Tea Party | The People's Therapist

Posts Tagged ‘Tea Party’

Fall into the Gap

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged American Dream, bar exam, e-discovery, Erie problems, Gilded Age, Harvard, Horatio Alger, MBA, Medicare, Nebraska, Orlando Patterson, Ozzie and Harriet, plutocracy, Return on Investment, ROI, Sarah Palin, social death, Super-PACs, Tea Party on February 29, 2012| 40 Comments »

A law student client – already an MBA – said she needed convincing to drop out of her third-tier school.

I told her to calculate the return on investment for the final three semesters.

She crunched the numbers.

“Debit-wise, I’ve burned $80k in savings and I’m looking at another $100k of borrowed money. On the credit side, I might find a low-salary doc review gig.” She pretended to scratch notes. “So… big loans, interest payments, inadequate cash flow…opportunity cost of eighteen more wasted months learning legal mumbo-jumbo followed by the bar exam…”

“In other words…” I egged her on.

“I’d be totally screwed.” She affixed the cap on her pen. “Thanks. I’m convinced.”

I posed the question we were dancing around: “Why are we having this conversation?”

My client laid out the background: “My dad’s a lawyer. My mom’s a lawyer. My little brother’s taking his LSAT. This is what my family does. If I quit, I feel like I’m failing.”

She added: “It seems like it was different in my parents’ day.”

That’s because it was. A generation gap has opened in the legal world. On one side there are lawyers over-50, for whom law still looks like a safe, reliable ladder to the upper-middle-class. From the other side – where their kids are perched – law more closely resembles un ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

My client’s parents live in a time warp – a world trapped in a snow globe. Mom’s worked for 25 years as an in-house lawyer for a state college – safe, not terribly stressful (or interesting) work, with a decent salary, good hours and benefits. Dad’s worked for decades as general counsel for a local business. It’s no wonder that for them – and their generation – law still epitomizes a safe, low-stress career with good pay and benefits.

These over-50 types can’t imagine how bad it gets nowadays for someone calling himself an attorney. Their Weltanschauung doesn’t encompass windowless warehouses packed with contract lawyers logging 18-hour shifts of doc review for hourly wages, no benefits. Mom and Dad haven’t seen young partners at top firms getting de-equitized and struggling to snare in-house positions. If they knew that reality, they’d also realize their own sort of safe, steady work with benefits, a decent wage and reasonable hours constitutes a pipe dream for a kid graduating law school today.

Another client of mine – a 20-something from a decent school entering her third year in biglaw – summed up her reality thus:

“Really? I spent myself into life-long debt, endured hours of property law lectures, analyzed Erie problems on brutal exams, crammed for the bar…all so I could waste two years on doc review, then wait to get laid off (with the de rigueur bad review and zero career prospects) so someone younger and cheaper can take my seat? Really?”

If she’d studied computer science, or gotten an MBA or just quit school after college, she might have become a better-paid “e-discovery provider.” As a JD, it’s strictly “e-discovery peon.” In any case, five years from now a computer program will do doc review all by itself. As one client put it: “that’s when attorneys start living in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk.”

This isn’t your grandfather’s biglaw.

(more…)

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Your Id – and Sarah Palin

Posted in Current Events, Intriguing Patients, tagged healthcare, Id, inner child, Pleasure Principle, regression, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Tea Partiers, Tea Party, Tea Party movement, thisiswhyyourefat.com on September 15, 2010| 1 Comment »

There are foods no rational human would knowingly ingest: the stuff listed on this website.

Why would you eat a double bacon peanut butter egg and cheese burger with chipotle mayo?

Because you think it will taste good.

To be precise, a little child inside you thinks it will taste good. That little child is unconscious, and he seeks pleasure. Freud called him the “Id.” He doesn’t think. He reaches for something shiny because it’s shiny.

Welcome to the appeal of Sarah Palin.

Sarah is the political equivalent of marshmallow fluff, chocolate fudge, mac & cheese and cookie dough in a deep fryer.

Why does she look like she’ll taste good – and why is she so bad for you?:

FIRST REASON: Sarah has an easy answer for EVERYTHING.

Millions of Americans without healthcare? Sarah would shrink government while lowering costs, cutting taxes and creating jobs. It’s THAT SIMPLE!!

