
This week has been a year. The clients are asking me, WTF?? What is Trump and his cronies doing?? How do I know? I am heartbroken for my kids. I think my Dad would say let the pendulum swing back - it always does. Yet my husband is less sanguine (love this word). What about the BS therapists say, to cling to what you can control? No. I strongly intuit that something terrible is going to happen, and the whole house of cards will come down. Of course that will be after much looting has taken place. How did the messages of hate get through and not the messages of love? Because the Internet is only the middleman. There's nothing to blame but mass hysteria. I'm talking about those people who thought Trump was a demi-God. Noooooooooooooooooooooo. He is a selfish, brain damaged, dangerous idiot.
So in case you didn't know where I stand... My clients are feeling shocked. So am I. I also feel exhausted, heavy and helpless. And cold. This too shall pass, my Mom would say. Shocked about what? Oh, only the Supreme Court compromised by graft, the lack of meaningful access to healthcare for all (my daughter can't even find a doctor in the state of Vermont), the uptick in looting out in the open, the sickening lack of empathy for our hardest workers, the immigration fear mongering ("They're coming for your jobs!" - no actually they do the jobs no one else wants to do), the rich acting like societal norms no longer apply to them, women getting trampled for being pregnant, rapists and alcoholics being confirmed to the highest levels, government protections - blitzed away, fires blazing in the west while Trump plays at schoolyard name-calling, the pardoning of the incitement to violence on Jan. 6. The Oligarchs not giving a shit about you and me. The environment. Our very breath; air.
One article said this: “He’s very triggering for people,” Carino, who is based in Brooklyn, tells The Independent. “Just his personality, his unpredictability, too. The fact that you never know what he’s gonna say and you never know what he’s gonna do. He creates the sense of lack of safety, and safety is so important in mental health.” -(https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-presidency-2-therapists-inauguration-b2682699.html)
Healing is hard and time consuming. I agree with the author, “There has been a real shift in the therapeutic community from an individualized way of looking at things — like, what’s wrong with you? —to really accepting the fact that, yeah, society is coming apart, and we really need to deal with this. It’s not all in your head,” she says.
I have been doing some advanced training in Internal Family Systems (with the wonderful https://ralphdelarosa.com/). It teaches us to release our death grip on the parts of ourselves that we are distressed about, open up a dialogue with those parts, and ask them to step aside. Perhaps if everyone could do some inner work, the outer world would also soften.
In the meantime, ICE is coming to your school, someone told me; radically un-selfdisciplined players are moving the pieces, and fear abounds. Real fear. Getting in touch with your inner child, as corny as that sounds, maybe can reduce anxiety, pain, trauma and loss. New paradigms may form for marginalized communities. Grass roots efforts make the most sense. Join something meaningful. Do it today.
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