Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.
Even dog trainers know this.
It’s the owner.
The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.
The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.
The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.
Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.
So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..
”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.
The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.
”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid
So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.
In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.
Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.
Who is a stinky baby!
And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.
While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?
or at least if there is profit in it?
Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.
Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.
Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.
and its way bigger than Trump.
Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.
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