Sorry I don't understand... could you further elaborate on Frankl's quote within the context of Trump's close call with his own death? A Malignant Narcissist cannot evolve, change or adapt... they only know how to manipulate & skewer reality/truth... Isn't Frankl's quote aimed only at those who have self-awareness or who are at least willing to grow self-awareness/insight? Meaning those who have a level of Humanity within themselves? Trump's brain has no ability/zero ability to be in reality as the only reality that exists is his own... He doesn't see himself as "reaping what he has sown = violence" -- he only sees himself as a "victim of evil" -- not himself as the real true evil... And even if (IF) he could actually "change/evolve/grow" it still would not last more than a few days or weeks if that... then he will return to the toxic/broken brain status of a malignant narcissist...
The quote was in reference to what Dr. Lee was suggesting as an appropriate way for us to respond in the current situation. I'm neither in the habit of, nor am I equipped to give, advice to malignant narcissists. And I agree that they're not in the habit of listening to Viktor Frankl's advice, or anyone else's but their own.
I Got Overwhelmed and found myself turning off All Media. I Looked around my Life and picked-up where I left off before the Dam Broke…! I stayed Busy Taking Care of my wards and myself then Time Flew By! Fundamentally nothing had really changed pertaining to me and my Life. When Friends made Contact I responded from A Place of Calm.
Thank you for your and Dr. Chandra's words so we may turn our eyes inward in this painful time, fostering compassion, mindfulness, creativity, insight, generosity, joy and love to flow everywhere within and in everything we see.
One reason I mention Ego so often in this substack is I've the sense my words might make sense here.
In my experience, I've never been able to unblock my own barriers, nor have I been able to free myself from oppression. Each time I tried, my Ego blocked the flow of life within. After years of effort, it began to seem more comfortable to cooperate with life itself, not my own Ego's or Self's needs. Identifying the difference between my needs and life's needs is joy.
In my view, we can train Ego to recognize it's own presence and participate in a choice to sideline itself, but this requires sensing our essence is something we cannot see or touch but nonetheless exists without our involvement so life may flow on its own.
At least that's how I know it. Personally, I consider this movement a grace, independent of our background or tradition.
There's an old saying "The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn’t Exist"
I would say that The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World that it is a poor victim.
Donald Trump, a victim of political extremism (which actually he's the chief perpetrator of) will demolish existing American institutions on pretext of fighting deep state. It's openly spelled out in Project 2025.
Today Trump chose his Goebbels. JD Vance had blamed Biden for 13 July attack on Trump.
The evil is trying to convince the world that it's a victim. The evil says he should not be rejected, criticized and repelled. The evil is trying to project reality as upside down.
The new line of MAGA is that Trump has been criticized as a threat to Democracy, a Fascist, a threat to America. This criticism has caused radicalization of American politics. Trump is a poor victim of political extremism created by progressive intellectual elements of society. The progressives should dial down the extremist rhetoric. They should stop using such harsh terminology for Trump. They should stop talking about Trump as the instigator of Jan 6 coup. The intellectuals should now self censor and muzzle their radical and irrational opinions of Donald Trump.
The political picture is changing fast in America and to the worse. Looks like a coup is underway to demolish the existing American state. A groundwork is prepared to change American state & society, Project 2025 is a blueprint. If Trump wins the election, he will use the pretext of "deep state" to dismantle and purge all American institutions.
Thank you. Amid my attempts to resist the urge to anger and despair, I keep the same points in mind that you've expressed. The practically evil motivation and methods stemming from Trump himself involve distorting or twisting things about himself and his ilk, to place the problems onto others (denial and projection) and look like the savior. As the old saying goes, "If you don't recognize the con, then you're the mark." So, it's actually an old ploy that some people fall for and can be so maddening and depressing. But I take some heart in reading here that there are still some people who aren't the "mark." I'm hoping that a majority who've not voted for Trump will do so again--overwhelming the Electoral College again.
Within minutes of the assassination attempt, Trump's acolytes were fundraising and blaming it on Biden. Now they want us to forget that Biden never called on anyone to commit violence, yet it has always been a staple of a Donald Trump rally to "beat the hell out of them," or "punch them in the face," and "I'll pay your legal bills."
