Terry Real Responds to Trump’s Reelection

I was pleased when the editors of Psychotherapy Networker asked me, a week beforehand, to be amongst those invited to share my reactions to the election, “no matter how it goes.”

I write this now, at 1 in the morning, after the polls have closed, too shaken to sleep. What have we done? How has this happened? What does it signify about us as a people, as a country?

I fully expect my words will evoke disdain and judgment in many readers. A partisan therapist? Where does he get off? But if you’re looking for gentle acceptance and mild neutrality, you’ve clicked on the wrong article.

For close to 40 years, as the developer of Relational Life Therapy, I’ve been dedicated to explicating the dreadful wages of patriarchy—a system that, as the legendary feminist therapist Carol Gilligan wrote, “Holds some men as superior to others, and all men as superior to women.” My work with men throughout my career has shown me that the inner, often disowned, wound we carry is the wound of disconnection, and that the cure lays in reconnection: to ourselves, to our own feelings, and to others. Intimacy heals—and as therapists, of any stripe, we are intimacy merchants.

And yet, within the binary of patriarchy, intimacy is coded as feminine, which means that as a society, we treat it as we do many things deemed feminine—we idealize it in principle and devalue it in fact. Connection, sure. Inclusion, nice for a weekend. But here’s where we really live, my fellow Americans: in the plush corridors and blood-stained alleys of power, square in the festering wound of patriarchy, where a “real man” stands apart from nature, above it, and in control of it.

For half a century, psychotherapy has been obsessed with helping people rise up out of their shame, but we’ve paid little attention to the importance of helping people come down from their grandiosity—the other self-esteem disorder, the one that fuels entitlement, selfishness, control, abuse. We pass by grandiosity in silence—taught to be nice, to nurture and excuse. No wonder conventional wisdom sees narcissism as “untreatable.” Nothing in our training has equipped us to know how to honestly deal with it. Patriarchy protects perpetrators.

I don’t care whether you call yourself liberal or conservative, anyone with eyes in their head can see the man this country has elected back to the presidency is a poster child for grandiosity. Like the autocrats he so explicitly admires, Trump represents a resurgence of some of the most threatening, racist, sexist, bullying traits of patriarchal masculinity.

Here’s Trump in the infamous Access Hollywood tape: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” That’s from the man who said, “I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose a vote.” That’s the leader our Supreme Court granted legal immunity to.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the rise of Robber Barrons, the “self-made man,” America has worshipped social Darwinism. For years pundits wondered how Trump could be so popular despite his clear lies, cons, racism, and misogyny. By now, it should be abundantly clear he is not popular despite these traits but because of them. He is grandiosity unleashed—and, just as he claims, he gets away with it. Those of us who choose him don’t really think he’ll look after us: we want to be him. The true, unacknowledged American Dream is that fame and money will transform us, render us more than human: a celebrity, a deity, a star.

I work every day with enormously successful, powerful, unhappy men. I do my best to teach them the difference between gratification and relational joy. Gratification is a short-term hit of pleasure: an investment wins, a colleague flirts with you. Relational joy is the deeper down pleasure of being connected: being a parent, a spouse, a member of a community. Think of parenting. Sometimes it’s gratifying and sometimes it’s a royal pain. The joy of it goes deeper than such fluctuations.

What ails us—as individuals, as spouses, as families, and as a culture—is the replacement of real joy with the grandiose self-medication of gratification. We believe that enough achievement, success, money, power will somehow fill up the gnawing emptiness we run from—the hole where connection should be.

So where does this leave us now, at least those of us who want something more? Do we sink into silence, inaction, neutrality? No! I believe in the deepest recesses of my heart that patriarchal power is atavistic. Long as some might for the good old days of certainty and privilege, we all live in an interdependent world. We live within nature, not above it. We must learn to care for it, and one another, or face a catastrophic future.

As individuals and as a collective field, we must promote an alternative to dominance, to advocate for it, to learn to live it. We must trumpet a call to sanity wherever we can. Our rights will be assaulted. Count on it. Our environment will not be protected. Count on it. The only thing left standing between the triumph of autocracy is us and our beating hearts. Now, our greatest political resource is the beating hearts of one another. Let this night vitalize our resolve toward action.