And yet no one in the arena seemed to find this blow to a small child’s sensibility disturbing. No media commentator so much as registered that this handpicked example of supposedly inspiring parenting was, in fact, a public celebration of trauma. No observer suggested that a little girl seeking the safety of the parent’s embrace is hardly a coward. She is a normal four-year-old.
In any case, the life lesson about pushing through the pain did its work. More than six decades later, a campaigning Clinton was ill and dehydrated with pneumonia but hid her “weakness” from everyone until she collapsed in the street. “I’m feeling great,” she unconvincingly assured the public the same day. “It’s a beautiful day in New York.” No doubt, the same self-suppressing dynamic compelled her to tolerate her husband’s philandering proclivities, described by the late writer Joan Didion as “the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.” In stereotypical trauma-impact fashion, Hillary blamed herself for her spouse’s infidelity. He was under great stress, and she had not sufficiently tended to his emotional needs, she told a friend, thus aligning with women’s assigned role in the culture of patriarchy. “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying,” this close confidant summarized Hillary’s views.[13]
The internalized lack of empathy showed itself during the election campaign when she carelessly—but all the more tellingly—dubbed half of Trump’s base “a basket of deplorables,” revealing to a wide swath of America what they already knew in their bones: that many urban elites view them with smug contempt as people whose economic, political, and moral grievances can be ignored. The deplorables’ retort came that November, in the form of a stunning political upset.
“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump,” the conservative columnist David Brooks wrote discerningly in 2016, “. . . both ultimately hew to a distrustful, stark, combative, zero-sum view of life—the idea that making it in this world is an unforgiving slog and that, given other people’s selfish natures, vulnerability is dangerous.”[14] That sense of danger, I would only add, started long before their forays into political life. Although their respective supporters would likely shudder at the thought of them being remotely similar, Trump and Clinton were a match made in childhood suffering.
On reading the biographies of leaders from many countries across historical periods, one sees how each of them, in their own way, had emotionally starved childhoods; each “overcame” these adversities by dint of the very personality qualities that would land them in the history books as icons and change makers, no matter what great harms they perpetrated. In each case, these traits are seen by many people to this day as laudable and worthy of emulation. That’s as normal as normal can get.
And that’s where the rest of us come in. Abetted and amplified by the profit-driven media machine, political culture plays on our deepest longings for surety, security, and even supremacy, targeting our damaged “inner children” with force and precision. In fact, much of politics is a lot more coherent if we see how people, many millions of them at once, unconsciously look to their leaders to fulfill their own unmet childhood needs. As the cognitive scientist George Lakoff puts it, “We all think with a largely unconscious metaphor: the Nation as Family.”[15]
I asked Daniel Siegel what draws people to follow leaders who exude hostility and an authoritarian streak, such as a Donald Trump. “People may actually feel excitement that someone in the public eye is expressing aggression or assertion, the opposite of impotence,” the psychiatrist and mind researcher said, noting how such traits can feel empowering to those in whom a sense of real power is wanting. “It’s like a child wanting to be with a parent that will protect them. There is a sense of ‘I’m going to be safe and everything is going to be okay.’” What Dan describes is also a sense memory, an indelible and usually unexplored imprint from childhood, a longing stored in the bodymind and activated by present-day insecurities projected into the political realm.
On the liberal side, idealizing leaders as kind, supportive, caring, and inclusive can be another form of displaced longing for attuned parenting. One prominent Democratic-supporting celebrity, the song parodist known as Randy Rainbow, tweeted out a photo of a smiling Joe Biden with Kamala Harris the night she was announced as Biden’s running mate. His caption read “G’night, Mom and Dad. See you in the morning.”[16] People under the sway of such childlike idealizations, even in half jest, are liable to ignore discomfiting counterevidence.
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Adjacent to politics—increasingly overlapping with it, in fact—is the vast expanse of entertainments, professional sports, fads, and obsessions that we call popular culture. Indeed, one social function of pop culture is to divert people’s attention from things that really do matter; imagine if all the energy now expended on analyzing the private lives of celebrities or the detailed intricacies of sporting events were, instead, devoted to mobilizing populations to collectively tackle the great issues of our age.
