And FWIW, I’ll also just note that I’m writing this as someone with two graduate degrees from an evangelical seminary—one of them a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) with a “Christian Thought” concentration in the intersections of theology, philosophy, and apologetics—as well as three years of experience grading evangelical seminary student theology papers as a graduate teaching/research assistant in the seminary’s Department of Biblical and Theological Studies.

So in that post, I noted how domestic abuse researchers, treatment specialists, and victim advocates have observed that when someone recurrently alternates between acts of “love” and acts of abuse in a relationship, the “love” ultimately becomes part of the relationship’s overall abuse dynamic or pattern/cycle. I laid out 10 ways this commonly happens, each of which serves to further enable, reinforce, and empower the abuser—and their abuse of power—in what ultimately constitutes an abusive relationship (or family, church, organization, etc. when a structural feature of those systems).

I noted how this can lead to the confusion or conflation of love and abuse for both perpetrators and victims. And I noted how this can contribute to the justification of abuse in the name of “love,” the “greater good,” or the victim’s (and the relationship’s) “best interests”—since the “love” doesn’t actually function to prophetically confront the abuser or protect the victim from the abuse/evil here and has, instead, been co-opted by or grafted into it. I also mentioned how victims can even come to imitate or mirror the abuser in ways ultimately aimed at protecting themselves or others from that more powerful abuser (which only further exacerbates the conflation of love with abuse, as well as those justifications of abuse in the name of love). And with enough imitation over time, people can even come to share the abuser’s sense of entitlement, superiority, and grandiosity (cf. narcissism by proxy).

So how can countless evangelical and other conservative Christians and their faith communities be so inclined to attach to, trust, support, defend, praise, and even mimic such a brazenly narcissistic, compulsively exploitative, power-abusing “leader” like Trump—all despite claiming allegiance to a God who “is love” (1 John 4:8), a Savior who tells his followers to “love your enemies,” and a Bible that says faith, hope, and love remain “but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13)? And for that matter, how do we make sense of conservative Christendom’s abusive marriages of Church and State/Empire for cultural advantage throughout history no matter the cost to countless vulnerable people and to the reputation or perceived trustworthiness of the Church itself? How can so many of the faithful see no problem with such patterns and, instead, feel so justified in the often destructive use of power and control in the name of a “loving” God, the “greater good,” and people’s “best interests”?

Well, it might have a lot to do with the fact that, given the kinds of beliefs commonly found in their theological frameworks, they’ve arguably been fusing love and abuse in their picture(s) of God, his goodness, and their attending worldview(s) for a very long time. Sadly, countless people in these theological camps believe in a “God” they take to be perfectly loving despite the fact that he:

🔻 Ultimately exploits humanity for his own glory regardless of the cost—and even eternal cost—to countless people (and despite the fact that this makes him largely indistinguishable from a narcissistic abuser, to say nothing of the kind of entitled patriarchs often found at the top of narcissistic family systems/structures)

🔻 Sovereignly ordains all things for that same end—including all tragedy and trauma (e.g., all abuse and neglect/abandonment, rape and murder, natural disasters and diseases, poverty and crime, etc.)—and then blames people for their “sinful” reactions to any of it (even if their reactions should happen to be natural fight, flight, freeze, or fawn-based trauma responses involuntarily born out of the tragic event’s impact on their nervous system)

🔻 Alternates between providentially bringing about harm and then soothing, comforting, or rescuing sufferers from the experience/impacts of that harm (which is arguably conducive to trauma bonding with God or one’s concept thereof)

🔻 Threatens and ensures eternal punishment, abandonment, or rejection for not having the right beliefs about or compliant/obedient responses to him (which is essentially a textbook pattern of narcissistic parents/parenting)

🔻 Eternally condemns people for not having a faith that allegedly only he can give them as a “gift” (which brings to mind the dilemma of being simultaneously responsible and powerless/helpless in primary attachment relationships that’s commonly so foundational to the development of complex trauma and dissociative disorders)

🔻 Uses fear and shame to psychologically control people (cultivating fawn-based trauma/anxiety responses—as well as people’s efforts to control others through fight-based responses—as they do whatever they feel they need to in order to gain his acceptance or to protect themselves and their loved ones or tribe from his rejection and wrath)

🔻 Perpetrates and commands ethnocultural conquests, genocide, enslavement, and the acquisition/abduction of conquered men’s wives and children (ensuring intergenerational trauma and the proliferation thereof)

🔻 Wants women subjected to the power and control of structurally privileged men, remaining in abusive marriages, and being largely relegated to their roles as wives and mothers (cf. the common tendency of dysfunctional family systems to reduce family members and their worth/value/acceptability to their function or utility…i.e., the roles they perform for others)

🔻 Shames, rejects, and eternally condemns members of the LGBTQIA+ community despite the fact that non-normative sexual orientation and gender identity as such are in no way intrinsically incompatible with the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 and characteristics of love in 1 Corinthians 13 (and despite the fact that the chronic oppression, rejection, and shame foisted on sexual and gender minorities by sanctimonious and disgust-driven families, churches, and societies overwhelmingly contribute to complex trauma, dissociation, and countless mental health diagnoses—to say nothing of suicides—in these vulnerable populations)

🔻 Wants children “disciplined” with physical aggression by being spanked/hit despite the widespread and so often detrimental impacts of such on children’s developing nervous systems (e.g., activating natural fight or flight protective responses that, given the power differential between them and the parent, the child is often forced to suppress, dissociate, and trap as unprocessed/potentiated energy or charge in the nervous system…which can cultivate predispositions towards fight-based aggression, fawn-based submission, or both in relationships—rendering them more vulnerable to controlling, abusing, or exploiting others or to being controlled, abused, or exploited by others in their later marriages, jobs, churches, etc.)

