Everybody is talking about this:
To the catalogue of anxieties her patients explore during therapy — marriage, children, and careers — psychologist Alison Howard is now listening to a new source of stress: the political rise of Donald Trump.
In recent days, at least two patients have invoked the Republican front-runner, including one who talked at length about being disturbed that Trump can be so divisive and popular at the same time, said Howard, who practices in the District.
What had happened to Trump during his childhood, the patient wanted to know, to make him such a “bad person?”
“He has stirred people up,” Howard said. “We’ve been told our whole lives not to say bad things about people, to not be bullies, to not ostracize people based on their skin color. We have these social mores and he breaks all of them and he’s successful. And people are wondering how he gets away with it.”
Remember liberals don’t use logic – they base their perception of reality on whatever fantasy makes them feel good. If everyone buys their fantasy and reinforces it, the stress structure in their brain, the amygdala, will shut off and they will feel really good. However if everyone ridicules their fantasy, then they can’t use that fantasy to assuage their neuroses, and they default to their panic mode. Their amygdala fires up, and they are in agony.
This is a big reason to support Donald. He is the anti-George Bush. Liberals never felt this way about Bush. He went out of his way to coddle them and their various mental frailties. Everybody had to get along. Conflict was unbecoming of his office, (unless he needed it to get elected). People belittled him, and he meekly took the blows and then went and hid away under a desk somewhere. When he did, liberals saw their false reality reinforced, and they felt wonderful. He never fought back, and liberals loved it. Suddenly they could effortlessly make up a reality in their head that made them feel good, and nobody would challenge it. Bush’s adherence to conservative principles was fine, but his cowardice and pacifism in the face of attack destroyed the conservative movement and emboldened liberals beyond all measure. In his single presidency he took a nation hardened with warrior resolve by 9/11, and turned it into an apathetic nation of whining liberal pussies who elected a foreign Marxist as President – happily.
Trump is the opposite of George W, and that is a good thing. If a liberal, (especially a GOPe liberal), hits Trump, he hits back twice as hard, with a version of reality the public adopts as truth. This is devastating to liberals. The false realities they have become totally dependent on for sanity are crushed when each poll comes out showing them that nobody else buys their fantasies. Suddenly reality hurts everywhere they look, and nobody helps them feel better by listening to their fantasy as if it were real. Right now any of those nutjobs whining to their head doctors would kill to have George W. Bush to kick around again.
As this happens, liberals are thrown into a state of cognitive dissonance. Their brain hurts, in a way they desperately want to fix. In that state, they need to resolve the angst, but if the populace adheres to a position which causes the angst, then the population is adhering to a concept that adheres to reality. If that is the case, the only way the liberal can resolve the angst is to accept reality, and bring their view into line with the population’s, thereby abandoning their delusions, and becoming less bothered by reality. That means they have to become more conservative, and less liberal in their head to relieve the pain – and that is what they will do. That brain pain will make them, because with Donald, it is the only way they can get away from it.
This isn’t operative in every citizen, obviously. Some people are already K-selected warriors by nature, and firmly adhered to reality. Others are hopeless r-selected rabbits who can’t change, and I expect they will end up fairly catatonic politically after eight years of a Trumpian regime.
But there is a changeable mass, designed in nature to go with the r or K-selected flow. When times are easy, safe, and r-selected, they can effortlessly get away with satiating every little fancy, and they quickly adapt to become the unhinged, triggerable liberal nutjobs we see all around us today. When times are harsh and turn K-selected, and suddenly reality smacks them around every time they head toward r-selected thought patterns, then they are designed to remodel their brain to be K-selected.
As a reader, you already know it is the stress center of the brain, the amygdalae that is in pain, and that pain is forcing the amygdala to develop pathways to solve the problem causing the pain to get relief. That is amygdala development, courtesy of Donald Trump exercising liberal amygdalae, and those bigger more developed amygdalae are going to be conservative according to the research. This is the mechanism behind the mental adaption to K-selection. Trump is the mechanism, in action. He is Apocalypse in a bottle. His words simulate all the death and destruction in nature which would normally make a society turn K-selected, without killing or hurting anyone.
Now, all of these liberal nutjobs are crawling to their shrinks, hoping the shrink will say something that will help them shut off the pain caused by Donald’s words, so they can go back to their fantasy and the amygdala-immaturity it fosters. They want an enabler, who will encourage them to think the wrong, but easy, thing. The Donald was mistreated in his childhood and is a bad person today, so you can ignore the things he is saying. Amygdala off. He is mentally unhinged, so you can ignore what he says, and crawl back into your fantasy world. Amygdala off. The best thing for them would be if Donald was rejected by everyone as bad, because then the Donald is just wrong – end of story, and back to fantasyland.
But that isn’t happening. Everywhere they look, everyone is backslapping the Donald, and cheering him on. The Donald must be right.
The irony is, even as the Donald is painful to them, he is creating a therapeutic battle in their brains, adapting them to cope with the natural stress of reality. On the one side is an unbearable pain, and on the other is reality. Eventually, they are going so see the pain become so unbearable that they will have to accept reality.
Teaching young children to be transgender isn’t a good thing that intelligent people do. Allowing men to use women’s locker rooms with young girls on the pretext of identifying as female isn’t being super brilliant. Importing millions of young male Muslims from a part of the world particularly wracked by violence and sex-slavery won’t bring about a peaceful utopia. Diversity + Proximity in the presence of shortage will trigger war. You can’t fund every government program we have today without eventually running the nation into bankruptcy, and destroying every program. Third worlders without skills, transplanted to a first world nation, will tend to suffer relative to an educated populace, and that will breed problems. All painful ideas that liberals presently can’t contemplate, due to their amygdala’s inability to cope with stress.