Less than a day later, Trump was back in full "never surrender" mode. What you've called on us to do is known, in geopolitics, as unilateral disarmament. It is sheer folly. Sociopaths don't fight fair. They never have and they never will.
Dr. Lee writes, “There are two tasks we now have: not to be caught up in the madness and to conceive of creative ways to generate peace.”
I wish to address the negative pole of these two tasks: “not to be caught up in the madness.” In particular, I would like to address impotent rage, its tremendous negative power and positive ways of defeating it.
As is suggested by Dr. Chandra, the contemporary political situation has probably been producing recurrent, intense psychological distress in everyone who reads Dr. Lee’s newsletter. We find ourselves reading the news longer and more frequently than we intend to. Then when we finally step away from our digital device, we realize that we have not simply been reading the news, we have been doomscrolling. After a while we may realize that we have a maelstrom of emotions inside us. We may experience this maelstrom as a familiar devil whose presence no longer astonishes us. If we stop to reflect on these emotions, we may realize that they include anger and rage, anxiety and fear, desperation and hopelessness, a desire for revenge and a generalized sense of guilt, a sense of determination and a sense of resignation, fantasies of redemption and fantasies of doom, and so on. In short, the Pandora’s box of our id has been opened, and all the emotions from the most primitive layer of our psyches have been awakened and released, like legions of bats out of hell.
In this bewildering maelstrom of primitive emotions, there is one combination that is especially lethal, namely impotent rage.
In our distress we may not be aware that we are experiencing impotent rage, but it is not difficult to identify it in ourselves. First we need to look at ourselves from a normal perspective. It is obviously not normal to be lost in the maelstrom of emotions that contemporary politics produces in us. From a normal perspective, it is easy to recognize that the extreme anger we feel is really rage. It may also be easy to understand that our political rage is as irrational and self-defeating as road rage. We can easily see that we feel helpless to change what is enraging us; that is, that we feel impotent. At this point, is it essential to recognize that these two emotions, rage and a sense of helplessness, work together as a powerful pair. We are in a state of impotent rage. Next, we need to recognize that as long as we remain in this state, we will be spiraling ever downward into a deeper psychopathology. We have become enslaved to a masochistic, self-defeating emotional dynamic.
Of course, the preceding account describes the extreme situation, and may therefore sound somewhat melodramatic. But the extreme situation is real, and it is not uncommon. Creating impotent rage is a device deliberately employed by people with severe narcissistic personality disorders to reduce others to the status of narcissistic slaves. The device is deliberately used on their children by sadistic parents. A fascist leader constantly tells his followers how unjustly deprived they are; promises to remedy their deprivation while having no intention of doing so; and at the same time designates scapegoats who are supposedly responsible for their deprivation. He thus creates a sense of impotent rage in his followers, which makes them psychologically bewildered and therefore easily manipulated, and he redirects this rage against the designated scapegoats.
Thus in a Nazi concentration camp, a tailor and some helpers surreptitiously made uniforms that they used to escape. The commandant then reduced the food rations for the rest of the inmates to a starvation level, and told them why he was doing so. When the tailor and his helpers eventually were captured, the commandant had them placed in the midst of the rest of the inmates, who tore them apart limb from limb. Impotent rage, cultivated and redirected by the perpetrator against the victims.
If one feels recurrent intense psychological distress because of the current political situation, it is worthwhile to consider whether a milder form of impotent rage may be a component of one’s distress. The behavior of what are now the unambiguously fascist Republican Party and Supreme Court is indeed enraging. And the failure of one democratic safeguard after another, which Dr. Lee has described, together with the feeble opposition presented by the decrepit and complicit Democratic Party, indeed make one feel helpless.
How can one defeat the psychopathological dynamic of impotent rage? First, rage is extreme anger, and anger, like other normal emotions, is involuntary. We can employ various defenses to deny our anger, but it is still there. Ordinary anger often abides in us, quiescently, without doing any harm. But anger may be so great that it is more accurately called rage. Rage is simultaneously exhilarating and painful, a masochist enterprise of turning pain into pleasure. But in contrast to anger, rage is not intrinsically abiding. If we do not cultivate it, it will die away, or at least greatly diminish. The devil’s groom may bring us a magnificent stallion and hand us the reins, inviting us to mount and ride his horse of anger, and enjoy the exhilarating experience of rage. But we do not have to mount and ride his horse. If we do, the exhilarating rage will soon turn into primitive rage, which is not mere extreme anger, but an infantile rage from the lowest level of our psyche, and will be accompanied by serious psychological regression. If we should find ourselves riding his horse of anger, we need to realize that the reins are still in our hands, our feet are still in the stirrups, and we can dismount at will.