Foreign Affairs? Sarah would stand tall against our enemies and stop terrorism in its tracks while keeping us the strongest nation in the world.

Immigration? Sarah would stand up for real Americans and protect our jobs.

The environment? There’s plenty of oil – we just have to drill for it! Sarah doesn’t believe in global warming. We can do whatever we want. That’s what the planet’s there for – having fun!

What else is there?

Who cares!

Sarah would cut taxes, build the economy, create jobs, shrink government, make America strong and bring the family back – like things used to be in the olden days! Everything would be super!!

You betcha.

Does any of this make sense?

Does washing down a bag of Doritos with a two liter bottle of Mountain Dew and a super-size bag of peanut butter M&M’s make sense? Does it have to make sense?

It feels good. Until a few hours later. When you throw up.

SECOND REASON: Sarah’s just like you!

Palin’s Tea Party supporters are always stressing how “real” Sarah is. That word – “real” – is code for “just like me!” Your Id, like a small child, is by definition a narcissist – he cannot see where he stops and another person begins, so doesn’t see anyone or anything beyond his own reflection.

Neither does Sarah!

She brings you…you. Not like that weirdo Obama, who’s…well…umm…he looks “different” – you know what I mean?

Your Id wants to have fun. He seeks pleasure. That’s the “Pleasure Principle.” Your unconscious – this child – is utterly regressed. He likes sugar, and shiny things. He likes Sarah.

In case you need a male Sarah Palin? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

That would be Scott Brown.

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The psychodynamics of Sarah Barracuda

Posted in Current Events, Intriguing Patients, tagged barracuda, cannibalism, cheerleader, deprivation, famine, Great Leap Forward, John McCain, Mao, mashed potatoes, Republican, Sarah Barracuda, Sarah Palin, Tea Partiers, Tea Party on February 26, 2010| 11 Comments »

Sarah Palin’s nickname in high school was “Sarah Barracuda.”

Supposedly, this reflected “her competitive streak.”

Charming.

How did this happen? How does a child grow up with a grasping nature so extreme that she becomes nicknamed after a vicious carnivorous fish?

There aren’t many clues in Palin’s early biography, which reads like a carefully pruned and polished star cheerleader’s resume…which, of course, it is.

Sarah was born the third of four children. That’s our one clue. Perhaps she had to compete for attention with older and younger siblings.

At some point in Sarah’s life – I’d guess the first five minutes – she decided there wasn’t enough out there for her. At least, not enough out there for her if she was going to share any of it with anyone else.

Maybe it was a sense of poverty. Maybe the Palins were poorer than their neighbors. Or maybe competing with those siblings was enough. But somewhere during that childhood, profound feelings of deprivation developed in Sarah’s psyche, and a famine mentality set in.

After that, all we can do is sit back and watch a mighty appetite gobble everything in its path.

When people are subjected to a severe deprivation, like a famine, they hoard and deny others and generally act in ways they aren’t proud of. During the famine in China that occurred as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign in the late 1950’s, widespread starvation led to cannibalism among the rural peasantry. Hunger can drive people to do terrible things. They can turn vicious.

A bit like a barracuda, tearing off hunks of flesh to gulp down its maw.

A bit like Sarah Palin.

Here’s a charming quote from the Barracuda herself: “I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon-burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou.”

The mental image is of a gaping mouth, with sharp teeth.

How about her politics? Could they even be considered politics? Mostly, it boils down to Sarah, Sarah, Sarah – and making money for Sarah.

She quit her job as governor to give speeches to the highest bidder, write a book and work on tv – all for enormous sums of cash.

She was willing to speak (and no doubt thrill and inspire) the Tea Party wackos – for many, many thousands of dollars.

Even when she was working for John McCain, it was clearly all about Sarah – her expensive clothes, her big family (she has five children), her gigantic super-church, her enormous state – even the humongous “big box” stores she enticed to the little town of Wasilla to replace its now-moribund downtown.

