The Atlantic

He would tell me things like he was being supportive and patient with me to help me heal, and I felt like nobody else would ever be that kind or compassionate with me. I felt that I was too damaged for anyone else to be willing to deal with me.

I now realize that he systematically, slowly, broke down my self-esteem and sense of self-worth until I was fully dependent upon his approval. I compromised who I am as a person and the basic tenets of what makes me happy.

He spends two months in port and two months underway. He was at sea in September and we were keeping up our communication, emailing every day and speaking by phone when he was in a port of call. When he went 36 hours without emailing me, I wrote to him that I was worried; it had been longer than usual and I hoped everything was OK.

He wrote back and broke up with me, without any warning whatsoever, because he found that he was not as excited as he used to be about making plans with me returning home. I was completely devastated and suicidal. My friend took me to the emergency room and I was committed to the psych ward at the hospital. I was there for a week. I didn’t eat for the first four days because the stress triggered a relapse into a decades-long eating disorder. They threatened to put me on a feeding tube after I passed out while the nurses took blood one morning. I began eating again, but since then (for maybe six weeks) I have been caught in this full-blown eating disorder, struggling to find footing, unable to run like I used to because of debilitating physical side effects from the medications they put me on in the hospital. I am an endurance runner, and when I can’t go for my daily runs or my long runs on the weekend, it messes with everything from my mood to my eating habits.

It took at least a half-dozen mental health professionals telling me that I had been emotionally abused for me to realize what had happened. I had so much anger following my hospitalization that I felt shocked at myself. I am a pacifist Buddhist who rarely feels that much anger. After a few weeks, it dissipated and left me with the deepest sadness I’ve ever felt. I am grieving the loss of the man I loved while I recover from the abuse he inflicted on me. The person I loved never existed.

Now I feel ashamed, humiliated, lonely, and worthless. I am unable to enjoy what I used to do for fun. Several men have approached me and flirted, expressing interest in dating and/or sex. Normally after a breakup I would jump at the chance for a rebound boning. This time, though, I panic at the thought of anything sexual. I cannot even touch myself in that way.

Friends have since told me that what I thought was special treatment from my ex is actually the absolute minimum for how a Dom should treat his sub, and he consistently transgressed the limits we discussed and negotiated. I trusted my ex enough that I allowed him to (consensually) tie me down and hit me with things. The depth of trust required for that is immense. That trust has been betrayed and I struggle every single day to comprehend how I will ever recover from the betrayal and abuse.

I had to get my locks changed because I felt unsafe in my apartment and he has a spare key. A friend actually called the cops one evening after I flaked on our plans to get a beer together. They found me cowering in the corner of my kitchen, unable to communicate. It took several hours before I was able to speak with her and hold a conversation. That is how terrified I was. She offered to go with me to the magistrate’s office and swear out charges for a protective order, but she is a prosecutor herself and knows that emotional abuse does not break any laws (at least not here in Virginia). I never swore out charges because there is no hard, physical evidence of the abuse and I do not want to stand in front of a judge and explain everything in humiliating detail.

When I was raped a few years ago, I also chose not to swear out charges because a) I felt that it was my fault and b) I could not bring myself to describe in detail in court what had transpired.

He is back on land until next month. Despite my final email to him telling him not to contact me (after I got out of the hospital), he emailed me several days ago to tell me he has what he calls an STD. It’s not really an STD—more of a virus that anyone can contract anywhere from direct contact, and it clears up on its own without treatment. It’s kind of like warts or ringworm except you don’t have to treat it at all. A close friend told me he’s trying to continue the abuse and manipulation. I panicked when I saw his name in my inbox and deleted it without replying. I don’t have the virus, and I was not going to give him the satisfaction of replying.

Every single day I struggle with the effects of the abuse. I feel that because I have no physical signs of trauma, nobody would even believe that it’s real. When I read Olga’s article this morning, though, I felt less alone. I felt validated. I felt that yes, this is a real thing and other people have survived and healed from it. The article was very hard for me to read and it made me cry. But it makes me feel like victims of this type of abuse matter. What we are dealing with is real and it’s painful and we can recover from it.