Second, in respect to impotence, as Dr. Lee observes, our sense of helplessness is a learned illusion. It is an illusion carefully and energetically cultivated in us by the fascists, who exert all their powers to entice us to join them in the abyss of the primitive psyche in which they dwell. There are many online bibliographies of further reading about what we can actively do about our political situation.
Once we arrest our downward spiral of impotent rage, we are in a position to see that our task, as Dr. Lee writes, is both positive and negative. One of the fundamental psychological challenges we all face from birth onwards is to integrate our positive and negative, or libidinal and aggressive, feelings. The failure to do so is at the heart of the etiology of the narcissistic spectrum. For the narcissistic personality, everything and everyone is all-good or all-bad, white or black, never gray. That is why, as president, Trump would say that his latest appointee was the greatest in history, until he tired of them and they became the worst in history. A healthy person learns that the world consists of grays, with very little white or black. We must accept the negative reality that makes us experience impotent rage, but also recognize that this negative reality is only one part of reality, and there are many counterbalancing positive realities, because the world consists of grays. And we must actively engage with these positive realities in order to neutralize our negative experiences.
It may also be useful, now that we are contemplating the complete fascist-Republican takeover of all three branches of government, to consider a couple of extreme cases of actual impotence.
First, Alexander Solzhenitsyn relates that when he had descended into the furthest depths of despair in the inhumane, unlivable, and unbearable conditions of the Gulag, feeling as hopeless as a human being can feel, he finally found freedom. Where did he find freedom? In the recognition that he could die. This recognition liberated him from the sense of total helplessness that his captors had gone to so much trouble to create in him. Though deprived of every other support of his humanity, he thus found his freedom entirely within himself. Contrast how Solzhenitsyn found freedom with what Winston Smith in the novel 1984 found after he was broken by the fascist machinery of Oceania, collectively known as Big Brother. Like Solzhenitsyn, Smith looked into himself. But what he found in himself was, “I love Big Brother.” He thus extinguished both his sense of impotence and his rage, but at the cost of annihilating his humanity.
Second, a Buddhist nun had been tortured. She was asked what her greatest fear was while she was being tortured. She replied, “The fear that I would lose compassion for my torturers.” I find it difficult to imagine a more complete interiority, or a greater filling of the void abyss with human plenitude.
Thak you, Dr Lee, for an insightful, peaceable essay not only wll-timed but sorely needed (at least by me).
WRITTEN ELSEWHERE
President Trump made an impressive response at the moment of the shooting. Sadly, President Biden's responses will likely be overlooked by most media outlets. The President proved his statesmanlike manner during a time when states(wo)manship appears no longer to be esteemed.
I suspect the brevity of these statements will be exploited by M.A.G.A. demagogues as 'proof' of President Biden's incapacity; in actuality, no more need be said.
Sadly, this violence, and Democrats' repeated efforts to address it, is nothing new and the situation with respect to access to weapons may even be worse today than fifty-six years ago.
Since I am old and alone and lonely, today is one of profound pessimism for me. As I looked up the two statements by President Biden on C-span, each was preceded by the same advert. for a vid.-game glorifying mass-shootings. What a gun-saturated culture in which we live. Whether people understand that such simulated slaughter is fantasy is not the point; it is, as per Senator Kennedy's riveting words the day after the murder of Reverend Doctor King in April 1968, the systematic de-humanization fermenting a sickness in our souls.
Response to a post from a valued kinsman who is more conservative than I; he is not prone to agry fits or violence to the best of my knowledge. A good and successful family man.
I AM INCLINED TO AGREE WITH HIS CONCERN.
“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” --President Biden in a telephone call to donors per 'Politico'.