And at the end of the day, if you can justify an ultimately abusive deity by considering it the standard of perfect love and goodness, you can arguably justify anything.

(Originally posted to FB on 11/4/2024)

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So, researchers, treatment specialists, and victim advocates in the field of domestic and intimate partner abuse have observed that when a chronically abusive person recurrently alternates between acts of “love” and acts of abuse—i.e., entitlement-driven, boundary-violating efforts to gain or maintain power and control over another person (whether verbally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, financially, socially, technologically, physically, sexually, or otherwise)—the “love” ultimately becomes another aspect of the overall abuse dynamic, pattern, or cycle.

In such relationships (and family or ecclesial systems), the abusive person’s “loving” words and actions effectively end up functioning, or getting leveraged by the abuser, to:

🔻 Make the victim feel good about the abuser so they disregard or forget the abuse (often by comforting/soothing the victim after the abuse and “rescuing” them from its effects; cf. my chapter here on Stephen Karpman’s famous drama triangle in Oord et al.’s book Love Does Not Control: Therapists, Psychologists, and Counselors Explore Uncontrolling Love).

🔻 Elicit the victim’s unwarranted trust in the abuser.

🔻 Keep the victim from leaving the abuser.

🔻 Entitle the abuser to forgiveness for the abuse.

🔻 Prevent the abuser from having to face any consequences or accountability for the abuse.

🔻 Manipulatively and deceptively justify or legitimize the abuse.

🔻 Entitle the abuser to engage in further abuse.

🔻 Elicit the victim’s continued shouldering of responsibility for the abuser, their actions/abuse, and the consequences of their actions/abuse.

🔻 Make the victim more psychologically dependent upon the abuser (cf. “trauma bonding,” “attachment to the perpetrator,” and “loyalty to the aggressor” in the trauma treatment literature).

🔻 Make the victim more vulnerable, pliable, and amenable to further abuse.

Because here’s the thing—you can’t really integrate love and recurrent abuse…at least not without the abuse undermining, negating, or co-opting that “love” and its power or impact. Ultimately, the abuse ends up converting the power and impact/effects of that “love” into more fuel or supply for the abuser’s privilege and sense of entitlement to power and control. It even turns acts of “love” into abuse, where that “love” becomes just one more lever or mechanism for—and often the most powerful means of—gaining or maintaining power and control over the other person. Put differently, the “love” effectively comes to serve the abuse. And at the end of the day, relationships and families (including ecclesial families) characterized by such dynamics amount to fundamentally abusive systems that become structured or organized by them.

All of which can lead countless people to consequently confuse or conflate love and abuse—to see certain abusive words or actions as loving or to see certain words/actions as loving that are in fact abusive. When this happens, people can lose the ability to differentiate between the two and can ultimately come to see certain words/actions as good, loving, and in the best interests of the “beloved” that simply aren’t. And because love is always deemed right, warranted, and even the supreme virtue or greatest good (cf. 1 Cor 13:13), this fusion of “love” and abuse can foster a willingness to justify anything—including abuse—in the name of “love,” the “greater good,” and/or people’s “best interests.”

In relationships marked by such alternations between “love” and abuse, both perpetrator and victim are often beholden to this distorted perception—or toxic fusion—of love and abuse. The abuser is committed to it in virtue of their selfish or narcissistic entitlement, while the victim can be committed to it as a natural byproduct of the chronic abuse itself (or childhood/previous abuse), the constraining power differential, and the foundational dilemma of having to depend on—or recurrently seek safety and the meeting of one’s needs from—the very same person who constitutes the source of the harm, threat/danger, and trauma (which, again, brings to mind the concepts of trauma bonding, attachment to the perpetrator, or loyalty to the aggressor in the trauma treatment literature).

And given this combination of dependence and danger in the relationship with the abuser, many victims even develop psychosocial defenses that operate through imitation or mirroring of the abuser (cf. identification with the aggressor)—whether directed inward through ruthless inner critics, self-harm, or (often subconscious) self-sabotaging for example…or directed outward by similarly abusing/harming more vulnerable others or joining the abuser in doing so. Sadly, such mimicking of the abuser can help one more safely “blend in,” stay off the more powerful abuser’s radar, or gain their approval in order to feel both safer and more empowered (cf. the concepts of hostile introjects and perpetrator-imitating parts in “parts work” or “ego state” models of psychotherapy often used with—and in many cases necessary for the effective treatment of—complex trauma and complex dissociative disorders given the internal fragmentation to which they can be conducive).

With enough imitation over time, people can even come to share the abuser’s sense of entitlement, superiority, and grandiosity, as we see in narcissism by proxy and in the entitled, hostile, and rejecting behaviors of children towards a safe parent in cases where those children have been weaponized by the abusive parent’s narcissistic campaign of pathologically alienating that protective parent from their children.

In my next post, I’ll get into the significance I think all of this has for the widespread support we’ve seen for Trump among so many evangelical and other conservative Christian families, churches, and communities over the past decade.

(Originally posted to FB on 10/28/2024)

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Persecutors irresponsibly attack, blame, control, or otherwise oppress and abuse others (whether verbally, physically, psychologically, financially, spiritually, or otherwise).

Victims irresponsibly “play the victim” to avoid having to take responsibility for themselves, typically by feigning helplessness, complaining about how unfair everything is, or expecting others to rescue them from having to act responsibly (all of which involves a dysfunctional victim mentality, which we need to distinguish from the reality of being a victim or of having been victimized by a Persecutor...an injustice for which the victim is not responsible and about which they may have to speak up or speak out in order to effectively address rather than inadvertently reinforce the injustice).