• Members of Congress who act as a check and balance on the president will see their stars rise, especially if they are accessible to the media. The Narcissist in Chief isn’t the only person in Washington with an ego. It will start first with the Never Trumpers, especially those with nothing to lose, who are near retirement. Then the younger ones will want some of the glory. Again, an indirect conduit to White House news. They can use their authority to demand information, reducing the media’s research costs.
• The bulk of the front-facing media attention will be on members of Congress, especially if the Narcissist in Chief refuses access, out of necessity. The Narcissist in Chief will react accordingly when he is no longer the center of attention and possibly dig a very deep inescapable hole for himself. Most of his attacks are projections, so that’s your first place to look.
• A Deep Throat will come forward within a year, if not sooner. This leads me to a related point: As long as Melania Trump remains in Trump Tower and the Secret Service has two floors, it will be difficult to get information out of Trump Tower. Perhaps NYC will get tired of the security costs and hassles and that will change.
• There will be a renaissance in investigative journalism. Ah, back to the glory days of Watergate.
• FOIA, FOIA, FOIA. Did I mention FOIA?  Shoe leather. Digging through court and registry files. You may also end up having to order transcripts of court hearings. SEC filings.
• Cultivate the people who were around the failed businesses.
• Keep a sharp eye on what the foreign press is covering. They’re watching what he’s doing in their countries and what their governments are doing to cultivate the U.S. president.
• Get to know the people at the ACLU and other civil rights groups. They will uncover legislative initiatives the media might overlook and incidental findings that aren’t immediately relevant to the cases they’re litigating so they won’t come out in court. Some of this will be quite juicy.
• We’ll probably see a continued increase in paid media subscriptions, as the media is seen as the only hope of keeping feet to the fire. Many more will come after people have paid off Christmas bills, if they didn’t receive them as gifts. Proposed Social Security and health insurance reforms will be big drivers of this. Baby Boomers and older seniors will be the ones buying the subscriptions initially. They’ll be frightened and Lord knows they don’t need any more tchotchkes for the house. Attention to issues that immediately affect that demographic will bring eyeballs to your sites. And a younger demographic will be wondering how they have to reorient their investment and life strategies. That’s the next wave: people needing in-depth analysis. What will they do with the new education paradigm for their kids?
• Fake news sites will enchant for a while until the fake news hits too close to a subject the reader knows something about. Their credibility will be shot with the majority of the public before the end of the four-year term ...

Maybe I can have a bit of fun with an unrelated prediction here too. Now that no one is coming after their guns, the NRA will have a fundraising shortfall. It will be interesting to see what they do to make themselves relevant again.

I’ll keep this handy to compare against the unfolding news.

***

Next, a reader with mental-health experiences writes to point me toward what has become a very popular post on Medium, “Coping with Chaos in the White House.” It is by N. Ziehl and is adapted from an earlier Facebook post by the same writer.

The Medium post is a 10-point checklist, which I encourage you to read for yourself. Unlike most analysis of Trump’s behavior at The Atlantic or other major press outlets, it’s based on a “medicalized” discussion of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD. Again, I am explicitly not making any such medical assumptions. But if you assume that the list applies to the behaviors Donald Trump has unambiguously shown, I think you’ll find its items very useful. Samples:

1) [This behavior] is not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more than maybe a couple hours…

2) He will say whatever feels most comfortable or good to him at any given time. He will lie a lot, and say totally different things to different people. Stop being surprised by this….  If you’re trying to reconcile or analyze his words, don’t. It’s 100% not worth your time. Only pay attention to and address his actions.

4) Entitlement is a key aspect.... As we are already seeing, he will likely not observe traditional boundaries of the office… This particular attribute has huge implications for the presidency and it will be important for everyone who can to hold him to the same standards as previous presidents…

8) People [with these traits] often foster competition for sport in people they control. Expect lots of chaos, firings and recriminations… He will punish enemies. He may start out, as he has with the NYT, with a confusing combination of punishing/rewarding, which is a classic abuse tactic for control. If you see your media cooperating or facilitating this behavior for rewards, call them on it.

And, some final how-to advice for media and citizens as we enter this new terrain:

10) Whenever possible, do not focus on the narcissist or give him attention. Unfortunately we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the president, but don’t circulate his tweets or laugh at him — you are enabling him and getting his word out. (I’ve done this, of course, we all have… just try to be aware.) Pay attention to your own emotions: do you sort of enjoy his clowning? do you enjoy the outrage? is this kind of fun and dramatic, in a sick way? You are adding to his energy. Focus on what you can change and how you can resist, where you are. We are all called to be leaders now, in the absence of leadership.

We are all called to be leaders now, in the absence of leadership.

He is currently enlisted in the same National Guard that I will commission into. In the past six months, our relationship has dissolved. He made constant remarks about how mediocre of an officer he thinks I will be. He has stated that I “don’t belong in his uniform.” I am 12 out of 14 in my class, as printed on the accessions sheet, and he would constantly tell me how he “had to call around to get favors” to get me a good placement, because “Do you know how hard it is to vouch for a 12th seed cadet?” There were also threats that if we divorced, he would do what he could to wreck my military career, and by extension my civilian careers.

There was also some sexual abuse. He would tell me he wanted me to walk around with a very uncomfortable dildo in myself so that I could feel the way that I made him feel all the time. He also got angry enough at me one time to hide all the modest underwear I had, leaving me to wear a thong in my army uniforms for about a week.

He has experienced some traumatic events in the military, all of which he blames on the officers involved. Ergo, he took it out on me through impossible expectations.

At the same time, he expected that I be the best officer I could, but still fulfill all the obligations as a wife. He was enraged when I told him I had a mandatory four-month training after I graduate because he wanted me to “pump out a kid” for him as soon as possible.