As much as I prefer President Biden to President Trump, this statement by my candidate of choice was thoughtless at best, more likely irresponsible in a time as fraught as ours. I can understand better the revolting comments by M.A.G.A. demagogues blaming President Biden for this assassination attempt; obviously a spurious slur. While President Biden intended to say that the Democratic Party should focus on defeating President Trump, I really wish he had dispensed with the metaphor.
QUESTION PLEASE? Does any legit/verified background personality history exist about Donald Trump's mother? What was her personality like? Was she an extreme socialite... ? What was her parenting style & relationship with Trump? If Trump's mother had a superficial type of personality, one who was more mesmerized by materialism=wealth, being seen at parties, social recognition, "connections" etc., than spending a healthy amount of time nurturing, loving, teaching & caring for "baby" Donald -- then isn't it possible she did not attend to Trump as much as a newborn and/or toddler needs to develop a healthy brain? Not saying that all Socialites are bad mothers... just wondering if any info about his mother points to this possibility?
Thank you. Very helpful to stem an urge to react in anger and despair. I have to keep reminding myself of such ways to re-empower oneself. It overcomes the tendency to focus on threat from ruthlessness on the part of some people. Of course, finding a "balance" is the best, though sometimes seems like a tight-rope walk over Niagara Falls! Many thanks to Dr. Lee and Dr. Chandra. I try to keep in mind my attempts to understand Buddhist enlightenment--that in order to have it, it must involve the motivation for having it for everyone.
The top electoral candidates of the Democratic Party in the USA are a mild-mannered octogenarian male, Joe Biden, and a not yet sexagenarian female, Kamala Harris. The top two 2024 electoral candidates of the Republican Party in the 2024 electoral contest are a not so septuagenarian and former president male, Donald J Trump, and a not yet 40-year old male, J D Vance. It is clear which party prioritizes experience, wisdom and gender balance, and which party values masculine "fight, fight, fight" as an electoral virtue. Is it merely coincidental that Dr. Bandy Lee, a prominent female forensic psychiatrist and President of the World Mental Health Coalition, has faced extraordinary stifling/"stiffling" and adversity involving, by all accounts, a preponderance of males in high places... It is, therefore, odd and not even-handed, to hear a barrage of male commentators insisting that DJT is in a winning position in regard to November 5, when controversial Republican policy positions, overriding medical ethics and patient privacy, and jeopardizing female reproductive health and life, together with an all male running pair, appears to have greatly surrendered the female vote in the American elections this year. G-d blessing that I eventually qualify with the MPH: Nutrition and Wellness and join the WMHC, one area that I would be interested in examining proactively is the interplay of gender dynamics in leadership and politics around the globe vis-a-vis mental and neurological health, and the recommendations of bodies such as the United Nations in this regard. G-d bless!
Thank you, Dr. Lee, for your very balanced and timely perspectives in regard to the culmination of violence in politics in America and globally. Peace at grassroots level and in the corridors of power outdoes even the most irreversible, egocentric juggernaut of destruction.
QUESTION: Trump's fake persona of being a "changed man" & speaking about "Uniting American Citizens" will last approximately how many days before he reverts back to his toxic, abusive Malignant Narcissist? Weeks? Months? Correct Answer? D-A-Y-S... A Malignant Narcissist never learns nor adapts... they just use their "I'm-a-Poor-Victim/Martyr!" battlecry-lies to further escalate their sick & DANGEROUS agendas... Seems like everywhere Typhoid Trump goes... he leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him... 8 years and counting.... The real question is how do you wake someone up out of their delusions that exist within all the Typhoid Trump Cult Followers?
As I was reading, one of my favorite quotes expressing a harmonious sentiment came to mind.
"When we are no longer able to challenge a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." —Viktor Frankl.
Sorry I don't understand... could you further elaborate on Frankl's quote within the context of Trump's close call with his own death? A Malignant Narcissist cannot evolve, change or adapt... they only know how to manipulate & skewer reality/truth... Isn't Frankl's quote aimed only at those who have self-awareness or who are at least willing to grow self-awareness/insight? Meaning those who have a level of Humanity within themselves? Trump's brain has no ability/zero ability to be in reality as the only reality that exists is his own... He doesn't see himself as "reaping what he has sown = violence" -- he only sees himself as a "victim of evil" -- not himself as the real true evil... And even if (IF) he could actually "change/evolve/grow" it still would not last more than a few days or weeks if that... then he will return to the toxic/broken brain status of a malignant narcissist...
