The Siloing of Suffering

My election night meltdown

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

It was as if I were possessed by a demon, so tormenting were the psychic spasms.  The worst had happened, and I felt it in the depths, as if a sadistic coldness had gripped me, I tried to twist free with circular agony …

Needless to say, my candidate had not prevailed.

And right before the election, I had a nightmarish anxiety-dream wherein I was working for Trump and could not escape…

The “orange man” represents, for me and many of my patients (and friends and colleagues, and probably tens of millions of Americans) a repetitive paternal nightmare.  For others he seems to represent a tough but benevolent “daddy” figure—whether they like it or not…that phrase of his spoken at a rally (regarding the female population) echoing the permafrost of Trump’s narcissistic clowning, that sugar-high boost for his base.

I see Trumpism as an addiction of sorts.  You’ll notice no win or victory, no “owning” of the libs, no crass insult, is ever enough to satiate him or his followers; many sound more bitter after he wins, if his grandiosity is not duly reflected. 

This is my lens of course, given an alcoholic father who could never find enough praise or admiration from others, or booze, to soothe his wounded soul.  Our country has a parallel type of wounding, fed by disinformation and divisiveness, which no one election will fix.

I got more than one text from patients late into election night, who said they were terrified, angry, or worse.  I was in the same boat.  It helped remind me I had a role to play in all this, before the night wore on and I tried fruitlessly to sleep, which in the fever-fear of the wee hours felt like a skinned rawness.  My illusions of safety and reassurance had been destroyed.

I had fallen prey to the Kamala info-bubble, refusing to think the unthinkable, that he might win. 2016 had been so awful I just couldn’t…. But there is more to it.

This is the Sisyphean absurdity Camus wrote about, in facing his own very real nightmares: the shameful poverty of his Algerian youth, his mother’s depressive withdrawal, the Nazi invasion of his home country (and Vichy cooperation), the rationalization of Stalin’s terrors by Sartre and friends—together with his own lethal ongoing tuberculosis, requiring isolation in the mountains.

He knew whereof he spoke when he said absurdity is both “lucid reason noting its limits” and “the mind that desires and the world that disappoints…[with a] nostalgia for unity.”

My nostalgia went back to November 2020 and January 6, 2021: the illusion that this, surely, was the end of MAGA.

Guess again. 

Unthinkable that sexual assault, felonies, insurrection, Putin love, compulsive lying, fraud, and so forth and so on on, did not disqualify from the most powerful office in the world.  “Once again a qualified female candidate loses to the worst guy in the country.  What the fuck, America?” said Desi Lydic on the Daily Show.

I do not think all of his voters are terrible, incidentally.  But that’s a topic for another day.

How could this happen.  It brings to mind psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow’s descriptions of the trauma of loss, and the existential crumbling that follows.  He calls this (with a quick nod to Heidegger) the “shattering of our tranquilizing absolutisms.” 

I quote from one of his papers: “When a person says to a friend, ‘I’ll see you later,’ or a parent says to a child, ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ these are statements…delusions, whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naive realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence…  Such losses expose…a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured.  There is…parallel here with developmental or emotional trauma, which disrupts the person’s sense of temporal continuity.”  (Stolorow, 2015.)

This is precisely what I felt on election night, all night, a yawning three a.m. abyss in which the hyperfreeze of terror again invaded my nervous system.  Nowhere to hide from the terror twisting like an icy butcher’s blade. As soon as I relaxed a new fright-wave shuddered through me.  Any shelter of reassurance or possibility—stay in the moment, you’re not alone in this—was blown clear like Kleenex by an arctic blast of fear.

Any attempt to put together a sense of safety, of hope or some trust that not all was lost, was angrily met by apocalyptic winds.  It reminded me of my first Thanksgiving in Los Angeles when I, buzzed on pot and booze, took a walk in the warm night, lonely and anxiously uncertain, the Santa Ana winds whipping right through me as if I was hollow, as if the warm air was somehow bewitched. At that point I still had pot and porn for morphine.