Rescuers then—often as a result of thin emotional boundaries, a grandiose sense of superiority, a desire to feel important, or to avoid taking responsibility for their own issues—over-responsibly seek to rescue or soothe a perceived Victim, ultimately serving to enable and reinforce the latter’s irresponsibility and maintain that person’s unhealthy dependence upon them (along with any codependency in the relationship).

The nature of the drama triangle (sometimes called the VPR triangle) is such that those who are caught up in its toxic “dance” tend to just rotate positions around the triangle—ultimately serving to circulate, sustain, and amplify the system’s dysfunction (be it a family, church, company, or otherwise)—rather than actually making things better, or even just making themselves better.

Persecutors, for example, often rotate to playing the Victim when suffering negative consequences for their persecutory/abusive behaviors, or to the role of Rescuer when wanting to distract from or make up for those irresponsible behaviors. Rescuers often rotate to the position of Persecutor in their impulsive attempts to rescue others, or into the role of Victim themselves when their attempts to rescue someone fail or are insufficiently appreciated. And those playing the Victim role often rotate to the position of Persecutor through a responsibility-evading litany of harsh complaints about others, or to the role of someone else’s Rescuer to feel a sense of power or relief.

While the drama triangle can characterize unhealthy family/social systems of various kinds plagued with various types of problems, it’s especially likely to characterize systems whose leaders themselves irresponsibly rotate from position to position around the triangle, sucking others into its dysfunctional dynamics by virtue of their positional power alone as system leaders with whom others are forced to “dance”—especially if it’s a system from which people cannot easily escape or from which the leader cannot be readily expelled.

Which is precisely what we’ve witnessed in/with our President—and not surprisingly across our entire nation—at profoundly escalated levels since 2016. The image below merely notes some of his more popular manifestations of these dysfunctional roles.

(This is an amended version of the original posted to FB on 12/28/2020, the text of which I later grafted into my chapter “The Drama Triangle, Relational Dysfunction, and Uncontrolling Love” in Love Does Not Control: Therapists, Psychologists, and Counselors Explore Uncontrolling Love, edited by Oord et al.)

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Given the connections between adverse community environments and adverse childhood experiences (or ACEs), we know that poverty profoundly increases countless children’s exposure to and experience of various kinds of trauma during their most formative developmental years—often subjecting them to multiple forms of trauma simultaneously. And as the research on ACEs suggests, these formative developmental experiences significantly correlate with later physical, mental, and chemical health conditions in adulthood, underlie a host of pervasive public health problems, and end up costing the nation enormous amounts of money in both lost work productivity and in the various kinds of resources (e.g., healthcare, criminal justice, ...) committed to dealing with the fallout.

This disproportionately higher experience of ACEs and the trauma they yield in people’s nervous systems naturally result in higher degrees of functional impairment throughout poor communities all over the country—impairment for which they’re often naively and simplistically shamed by those (like GOP politicians) who exhibit little to no consideration or compassion regarding the intersections of poverty and trauma. The helpful infographic below, for example, notes how trauma detrimentally impacts all types of memory, with developmentally earlier and more chronic trauma generally having more profound and pervasive developmental impacts.

In fact, the developmental trauma so endemic to chronic and intergenerational poverty commonly impacts all areas of the brain’s executive functioning, often leading to widespread diagnoses and symptoms of ADHD—a diagnosis of impaired executive functioning that often ultimately amounts to undiagnosed or even misdiagnosed trauma.

Of course, these impacts on memory and on the brain’s broader executive functioning significantly impact people’s ability to effectively manage their academic, vocational, and familial responsibilities (cf. their ability to respond)—making these responsibilities substantially more difficult, on average, then they are for less traumatized (e.g., more affluent) populations. At which point a person is battling both the external (e.g., family or broader socioeconomic system) and internal (central nervous system) constraints of their impoverished reality.

So if we think that the principal way to address poverty and poverty-related problems among the poor is to simply demand more personal responsibility from them—or if we think poverty is principally a problem of personal irresponsibility—we have a woefully uninformed anthropology or understanding of how humanity actually operates here.

And political strategies for addressing poverty that rely predominantly on the bottom-up causation (e.g., individuals changing systems, rather than the inverse) and inside-out philosophies of individualism (e.g., prioritizing changes in internal thoughts, willpower, or spirituality over structurally changing the larger external systems that profoundly condition people’s internal experiences) are likely to crash against the rocks of reality here. They fail to understand the internal and external barriers faced by the poor, as well as the kinds of systemic change the intergenerationally impoverished and traumatized are likely to require in order to more broadly and collectively heal and thrive.

To say nothing of the fact that those who accuse the poor of being lazy are arguably evidencing their own pride, arrogance, or narcissism in presumptuously assuming that, were they in these particular impoverished people’s shoes—and facing all of the barriers/constraints the latter face both externally and internally—surely they would be able to transcend that poverty. It’s hubris at its finest (with a dash of projected grandiosity).

And no, from the fact that some people manage to escape or overcome their poverty, it doesn’t logically follow that, therefore, the poor in general are able to do so, or even that any other person in particular is necessarily able to do so. No two people have the same nervous system, much less the exact same convergence and configuration of those external and internal constraints. To claim otherwise is a convenient abstraction or idealization.

And then there’s the pressing reality that when—like the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—you legislatively take away the physical and mental health care that helps so many among the poor even have a chance at feasibly shouldering more responsibility to improve their condition, you effectively guarantee an increase in the rates of suicide, crime, hospitalizations, incarcerations, homelessness, and the deterioration of countless families across the nation. Which only yields further intergenerational trauma, poverty, and the exacerbation of public health problems—to say nothing of the incalculable costs thereof to society.