As recently as two weeks ago, I proposed divorce. After taking my phone (thank goodness my mother sent me an emergency one), he started to spread a false rumor to people in his unit that I cheated on him in our marriage [which is actually a crime within the military]. (I didn’t. He actually cheated on me and gave me an STD). He also threatened to post up very intimate photos of myself in my uniform. (He put one up on Whisper and, thank goodness, I was able to flag it for bullying.) I had addressed this manipulation of my esteem and career with my commanding officer long before this incident, and he has been very supportive of me while I go through this.

My husband is getting better through counseling, and I am getting better too. But while we are currently only separated, I think it is best to go through with a divorce. So much has happened to me that, while I may forgive, I don’t think I will ever be able to fully forget.

One more reader shares her story of toxic marriage:

I’m a 35-year-old teacher with a master’s degree and 10 years of experience in my field. I recently divorced in September after discovering that I was in an emotionally abusive marriage. I recognized there was something off early in on the relationship, but even with my education, experience, knowledge, family, and friends, I didn’t fully realize it until everything finally started to unravel after six years of marriage and two children.

Two years ago, my now-ex told me he wanted a divorce. He said he had been unhappy for a long time, and he was upset that I was prioritizing other things above him. This was not the first time he brought up the D-word. He’d done it once after a trip out of town, because I didn’t reward the trip with having sex with him. He’d done it previously because I wasn’t “excited” about a 14-hour road trip on Christmas Day to visit his daughter from a previous relationship.

In all, divorce came up about once a year. This particular instance, though, it felt different. Thus began our spiral into destruction, where for three months we tried to fix things but they unraveled faster. He would claim he didn’t really want a divorce, and he would beg me to stay when I began packing to move. Then the next day he’d scream at me that he wanted a divorce again, or leave divorce papers on the kitchen counter for me. In this three-month time period, he told me he wanted a divorce nine times; and then talk me into staying again, giving him just “one more chance.”

He would disappear for days then show up angry that I had a (female) friend over. He monitored all my accounts (emails, texts, social media) without my knowledge. He told me I could only talk about our relationship with people he approved (his friends). He cut off my phone service so I couldn’t contact anyone. He harassed me online. He stormed out of counseling appointments cussing at me. He repeatedly locked me out of portions of the house. He drove away in a different vehicle and left me alone in the car 10 miles from home with no keys in February. He changed the locks on the house altogether to keep me from being able to enter.  

That was what made me finally face the fact that this was not normal relationship behavior. I ended up moving out and finally taking the time to work on myself.  And I finally admitted that I was in an abusive relationship.

Honestly, I knew before. I remember within months of our whirlwind relationship—we dated only six months before he proposed—googling “emotional abuse” and “verbal abuse.” The escalation in behaviors forced me to really look at it. I can check off so much of the abusive actions on any checklist, but like he said to me: He didn’t hit me. I do wish he had, then I would have known. But since he didn’t, it was easy to justify away or leave it as a gray area.

The abusive behaviors were mainly about control and manipulation.  There was a constant criticism of me and my “unwillingness to change” myself to be better for him. If I complained about the criticism, I was told I needed a thicker skin.

He told me the reason I was a bad wife is because I didn’t grow up with a good female role model. My mom died when I was 10.

He would get upset about the words I used or the tone, and either scream at me or ignore me for 3 to 5 days until I apologized. If I cried, he told me I was trying to manipulate him.

He once asked if I wanted to go to restaurant A or B. When I said, “I prefer A.” He screamed, “I didn't ask which one you preferred; I asked which you wanted to go to. You can’t even answer a fucking question correctly.” I always felt like I was playing a game without knowing the rules.  And when I screwed up, the punishment was way too severe for the so-called “crime.”

After initiating the divorce last year, I discovered the financial abuse: He had accumulated over $100,000 in unsecured debt. He drained my personal IRA (he works for the company). He also has forced litigation, and continues to use the legal system to punish me for leaving him. He forced it to go to trial. We were finally divorced in September.

Just today, we had yet another hearing because he is moving towards appealing the divorce judgment. I, with the help of family, have spent over $15,000 in legal fees so far. I’ve been told to defend an appeal, which will be an additional $5,000. I have maxed out my credit card and sold off belongings to try to pay for the attorney fees. I am currently driving a vehicle that was donated to me.

He makes twice the income that I do and yet hasn’t paid any of the court-ordered child support. He owes me nearly $12,000 currently in arrears.  

I’ve been in therapy now for over two years. I’m not going to claim to be blameless. There are many things I did that contributed to the dysfunction of our relationship. I have a lot of brokenness from childhood that was not properly dealt with, and I was in no way ready for a marriage. However, nothing I did warranted the treatment I received from him.

Even still, I struggle to know what is healthy and what isn’t. I think that maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be. All it takes is rereading some old emails or messages, or reading over a checklist of unhealthy behaviors to remind myself just how toxic our marriage was. And then be grateful I was able to get out.