EDIT: I took James's statement as referring to oneself.
----------
Sounds like Reinhold Niebuhr's 'serenity prayer' to me; in its abridged wording:
G-D grant us the serenity to accept the things we can not change,
the courage to change the things we can, and
the wisdom for us to know the difference.
The quote was in reference to what Dr. Lee was suggesting as an appropriate way for us to respond in the current situation. I'm neither in the habit of, nor am I equipped to give, advice to malignant narcissists. And I agree that they're not in the habit of listening to Viktor Frankl's advice, or anyone else's but their own.
Hope that makes more sense.
I Got Overwhelmed and found myself turning off All Media. I Looked around my Life and picked-up where I left off before the Dam Broke…! I stayed Busy Taking Care of my wards and myself then Time Flew By! Fundamentally nothing had really changed pertaining to me and my Life. When Friends made Contact I responded from A Place of Calm.
But I had questions…How did Trump lose his tied on shoes and his Red Necktie?
Thank you for your and Dr. Chandra's words so we may turn our eyes inward in this painful time, fostering compassion, mindfulness, creativity, insight, generosity, joy and love to flow everywhere within and in everything we see.
One reason I mention Ego so often in this substack is I've the sense my words might make sense here.
In my experience, I've never been able to unblock my own barriers, nor have I been able to free myself from oppression. Each time I tried, my Ego blocked the flow of life within. After years of effort, it began to seem more comfortable to cooperate with life itself, not my own Ego's or Self's needs. Identifying the difference between my needs and life's needs is joy.
In my view, we can train Ego to recognize it's own presence and participate in a choice to sideline itself, but this requires sensing our essence is something we cannot see or touch but nonetheless exists without our involvement so life may flow on its own.
At least that's how I know it. Personally, I consider this movement a grace, independent of our background or tradition.
There's an old saying "The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn’t Exist"
I would say that The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World that it is a poor victim.
Donald Trump, a victim of political extremism (which actually he's the chief perpetrator of) will demolish existing American institutions on pretext of fighting deep state. It's openly spelled out in Project 2025.
Today Trump chose his Goebbels. JD Vance had blamed Biden for 13 July attack on Trump.
The evil is trying to convince the world that it's a victim. The evil says he should not be rejected, criticized and repelled. The evil is trying to project reality as upside down.
The new line of MAGA is that Trump has been criticized as a threat to Democracy, a Fascist, a threat to America. This criticism has caused radicalization of American politics. Trump is a poor victim of political extremism created by progressive intellectual elements of society. The progressives should dial down the extremist rhetoric. They should stop using such harsh terminology for Trump. They should stop talking about Trump as the instigator of Jan 6 coup. The intellectuals should now self censor and muzzle their radical and irrational opinions of Donald Trump.
The political picture is changing fast in America and to the worse. Looks like a coup is underway to demolish the existing American state. A groundwork is prepared to change American state & society, Project 2025 is a blueprint. If Trump wins the election, he will use the pretext of "deep state" to dismantle and purge all American institutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpLpOtFNFWg&pp=ygUSbGluY29sbiBwcm9qZWN0IGFk
Thank you. Amid my attempts to resist the urge to anger and despair, I keep the same points in mind that you've expressed. The practically evil motivation and methods stemming from Trump himself involve distorting or twisting things about himself and his ilk, to place the problems onto others (denial and projection) and look like the savior. As the old saying goes, "If you don't recognize the con, then you're the mark." So, it's actually an old ploy that some people fall for and can be so maddening and depressing. But I take some heart in reading here that there are still some people who aren't the "mark." I'm hoping that a majority who've not voted for Trump will do so again--overwhelming the Electoral College again.
Within minutes of the assassination attempt, Trump's acolytes were fundraising and blaming it on Biden. Now they want us to forget that Biden never called on anyone to commit violence, yet it has always been a staple of a Donald Trump rally to "beat the hell out of them," or "punch them in the face," and "I'll pay your legal bills."