I and my colleagues have a good number of clients who would likely become acutely suicidal or otherwise desperate if they suddenly lost their healthcare. And I can only imagine how many other healthcare providers would say the same. 🫤

(Amended from original post to FB on 10/17/2020)

Golden Child: My Descent to Scapegoat and Rise to Freedom, by Lauren Smallcomb

As noted in one announcement, this courageous memoir “details the collapse of illusory goodness within a family system through the disruption of Christian Nationalism, ultimately leading the token golden child to walk out of her gilded golden cage.”

For those familiar with historian Kristin Du Mez’s paradigm-changing book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Golden Child essentially illustrates this national “fracturing” at the more intimate level of one family system, as if zooming in on a microcosm.

Lauren’s memoir is going to profoundly resonate with a LOT of people who have experienced similar ruptures in their own families due to loved ones’ damaging commitments to Christian Nationalism and to evangelicalism’s broader sociospiritual commitments to condemnation, exclusion, and control.

It also has what is quite possibly the coolest cover in the history of book covers! 🤷🏻‍♂️

Here are some excerpts Lauren herself has posted from the foreword:

Check out her incredible promo page HERE for more about the book and its growing body of well-deserved endorsements.

Consider becoming part of the launch team by following the instructions HERE.

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Being a trauma therapist working daily with both victims and perpetrators of abuse, I’ve noted in some of my FB posts in recent years where I see our congressional GOP profoundly resembling chronic perpetrators of domestic and intimate partner abuse/violence in some of their political tactics, as well as evidencing a host of other dysfunctional family/social system dynamics and malignant psychosocial defense mechanisms. In this same vein, I see an additional (and I think neither irrelevant nor coincidental) resemblance between the congressional GOP’s longstanding insistence upon “states’ rights” and domestic abuse perpetrators’ efforts to isolate their victims, or those on the bottom end of the power differential, in their families/relationships.

Isolating one’s victims—to cut them off from outside protection, support, and access to empowering resources—is a common tactic of privileged perpetrators of abuse in families/relationships (as well as in churches, businesses, governments, countries, or other social systems). Because, of course, external (and potentially more powerful) systems often constitute a threat to the abuser’s power or privileged position at the top of that power differential. Consequently, family systems organized around abusers or abusive power differentials often have thick or rigid boundaries between the family system and outside systems, while having thin or minimal boundaries within the family system itself or between its members (cf. enmeshment and codependency).

Basically, by structurally or psychosocially creating a thick boundary (or “wall”) between the immediate family system or intimate partnership and the outside environment or external systems (e.g. the extended family, public school, or healthcare systems) to limit the flow of information and access, abuse perpetrators on the privileged end of the power differential are more easily and comfortably able to benefit from the thin or deficient boundaries within the family system or intimate partnership (and their abusive violations thereof).

I think similar, if not identical, dynamics are at play here in the GOP’s “states’ rights” efforts to box out (or create a rigid boundary with respect to) the federal government and its legislation supporting those on the bottom end of the power differential in their states. The historical record is telling here.

[originally posted to FB on 11/7/2022…and since then, we obviously have a new federal government that has ratcheted these patterns up to the national level—invoking that more rigid and isolating boundary between the United States and the rest of the world while trampling and capitalizing on the removal of protective boundaries within the nation as such]

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So whether they intend to or not, and whether they’re aware of it or not, those who are broadly anti-regulation (or even more broadly anti-government) are de facto promoting the widespread absence of organizational and the attending interpersonal boundaries throughout society, effectively rolling out the red carpet for the powerful to capitalize on the absence thereof. And in advocating against regulation in any broad sense, they’re arguably evidencing their personal lack of, poor understanding of, or self-serving lack of regard for boundaries—and more than likely exhibiting some ideological captivity or beholdenness to, and some idealization of, individualism in the process. (See my post here on how Trumpism aggregates numerous defensive psychological idealizations.)

Because like it or not, the health and healing of any social system (or its people) requires enforceable, power-restraining, protectively regulatory boundaries that indicate where some people and their power need to stop so that other people and their power can start. And it’s precisely the powerful and privileged who tend to be the most invested in the lack of such regulatory boundaries—or at least in the lack of any regulations/boundaries that would restrain their own ability to boundlessly consume, abuse, and exploit for their own ends, supply, and glory.

And as we’re witnessing in our current Administration, often the boundless ego consumes until it no longer can—or until it is no longer allowed to.

[originally posted to FB on 3/3/2025]

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Skye Jethani’s illustration below notes how two of those responses (fight and flight) commonly manifest in the broader evangelical community’s relationship to our larger culture and its ongoing sociopolitical changes—changes that are widely experienced by evangelical Christianity (Christianities, granted) as threatening and therefore anxiety-provoking.

What isn’t noted in Jethani’s picture here, however, is the fawn-based response to God out of which these fight- and flight-based reactions towards the culture significantly arise. Broadly speaking, the evangelical community tends to operate out of a fawn-based response to a God (or picture of God) who is at the deepest level existentially threatening—and therefore anxiety-provoking—in virtue of his power to condemn and abandon them or their loved ones to the “eternal conscious torment” of Hell for having the wrong beliefs about or disposition towards him...or to providentially bring about misfortune in their life to perhaps “teach them a lesson” or “discipline” them for sin...or to make them suffer as an example for others...or to withdraw his protective hand or refuse to extend grace/help in the midst of hardship or suffering...and so on.