Update from another reader with a happy ending:

I wanted to contribute to the series because in my own years of healing from an emotionally abusive relationship, it was reading stories from other people of their own experiences that convinced me that it wasn’t “just me,” that I wasn’t “overreacting,” and that the relationship I had been in wasn’t normal or or okay or “just fighting like all couples do.”

I spent 10 years married to an emotionally abusive man, though it took me most of those 10 years to be able to recognize it as abuse. To this day, he would say that although he did some things wrong, he wasn’t “abusive” toward me.  

He would alternate between telling me he admired my intelligence and berating how stupid I was. When he was angry, which was often, he would throw a fit—screaming at me, breaking things that were important to me, sometimes physically abusing a pet that was dear to me. He’d point a gun at me. He tried to run me over with a car once. He liked to start fights with me in public places because he knew it would embarrass me. He would abandon me at the store or lock me out of the house. He would drive recklessly to scare me, including the time after I was in an accident and he drove me to the hospital (he refused to let an ambulance take me because he wasn’t going to pay for it).

Our finances, which he handled, were always a mess. He’d overspend because he felt like he’d “earned it” being stressed out with work. Then he’d call me on the phone when I was out to eat with friends and tell me I wasn’t allowed to spend a dime on dinner because he thought I’d spent foolishly on something and now we didn’t have any money. I never knew if we had money to spend from day to day. He’d pay for expensive vacations and meals for us, then get angry with me when I needed to buy groceries. We found money to pay for his master’s degree but he spent years convincing me we couldn’t afford for me to get mine. His parents bailed us out of huge financial debt more than once because of his spending, though he always blamed me for our financial troubles.

Because I worked for a religious organization, I knew I would lose my job if I divorced. He knew I loved my job and used this as leverage anytime I considered leaving. He also knew that my family didn’t believe in divorce, as was also true of most of the people in our religious community. He told me that no one would support me if I left, and largely he was right. He also leveraged my faith to convince me that I was not forgiving enough when I’d try to hold him accountable for his actions.

After we divorced, I came across an article on “gaslighting.” It took me several days to read all the comments and stories after the article, but I was absorbed—it was actually a thing! The way I’d spent years doubting my own perceptions of reality because he kept telling me that I had misunderstood, misremembered, or was just “wrong” about my own memories … it was a thing that other people had experienced as well!

The best decision I ever made in that relationship was not having kids with him. I’m now deliriously happily remarried. Five years in and we have never had a fight. We’re also expecting our first child.

In college, I studied 50 hours a week. I was a biology major. This was a total of 16 years of sacrifice in school. Remember, I didn’t have any family wealth, so I had to actually give up stuff to get this education, unlike rich kids who still get family trips and nice clothes while they study. I didn’t know what the professional world would look like, but I assumed a STEM major would get me money.

When I graduated and started working at Harvard, I was making $28K a year. Most construction workers made more than I did. I had to live at home for three years because I couldn’t afford rent anywhere. I became extremely resentful because I felt like I wasted all that effort in school for no payoff.

But I quickly realized that immunology was super hot. My lab was an immunology lab, and I learned that with three years more of lab work, I could jump out of the academic treadmill and go to where the real money is: Big Pharma.

My final annual pay at Harvard was $32K after three years of work. The job I took in the pharmaceutical industry paid $70K, and after a year of working every day, I was given a raise to $90K.

Academia is really the land of the trust-fund kids. The pay is so bad, you need to either have a trust fund or a spouse who will support you. Academia requires a life of sacrifice. I had zero interest in sacrificing a day longer than I had to.

My boss in academia went to Harvard for undergrad and PHD and had five years of postdoctoral experience. She was making $50K. Black and Hispanic people are disproportionately from poor families, so people like me who have the smarts to work at a place like Harvard aren’t all that interested in making $50K a year. You have the chance that no one in your family ever had to be rich. Why waste that? Someone has to generate wealth for the family.

A large percentage of black people know economic struggle. We aren’t likely to take on the burdens of education if it’s not actually going to improve our living standards. You can work tons of hours and make tons of money; or you can work more reasonable hours and make much less money but have tons of family time; but why on earth would you want to work tons of hours for no money?

We have a word for that. It’s called exploitation.

My hours are also better than a science professor. I work 70 hours a week, but that’s by choice. I’m also going to grad school for an MBA. (I want to be a CEO, so I need to prove myself.) My lab is usually done by 5pm. We have some nights that go to 8pm, but that’s not the norm. In academia, 70-hour weeks are the norm.

There are only three kinds of people in the economy: owners, management, and workers. It’s incredibly hard to be an owner, so I’m going to be a manager because they can get rich. Workers in the Anglo-Saxon model are always getting screwed. I would rather do the screwing.

My goal in life is to be rich. That’s what motivated an inner-city kid to pull 12-hour days from 2nd grade till today. I sacrificed my entire childhood to get to this point. I didn’t do it because I was looking to help people. I’m not interested in sacrificing my life for others. It was made abundantly clear to me growing up that the broader society didn’t care about the conditions I was growing up in, so outside of other working-class kids, I don’t feel like I owe this broader society anything.

