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The Election Provides a Powerful Opportunity by Helen Kramer

  • Screen Shot 2016-11-17 at 1.48.30 PM
by alan steinfeld | Nov 17, 2016
Great change can come out of great pain so many of us are feeling right now. The opportunity exists now to support each other in becoming truly empowered by treating everyone with dignity. Just as we don’t want Trump and his supporters to dehumanizing those who are different form them we as well don’t want to emulate this behavior.

Great change can come out of the great pain so many of us are feeling right now. The opportunity exists now to support each other in becoming truly empowered by treating everyone with dignity. Just as we don’t want Trump and his supporters to dehumanize not dehumanizing those who are different form them we as well don’t want to emulate this behavior.

This election is an opportunity for us to learn some important lessons.  First, Donald Trump makes it obvious that an enormous part of our population is living in fear.  His effective communication was in empathizing with people who are stressed or frightened. Trump understood that these people are overwhelmed with downward mobility, terrorism, climate change and a global economy that combine to create feelings of impotence and anger.  They are facing these monumental issues while traditional support systems are collapsing.  People can no longer rely on traditional support from a strong family unit, or a cohesive community or religious affiliations. They have nothing outside of themselves to sustain them in the face of the stresses they face.

Years ago I said that “we are living in a time when the narcissist is King.”  I was aware that our social issues have changed, leaving many people feeling powerless and unseen.  Many narcissists have an uncanny ability to accurately perceive other people’s fear and seduce them into believing that they alone have the ability to assuage it. Working as I have with people for all these years I understand that it is excruciatingly painful for people to feel unseen and alone. Trump and other charismatic leaders, intuitively know the right things to say to help those who feel invisible feel think they are being seen. We need to learn this lesson because it is potentially dangerous for all of us to allow people suffering and feeling invisible because this will inevitably (delete can) lead to aggressive and irrational behavior.  But the impact of Trump’s lying, bullying, questionable business practices, unashamed bragging including his entitlement to “grab pussy,” pales in comparison to the impact he made by seeing people’s fears.  Even with Trump’s flawed candidacy he was able to rally the support and unwavering loyalty of his constituents by convincing people that he alone could guarantee success and empowerment where they were feeling fear and impotence.  This is why he could say “if I shoot someone on Fifth Avenue my constituents would still follow me.” He was right.

If we don’t understand the danger we face when the established politicians ignore the fears of so many we are condemning ourselves to more leaders like Trump, or leaders that are even more dangerous. We need to be able to provide real solutions to people who are suffering and not just seduce them with rhetoric.  Their anger comes from the fact that establishment politicians have not seen them or their plight for years.  We and our government can only be effective if we understand why people are suffering and what they need.

Similarly, we need to understand who Trump is and why his message resonated so powerfully with people.  To understand the inner life of a person who holds racist attitudes, demeans others etc. just listen to everything they say about others and imagine that they're talking to themselves in a mirror.  How we treat others is a direct reflection of how we were treated as children and learned to treat ourselves.  A person who humiliates others was humiliated early in their lives by someone who was important to them.  This caused some wires to be crossed allowing them to equate humiliation with power and love.

Life became a seesaw, where someone had to be on the bottom and someone had to be on the top. They are constantly looking over their shoulder anticipating slights and humiliations, often imagining them, when in actuality they haven’t occurred. They are trying to undo their own feelings of shame and humiliation by re-creating those very feelings and others. This never works and that’s why they have to repeat the behavior over and over again. The only real antidote shame is true love.

I always ask people to imagine going to a hospital and looking at the newborns in the nursery. Everyone including Donald Trump was once that innocent baby; wanting love; wanting to feel fundamentally good and lovable. At what age would a child “decide,” to become a bully?  The answer is: At no age!  Children become bullies and grow into adult bullies as a direct result of their conditioning.  It is not a choice. The messages we get as children shape who we become.  No child wants to suffer and the bully is always suffering and always living in fear.

There are some cultures like the Buddhists who empower their children by teaching them that anyone who inflicts pain is by definition suffering.  For example the Dalai Lama asked one of the Buddhist monks tortured by the Chinese how he was able to survive years of brutal treatment.  The monk replied that there were only two times he lost his compassion for his torturer. As a Buddhist he realized that anybody who does hurtful things is suffering and that their own real power comes from their ability to be compassionate.  We need to understand that every time we judge, criticize or even use humor to make fun of people we are trying to feel better about ourselves by diminishing others.