Less than a day later, Trump was back in full "never surrender" mode. What you've called on us to do is known, in geopolitics, as unilateral disarmament. It is sheer folly. Sociopaths don't fight fair. They never have and they never will.
We go Joe!
Dr. Lee writes, “There are two tasks we now have: not to be caught up in the madness and to conceive of creative ways to generate peace.”
I wish to address the negative pole of these two tasks: “not to be caught up in the madness.” In particular, I would like to address impotent rage, its tremendous negative power and positive ways of defeating it.
As is suggested by Dr. Chandra, the contemporary political situation has probably been producing recurrent, intense psychological distress in everyone who reads Dr. Lee’s newsletter. We find ourselves reading the news longer and more frequently than we intend to. Then when we finally step away from our digital device, we realize that we have not simply been reading the news, we have been doomscrolling. After a while we may realize that we have a maelstrom of emotions inside us. We may experience this maelstrom as a familiar devil whose presence no longer astonishes us. If we stop to reflect on these emotions, we may realize that they include anger and rage, anxiety and fear, desperation and hopelessness, a desire for revenge and a generalized sense of guilt, a sense of determination and a sense of resignation, fantasies of redemption and fantasies of doom, and so on. In short, the Pandora’s box of our id has been opened, and all the emotions from the most primitive layer of our psyches have been awakened and released, like legions of bats out of hell.
In this bewildering maelstrom of primitive emotions, there is one combination that is especially lethal, namely impotent rage.
In our distress we may not be aware that we are experiencing impotent rage, but it is not difficult to identify it in ourselves. First we need to look at ourselves from a normal perspective. It is obviously not normal to be lost in the maelstrom of emotions that contemporary politics produces in us. From a normal perspective, it is easy to recognize that the extreme anger we feel is really rage. It may also be easy to understand that our political rage is as irrational and self-defeating as road rage. We can easily see that we feel helpless to change what is enraging us; that is, that we feel impotent. At this point, is it essential to recognize that these two emotions, rage and a sense of helplessness, work together as a powerful pair. We are in a state of impotent rage. Next, we need to recognize that as long as we remain in this state, we will be spiraling ever downward into a deeper psychopathology. We have become enslaved to a masochistic, self-defeating emotional dynamic.
Of course, the preceding account describes the extreme situation, and may therefore sound somewhat melodramatic. But the extreme situation is real, and it is not uncommon. Creating impotent rage is a device deliberately employed by people with severe narcissistic personality disorders to reduce others to the status of narcissistic slaves. The device is deliberately used on their children by sadistic parents. A fascist leader constantly tells his followers how unjustly deprived they are; promises to remedy their deprivation while having no intention of doing so; and at the same time designates scapegoats who are supposedly responsible for their deprivation. He thus creates a sense of impotent rage in his followers, which makes them psychologically bewildered and therefore easily manipulated, and he redirects this rage against the designated scapegoats.
Thus in a Nazi concentration camp, a tailor and some helpers surreptitiously made uniforms that they used to escape. The commandant then reduced the food rations for the rest of the inmates to a starvation level, and told them why he was doing so. When the tailor and his helpers eventually were captured, the commandant had them placed in the midst of the rest of the inmates, who tore them apart limb from limb. Impotent rage, cultivated and redirected by the perpetrator against the victims.
If one feels recurrent intense psychological distress because of the current political situation, it is worthwhile to consider whether a milder form of impotent rage may be a component of one’s distress. The behavior of what are now the unambiguously fascist Republican Party and Supreme Court is indeed enraging. And the failure of one democratic safeguard after another, which Dr. Lee has described, together with the feeble opposition presented by the decrepit and complicit Democratic Party, indeed make one feel helpless.
How can one defeat the psychopathological dynamic of impotent rage? First, rage is extreme anger, and anger, like other normal emotions, is involuntary. We can employ various defenses to deny our anger, but it is still there. Ordinary anger often abides in us, quiescently, without doing any harm. But anger may be so great that it is more accurately called rage. Rage is simultaneously exhilarating and painful, a masochist enterprise of turning pain into pleasure. But in contrast to anger, rage is not intrinsically abiding. If we do not cultivate it, it will die away, or at least greatly diminish. The devil’s groom may bring us a magnificent stallion and hand us the reins, inviting us to mount and ride his horse of anger, and enjoy the exhilarating experience of rage. But we do not have to mount and ride his horse. If we do, the exhilarating rage will soon turn into primitive rage, which is not mere extreme anger, but an infantile rage from the lowest level of our psyche, and will be accompanied by serious psychological regression. If we should find ourselves riding his horse of anger, we need to realize that the reins are still in our hands, our feet are still in the stirrups, and we can dismount at will.
