Posted by edina
(here)
I read this article on ZeroHedge earlier today and it's been staying with me. I wanted to share this and get other people's thoughts, but I wasn't sure where it fit in the forum.
The Libs Are Not Alright, Dante Moretti via American Mind.org,
The tone of this article is different than the tone of most of the posts in this thread, and I'm not sure how I feel about the labels of "woke" and "liberal". But the behaviors described in the article fit what is seen in the thread.
People are genuinely struggling.
At first, as I watched these sorts of reactions, I felt angry with the media that pushed the fear-mongering of Trump and lied about what was really going on in the Harris polls. The cognitive disconnect from what many of these people were inculcated to believe versus what reality actually is just led to some painful cognitive breakdowns.
I still feel there must be some sort of accountability in the media for their role in this. No easy answer there though.
Dante describes this from the perspective of being a practicing therapist:
I speak from some experience, having spent multiple hours per day over the past few weeks hearing from clients about the damage inflicted upon their psyches “by the Trump win.” This is their account of things. My own opinion, however, is that
someone has subjected these kids to psychic trauma. But it wasn’t Donald Trump.
The article tagline is one point that I keep revisiting in my mind.
Political fearmongering has real psychological consequences…
I think this applies across a wide spectrum of topics and culture, in addition to the political arena.
And this, it's thought-provoking to just sit and weigh in on it inwardly..
One truism I’ve observed in my practice is:
“you love what you pay attention to.”
A person could unpack a ton of insights and triggers to changed behavior just from that one statement. It invites me to pay attention to what I pay attention to, and then to recognize that investment of attention has a felt effect similar to love.
But the article is addressing the authors observations with clients struggling to cope with an election outcome.
Dante continued,
I am not saying that my clients spend $180 to talk about the election because they don’t care about their addiction, spouses, etc. But I am saying that they are
choosing to prioritize, and therefore
nourish, their hatred for Trump. This of course increases their distress, which increases their hatred. This is
not a vicious cycle they all just stumbled into by unfortunate happenstance. They were taught incessantly—by friends, by online forums, by figures they trust in the media—that Trump trumps all.
Trump may or may not be "the answer" to cleaning up the mess of our government, but for many media outlets, anything "Trump", positive or negative, has been the answer to their attention deficit and bottom profit line. Many media businesses have made a lot of money just by invoking his name in headlines.
That said, however, Dante's point is that this media frenzy has had real-life, real world, psychological consequences for real live human beings.
The tragic element in all these cases is that these fragile individuals have been violently interrupted in their healing progress by a
completely imaginary evil, projected in Hitler-moustachioed IMAX across the pages of The New Republic, blared from the anchor’s desk on CNN, and generally beaten into the heads of everyone in their immediate
circle of trust.
Dante goes on to describe about internal and external locus of control and offers a simple, solid description of good mental health. Common sense in a media culture that seems to have gone off the rails of common sense.
Just very curious about what others think about the points of this article.
And can anyone see how this information may help them help some of the people genuinely struggling with the election outcome?
Re: Trump's election: the woke reaction
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