I was told to pull myself up by my bootstraps and I did. I don’t look to blame racism for every ill, but nor do I look to pretend racism doesn’t exist like many conservatives do. Racism happens.

Would you like to respond to this reader, or do you have your own perspective to share? Please drop us a note: [email protected]. Update from a reader who responds to the previous one stating that “my goal in life is to be rich”:

Yeah, enough said—none of the scientists I know would describe “being rich” as among their top life goals. Others of us do it because it’s what we love, not because we hunger for status and wealth. Science is more important than that. That certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be well-compensated, but remember that doing science for its own sake is a PRIVILEGE. Not everyone gets let into this weird, little world.

Most scientists agree that to call oneself a scientist one has to have a Ph.D or at least a M.S. and actively contribute to the knowledge of one’s field by publishing regularly in peer-reviewed, high-quality journals. Having an undergraduate degree and working as a technician does not make one a scientist.

Update from another reader, Ben:

It seems the responding reader is engaging in exactly the kind of patronizing attitude described earlier in the thread. “Oh, this person wants to get rich, therefore their love of science can’t possibly be as great as mine, who will do it for less pay.” I have no doubt that the responding reader is passionate about science, but it’s pretty low to question someone’s scientific devotion merely because they made life choices you don’t agree with. There’s a July note from Mary that talks about the arrogant attitudes of academia; I’d say this first response is a prime example.

One point that's missing from this thread (although maybe also discussed in older notes) that I think is relevant is how the nature of your job changes as you transition from grad student/postdoc to assistant professor. As a student or postdoc, you’re in the laboratory constantly. It’s your raison d’etre. As an assistant professor, your job is to bring in money. It says it right in the job descriptions: “Develop an externally funded research program.” And that means writing grants, all the time, hoping that one of yours is one of the ~30 percent that will be funded. It’s a jarring transition, and for someone who really enjoys being in the lab (like myself), a major drawback of a career in academia. And that’s on top of the long hours and low pay (compared to industry) already discussed.

I love science, and I love that my job allows to me spend most of my time in the lab inventing new things.  But I love other things as well.  Most important, I love being able to come home from work and spend time with my family without worrying about writing another grant, or worrying about my graduate student doing an experiment properly, or worrying about some other research group beating me to a publication. As the reader summed up: “Not everyone gets let into this weird, little world.” Well, not everyone wants to be in that world.

Another reader who left that world is Jessica:

I started out on the PhD path in the late 1980s. I was idealistic, hardworking. I believe it was about the time of the birth of my second child—after my PhD and into my second postdoctoral fellowship—that I resolved to leave science. I had really crappy pay. I was able to look through a roster of state salaries and realize that a dental hygienist got paid more than I did. More than that, I simply felt demoralized and undervalued.

One point that I did not see made in other posts but seemed relevant to me is that most of my colleagues were foreign nationals for whom a chance at a citizenship was a bonus—which was not the case for me. There was a lot of academic dishonesty as well: plagiarized papers and work, but the offenders were not called out on it because the professors would jeopardize losing their labor pool. Though I mastered a body of knowledge, graduate school and post-doctoral fellowship was the most frustrating time of my life.

In my early 30s, I went to medical school and have never regretted the decision. School was a breeze for the most part, even with two little kids. I had the advantage of working long hours for uncertain rewards in the past, so the cycle of school and set exams seemed easier and predictable. Even residency was tolerable—fun actually. I finally felt in medicine that I was on a level playing field.

By now, as a partner in a practice, my salary is much larger—on order of 5-10 fold what it would have been on a traditional academic path. But I also feel much more control over my own destiny. Reviewing the paths of many of my graduate school colleagues, I would say at least half left the traditional path of academics to pursue law, business and medicine.

I really do feel annoyed at the whining about the United States not training more scientists. We do not pay scientists well, and potential trainees are simply reacting to market forces and taking their talents elsewhere.

Our journalistic and political assumption is that each side to a debate will “try” to tell the truth—and will count it as a setback if they’re caught making things up. Until now the idea has been that if you can show a contrast between words and actions, claim and reality, it may not bring the politician down, but it will hurt. For instance: Bill Clinton survived “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but he was damaged then, and lastingly, when the truth came out. To close the loop, knowledge of the risks of being caught has encouraged most politicians to minimize provable lies.

None of this works with Donald Trump. He doesn’t care, and at least so far the institutional GOP hasn’t either.

How can the press gird for action? Here are three early indications from the news:

***

1) Call out lies as lies, not “controversies.” In covering Trump’s latest illegal-voting outburst, The Washington Post and the LA Times took the lead in clearly labeling the claim as false, rather than “controversial” or “unsubstantiated.” The Post used the headline at the top of this item, and the one below on another fact-check report:

The LAT also took this approach in an online story:

By contrast, the version I’ve seen from the NYT takes a more “objective” tone—there’s “no evidence” for Trump’s claim, much as there was “no evidence” for his assertion that Ted Cruz’s dad played a part in the JFK assassination.