In other words, this God, as pictured, ultimately demands a fawn response from his constituents (cf. obedience, worship, love; see also, trauma bonding and Stockholm Syndrome), lest he for all practical purposes abuse or neglect, attack or abandon, them...engaging in his own fight or flight reaction towards them, as it were—which, given the magnitude of his power and those potentially eternal consequences, arguably constitutes the greatest threat imaginable (i.e., the “[Threat] than which none greater can be conceived,” to invoke and adapt a little Anselm).

And on behalf of fawning to this God as pictured—in the hopes, of course, of finding themselves and their loved ones the recipients of his grace or spared from his wrath—countless evangelicals engage in fight- or flight-based reactions to a rapidly changing culture that allegedly threatens their own or their loved ones’ safety and security before this God (whether by that culture assimilating them or their loved ones, undermining or changing some of their central/organizing beliefs, taking over God’s political means of cultural production, incurring God’s wrath upon the nation, or what have you).

And as illustrated in Jethani’s graphic, these fight and flight reactions significantly traffic in fear and anxiety-driven efforts to control—whether efforts to control the culture through politics and prayer, or efforts to control the Church through doctrinal purity measures, the leveraging of fear and shame, and the exclusionary purging of nonconformity (or simply the relational avoidance of those who are “not us”).

All of which serves to perpetuate and amplify the problematic nature of evangelical Christianity as a highly anxious system in contemporary society (which, incidentally, I think also made it highly susceptible to Trump and Trumpism). And given the common evangelical picture of God noted above, I’m really not sure it could be otherwise. With that kind of threat and dependency backdrop, a fairly pervasive measure of systemic, anxiety-driven codependency and predilection for control—through the dynamics of fawn, fight, and flight—is all but guaranteed.

And here’s what I find most interesting as a mental and relational health professional specializing in the treatment of trauma and working daily with both victims and perpetrators of abuse—the dynamics I’ve described above are essentially the same dynamics you find in narcissistic, toxic, or otherwise extremely unhealthy family systems that are dependent upon and organized around abusive, neglectful, and/or invalidating parents (who, of course, often use fear and shame to exert and maintain their power).

In such families, children hypervigilantly live under the chronic threat of physical or emotional abuse/attack, neglect/abandonment, and painful invalidation or shaming should their values, thoughts, feelings, words, actions, needs, and so on prove upsetting or insufficiently pleasing to that parent. As a result, they have to fawn to the unsafe parent in order to be/feel safe and get needs met, as well as engage in fight, flight, and/or fawn responses towards others—whether the other parent, siblings, or people outside the family—in order to protect themselves, that other parent, or their siblings from that parent who holds the supreme power and control.

In such circumstances, there are naturally strong urges to fight towards or flight from the unsafe parent, but this is often impossible—to say nothing of dangerous—given the child’s dependence upon that parent and the attending power differential. And when it’s unsafe to direct those natural fight and flight energies or responses towards the toxic parent themselves—the arguably appropriate recipient of such responses—children naturally have to suppress, dissociate, and displace these fight and flight responses/energies, whether directing them outward towards others (the safer parent, siblings, peers, teachers, other authorities, etc.) or inward towards the self (e.g., through self-alienating shame, self-harm, suicide, self-sabotage, obsessive-compulsive self-control measures, etc.).

All of which arguably parallels what we’ve been seeing over the years in evangelical Christianity’s increasingly implosive relationship with itself and its outgroups.

[originally posted to FB on 1/31/2021]

It’s a systemic/relational assessment tool developed by University of Minnesota professor David Olson that considers a family system’s overall degrees of relational cohesion (ranging from disengaged to enmeshed) and flexibility (ranging from chaotic to rigid). And while it was originally formulated with respect to family systems, it’s arguably applicable to social systems of various kinds and their respective cultures/subcultures—whether churches (or particular church/faith traditions), organizations, broader societies, and, yes, political parties.

And what kinds of social systems/groups tend to be the most resistant to change and to anything (including facts) that might threaten their system, stasis, and status quo? Rigidly enmeshed systems. Which is exactly what both Trumpism and more fundamentalist faith traditions happen to cultivate (and what both dictators and cult leaders thrive on). Rigidly enmeshed systems—which tend to be fairly anxious systems—are also likely to perceive more balanced and adaptively flexible systems as actually chaotic, even though these systems (in the lighter center of the model) tend to be healthiest and those in the four dark corners of the model (including rigidly enmeshed systems) the unhealthiest.

[originally posted to FB on 2/2/2020]

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My first post (“The Moral Foundations of Power, Privilege, and the Politics of Right and Left”) reflected on social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s work in his highly acclaimed book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and noted how the “moral foundations” of loyalty, authority, and sanctity that he reported being significantly foundational for conservatives though not so much for liberals also happen to be the foundations most conducive to the acquisition, consolidation, and retention of power.

I also noted that they tend to be the moral foundations most conducive to the preservation of personal and tribal identity and, consequently, to individual and collective psychosocial defensiveness. In addition, I noted that as the arguably central moral foundations for conservatives, they tend to determine the nature and political distribution of care and fairness in conservative politics (Haidt’s two other primary moral foundations), ultimately fostering the institutionalized privilege—or alternatively exclusion—of certain rights, benefits, protections, and so on for certain groups of people.

My second post (“On Right-Wing Systems and Narcissistic Family Structures”) noted how the structures of Right-wing theological, governmental, economic, cultural, and household family systems happen to reflect the structures of narcissistic family systems—families where children are expected to meet the emotional and related needs of parents rather than the parents doing so for the children (in accordance with developmental stage, of course). In other words, family systems where those at the bottom and most vulnerable are expected to loyally care for, empower, and prop up those at the top rather than those with the power and authority at the top appropriately caring for and empowering those vulnerable at the bottom.