But now, sober, it was here again: the knife-edge of dread gripping the insomniac dark, as in first grade when the neighborhood bully teased me that the mushroom I touched was poisonous and would kill me, and I spasm-cried for hours…or in third grade after seeing The Exorcist, when I had the somewhat prescient terror of a demonic invasion of my siblings, invading night after night ight.  (“You’re mature enough to see it,” my father assured me.) 

This was also the soul-chilling fear of hearing my parents bellow insults at each other at midnight, when I was thirteen, obscenities shaking the hallways, an apocalyptic wailing.  And again when I stopped drinking, the anesthesia-free accumulation of closeted terror now plaguing me for weeks and months, until daylight, the world a roaring blaze without asylum….the hurricane-void of safety…

The difference being that this time, I know we are not facing it alone. I reached out to my friends and colleagues the next day, and heard variations of the same thing. Yes this sucks, but we’ll get through it. This is the difference, just as Stolorow said: that trauma comes from unmet or unrecognized suffering, that which the child or adult suffers in isolation. 

This time daylight, sober and clear, actually arrived.  Innocence is rediscovered when its seeking is abandoned.

Now we have a chance to flush the polls and predictions, comfort those among us equally frightened now, those in worse jeopardy (if we’re economically or socially privileged)—including our vulnerable climate, whose decimating conniptions do not discriminate among parties, races, or class. There is no time to lose.

The daylight difference between childhood and now, for me at least, is community.  (“Me…We!” said Muhammad Ali.) We have to be able to tell each other how freaked out we are, how frightened, and what we might do now….actions themselves reflecting the values of justice, respect, and a refusal to simply cede to bullying authority. 

Such resolve comes from the shattering Stolorow talks about, and the grief that follows. For there is grief, after being so hopeful my sixth-grade daughter would see the first woman president, that some kind of moral principle might triumph over inflation. (I don’t see Trump lowering grocery prices anytime soon.)

But from the ashes comes resolve.  For the first time the anti-Trump forces are in the minority; he won the popular vote, the narcissists are in charge.

This doesn’t mean we are wrong.  Nor does it mean we will agree on everything amidst ourselves.  We must go forward communally however, in some ragged but resolute way.

We have little control over such contingencies, as Camus so often reiterated and the serenity prayer reminds us.    

In hindsight it is humbling but helpful to come face to face with that turbocharged terror of dissolution, what Winnicott called primitive terror.  Not even psychoanalysts “graduate” into permanent illusions of safety. We are finite, mortal, and have no idea when the end is coming. The present is all we have.

Camus comments that “absurdity is king, [but] love saves us from it.” 

There is no development—subjective or social—without such private torment, no containment (or “self regulation”) without the need for exactly that, no need for spirituality or “good trouble” activism; in this way we develop a role that bears witness. Each of my friends, family members, and patients were afraid, albeit in their own individual way, which reminded me of the inner resources I tend to forget in the the witching hours. A few patients, meanwhile, who quietly voted for “him” were now in terror of being savaged by progressive friends, something I will explore in a future column.

But for now let us accept the three a.m. demons, our own mortal vulnerability, the child-self that suffers but also, most crucially, desires and dreams. Camus also commented he was fond of lost causes; here we all might find a kindred spirit.

Failure or “weakness” reflects our human commonality; Trump too is mortal, and political regimes are not eternal. We have our existential midnight moment, but still I sense in my daily discussions a common need for the communal: an inflection point where isolation and the siloing of suffering is simply not an option. Bewitching is the delusion of our psychic omnipotence, where all bad spirits can be banished with the right phrase, attitude, or drug…an illusion perpetually collapsing while feeding that hurricane dread. We all have a role to play, somewhere or somehow, and now is the time to start. We have reached the unthinkable, and still the sun rises.