Second, in respect to impotence, as Dr. Lee observes, our sense of helplessness is a learned illusion. It is an illusion carefully and energetically cultivated in us by the fascists, who exert all their powers to entice us to join them in the abyss of the primitive psyche in which they dwell. There are many online bibliographies of further reading about what we can actively do about our political situation.
Once we arrest our downward spiral of impotent rage, we are in a position to see that our task, as Dr. Lee writes, is both positive and negative. One of the fundamental psychological challenges we all face from birth onwards is to integrate our positive and negative, or libidinal and aggressive, feelings. The failure to do so is at the heart of the etiology of the narcissistic spectrum. For the narcissistic personality, everything and everyone is all-good or all-bad, white or black, never gray. That is why, as president, Trump would say that his latest appointee was the greatest in history, until he tired of them and they became the worst in history. A healthy person learns that the world consists of grays, with very little white or black. We must accept the negative reality that makes us experience impotent rage, but also recognize that this negative reality is only one part of reality, and there are many counterbalancing positive realities, because the world consists of grays. And we must actively engage with these positive realities in order to neutralize our negative experiences.
It may also be useful, now that we are contemplating the complete fascist-Republican takeover of all three branches of government, to consider a couple of extreme cases of actual impotence.
First, Alexander Solzhenitsyn relates that when he had descended into the furthest depths of despair in the inhumane, unlivable, and unbearable conditions of the Gulag, feeling as hopeless as a human being can feel, he finally found freedom. Where did he find freedom? In the recognition that he could die. This recognition liberated him from the sense of total helplessness that his captors had gone to so much trouble to create in him. Though deprived of every other support of his humanity, he thus found his freedom entirely within himself. Contrast how Solzhenitsyn found freedom with what Winston Smith in the novel 1984 found after he was broken by the fascist machinery of Oceania, collectively known as Big Brother. Like Solzhenitsyn, Smith looked into himself. But what he found in himself was, “I love Big Brother.” He thus extinguished both his sense of impotence and his rage, but at the cost of annihilating his humanity.
Second, a Buddhist nun had been tortured. She was asked what her greatest fear was while she was being tortured. She replied, “The fear that I would lose compassion for my torturers.” I find it difficult to imagine a more complete interiority, or a greater filling of the void abyss with human plenitude.
Bandy - can you get with George Conway? https://youtu.be/PRBaqyvIkIE?si=1jC5ZAuJQt8X6ROw
Thak you, Dr Lee, for an insightful, peaceable essay not only wll-timed but sorely needed (at least by me).
WRITTEN ELSEWHERE
President Trump made an impressive response at the moment of the shooting. Sadly, President Biden's responses will likely be overlooked by most media outlets. The President proved his statesmanlike manner during a time when states(wo)manship appears no longer to be esteemed.
https://lnkd.in/epYtyKwT (President Biden's initial statement of three minutes on 13jul24)
I suspect the brevity of these statements will be exploited by M.A.G.A. demagogues as 'proof' of President Biden's incapacity; in actuality, no more need be said.
https://lnkd.in/eh_f7x6U (six-minute address to the country on 14jul24)
Sadly, this violence, and Democrats' repeated efforts to address it, is nothing new and the situation with respect to access to weapons may even be worse today than fifty-six years ago.
https://lnkd.in/epxK_RF7 (seven minutes)
Since I am old and alone and lonely, today is one of profound pessimism for me. As I looked up the two statements by President Biden on C-span, each was preceded by the same advert. for a vid.-game glorifying mass-shootings. What a gun-saturated culture in which we live. Whether people understand that such simulated slaughter is fantasy is not the point; it is, as per Senator Kennedy's riveting words the day after the murder of Reverend Doctor King in April 1968, the systematic de-humanization fermenting a sickness in our souls.