This structural system dynamic of inverted caretaking, of course, helps foster the acquisition, consolidation, and retention of power by those privileged at the top and unfortunately does so at the cost of the vulnerable not receiving adequate care or the fair/equitable distribution thereof within the system.

In addition, narcissistic family systems, and especially religiously conservative ones, tend to maintain patterns of dysfunctional codependency, abuses of power, and scapegoating—as well as any collective sense of family identity and defensiveness rooted in the preservation of that identity—precisely through appeals to loyalty, authority, and sanctity…patterns and appeals that tend to condition the nature and distribution of care and “fairness” (or the lack of either) within the family, much like they do in conservative politics more broadly.

My third post (“Trumpism and the Psychological Defense Mechanism of Idealization”) noted the intersections of Trumpism and idealization, a psychological defense mechanism by which something is seen as good that actually isn’t, is seen as better than it actually is, or is in some way compensatorily elevated or glamorized in order to protect or “defend” someone from having to face and feel a more unsettling reality or emotion. I noted how Trumpism provides a convenient conglomeration (or consolidation) of ten popular examples of such idealization.

Interestingly enough, Haidt’s moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity—to say nothing of power and morality as such—are either explicitly or implicitly included in that list of examples and, not surprisingly, tend to play significantly into the Party of Trump’s sense of identity, collective defensiveness, and general idealization of itself and its Dear Leader. And all ten of those popular examples of idealization, not coincidentally, happen to foster and fuel the Party’s acquisition, consolidation, and retention of power.

I might also note that it’s remarkably common for children in narcissistic family systems to inaccurately idealize the emotionally or otherwise unsafe or neglectful parent/parents (i.e., leaders) upon whom they psychologically and physically depend, as this provides a psychological salve of sorts that helps ward off the unbearable degree of fear, hopelessness, and resignation they might experience if they knew and felt the full reality of just how unsafe, unreliable, or unloving their parents actually are.

My fourth post (“Collective NPD and the Party of DJT”) noted how the Party of Trump’s “collective personality” as a system arguably meets criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a cluster of personality traits largely anchored in the idealization of self (in this case, the collective Self or Party) and one’s identity in the eyes of others. Those with such personalities commonly expect loyalty, as well as others’ unquestioning submission to their authority or power, and tend to self-servingly allocate any “care” or alleged “fairness” towards others based on the utility thereof for themselves. And they commonly devalue, discard, and morally scapegoat those who fail to submit to, accommodate, or reinforce their narcissistic entitlement and privilege.

In addition, they tend to create narcissistic family, ecclesial, and other organizational systems as leaders, as well as commonly gravitate towards narcissistic conceptions/versions of God and Christianity. And as people who are highly vulnerability-phobic—and consequently vulnerability-avoidant—those with narcissistic personalities tend to be remarkably defensive in general, routinely trafficking in the full panoply of psychological defense mechanisms (e.g., denial, rationalization, idealization, splitting, projection, sublimation, reaction formation, etc.).

Finally, my fifth post (“Trump, Cultural Reinforcement, and the Extinction Burst”) reflected on whether or to what degree the extreme (and extremist) political phenomenon of Donald Trump and his widespread support among conservative Christians might fundamentally amount to a collective extinction burst—a concept from behavioral psychology referring to someone’s tendency, when external reinforcement for a behavior (e.g., a privilege) has been withdrawn, to escalate their behavior or reactivity in an attempt to get others to reinstate that reinforcement or privilege. I noted children’s temper tantrums when their parents remove a privilege, and domestic abuse perpetrators’ escalation of abusive behaviors when their partners try to leave them, as prominent examples.

I hypothesized that the radical Church-Trump enmeshment we’ve been witnessing over the years could be seen as an extinction burst in reaction to his base’s increasing loss of sociopolitical privilege—or the reduced reinforcement of their idealized power, authority, and identity—in recent American history given our nation’s changing ideological, religious, cultural, ethnoracial, and attending political landscape.

Being psychobehavioral defenses themselves, extinction bursts are basically power displays exerted on behalf of the acquisition or retention of power (i.e., the power to keep doing or getting something) when that power is being removed or feels threatened. And as intense and often erratic defenses, they generally exhibit no concern for others’ experiences of care or fairness, as well as tend to operate narcissistically insofar as they care only about getting what one wants regardless of the cost of that burst to others.

In addition, when those at the top of the power differential in their system face the threat of losing that power and attending privilege—a threat inevitably presented by others’ pursuits of equality—their engagement in an extinction burst will almost certainly be an attempt to more or less reinstitute the narcissistic family system dynamic of those at the bottom loyally appeasing and propping up those at the top.

And as for the idealization and other psychological defense mechanisms (often referred to as ego defenses) that are so prevalent in narcissistic family systems, to say nothing of in those with narcissistic personalities, people don’t merely engage in such defenses—they also tend to vigorously defend their defenses. Especially if they psychologically depend on them for their broader sense of identity, meaning, security, purpose, hope, and belonging (to say nothing of their job or career for those politically or ecclesially employed). In fact, I’d note that our nation’s changing ideological, religious, socioeconomic, cultural, and political landscape over the years has led to a loss of reinforcement for many of the ten idealizations I noted in my third post—which has likewise arguably contributed to the potential extinction burst we’ve witnessed among Trump’s conservative Christian following.

