Trauma, Triumph and Dissociation: Election 2016

Many of my friends, colleagues, clients and family members report feeling traumatized by the outcome of the Presidential election. They were sure Clinton would win, so sure that there was virtually no space in their minds for Trump to come out on top. Walking around NYC the morning after, taking the subway, speaking with people, there was a palpable peri-traumatic dissociative vibe. Many likened it to 9/11. People were walking around in a daze, grieving, numb, unable to disbelieve, in shock, angry, confused, unable to grasp how this happened. The media outlets and polls made it seem nearly impossible that Donald Trump would win. They likened his changes of winning to the chances of getting a highly improbable hand in a game of poker - "drawing an inside straight".

Pundits highlighted the heartfelt rational objections to him as a viable Presidential candidate - the bullying, the vitriolic misogyny, the guns, the disinhibition of racism and implicit calls for violence, the objectionable behavior of some of his supporters, the seemingly chaotic nature of his campaign, the impulsiveness, all the pathologizing character analyses, the late night tweets, the bravado... nothing for a good progressive to relate to or identify with, on a personal level. On a personal level, the antithesis of all which is good and right, total anathema.

Underpinning this position is the inability to empathize with the Otherness of the disenfranchized "uneducated White males" - a profound totalizing and oversimplification of Trump's base of supporters. A demonizing and flattening of the dimensionality of the legitimate concerns they may have. It's easy to do when some of those messages are hateful. It's easy to miss how progressive messaging may be similarly experienced as unempathic, even destructive.

It's extremely hard to hold all the disparate parts of oneself in mind together - the good, the bad and the ugly, or good me, bad me and not me, as the psychiatrist and germinal interpersonal psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan named this basic tripartite fragmentation of the self.

We share a common experience of injury, neglect and pain. Yes, pain about different things... but on some level the same thing, perhaps the pain of exclusion, the pain of not belonging. We have an opportunity for learning, and we have an opportunity to continue our various struggles for justice and reparation.

The problem is whether there is a grounds for mutuality here, or if the positions we see in stark relief now are mutually exclusive. There are two basic perspectives here: the rational level of analysis, and the emotional level of analysis. They may not fit together, but without synthesis or integration, the collective splitting cannot begin to be addressed. Without individual and subgroup "internal" integration, there can be no real dialogue with outside groups. Without dialogue among different factions, there can be no collective approach toward mutuality. Even with dialogue, were it possible, the task may be multigenerational.

After all, we are dealing with transgenerational trauma in addition to recent trauma, and the attendant dissociative processes. Proximal traumas include 9/11, wars and the toll on our veterans, racial violence, misogyny, and the economic disaster affecting most of us, but some much more than others. Traumas of the last century, which are still playing out, include the wars, bias-based violence and restriction from opportunity, and genocide of the last century, as well as the erosion of our nation's resilience and identity due to social, political and economic factors. On top of it, these issues are piled up on top of centuries of strife, though arguably there has been an overall reduction of violence and disease in our culture. The more intolerant we become of harm to one another, the greater our sense of being part of one family is, the more glaring and unacceptable any problems become.

Trauma, which overwhelms our various abilities to make sense of reality, individually and collectively, leads to dissociative responses. Rather than being able to hold many incompatible realities and perspectives togother, rather than being able to grasp one's subjective reality along with others' subjective realities, the mind breaks apart, and suppresses awareness of other valid perspectives. These other perspectives are not only valid in theory - they lead to action in the world. Forgetting this last point is a terminal mistake, leading to errors in judgment which change the outcome of complex decisions.

My perspective on the USA, is that the nation's psyche is dissociated, composed of two major evident "self-states" and many smaller fragments of identity, in addition to a large covert part of the population who are silent e.g. do not vote. A self-state is a term used by traumatologists and mainly relational psychoanalysts to describe how an individual personality may have many different facets which are expressed differently depending on the context, the emotions involved, the role one is in at the time, and so on. On a basic level, we take on different identities depending on the situation we are in - while there is some continuity overall, we are quite different at work, then with family, than with friendly acquaintances, than with old friends. Even within those different contexts, a different side of ourselves comes out whether we are with our boss, or an employee, or a co-worker; whether we are a parent, a spouse, or a playmate; and so on. In addition, our emotional state may bring out a different self-state. If I am in a good mood, I may be more patient and upbeat; if I am in a bad mood, disappointed by something, I may be more irritable, perhaps even hostile without meaning to be, or I may be sad and perhaps more compassionate than usual. These are all ordinary examples of softly dissociated self-states; it is easier to connect them with one another, easier to see the whole range of possibilities from within one subjective perspective, easier to notice the shifting among different self-states and what may have precipitated the shift.