Response to a post from a valued kinsman who is more conservative than I; he is not prone to agry fits or violence to the best of my knowledge. A good and successful family man.
I AM INCLINED TO AGREE WITH HIS CONCERN.
“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” --President Biden in a telephone call to donors per 'Politico'.
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/07/08/congress/defiant-biden-tells-donors-were-done-with-the-debate-00166834
As much as I prefer President Biden to President Trump, this statement by my candidate of choice was thoughtless at best, more likely irresponsible in a time as fraught as ours. I can understand better the revolting comments by M.A.G.A. demagogues blaming President Biden for this assassination attempt; obviously a spurious slur. While President Biden intended to say that the Democratic Party should focus on defeating President Trump, I really wish he had dispensed with the metaphor.
QUESTION PLEASE? Does any legit/verified background personality history exist about Donald Trump's mother? What was her personality like? Was she an extreme socialite... ? What was her parenting style & relationship with Trump? If Trump's mother had a superficial type of personality, one who was more mesmerized by materialism=wealth, being seen at parties, social recognition, "connections" etc., than spending a healthy amount of time nurturing, loving, teaching & caring for "baby" Donald -- then isn't it possible she did not attend to Trump as much as a newborn and/or toddler needs to develop a healthy brain? Not saying that all Socialites are bad mothers... just wondering if any info about his mother points to this possibility?
Scot emigré, devout Presbyterian, and a tough old bird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anne_MacLeod_Trump
Thank you. Very helpful to stem an urge to react in anger and despair. I have to keep reminding myself of such ways to re-empower oneself. It overcomes the tendency to focus on threat from ruthlessness on the part of some people. Of course, finding a "balance" is the best, though sometimes seems like a tight-rope walk over Niagara Falls! Many thanks to Dr. Lee and Dr. Chandra. I try to keep in mind my attempts to understand Buddhist enlightenment--that in order to have it, it must involve the motivation for having it for everyone.
The top electoral candidates of the Democratic Party in the USA are a mild-mannered octogenarian male, Joe Biden, and a not yet sexagenarian female, Kamala Harris. The top two 2024 electoral candidates of the Republican Party in the 2024 electoral contest are a not so septuagenarian and former president male, Donald J Trump, and a not yet 40-year old male, J D Vance. It is clear which party prioritizes experience, wisdom and gender balance, and which party values masculine "fight, fight, fight" as an electoral virtue. Is it merely coincidental that Dr. Bandy Lee, a prominent female forensic psychiatrist and President of the World Mental Health Coalition, has faced extraordinary stifling/"stiffling" and adversity involving, by all accounts, a preponderance of males in high places... It is, therefore, odd and not even-handed, to hear a barrage of male commentators insisting that DJT is in a winning position in regard to November 5, when controversial Republican policy positions, overriding medical ethics and patient privacy, and jeopardizing female reproductive health and life, together with an all male running pair, appears to have greatly surrendered the female vote in the American elections this year. G-d blessing that I eventually qualify with the MPH: Nutrition and Wellness and join the WMHC, one area that I would be interested in examining proactively is the interplay of gender dynamics in leadership and politics around the globe vis-a-vis mental and neurological health, and the recommendations of bodies such as the United Nations in this regard. G-d bless!
Thank you, Dr. Lee, for your very balanced and timely perspectives in regard to the culmination of violence in politics in America and globally. Peace at grassroots level and in the corridors of power outdoes even the most irreversible, egocentric juggernaut of destruction.
QUESTION: Trump's fake persona of being a "changed man" & speaking about "Uniting American Citizens" will last approximately how many days before he reverts back to his toxic, abusive Malignant Narcissist? Weeks? Months? Correct Answer? D-A-Y-S... A Malignant Narcissist never learns nor adapts... they just use their "I'm-a-Poor-Victim/Martyr!" battlecry-lies to further escalate their sick & DANGEROUS agendas... Seems like everywhere Typhoid Trump goes... he leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him... 8 years and counting.... The real question is how do you wake someone up out of their delusions that exist within all the Typhoid Trump Cult Followers?
“Silent Screams in the Vacuum of Ignorance “
https://youtu.be/NZdpyy9trv4?feature=shared