Ever since the narcissist-in-chief began his rampage in January I've been struggling. A part of me is stuck on the last of the three nervous system’s responses to danger: fight- flight-freeze. I’m on freeze, feeling helpless because a petty, rageaholic president is playing out on the world stage the drama I experienced in my childhood home.
The freeze response is what an animal does when it can’t fight off or flee from danger. It's the deer-in-the-headlights, last-ditch response. It’s what the rabbit does when the cougar is upon it and it can only play dead, hoping the big cat will conclude it’s sick or poisoned, not safe to eat. And as I try, like the rabbit, to protect myself in this helplessness, I realize what I and everyone who is having my same experience needs: to recognize the link between narcissistic abuse at the personal and the political level, and to apply what we know about healing to this large-scale situation.
I was raised by a rageaholic, alcoholic dad who himself had a harsh childhood. My father's mom died when he was 5. Persecuted for being a socialist, his father left Guatemala to save his life and went into exile. From the age of 8 my dad and his siblings were shunted among family members who did not want them and could not afford to feed them. My father was thus effectively orphaned by the civil war in Guatemala, caused when the CIA toppled a democratically elected socialist government.
Like many people who experience severe trauma between the ages of 2 and 5, my dad became a narcissist. Deep down he felt inferior; he perceived his parents’ absence as abandonment, and his extended family had rejected him. To protect himself, he fashioned a sense of superiority based in part on his intellectual achievements. My father got ahead by going to one school in the morning and another at night, his academic intelligence and effort eventually earning him a scholarship to college in Mexico, then an Ivy League PhD in the United States. For 40 years he taught Economics at a public university in Mexico until a stroke left him paralyzed for the last years of his life.
Like all children, I was wired to love and admire my parents. For a time, my dad was my hero. He fantasized that he would one day win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and I daydreamed right along with him: maybe I could become an economist, too, and we could both solve poverty in the world and earn the prestigious prize together.
But I was 4 when my dad gave me my first beating. My mom had gone out and he was left in charge of me. I asked him if I could go play at the neighbor's house, and barely looking away from the newspaper he was reading, he said yes. Two hours later, having forgotten that he gave me permission to play at the neighbors', he frantically knocked on doors around our apartment building. When he finally found me, he flung me over his shoulder and marched me home in a blind fury, the veins in his forehead bulging. He took out his belt and whipped me while I pleaded, snot and tears running down my face. "But daddy, you gave me permission, don't you remember?" Possessed by his rage, a vacant look in his eyes, he beat me until, I presume, he burned enough of his stress hormones to come to his senses again.
My dad wasn't possessed by rage all the time. Only about half the time -- which made it more difficult to interact with him. Which of my two fathers would I encounter when I came home from school? The charming one who loved to dance and tell jokes and stories, or the one who demanded perfection, whose approval depended on me getting perfect grades?
Narcissism, a sense of self-centeredness and self-importance, is not always pathological. In fact, narcissism occurs naturally in young children up to age 5. When a child is born, it is natural for them to feel they are the center of the universe, that their primary caregiver exists to meet their every need. If all goes well in early childhood, nurturing parents lovingly meet the child's needs and by age 6 the child does three things: expands their attachment to other members of the extended family and community, learns empathy, and trusts that while they themselves are important, other people are important too.
It is only when attachment is traumatically disrupted in early childhood and the parents, family, and community fail to meet the child's needs that healthy narcissism fails to evolve into empathy. If the child feels abandoned, neglected, or abused, if they don't feel seen, understood, or cared for by others, they may develop an internal need to shore up their own importance.
This produces an intolerable inferiority complex: "If I am not important enough to have my needs met, I must not be worthy of love." Which devolves into denial: "It's not true that I'm not important." And projection: "I am a winner. You are a loser." And self-aggrandizement: "I am the smartest/best there ever was."
These are statements that you've heard the narcissist-in-chief of the United States make routinely: "I am a stable genius," "My inauguration crowds were bigger," "My (action) is the best the world has ever seen," “I won the 2020 election.” The narcissist denies reality because he finds it unbearable.
Denial, one of the most immature and common coping strategies humans possess, consists of lying to oneself by disbelieving reality. Dissociation, one of the main characteristics of trauma, is the splitting of consciousness that happens when we cannot tolerate a harsh reality and unconsciously separate it from our awareness. Dissociation facilitates the telling of lies to others.
When I was a teenager, I started noticing that my father didn't know how to take responsibility for his actions. When he made a mistake, he'd yell at my mother, "Look what you made me do!" I didn't understand to what degree my father believed his own lies until during my parents’ divorce, I happened to be visiting my mother as my dad yelled and insulted her ceaselessly over the phone. My mom held the earpiece aloft, paralyzed, while I heard every word until she finally hung up on him. By then a young adult, I wasn't willing to enable this behavior. The next time I saw my father, I told him if he insulted my mother again I would stop all contact with him. With a straight face he said, "You've been misinformed, Magali. I never did such a thing. I did not call your mother, much less insult her over the phone."
No argument on my part made him shift his position. He appeared convinced that this thing I had witnessed had never happened. It wasn't until many years later, when I was studying with Professor Jennifer Freyd, who has done extensive research on memory and trauma, that I understood: most perpetrators experience dissociation while committing abuse.
It all made sense now. When I was 4, my preoccupied father never registered that he gave me permission to play at the neighbors'. And when I was 24, he conveniently split from his awareness the fact that he yelled insults at my mother on the phone.