In more profound dissociative states, the interconnection and awareness of a range of self-states within an overarching context of oneself is lost, to varying degrees. This may be the more everyday situation when an individual isn't aware they are "taking out" emotions from work on a child, until it is pointed out - perhaps more than once, because this is learning by repetition. In some cases, the dissociation is more stark - in the case of Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder and popularized in TV shows such as the United States of Tara and more recently Mr. Robot, and to a lesser extent The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the overall personality is fragmented sufficiently that at times different self-states are in control without awareness of other self-states. This can lead to many problems, of course. In the Structural Theory of Dissociation (Steele, van der Hart, and Neijenhuis), there are three levels of fragmentation described, ranging from a binary split between ordinary everyday self and emotional self, to fragmentation of ordinary presenting selves as well as emotional parts.

Applying this model of individual personality to an entire nation is a leap. Yet, to me, it fits. The United States of America is based on mutually exclusive value systems. One is the more loft promise of Freedom and Equality. However, historically and at the beginning of the nation (and before the War for Independence/American Revolution), only some folks were entitled to those universal rights - landed Caucasian men. The shadow side of the United States arguably is based on Slavery and Genocide - the use of Black human beings as property, essentially machines owned to do work, and the annihilation of aboriginal peoples, the Native Americans who were living on the land before the White Man arrived. What better set up could there be for a dissociated national psyche? There has been little or no processing of this core trauma, this core split... we are still paying the price today.

Fast forward to the establishment of our Republic. We have settled into a two-party system, which is basically completely divided. There is little collaboration, or bi-partisan-ship - especially recently. This plays out on every level of society, and is coming to the surface, as we analysts like to say, in the aftermath of this election. Elections are so close, as to make one question whether the system works, and the confusion regarding how the popular vote can be won and the electoral vote lost, is a gap which appears to defy logic, and which emotion can fill.

The present election is a prime example of how one self-state can prevail and lead to a serious misapprehension of reality. Clinton supporters, many media outlets, pollsters and others believed that the Presidency was all but cinched for Her. Analysts and pundits were quick to point out how highly improbable it was that Trump could draw the cards required to win the sacred two hundred and seventy electoral votes. Yet all along, Trump called it, and it went down the way he said it would. Was it so easy to dismiss the reality of what he was telegraphing because of emotional distraction engendered by the many transgressions against the progressive self-state which gelled around enthusiasm for HRC, and the sense of belief and mission evoked by the promise of finally having a woman President, on the heels of a President of Color? Research shows that strong belief can impair cognitive function. What was so hard for Clinton supporters to dismiss about Trump and the things he said and did, was so easy for Trump supporters to dismiss with a proverbial wave of the hand, which was itself met with outrage and incredulity by the Other.

We have here an Other-Other political system, a country which was once a melting pot, then a tossed salad, and now the dissociative structure of the country is brought into stark relief. It is hard to conceptualize a process of repair, as a voice calling for mutual recognition and repair is likely to be seen as Other to both parties, drawing aggression and increasing cognitive dissonance. The outcome of this election polarizes the distinct self-states for both Trump supporters and Clinton supporters is will further codify belief and indignation out of injury and injustice, or alternatively triumph and power.

Where do we go from here? Most likely, to further polarization. The chances that each side will empathize with the other, for the time being, is very low. There is little space for compassion, and little space for mutual recognition. On the level of the national psyche, this means maintaining the division, and avoiding integration in order to keep pain and distress out of awareness. At the same time, keeping the pain and distress out of awareness only serves to increase the intensity of the hidden discomfort, leaving it to drive destructive decisions and behaviors which only increase confusion and polarization, perpetuating the blame game and preventing progress.

What we can do about this situation is another question altogether.