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It is morning, November 9, 2016. I am awake and not wanting to open my eyes. But I can hear it still, coming at me like a parade of boots marching on pebbles, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want to hide my face. And I’m afraid. How can I see patients in this state?
Yet one by one (except for one) my patients comfort me this day as I hold with them their shock and then their pain. And as I surrender to the tumble of their rapidly emerging self-states—from disbelief to outrage—I grow oddly steady. No wonder I am taken aback when my last patient, Jason, arrives. Heading straight for the couch, he tells me in no uncertain terms, “I don’t want to talk about Trump!”
I am stunned.
More about Jason in a minute. First I want to make clear that now, one week after the election, I am convinced that Trump’s victory, like any other catastrophic trauma occurring in the outside world, can become like an arrow that pierces straight through each recipient’s consciousness and particular vulnerability, continuing on its journey—moving below language, beyond mood— into the very depth of being. It is a disorienting, hollowed-out experience, simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Both universal and utterly personal. And terrifying.
Believe it or not, Jason is a prime example of my thesis. A well-known inventor and CEO of a large company, Jason is entirely self-taught. Affable, friendly, sensitive, and caring, secretly a “neat freak” and habitual worrier, he is a genius but you’d never know it. He rarely thinks about that. Jason is by far the most successful of his siblings— two younger brothers and a baby sister— which makes him feel guilty and bad. He is highly moral and vulnerable to judgment, a trait inherited from his mother, whose judgments were most often leveled against him. (“When I was a little kid, my mother caught me snatching a Clark Bar from the candy store. ‘Hey, Jason, do you have anything in your pocket?’ ‘No,’ I said. And when she reached in