Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 151
Impaired

1/ I’m going to share a clinical assessment in this thread, so first here’s a bit of my background. In the 70’s I did some clinical pastoral training in the DC area as part of my seminary experience.

2/ My wise dean, sensing my inclinations of head over heart and verbosity over humility, arranged for my training to take place in a reformatory in Laurel, Maryland.

3/Teenagers from DC in trouble with the law were incarcerated there. The whole thing was difficult and revelatory. To this day, almost 50 years later, thinking of what those souls revealed to me makes me weep.

4/The learning system in clinical training pivoted on verbatims. I would visit with an imprisoned person and attempt to minister with him or her. Right after, I would write up, as honestly and candidly as I could, a transcript of the conversation.

5/There could be a summary, but what was required was at least a page of accurate, verbatim transcript of a few minutes of the conversation.

6/ I think there were 8 pastors in training in my group. We would meet with our supervisor, Dave, the toughest old bird I ever met, and we’d take an hour apiece with 2 or 3 of the verbatims.

7/ The whole group would then focus on what was going on in that moment. Underneath the verbatim lurked oceans of meaning. What was s/he feeling? What were you feeling? What does the dialogue reveal about the pastor? What resistances were arising in me that blocked compassion?

8/ It was all about learning to listen. As you probably know, really active listening is intense, and it’s also when all the healing starts to happen. “Advice,” our supervisor kept telling us, “isn’t worth much; and if you’re not listening, it isn’t worth a bucket of spit.”

9/ All this training came flooding back to me as I read David Frum’s article in the current Atlantic entitled “This is Trump’s Fault.” (Great piece, BTW). Frum gives some extended verbatims of Trump speaking at his rallies --

10/--all the repetitions, hesitations, leaps of logic and associations, all the ramblings are perfectly transcribed by Frum. Here’s what that verbatim reveals to me:

11/ This is a grievously impaired human being. If I had brought a verbatim of my side of a conversation that sounded like Trump at that rally, Dave would have arranged for my admission to a psychiatric ward and for a wellness check on my family.

12/ Clinically, the first thing I notice is that this speaker is unconsciously terrified. You can tell by looking at the defenses he compulsively creates moment by moment.

13/ Those defenses crumble, so that Trump has to leap from one precipice of thought to another because whatever he is standing on at the moment starts to crumble beneath him.

14/ Trump needs to be removed and we must make that happen this November.

15/ David Frum presents a fine, indeed meticulous case that Trump is personally accountable for the inept & deadly national response to the crisis of COVID 19. While this is bad enough, our situation is actually worse.

16/ Usually I mute Trump when he is on. His voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Reading his exactly transcribed utterances and remembering the tortured souls in that reformatory, I now know why I find him so frightening.

17/ Trump is way more deranged than those kids ever were, way less self-aware than even I was in my 20’s. It’s terrifying to contemplate the violent fear just below his surface...

18/.. It glints out, as when he said, of the Nazis at Charlottesville “Very fine people. I know it and YOU KNOW IT!!!!”. We see it as he snarls at reporters and insults them personally. Anger is a secondary response to fear.

19/ Next time Trump is on your screen, hit pause. Then look dispassionately at him. What do you see? Notice those ashen rings around the sockets of his eyes? That’s the actual color of his skin. What is he telling us? He's always wearing a mask.

20/ He's not some super-vigorous septuagenarian. He reminds me of the Veneerings in Dickens’ "Our Mutual Friend" If Trump were ever humbled into honesty, he would say, with King Lear, “I am a very foolish, fond old man, and sometimes I fear I am not in my right mind.”

21/ The key to the terror that drives Trump to deny so much reality, is that unconsciously he knows he is a fraud. He is suppressing the truth about himself. From himself...

22/....Trump has lived a whole lifetime of outward glamor and inner corruption, of glitz distracting the rest of us from his criminality. And it’s all now coming into the view of the whole world. Think of the terror of that.

23/ This is how Jesus describes such an authority figure:
“You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean.” (Matt 23:27)