Something in Sarah’s background left her feeling hungry – deeply hungry – and she is still grabbing up everything at the table. Her “politics” are a philosophy of greed. She can get married – but gay people can’t. She doesn’t want to pay taxes – even to help other Americans survive. She’s got her healthcare – if you don’t have yours, well, tough luck. She’ll drill for every drop of oil in a nature sanctuary until her giant SUV is purring like a kitten, slurping it all down, belching, and demanding more. Immigrants can stay out – this country is Sarah’s, securely stolen from indigenous peoples and guarded with guns guns guns and more guns, wonderful guns. Sarah doesn’t like government – she wants to go it alone, because she’s got hers, and you can worry about yourself, thank you very much.

Sarah wants to get a gun and go out in nature and kill something beautiful and devour it.

A couple more charming quotes:

“If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

“I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.”

Sarah is a predator. She’s earning a lot of money chomping her way through a frightened minority of mostly older, white Americans who are terrified of the future and will buy all the double-cheeseburgers, super-size fries and giant cokes they need to maintain a secure perimeter of human fat cells. Hunkered down in their gated retirement communities, clinging to their beloved guns, they crouch by the glow of their wall-size flat-screen plasma tv’s and defend what’s rightfully theirs – which is to say, everything.

Sarah represents insecurity in love. Somewhere along the way, early on, she decided there wasn’t any love out there for her. So she had no love to spare for anyone else.

Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.

There’s room for you next to the mashed potatoes.

That’s the barracuda’s creed.

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Why Scott Brown needs so much attention

Posted in Current Events, Intriguing Patients, tagged acting out, filibuster, healthcare, Judge Samuel Zoll, Massachusetts, Scott Brown, Scott Brown's daughters, shop-lifting, Tea Party, Ted Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy on February 11, 2010| 1 Comment »

Children need a lot of attention. When they don’t get it, they’ll often act out – misbehave – in a desperate attempt to be paid attention to, even if the result is negative attention.

I had a patient who used to vomit frequently as a child. It became an unpleasant regular event during family meals – but he managed to distract his mother for a few minutes. Even if she was cross and impatient with him, at least she was paying attention.

Scott Brown, the newly-elected US Senator from Massachusetts, grew up in a family where there wasn’t much time available to devote to raising children. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and both the mother and the father have since remarried three times each.

Scott’s mother was living on welfare at various periods during his youth, and Scott sometimes ended up getting shipped off to live with his grandparents or his aunt. He had siblings, too. My guess is there were enough other children around to consume whatever time was available for Scott.

How did the young Scott Brown respond to this situation? He acted out – badly. By the time he was 12 years old, Scott was arrested for shop-lifting from a record store and brought before a judge.

This is where things get interesting. Brown’s story is that the judge, Samuel Zoll, shamed him by sentencing him to write a 1500-word essay on how his siblings would feel watching Brown play basketball in jail.

The People’s Therapist suspects something else happened, too. Scott had finally forced a father figure – Judge Zoll – to pay attention to him.

That’s why he stole from the record store in the first place. He didn’t need records. He needed a parent-figure’s attention. And he got it – even if it was negative attention.

From that point on, we see a string of events suggesting that grabbing attention – even negative attention – became an unconscious impulse in Brown’s life. Here are a few examples that jump out at you:

1. Posing nude for Cosmopolitan Magazine as a law student;

2. Using the “F-word” as a State Senator during a debate on gay marriage at a high school; and

3. Presenting his daughters, Ayla and Arianna Brown, as “available” (whatever that was supposed to mean) during his acceptance speech for the US Senate.

The biggest attention-getter of all was politics itself. Brown seemed to run compulsively for everything there was to run for, from Property Assessor to Selectman to State Representative to State Senator.

This latest campaign, for the US Senate, was an even bigger attention-getter, and once again, it was negative attention. Brown’s role was the spoiler.

Teddy Kennedy, a legend in the Senate, devoted much of his life to fighting to guarantee decent healthcare for all Americans. On the cusp of achieving this goal, Kennedy died after a courageous battle with brain cancer. Brown’s job? To get elected on a wave of Tea-Party cash, so he could shatter Kennedy’s dream. Brown had to get elected so he could be the 41st vote that would allow the small Republican minority from mostly under-populated states, representing an even tinier minority of Americans, to abuse the filibuster rule and destroy years of hard work by blocking healthcare reform.