What’s the difference? The NYT said that the claim had “no evidence.” The Post said it was false. The Times’s is more conventional—but it is also “normalizing” in suggesting that Trump actually cared whether there was evidence for what he said. I think the Post’s is closer to calling things what they are.

A long-experienced figure in the news business sent me a note about the contrasting Post and NYT stories:

It’s not that Trump cited no evidence, it’s that the claim itself is groundless. Reading The Times, you would think that Trump broke a debating rule.

Now look at the two ledes, emphases mine.

Times:

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he had fallen short in the popular vote in the general election only because millions of people had voted illegally, leveling his claim — despite the absence of any such evidence — as part of a daylong storm of Twitter posts voicing anger about a three-state recount push.

Post:

President-elect Donald Trump spent Sunday ridiculing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign for joining a recount effort in Wisconsin, ending his day on Twitter by parroting a widely debunked conspiracy theory that her campaign benefited from massive voter fraud.

Subtler, perhaps, than their respective headlines, but one reflects the essential truth whereas the other is merely fatuously accurate.

***

2) Fighting for Reality Itself. I highly recommend this new essay by Ned Resnikoff at the Think Progress site. It explains the chaos-generating logic of Trump’s seemingly illogical stream of nonstop lies big and small, which Resnikoff traces to reality TV, to Breitbart and Steve Bannon, and to Vladimir Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov. It also lays out very different responsibilities for the press and public institutions from what they have assumed their duties to be. A sample about the media:

If the United States is to remain a liberal democracy, then Trump’s non-linear warfare needs to fail. Politics needs to once again become grounded in some kind of stable, shared reality. It’s not clear how that could happen. But there are at least a couple of steps that anti-authoritarians can make right away...

Journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration.

They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy.

Seriously, please read and reflect on this essay. Also, please read Michael Tomasky’s latest essay in The Daily Beast.

***

3) Dealing with this kind of man. While I was chronicling Donald Trump’s lies, outbursts, and attention-failures in the Time Capsule series, I received a large amount of mail offering medical hypotheses for why he might behave the way he did. I suspect the same is true of most other reporters who have written about him. And like most other press operations, while the campaign was underway The Atlantic deliberately decided not to “medicalize” any discussion of Trump’s behavior. Most of us are not doctors; even the doctors who were writing to us had not dealt with Trump firsthand; and from a civic point of view, the real issue was the behavior itself, not whatever label you might attach to it.

The campaign is now over; Trump is set to assume enormous power; and the world and the country need to understand how to deal with him. A reader with professional expertise in this field has sent a note on how journalism should prepare for Trump, especially in thinking about his nonstop string of lies.

Again, to be clear, this reader is not “medicalizing” Trump’s behavior or recommending that the press do so. But there are common-sense meanings for terms to describe behavior, which we can use without relying on a medical diagnosis. We can say someone seems cruel without saying he’s a psychopath; that he seems amoral without claiming he’s a sociopath; that he seems moody or depressed without implying a clinical diagnosis. And in common-sense terms, anyone can see that Trump’s behavior is narcissistic, regardless of underlying cause. I turn it over to the reader:

Now that he is poised to assume power, I (and a lot of others) are feeling some urgency around holding his worst tendencies in check and preventing him from following through on his noxious campaign challenges.

It troubles me to observe that so far the news media are having trouble when they deal with him directly. I am seeing good investigative reporting on his conflicts of interest, for instance, but it looked like the NY Times just sort of rolled over when they interviewed him in person.

Nobody seems to realize that normal rules do not apply when you are interviewing a narcissist. You can’t go about this in the way you were trained, because he is an expert at manipulating the very rules you learned. It’s clear to me that reporters (and anyone else) who will deal with DT directly need to take a crash course in handling someone displaying these behaviors.

The Times got in trouble by trying to make sense of his words. It’s an easy mistake for people in a word-saturated medium to make, but anyone who’s dealt with a narcissist knows you never, ever believe what they say—because they will say whatever the person they are talking to wants to hear. DT is a master at phrasing things vaguely enough that multiple listeners will be able to hear exactly what they want. It isn’t word salad; it’s overt deception, which is much more pernicious.  

But the Times fell for it. I’m watching the same mistake get made over and over again, but I don’t know how to help journalists get out of the trap. If we are going to survive the days ahead, someone needs to teach reporters the difference between naming narcissism—[JF note: which, to emphasize, there is no point doing]— vs. dealing effectively with a narcissist.  

There's a ton of information out there about how to deal with narcissists. I would really like to see journalists get as interested in the topic—and adept at the strategies—as abused spouses are. We need to somehow widely disseminate ideas for dealing with it.

During this time, no one had to deal with her endless drama, intoxicated episodes, getting kicked in and out of friends and family members’ homes, rescuing her from the latest abusive boyfriend and her incessant calls to 911 followed by a suicide threat in order to get herself into the psyche ward for a place to stay for few days. Much of this drama played out in my parent’s lovely brick home on a quiet tree-lined street in a picture-perfect Midwestern suburb.

