Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

Ego Integrity, Shame, and Politics

At a family get together decades ago, one of my young nephews got into some mischief, did something “wrong,” and his mother challenged him sternly, “Billy, why did you do that?” I’ll never forget the look on the face of that five year old boy. His eyes glared with guilt and fear, he looked away, he stammered and then announced, “No!” His guilt was obvious to all; some of us smiled, remembering our youth when we had been there in Billy’s shoes. Years later In my clinical practice I was presented one morning with a six year old boy with impulse control issues (adhd) who had been rescued from an abusive family by his kindly grandparents. Sammy, as I’ll call this young tyke, eagerly greeted game playing as part of his treatment plan. This strategy was invaluable for a patient with these issues, providing an opportunity to teach respect for rules of simple board games, as well as patience. His moments of frustration and anger could then be explored in relation to behavior in school and family life. Sammy had very little control over his impulses, not able to accept having made a bad move and insisting that got to have a “do-over.” He even threw the board one time in frustration as I emphasized a simple rule. Often he would simply lie though it was obvious that he had cheated.

Both of these young lads had not reached the developmental stage of being able to admit having made a mistake, having been “wrong”, which is a basic skill in participating in the human race. The social body functions only if certain basic rules of organization, structure, civility, decorum, and respect for others can be adhered to. In each of these instances, they were off to a poor start in accomplishing this goal.

“Ego integrity” can handle critical feedback from others though it often still hurts deeply. I remember the impeachments of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Each of them were deeply humiliated, and tried to lie their way out of it, but ultimately had to accept their fate and admit they had erred. In Nixon’s case, he had to accept the great humiliation of being forced to resign from office. Each of us have an ego and our ego is designed to attempt to save face; this is how the ego is designed. But when one has developmentally matured enough, his ego can have the integrity to accept the shame of humbly admitting, “I was wrong. I made a mistake.” In some contexts this might even be framed as, “I have sinned.”

When one lacks this ego integrity, and is is extremely immature and overwhelmed with shame and humiliation, the individual will go to any extreme to save face, even resorting to violence. This violence can be overt but also subtle, i.e. taking political form, and having a devastating or catastrophic impact on the social body. This individual cannot back down.

The Pain of “Seeing Things Too Well”

7 Replies

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well. –Wallace Stevens

Matthew Warren, the son of widely-renown evangelical pastor Rick Warren, has taken his life. Only in his mid-twenties, the report from his father was that his son had struggled with depression and “mental illness” for most of his life, often pining for death to ease his pain. I was deeply troubled by this story, so sorry for the young man who was so overcome with the difficulty of life and for his family whose life has now been shaken to the core.

“You who watched Matthew grow up knew he was an incredibly kind, gentle, and compassionate man,” Warren wrote. “He had a brilliant intellect and a gift for sensing who was most in pain or most uncomfortable in a room. He’d then make a bee-line to that person to engage and encourage them.”

This anecdote from Pastor Warren reveals that Matthew was a very sensitive soul, who could be described as “having boundary problems” and taking on the troubles and pain of other people. In my trade, I once heard a psychiatrist describe a similar soul as suffering from “porosity of boundaries.”

I don’t know anything about the Matthew and never will. But I certainly identify with him as I know what it is like to overly-identify with other people and, on occasion to cross a line and take on more of their pain than I should. That is why I was a “mental health professional” and often could have uttered the famous words of Bill Clinton, “I feel your pain.” But, mercifully my “porosity” never reached the extreme of this young man and I’ve never had to battle with suicidality.

Life is really painful. Most people are “blessed” with blinders but some are not so fortunate. If they are lucky, they will be able to channel this anguish into a productive outlet…art, music, “care-giving” professions, ministry, etc….; otherwise, they suffer terribly and sometimes opt for the “bare bodkin” that Hamlet pined for. Most cultures do not make room for young men and women of this cut, those who “see things too well.” This greatly exacerbates their pain, forcing them to suffer in isolation. I’m reminded again of the wisdom of Leonardo da Vinci:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”. Just as Jaspers would note, da Vinci knew that we “have to take it where we find it.”

Why Did the Jews Kill Jesus????

4 Replies

David Letterman used to have a little routine he would do on his show called “Brush with Greatness” in which he would pick a person from his audience who had encountered a luminary at some point in his/her life in some totally casual manner. That person would tell of that chance encounter and then David would hand him/her the “writer’s embellishment” to read which would be a fantasy account in which that encounter made a monumental impact on the life of that luminary. Well, in 1980 on Good Friday I had an encounter with a true luminary, an eventual earth shaker indeed, and here I will share about that encounter and then provide a “writer’s embellishment.”

The year was 1980 and I was teaching social studies at a rural school in Northwest Arkansas. The young governor of our state was dropping by on a campaign swing, recently having started the campaign against Frank White. It was early in the campaign and it was a given that the governor would win re-election in this traditional democratic state against an unheard of opponent.