Our strength comes from our ability to live with compassion for ourselves and those with whom we disagree. We now have an excellent opportunity to do that with people who hold social and political beliefs that are counter to our own.  Racism and those using discriminatory rhetoric must be held with compassion for the fear they hold inside. People who discriminate against gender, race, religion or sexual orientation live with a tremendous sense of unworthiness that is constantly being triggered by those who are different.  Understanding gives us the power to both take action to affirm our values while simultaneously reaching out to those who were suffering and feeling powerless.

Great change can come out of great pain so many of us are feeling right now.  The opportunity exists now to support each other in becoming truly empowered by treating everyone with dignity. Just as we don’t want Trump and his supporters to dehumanizing those who are different form them we as well don’t want to emulate this behavior.

We can’t afford to relate to those who hold different beliefs as “the other,”  We cannot sanction our hatred and anger  because that will only create more fear in us and those we are reacting to opportunities for the peace and harmony we all need.  I am not in any way insensitive to the fear and anger people are feeling I felt it myself. But when those feelings arose for me I knew that I was being triggered into weakness and I didn’t want to stay there.  I knew there was a way to respond with empathy and compassion for ourselves and others.  Right now we have an amazing opportunity to transform our lives and the global community.  An important tool is something I call “matching. This is a way of understanding people from the inside out.”   Since we human beings are so vulnerable to fear, look inside of yourself and see how your fear gets triggered and what you do when it does?  Have you ever felt frightened by feelings of loneliness and in order to escape that fear use the substance like food or alcohol?  Even though you vowed not to use food to quell your anxiety you couldn’t stop yourself from overeating.  This is because fear trumps all other emotions (no pun intended).  Our brains are designed for a hair trigger response to fear because that is how our species survived. If we truly understand how ubiquitous fear is, it is incumbent upon us to develop more compassion for our own fear responses and the fear responses of others.  Your overeating or drinking too much may not hurt other people but it hurts you.  

Fear that is the bane of our existence. Without fear we wouldn’t hurt ourselves or each other.  We don’t want to let their behavior trigger like behavior in us.  If you are appalled by the racist, sexist comments Trump and his supporters don’t emulate them.  Those of us who want every human being regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation to be treated with dignity need to do the same with those whose ideas are different from our own.  We need to be able to  “peel the onion,” and look beneath the surface differences of skin color, religious beliefs and cultural practices, now we have to do that across the board with people who hold social and political beliefs that are counter to our own.

Another important life skill is to understand that most people are complicated.  I think what made the “Sopranos,” so compelling was Tony Soprano’s (typo here you can delete it be s) ability to be cruel and ruthless as well as loving and even vulnerable with his own family and friends.  We are all like that. We can have beautiful strengths in some areas but these strengths don’t necessarily generalize into all areas of our lives.

We will all function at our lowest level when we are frightened but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a higher level when we feel safe.  So many people who are understandably troubled by Trump, his supporters and sometimes all Republicans see them as “the other.”  The demonizing of those who are different just increases our own fear.  By seeing others as one-dimensional we distort reality and create even greater distance and fear.

Trump will probably always be a complicated person. I am not expecting that he will have an epiphany. But once he won the election we saw another side of him.  He praised Obama after we witnessed years of demonizing his projection of Obama. He also praised Hillary after insulting, threatening and demeaning her. He can be more magnanimous and generous when he’s not frightened. Most of us live with less fearfulness than he does so let’s support each other in moving past our own fears so that we can be compassionate and magnanimous, while still taking action to protect the beliefs we hold sacred.

I know that Trump has a lot more fear than the average person and with the stress of being president, I can’t predict the impact of a Trump administration. However, I feel so much more at peace knowing that I have the internal resources to withstand what ever happens.  We can use this election as an opportunity to support ourselves and each other by staying connected to our strengths.  We can all be inspired by listening to Hillary’s concession speech; interviews with Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren.  All are now passionate about wanting to work with Trump for the good of the country.  We know that they are in pain and yet they have not letting their pain make them feel less effective.

We human beings have the potential to be magnificently resourceful.  As a species we have survived and thrived under the most oppressive circumstances.  Let’s support each other in living; in celebrating our strengths.  Let’s take inspiration from people like Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Ellie Weizel.  Experiencing our common humanity allows us to fully express the gifts of love, openness and freedom.  If our differences cause us pain we need not to lose sight of our capacity to be resourceful, loving, human beings.

Let’s become good role models for our children as we move stronger together beyond the false sense of power we get by being critical and judgmental. Let’s create an authentic sense of power based in love and compassion. Let’s celebrate each others' differences and see below these superficial differences to find our common humanity. There are things that a Trump administration will do that we may have no control over but we can control how we react to what he does.  I vote that we choose to live with dignity and encourage that dignity in others.

 

 

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