After she was released, she was ordered to stay sober as part of her parole, and after just four months out, she relapsed and was thrown back in for another months. This stint mainly consisting of some sort of prison rehab. My sister has been in rehab so many times over the past 15 years, she could probably teach every course. It’s just too bad she doesn’t have the sobriety to back it up.

My sister’s addiction and eventual incarceration have prevented her from doing anything with her life; she never finished college, has no discernible skills, and has never been able to hold down even a minimum wage job for longer than a few months. I look at her and see so much wasted potential. Children of college-educated business people with means and resources are not supposed to end up like this.

She was released a few days ago and is back living with my parents on the condition of sobriety, so it’s only a matter of time until she gets kicked out. My sister’s 9-year-old daughter bears witness to all of this because my parents have custody of her. They recently formally adopted her—a status that cannot be revoked—after coming to terms with the fact that my sister will never be capable of providing for her own daughter. My niece’s father, a man my sister barely knew, has never been in the picture.

The fact that my parents allow my sister in and out of her daughter’s life, and the fact that they brought my niece to visit my sister in prison, are a constant source of tension between my parents and me. This is just one of the many challenging dynamics within families of addicts and ex-cons—disagreement over enabling the addict, boundaries, co-dependency, and denial. Oftentimes the family is at odds with one another over how to handle the addict. In my family, it has led to secrecy at times on the part of my parents—them not wanting to tell my brother and me things for fear that we’ll just criticize how they’re handling it.

I really do work at how I communicate my frustrations with them so as not to make them feel worse, but when it comes to my niece, this can be hard. How can they not see the psychological damage this is causing her? Why do they sometimes seem to put my sister’s well-being ahead of their granddaughter’s?

As a mother now myself, I have a better idea of the horrible position they’re in and the anguish they must feel watching their child go through a life of turmoil and suffering, but it’s still hard to witness the impact on a child so young. Upon hearing news that mommy would be coming home for awhile, my niece’s response was that she didn’t want her mommy coming home. And while she loves her grandparents dearly, she has frequently told me that she wishes I was her mom. These are truly heart-breaking moments, and I have to be honest, I’m never sure how to respond.

Over the years my relationship with my sister has gone from estranged to cordial to strained and back again. Today, I’d say it is strained mainly because I, like my parents, am just waiting for the other shoe to drop—for her to show up somewhere intoxicated and start the whole downward spiral. I wish I could be more optimistic, but history shows it’s only a matter of time.

It’s hard to talk to my sister because every time she walks back into our lives, she acts as if nothing has happened. She wants to get chummy again with everyone and takes offense if someone is hesitant or standoffish. She’ll also use that treatment as an excuse for relapse.

I’m not sure exactly how to talk to her now or how I even feel about her. Certainly, it’s hard to relate to her; we have little in common anymore. In high school, I excelled at sports and schoolwork, went off to college, moved to a big city, built a career, married a great guy, and waited to have children until I was financially and emotionally ready. I guess I did everything I was supposed to do.

Her life after 16 took a polar opposite path. I’ve witnessed and felt the endless pain she has caused my parents, the toll her life choices have had on my niece. I see the wasted potential. I feel the shame and embarrassment of having to hide this part of my family. I have to skirt around talking about her knowing that most people can’t relate and will likely judge my family for her behavior.

I know my sister feels immense shame too, but I don’t always sense that. At this point, I think her way of life almost seems normal to her. Chaos seems to follow wherever she goes, or more likely, she creates it. I see her consistently exhibiting the same patterns of behavior, and the outcomes are always the same, always disastrous. It is extremely hard to have a relationship with someone like this. It is extremely hard to trust someone like this. It is extremely hard not to hold a lot of resentment toward someone like this.

What’s equally infuriating is that she’s very open about the fact that she was “locked up,” as she calls it. I’ve had to remind her that there’s a stigma associated with having been in prison. Telling the neighbor with little kids is probably not a good idea. In fact, it’s really bad judgment and only ends up hurting her daughter. My sister’s mentality is less like a 30-year-old woman’s and more like an adolescent—something that I’ve learned can happen to addicts who begin using at a young age; they almost become paralyzed in the emotional state at which they became addicted.

For many years, I kept even her addiction a secret. I seriously don’t even think my work colleagues of eight plus years knew I had a sister. I just didn’t talk about her. In my world, brothers and sisters are usually close, and they have similar degrees of success and values. Most women I know might even describe their sister as their best friend. I never had that. Pretending like I do takes an incredible amount of energy, so I’ve found it’s best to just not broach the topic.

Her incarceration is a whole other level of shame, though. Mentioning to someone that my sister has addiction issues doesn’t seem so bad anymore, and honestly it’s not. Millions of people struggle with alcoholism and addiction, and I am in awe of those I encounter who’ve overcome it. Telling someone that your sister is or was in prison, though, is quite another story. It’s the kind of thing people pass judgment on. I certainly would if it weren’t my family.