And, of course, those with narcissistic personalities are notorious for the “narcissistic rage” (cf. extinction burst) they often exhibit when they’ve experienced a “narcissistic injury” that has painfully broken through their defenses and threatened their idealized image of themselves. Interestingly enough, I originally posted “Trump, Cultural Reinforcement, and the Extinction Burst” to Facebook on December 12, 2020—exactly 25 days before Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol in the Insurrection of January 6, 2021. And at some point that day, I changed my Facebook profile pic to say “25TH AMENDMENT NOW.”

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When an established behavior pattern that’s been rewarded or reinforced over time undergoes a loss of reinforcement, it’s common to witness what behavioral psychologists call an extinction burst—a phenomenon where the previously reinforced person reactively cranks up the frequency or intensity of the behavior (often impulsively, irrationally, and explosively) in an attempt to reboot the reinforcement and snap those who had been providing it back into position.

Think temper tantrums in children/teens when parents stop giving them something they want, or the escalation of aggression among perpetrators of domestic violence/abuse when their partner (or victim) tries to leave the relationship.

Trump’s base has some foundational ideological commitments intertwined with significant cultural, ethnoracial, and political privileges that have long been reinforced by our culture and government but that in recent decades have been losing some of this sociopolitical reinforcement in virtue of the significant changes we’ve experienced in our nation’s ideological, cultural, ethnoracial, and attending political landscape.

All of which might be eliciting an extinction burst in the form of impulsive Trumpism and radical Church-Trump enmeshment…which isn’t terribly surprising when you consider that this loss of sociopolitical reinforcement can feel existentially destabilizing for those who have long had their sense of identity, significance, security (even eternal security), meaning, purpose, hope, and/or belonging—to say nothing of careers and related “sunk cost” for those politically, ecclesially, or academically employed—anchored in these very ideological commitments and attending cultural privileges that they fear are being threatened with sociopolitical extinction.

[originally posted to FB on 12/12/2020]

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(Something’s being systemic or true of a system, BTW, needn’t mean it’s *universal* within the system, or true of every individual in the system. Neither all nor even most who align with the Party would individually meet criteria for the diagnosis.)

[originally posted to FB on 2/1/2025]

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When people have histories of unprocessed trauma, engagement in regrettable/shameful actions, or other experiences that if faced and really “sat with” would stir significant feelings of shame, anxiety, or other unsavory emotions, it’s common for people to develop any number of psychological defenses (sometimes called ego defenses) to insulate themselves from having to face, feel, and deal with those distressing realities, memories, and attending emotions. And these defenses can be invoked intentionally/consciously or unintentionally/subconsciously (i.e., automatically).

Jim Knipe, a leading expert in the treatment of complex trauma with EMDR therapy, refers to one category of ego defenses as idealization defenses (stay with me here) where something is seen or esteemed as good that actually isn’t/wasn’t—or is in some way unduly or compensatorily elevated/glamorized—in order to protect or “defend” the person from having to face, feel, or deal with a more distressing or unsettling reality. So for example, someone might idealize an abusive or otherwise toxic parent, ex-boyfriend, or family by saying they were “a great dad/mom/guy/family,” ultimately to prevent themselves from facing and feeling what they actually felt when with them (e.g., unsafe, shame, powerlessness, hopelessness).

Similarly, someone might idealize money, power, fame, career, or accomplishments in order to insulate themselves from a deeper underlying anxiety, sense of hopelessness, or feeling of shame tied to a lost relationship, job failure, or perhaps even to having abused/assaulted a loved one or intimate partner. And similarly, someone might idealize certain biblical texts, theological or ideological beliefs, or spiritual practices (cf. “spiritual bypassing”) to similarly distance from or “defend” themselves against deeper feelings of anxious uncertainty, shame, or powerlessness.

These and other such idealization defenses ultimately inhibit healing and growth by keeping the person from adaptively processing, metabolizing, integrating, and/or learning from the distressing experiences and emotions that have been quarantined under the surface (and which largely drive the defenses, along with the dysfunction these defenses often produce).

👉 And here’s where this Trump-supporting LOPA hat comes in and strikes me as so ironic. When treating idealization defenses with EMDR as trauma therapists, we often use Knipe’s “LOPA scale”—short for the “Level of Positive Affect” (or positive emotion) a person feels (scaled from 0 to 10) when deeply focusing on whatever they’ve idealized. After having clients focus on what they’ve idealized and then scale their level of positive affect from 0 to 10, we use EMDR to process and de-idealize the maladaptive idealization defense (reducing the LOPA rating) to a low enough level that they’re then both willing and able to actually process the distressing experiences, memories, or emotions that the defense (with its dysfunctional positive affect) was insulating them from.

So why the irony? Because I think Trumpism largely consists of a convenient conglomeration of idealization defenses that provide many of us and our fellow Americans a significant Level of (insulatory) Positive Affect—or LOPA. Here are just 10 of those defenses:

1. the idealization of power or strength to insulate us from deeper feelings of powerlessness

2. the idealization of wealth to prevent us from facing and feeling our poverty of spirit or the brokenness in our families

3. the idealization of a “Christian nation” to buffer us from the anxiety triggered by an increasingly post-Christian society, if not also to insulate us from the shame of having been undeniably anti-Christ throughout much of our history (e.g., genocide and slavery, materialism and neglect of the poor, past and present racism, the abuse and oppression of women and children, etc.)