The irony is the Donald is performing more therapy on the nation every day all by himself than all the shrinks put together have performed over the eight years of the Bush administration. Want proof? Over the eight years of the Bush administration the nation went so far leftward it elected Obama and didn’t care. We ended up with and endless stream of neurotics complaining about trigger-warnings, safe-spaces, micro-aggressions, dog-whistles nobody can hear, and other signs of rampant insanity.
Elect Donald, and watch the anti-Bush effect – the nation will grow more conservative over the Donald’s term. Directly associated with that, will be a reduction in the neuroses which underlie the leftist ideology. All the neurotic whining about trigger-warnings, and safe-spaces, and micro-aggressions, and thugs being shot will disappear in the face of the Donald’s onslaught. Leftists will attack him, and he will destroy them. They will either embrace reality and jump on the trump train (maybe even more enthusiastically than a sane person, since they will be doing it to avoid pain), or they will end up glassy eye’d and catatonic, mumbling the theme from the Lion King to themselves.
At this point, Trump’s policies are beside the point. We need the Anti-Bush – a national shrink able to shock sanity back into the electorate.
Donald will be that Psychiatrist-in-chief, and boy do we need him.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
I wish the ‘Never Trump’ people like Ben Shapiro felt the same way. They may very well derail Trump with their boycott and hand it to Hilla the Hun. They seem to think they’ll be able to ‘save’ the US in 2020. I’m pretty sure that with a leftist replacement of Scalia it’ll be far too late by then.
I wasn’t fond of Romney, and couldn’t imagine voting for him, given how phony I knew he was, but when push came to shove, I voted for him. I’m guessing they are the same.
I felt the same way about Romney. I knew he was phony, to the point he was nauseating, and I knew he’d screw us in office. Still, when push came to shove I voted for him. My guess is they will do the same. Everybody knows the only advantage to that bitch is she is so awful she would crash the whole fucking corrupt ediface.
Who abused the writer of this article? The person made A LOT OF CLAIMS ABOUT TRUMP with no references!
Really insightful post. I’ve read your book, but it’s great to see these concepts applied directly to current events. So much of what we see in the world today is pure insanity (importing violent fighting-age foreigners, letting males use female locker rooms, shrieking “racist” at those with differing policy ideas, etc.)
It’s a funny thing about pendulums. The harder they swing one way, the harder they swing back the other way. If this holds true, the future should be very interesting. I just hope that Trump is elected, so we can see the pendulum swing sooner, rather than later.
Yeah, a sooner swing, pre-apocalypse, will be more gentle than a later swing, post apocalypse, when everybody’s amygdala will be on fire.
Yeah, a swing now due to Donald insulting people, pre-apocalypse is way better than a swing later due to death and destruction, post-apocalypse.
There’s an interview with Sam Vaknin at American Thinker. In his “expert” opinion Trump is a pathological narcissist but since Vaknin himself is a pathological narcissist it’s hard to believe. Based on my experience with narcs if Trump were one we’d be hearing the tales of woe as they manage to screw over everyone they touch–that’s the “tell”. I’m wondering whether Vaknin is riding the zeitgeist–modern confusion of narcissism with straight talking confidence or if he’s acting out a gamma rage. Do narcissists tend to be gammas? And is this an example of gamma rage towards an alpha?
I’d say yes, to the extent narcissists tend to be narcissists due to extreme insecurity. Trump isn’t a narcissist. He isn’t a sociopath either, though as a person becomes more competitive, and has the brilliance Donald does it can be tough to tell.
And you are dead on about the tell. If Donald were a Narcissist, his insecurity within the world of billionaires would have left a wake of destruction as he fucked over all the other billionaires who made him feel inferior and insecure. We don’t see that, so if is a safe bet Trump is merely using the tools of the narcissist to move to the top in a world which rewards that.
Since narcissists are narcissists to assuage insecurity, I’d say yes.
And you are dead on about the tell. If Trump was a narcissist, there would be a swath a mile wide of others he had fucked over to make himself feel better, especially in the high-class circles he traveled. That every employee we hear of loves him would say quite the opposite.
I agree that we need him, but some actions of his appear troublesome. When he responds to BLM with ALM he is only placating the problem. It is as if a two pack a day man is told by his doctor that he has a spot on his lung and therefore goes home making the decision that he will quit smoking. That won’t do, he needs to address the cancer and remove it.
In the last debate, when Donald was first attacked by a Fox antagonist with charts, then later by another antagonist with selected videos, he failed both times to demand why the chosen to his left and right where not also similarly challenged.
I am told he is merely sitting calm now with his lead. I believe he needs to continue to attack the liberal amygdala, because they will soon be inundated with comforting fantasy courtesy of millions of dollars once it is a two man race.
Yeah, if he stops attacking, he will be toast. But I suspect as Cruz consolidates, he will go on the attack more.
This is a powerful post. The insights in here go past lauding Trump and offer hope to those of us with r-selected traits to change. You have also given reason to genuinely hope for something better in the electorate.
The worst thing about a bad situation is despair that nothin can change, you have demonstrated the mechanism by which positive healthy change comes about. I think that is massive.
[…] Donald Trump is literally triggering leftists: therapists and psychiatrists are reporting an increase in patients with “Trump anxiety.” […]