With the holidays approaching, everyone is particularly on edge, especially my parents. My husband and I are hosting Thanksgiving, and obviously we want my parents to be there, but this means my sister has to come. For many years in my family, holidays have gone one of two ways: either nerve-wracking when my sister is in the picture, because there is always an episode, or with a shadow over them when we have to make up a lame excuse for why she isn’t there—not to mention the sadness watching my mother spend the entire time depressed because one of children is, once again, not there.

I cannot tell you how jealous I am of other families for whom the holidays are just fun. For us, “the most wonderful time of the year” is something we dread and cannot wait to get over with. Dealing with an addict day to day is certainly no picnic, but there’s something about holidays, watching other families just being able to enjoy themselves without a care in the world that makes our situation feel that much harder.

Despite the challenges, I have to admit the situation could be worse. I can’t imagine what my niece’s life would be like if her grandparents didn’t have the means and wherewithal to step in when they did. I don’t think my sister would be alive today if she’d had parents who’d abandoned her or hadn’t been able to pay for so many stints in rehab.

She’s sober and safe today. I think we as a family have learned to cherish that simple blessing and, despite the odds, still hold out a little hope for the best.  

1. Ken Bone. At a time of high tension between Democrats and Republicans, he gave us a couple things we could all agree on: his awesomeness and how adorable he is.

2. That the government didn't shut down this year! The little things go a long way!

3. Saturday Night Live. Larry David as Bernie Sanders and Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump have been nothing short of amazing.

4. That Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could find something they liked about each other when prompted to do so.

The election is over! Happy Thanksgiving!

On that note, Craig K. Lehman is grateful that at least we’ve reached “the end of the Bush and Clinton dynasties.”

David Caskey, from University Park, Maryland, is thankful for California:

Governor Brown signed a law which will require farm workers to get overtime after an eight-hour day. No developed society I know of has been this committed to a decent life for those who labor for our food.

Trump was defeated in California by over 3 million votes. Big old California gives me hope for America.

And finally, Barry Tarshis wrote in to say that he’s “thankful to be a Canadian.” Thanks for that, Barry.

The Erie area’s most important employer is no longer GE, which for years has been shedding jobs from its huge locomotive factory. Instead, it is Erie Insurance, a Fortune 500 company that was founded in the city in the 1920s and is still run with a very strong local-patriot sense. During election week it announced a $135 million new building project in the heart of Erie’s downtown, where its main campus is already located. This complements other downtown efforts, like the one I described earlier this fall.

In October, before this news came out, I asked Erie Insurance’s longtime chairman, Thomas Hagen, and its current CEO, Timothy NeCastro, why they had kept their growing business in this relatively remote location. “Our goal has been to do good things for our customers, and also for this community,” NeCastro said. Yes, sure, anyone could and would say that. But both Hagen and NeCastro went on to argue, as NeCastro put it, “we make plenty of money doing things according to our values. By setting out to do what we think is right for the customers, and this community, we find that we generate enough profits.”

I’ll have more to say about this very interesting company, which is run on the “reciprocal exchange” model that also applies to USAA and Farmers; Erie is No. 3 in size after those two. (In crude terms, you could think of this as an insurance-world counterpart to the Vanguard model of brokerage.) For me, what’s interesting about the company involves the way it has managed to run its national-scale operations and international talent-searches from its northwest Pennsylvania outpost, and how it imagines its long-term fortunes being connected to the town’s. That’s later; for our pre-Thanksgiving purposes, here is news of the expansion and background on the company’s evolution.

Also in local good news, I’ve mentioned the stark axis of generational differences in outlook in Erie. People in their 50s and 60s and above expected to work at the big factories, and bitterly feel the loss of those jobs. People in their 20s and 30s came of age when the factories were already on the way out, and they’re very prominent in the startup, advanced-manufacturing, and civic-engagement scene in Erie.

Last week one of the people we talked with several times in Erie announced his candidacy for mayor: That is Jay Breneman, a 34-year-old combat veteran of Iraq who is now on the county council. Obviously the choice about future leadership is one for Erie’s own people to make. My point is that the generational shift already evident in educational, technological, and non-profit parts of the community is extending to public life too. (And as Breneman and others are well aware, perhaps the most urgent task the city faces doesn’t involve crumbling factories at all. Instead it is the unjust state funding system that penalizes Erie’s schools. Pat Howard, opinion editor of the Erie Times-News, made the case very bluntly this past weekend. We’ll have more on this too, “soon.” )

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Want a few more teaser items on a pre-Thanksgiving list? Well, here is the latest report from the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, on the dispersal of startups around the country, and an accompanying video. And here’s Steve Case to similar effect. And here’s something related from AutoDesk. And this from our friends in Fresno.

But that’s enough for now. I’ll squeeze my thankfulness into the few hours of Thursday remaining when I get off the plane.