The handsome young Bill Clinton entered the packed gymnasium with a full entourage. The atmosphere was electric. Governors did not often stop by little rube communities like this and I’m sure this visit was because of some local small-fry dignitary that had pulled in a favor with someone. A question-and-answer session with the student body was to be the main part of the event and so we teachers had prepared our students to ask appropriate and thoughtful questions about the political issues of the day. Mr. Clinton made a few preliminary remarks and then opened the floor to questions from the student body.

Immediately, a gangly young early-teen female already well known as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer stood up and with a shrill, loud voice, shrieked out, “WHY DID THE JEWS KILL JESUS?” Well, the first thing I thought was, “Well, at least she is not a student of mine!” There was a pause, briefly, as everyone was stunned, realizing that the question had nothing to do with the moment even if it was Easter. But the governor did not miss a beat, being the skilled politician that he was. He did not smile, or chuckle in the least, taking the question with complete sincerity and responded with the standard-issue Baptist answer, that Jesus had died, was buried, and rose again for our sins. Please note that he did not answer the question at all, demonstrating that he already had the political skills to advance to higher office.

As he and his entourage left the gymnasium I happened to be in his path and got to shake his hand, making eye contact in the process. At this point I will begin the “Literarylew” writer’s embellishment:

I knew immediately that he and I were friends for life, BFF even before the concept emerged on Facebook. I could just tell that he could “feel my pain.” The encounter lasted only a half second but I knew that I would hear from him soon. Sure enough, that night he called me and said that he really wanted to be friends, to “pal around” from time to time as he could tell that I was really a special guy, even if I was just a scmuck school teacher in a rube Arkansas high school.

So, to make a long story short, beginning then we would get together every now and then and just “hang out.” And when he became President, he secretly used campaign funds to build a heli-port in my backyard and would just drop in a couple of times a year for a visit. As soon as he landed, we would head to my ’69 Chevy pick-up. While I was trying to start the engine, he would use a bungee cord to strap down the hood and then remove the plywood from the window that had been knocked out. We would then head to the local monster truck show, knocking down a six-pack of pbr on the war, tossing the empties out the window with impunity. He explained, with a wink, “Hell, Louie, if they stop us, I can fix it!”

(NOTE: Btw, Clinton lost that gubernatorial election in 1980!)

“I Feel Your Pain”

1 Reply

One of my blog-o-shere friends responded re a recent post of mine about the role of feeling in alleviating the “heaviness” of life’s burdens. (Twominutesofgrace@wordpress.com) She has been a therapist at one point in her life and noted how that part of her healing was learning the art of “reciprocal vulnerability” in the therapeutic relationship. One of the pitfalls of being professional care-givers is that so often we do carry our own load of guilt and shame and seek to assuage those feelings with our clients. If we go too far in that direction, if we trot out the Clintonian, “I feel your pain” too often, we might discover we have made it too much about ourselves. But if we refuse vulnerability in the first place—barricaded behind professional jargon, cliche, and the DSM IV—we don’t need to be in the position of therapist, pastor, or “care-giver” in the first place.

Someone once said, “To be is to be vulnerable.” I think the Apostle Paul had this in mind when he wrote to one church, “I was with you in weakness, and fear, and much trembling.” Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described vulnerability as having a heart “full of penetrable stuff” suggesting that without vulnerability we are “impenetrable.” And impenetrability is the natural trajectory of the human ego. It resists anything which causes it discomfort.

Macbeth and the Unconscious

Conspiracy Theory

2 Replies

I have a virulent disdain for conspiracy theories. This stems from my youth where I imbibed a variety of conspiracies from my community, especially from my little church. There was always the impending doom of “the communist conspiracy” that sought to overtake our country. And on that note, I owned my own copy of John Stormer’s magnum opus, None Dare Call it Treason. There were the “godless atheists” who wanted to destroy Christianity. And there was a hefty dollop of anti-Catholicism conspiracy—the Pope waiting in a submarine off the coast on the eve of the 1960 election, ready to step ashore and take control of the government should Kennedy win. And John Birch Society chatter was often in the air. The “Tri-lateral Commission” was supposedly promoting “big government,” thus facilitating the ogre of them all, a “one-world government” that was an essential part of the “end-times” scenario.

Let me skip then to the 1990’s and Bill Clinton. One of my all-time favorites was the notion then that Clinton was operating a drug-smuggling operation out of the tiny village of Mena, Arkansas. And, most recently there is the falderal about O’Bama being a Muslim and not being an American citizen.

So, I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and roundly dismiss anything that smells of “conspiracy theory.” And I do this at my own peril; for, true enough, “conspiracies” do take place from time to time.

(Btw, one of the best books I’ve ever come across on this subject is Richard Hofstadner’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics)

literary lew

prose/poetry/philosophy/religion