Narcissists lie to themselves to cover up their own inadequacies, faults, and mistakes and to assert their self-importance. They lie routinely, and if the trauma that gave rise to their narcissistic traits is severe, they live in such a state of frequent dissociation they believe their own lies.
This is why the 47th president of the United States cannot keep facts straight and willfully refutes facts he cannot tolerate because they do not bolster his self-serving agenda. This is why he can walk out of a debate where he embarrassed himself in the eyes of the world, yet state to the cameras that he "won" and this was "his best debate performance ever. The best the world has ever seen." This is why he claims that Ukraine started the war with Russia, despite the world’s witnessing of the opposite truth. Have you noticed that the face of the narcissist-in-chief is often blank, expressionless, vacant? That is the look of dissociation. I remember that face in my own father. His rigidity and inflexibility. His eyes were open but they weren't really focused on what was in front of him. I recognize this look in 47's face because I lived with it throughout my childhood.
When I have tried to understand the people who voted for a second Donald Trump presidency, I have accounted for many factors: that they have channeled their own class resentment into racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, disdain for both Jews and Muslims, etc. But I have overlooked an important phenomenon that reminds me of how paralyzed and confused I used to feel in my interactions with my father: many people from my generation and older share the experience of being raised by a narcissistic parent, and it is likely that they too are feeling triggered and paralyzed at the political spectacle. For decades this culture did not understand or support attachment parenting and instead enabled a great deal of cruelty toward children, creating the conditions for rampant narcissism and the intergenerational transmission of child abuse.
My father gave the impression of being functional but he was tragically mentally ill, or as I prefer to say, emotionally disabled. He was never able to heal the injuries of his childhood, and he got worse over time.
The 47th president of the United States has also gotten worse over time, coddled by a system that enables rich white men and rewards them with extraordinary privilege while covering for their bad behavior. With its cult of celebrities and white male supremacy, U.S. culture creates more unbridled narcissists. Any tendency to put people on pedestals, to encourage self-praise, and to fail to teach humility and empathy does that. Seen from my Mexican perspective, this is a society overly preoccupied with who is cool, who are the insiders versus the outsiders, who is a winner and who is a loser. And Donald Trump is one of the great monsters it has created.
Trump is a man with no moral center who lives inside a web of lies, and yet he occupies one of the most powerful positions on the planet. He sought re-election to stay out of jail and has funded his political trajectory by selling political favors. Every time he accuses someone of doing something terrible, he is already guilty of that transgression: rapist, abuser, criminal. He says he’s a great businessman, but he is a failed one, and his many failures and need to compensate for them have made him beholden to the Russians and the Saudis, to the corrupt politicians hiding behind him, and now to the other greatest narcissist currently, the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi. The two are grotesque mirrors of each other.
One reason why our default response to people like them is essentially disempowerment, is the common thread that runs between narcissism, white male supremacy and celebrity culture: the willingness to idealize powerful, famous or extremely rich people, and put them on pedestals.
It begins with parents. Alice Miller explains why in her classic book, The Drama of the Gifted Child: if a parent abuses a child, the child would rather believe My father hits me because I am bad than My father hits me because he is bad. Children’s physical and emotional survival depends on their primary caregivers. Our parents were the all-powerful giants who raised us, and nature programmed us to love and look up to them. The first way we begin to lie to ourselves, as abused children, is by taking responsibility for something we could not possibly control.
And it continues at the societal level. We have been programmed to believe that if someone becomes a billionaire it must be because they are smart, talented, good at something, worthy of admiration. Many people don’t see that Trump and Musk are not self-made men, but petty tyrants coddled by systems of enormous privilege. Although emotionally neglected as children they were handed huge inheritances, given endless government subsidies, the law failed to hold them accountable for their misdeeds and corrupt alliances, and everyone around them was too dazzled and disempowered to knock them off the pedestal.
But that is exactly what we need to do to claim our own power back.
In order to go from disempowered to centered, we need to:
1. Believe ourselves: listen to the little voice inside that tells us that what we know and feel is true. Believe yourself before you believe the gaslighter or mansplainer or narcissist out there.
2. Find witnessing: don’t keep your sense of being manipulated secret. We have been made to question and doubt ourselves, even outright lied to about what we’ve seen with our own eyes. As long as we are divided and isolated we cannot find witnesses to the reality of abusive behavior. The more you tell the story, the more you will be affirmed in the truth of what you’ve experienced. Community and affirmation are essential in this moment.
And in order to strengthen our nervous systems when we find ourselves experiencing the classic fight-flight-freeze responses toward danger, these methods can be helpful:
1. Shaking practice: shake your arms and shoulders. Shaking is what the rabbit and the deer do when they emerge from the traumatic freeze response. Physical movement helps our bodies burn stress hormones.
2. Breathe long and deep through the nose: this is the fastest way to switch from the nervous system thinking we’re in danger to the nervous system feeling we are safe, centered and connected. Instructional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLsqRgoVwsY&t=202s
3. The Butterfly Hug is a method of bilateral tapping on our shoulders useful for defusing traumatic memories and allowing the two hemispheres of the brain to better communicate. Instructional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_0iTUj1kMw&t=1s
This is so powerful on many levels, Magali. Thank you for sharing this most intimate of pains and connecting it to our current collective trauma. It feels so courageous for you to bare your soul like that but there's an even stronger undercurrent I sense: the cathartic nature of disarming your demons by dancing with them in front of everyone. And by doing so and tying your own process of dealing with an abusive father to what we are all going through right now being subjected to the most incorrigible, vicious and powerful narcissist this country has ever seen, you are giving us all permission to carry our trauma and wounds with this experience into the open. Thank you for…