4. the idealization of America as such (or nationalism, patriotism, etc.) to counter feelings of smallness and powerlessness in an increasingly “global village” and to compensate (via tribal acceptance and belonging) for feelings of loneliness in an increasingly disconnected society, if not also to distance us from that shamefully embarrassing national history (noted above) and its ongoing manifestations

5. the idealization of racial or ethnic uniformity to protect us from the anxiety occasioned by our country’s ever-increasing diversity and plurality

6. the idealization of hard work or “bootstrapping” to buffer us from the discouraging (and often despair-inducing) reality that hard work doesn’t guarantee success or even the ability to meet one’s basic needs these days

7. the idealization of independence (whether individual or global) to distance us from the vulnerability of our inescapable need for others as both individuals and as a nation

8. the idealization of religious freedom (by which, of course, we really mean conservative Christian religious freedom) to protect us from having to face and feel the embarrassing ways we misuse or neglect the religious freedom we already have, as well as to counter those feelings of anxiety and powerlessness in an increasingly post-Christian society

9. the idealization of moral or doctrinal purity to insulate us from the shame and anxiety of our own impurity, confusion, and uncertainty

10. and the idealization of a divinely appointed President to preserve, protect, and defend us from all of the emotional discomfort noted above.

    

[originally posted to FB on 12/1/2019]

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(NOTE: Such families needn’t require a clinically narcissistic parent in order to be narcissistic systems—we’re talking about systemic structures rather than individual personalities here—though having such a parent certainly increases the likelihood of having a narcissistic family system.)

So how do these observations from my own field of marriage and family therapy (a field specializing in how the dynamics of families as social/relational systems impact the mental, emotional, behavioral, and relational health of their members and health of those families as systems) intersect with our nation’s politics and current predicament? Well, families are only one kind of social system, and their relational/structural dynamics (say, between the family’s parents and their children—i.e., between its leaders and their dependents) can manifest in other kinds of social systems as well.

And I admittedly think one of the common threads between right-wing theological, governmental, economic, cultural, and family system models is that, broadly speaking, they’re all fundamentally narcissistic systems/structures. They’re social systems in which those at the bottom (i.e., the vulnerable, dependent, or those with less/no power) are effectively expected to meet or orbit around the psychological/emotional and related (e.g., ego/entitlement) “needs” of those at the top (i.e., those with the power/privilege/wealth)—even to the dependent’s own detriment—rather than those at the top sufficiently attuning to and helping to meet the needs of those at the bottom. We see this, for example, in:

🔻 A theology or metaphysics in which an ultimately authoritarian god demands his children’s absolute obedience, sacrifice, and service to his glory under threat of eternal rejection/condemnation—a narcissistic theological, religious, and ecclesial system.

🔻 A President and Party who demand unchecked unilateral power and absolute loyalty, punish those who try to stop (or set boundaries with) them, and work to suppress the vote, voice, and attending agency/power of those below them (whom they often believe to be intrinsically “beneath” them)—a narcissistic political or governmental system.

🔻 An economic structure that consolidates the overwhelming majority of Americans’ hard-earned income and wealth at the top while promising a “trickle-down economics” that’ll allegedly meet the needs of those at the bottom (despite the past 40 years’ overwhelming evidence to the contrary; cf. narcissistic “future faking”)—a narcissistic economic system.

🔻 A national culture structurally privileging conservative straight white (and especially evangelical) Christian men while expecting those not under these demographic umbrellas to yield to, center, serve, or assimilate into them—a narcissistic cultural system.

🔻 A family structure centering/privileging men as the divinely appointed “head of the household,” effectively expecting both women and children to attune to and dutifully organize around the man’s emotional and related (e.g., vocational and “leadership”) needs, prop up his authority/power, and submit to his final say in family decisions, often at great cost to and sacrifice of themselves—a narcissistic nuclear family system.

Granted, those promoting them are likely to deny that these systems/structures are narcissistic (or problematically so), but then those at the top of or privileged by narcissistic systems typically do. 😕

[originally posted to FB on 2/15/2025]

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In his highly acclaimed book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt drew on 25 years of research in moral psychology to discuss how people’s moral judgments and associated political/religious alignments tend to arise far more out of deeper psychological commitments or “intuitive ethics” than they do out of conscious reason. He used the framework of Moral Foundations Theory to explore and contrast how conservatives and liberals (broadly speaking) differentially rely on, or appeal to, the following five “moral foundations” in their respective political/religious commitments:

• Care (vs. harm)

• Fairness (vs. cheating)

• Loyalty (vs. betrayal)

• Authority (vs. subversion)

• Sanctity/Purity (vs. degradation/impurity)

Haidt ultimately concluded that whereas liberals rely primarily on the moral foundations of Care and Fairness, conservatives significantly rely on and appeal to all five of these foundations (which he noted might give conservatives an advantage in virtue of their “broader palette”). But it occurred to me that what he didn’t note, interestingly enough, is that the moral foundations of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—apparently so foundational for conservatives though less so for liberals—also happen to be the foundations most conducive to the acquisition, consolidation, and retention of POWER. (Especially when you combine them.)

They’re also the moral foundations most conducive to the preservation of personal and tribal IDENTITY—which naturally leads them to play a significant part in both individual and collective “self”-preservation and psychosocial defensiveness (and consequently in the culture wars). And as the arguably central and organizing moral foundations on the Right, they largely end up determining the nature and political distribution of the Right’s Care and Fairness throughout society (e.g., fostering the institutionalized privilege—or alternatively exclusion—of certain rights, benefits, protections, and so on for certain groups and the individuals within them).

Interestingly enough, it’s precisely in the appeal to these “moral foundations” of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity that Trump and white evangelical Christianity converge (and through which he’s been able to so easily exploit the latter for power). And perhaps even more interestingly, it’s largely for his alleged violation of these three moral foundations that Jesus was ultimately rejected, condemned, and crucified.

[originally posted to FB on 9/2/2024]

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