Climate Shrink Puts Presidential Candidates on the Couch
by Zhiwa Woodbury, M.A., J.D.
As a well qualified ecopsychologist with a background in ego-psychology, and as a fierce advocate for Mother Earth, I recently called all the candidates to heel — on my couch. Without breaching too much confidentiality, and balancing the public’s need to know with the political interests of my clients, I am compelled to share these diagnoses with all of you know. I should let you know that I am doing this from a hotel room in Hong Kong, desperately trying to get a message to Edward Snowden, who turns out not to be the easiest person in the world to get ahold of. Who knew? In any case, by the time you are reading this, I will be long gone. So don’t even try looking for me.
America — your candidate for the highest office in the World, Donald Trump, happens to be suffering from a classic personality disorder. The Mayo Clinic defines NPD as follows:
“Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”
This could be the easiest diagnosis I’ve ever made.
America — your candidate for the highest office in the World, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who insisted that I call her “HillRod” to prove her street cred, having grown up a few miles from me in Chicago) is also chronically afflicted by a personality disorder. This one, however, is a little more complicated. Do you remember when HillRod was still a teenager growing up in Park Ridge, and outgoing President Eisenhower tried to warn us about the threat of the “military-industrial complex”?
In psychology, a “complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status.” I’m afraid Eisenhower looked into the future and saw the embodiment of the military-industrial complex” dressed up in a pantsuit. Yes, HillRod suffers from a military (neocon war hawk) industrial (neoliberal elitist) complex. I told you it was complicated. She also happens to be a brilliant lawyer, but one of the main symptoms of her complex is a firm conviction that our nation’s laws do not apply to her.
Nation — yes, I’m talking to all of you — these are troubling times. We are all suffering from the effects of trauma, thanks to the unraveling of our life-support system. When faced with a traumatic threat, someone or some culture who suffers from trauma dissociates from reality, and by their refusal to face up to the reality of the threat they are facing, all past traumas are called up. Past trauma becomes present.
And so, as our President lays a wreath over ground zero in Hiroshima, and waves of climate refugees sweep across Europe, the trauma of world war rises from the ash heaps of previous world wars. Nationalist and even fascist movements take hold, countries threaten to close off their borders — as if that will protect them from the rising oceans and killer storms we are creating. We’ve proven in the recent past that we can create hell on Earth — from the poisoned trenches and gas chambers to nuclear holocaust, Chernobyl & Fukushima.
We are in the process of creating it on a much vaster scale of geologic time, the kind of holocaust that takes millions of years for the Earth to recover from, for higher life forms to re-emerge. And thanks to the real inconvenient truth of the climate crisis, the forty-year lag time between cause — gassing the planet — and effects — suffering the consequences of changing the chemistry of oceans and our own atmosphere, we are calling all these past traumas up for a reason. To present ourselves with the starkest of choices. Continue down this disastrous path like lemmings already going over the cliff, or change the future now by re-charting our course.
Which brings me to my third client. America, I could not find anything wrong with this funny little Jewish man, Bernie Sanders. In fact, he seemed like one of the most individuated, self-actualized, compassionate and caring human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure to analyze. He has the kind of ideals that once made this country great, and a strong moral compass. He seems, in fact, to embody all the redeeming qualities that have allowed us to overcome trauma and adversity in the past. But like the only sane person in a lunatic asylum, he seems to be having a hard time through the din of those in the political establishment and corporate media. The dramas surrounding the traumas of Megolomaniac Trump and Criminally Corrupt HillRod seems to be like an all consuming flame drawing in the most traumatized moths among us.
Rx: America, as your shrink, and as the legal representative of Mother Earth, I am prescribing some serious medicine for you. I warn you it will be hard to take. Admit you have a problem, America. Acknowledge you are suffering from cultural trauma. Embrace the healthy depression you’ve been suppressing for too long. Grieve what we’re already lost, and appreciate what we are in the process of losing. Finally, for your children’s and their children’s sake, America, take back control of your political system. Restore representative democracy, and lead the world into a more hopeful future than this status quo of endless war, incessant greed, and ecological suicide.
Before it is too late.
Nurse? You can send in Mrs. Stein now.