We can only hope a father figure – perhaps President Obama could fill in for Judge Zoll? – will arrive to give Brown the attention he needs. Maybe he should be forced to write a 1500-word essay on how his siblings would feel watching him destroy a chance at decent, affordable healthcare for millions of Americans.

This country has had enough of angry little children in positions of authority.

We need leaders who can behave like adults – who win our admiration for what they achieve. We do not need another attention-grabbing miscreant who will stop everyone in their tracks by throwing up at dinner.

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Those Tea Party people

Posted in Current Events, tagged guns, healthcare, Republicans, Right Wing, sense of security, Tea Partiers, Tea Party on January 16, 2010| 2 Comments »

The first thing the People’s Therapist notices about the Tea Party people is that they come to everything from a sense of deprivation. They are always – always always always – talking about their money, and how they don’t want anyone to get their hands on it. It’s theirs. They need it.

There isn’t enough of it.

If we spend their money on other people – say, on healthcare or schools or feeding the poor – then they’ll starve. This is a famine. It is every man for himself.

If the Tea Party people are willing to spend money on anything, it’s guns. Their own guns, and a seemingly endless supply of guns for the military, which can never have enough guns, because there are ENEMIES everywhere. We are in danger. We need to entrench, hunker down in a defensive posture, and wait out the storm, gripping our guns tightly and hoarding our money just like we hoard our food.

To many people, the fact that other developed countries offer free healthcare – as well as free schools, free fire departments and lots of other basic necessities and still somehow manage to eat and breathe and go about their daily lives, argues strongly that the Tea Partiers are over-reacting. In fact, to many Americans, those Tea Party people seem a little…well…nuts.

What’s going on here?

As a starting place, it is a basic principle in psychotherapy that money is a surrogate for security in love.

Young children love security – they flourish in an environment that most adults would find stifling. The safer the better is a good general rule for raising a happy child. You’ve probably noticed that when you finish reading a picture book to a small child he doesn’t want you to read another book to him. He wants you to read THE SAME BOOK to him, again. And then THE SAME BOOK again. And then again. It feels safer that way.

Young children like dinner to be at the same time every night. And breakfast at the same time every morning. And yep, they like lunch at the same time – in fact, they like to eat the same thing every single time, if possible (preferably something safe, like pizza or chicken nuggets.)

Most of all, children crave security in love. They need you to love them ABSOLUTELY, unconditionally and totally. In fact, they are literally of you – they came from your bodies – so you must love them as you love yourself. You must delight in them, utterly, or they will sense that something is wrong, and blame themselves, and start to worry.

That’s where the problems start.

What if a parent doesn’t love herself? Not all parents are certain that they like who they are. Nor are they all capable of providing an environment of absolute stability or safety. Life can feel like a storm-tossed sea sometimes, and even good parents often feel overwhelmed and filled with doubt about themselves and their future.

A child raised in a house that doesn’t feel safe will start to compensate by trying to create safety on his own. This can lead to a host of symptoms that follow him into adulthood.

Children in an insecure environment can employ magical thinking, imagining themselves having impossible powers and responsibilities, such as the power and responsibility to keep parents from fighting or abuse from recurring. Roles get reversed, and the child believes it has the responsibilities of the parent. The child can learn to distrust authority and feel he has to do everything for himself. Sometimes this ties into obsessive compulsive behaviors, eating disorders, sexual compulsiveness – a whole gamut of issues.

These children can also adapt hoarding behaviors, trying to create safety by collecting possessions. It could start with matchboxes or comic books and develop into a full-blown hoarding compulsion, or an obsession with money instead of the things that really matter in the world – other people, love, caring, relationships and connection with our fellow beings.

Any of this sound like those Tea Party people?

My work with the Tea Partiers (if they were to file, en masse, into my office) would be to symbolically re-parent them, to take them back to the scared children they once were, in a world that felt insecure, and to have them address themselves as the parents they needed, and still need, in order to feel safe and secure. They need to learn to self-soothe, to address messages to themselves intended to calm those scared children.

Then maybe they can accept that President Obama isn’t Adolf Hitler, providing healthcare to all Americans isn’t going to result in the apocalypse, the military isn’t the only route to a feeling of safety in the world – and putting money before people is the surest route to a wasted life.

On the other hand, helping others – offering care from a place of abundance – is the surest path to joy.