“He won.” Sleepy and disoriented from staying up way too late the night before, I looked bleary-eyed at my daughter, who was waking me up to say goodbye before she left for school. I didn’t quite hear her, only noticed the sadness on her face as she clenched her mouth and fought back tears. I asked her to repeat what she said. She didn’t look away this time. “He won.”
I drew her to me and did everything I could muster in that moment. I hugged her, stroked her hair and repeated, “I know, I know.” Because I did know. It wasn’t just that I had been awake until 3:30am looking at the overwhelmingly red map and saw no numerical possibility for any other outcome before they had even officially declared it. No, I knew so much more than that.
The first presidential election I ever tried to vote in was the 2000 race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. On Election Day, I was exactly a week shy of 18, so I couldn’t formally exercise my right as a citizen. But as a college freshman, the development of my political identity was in full swing, and I knew the stakes were high. Current events sometimes make me nostalgic about this time, when a stolen election in favor of a bungling, unintelligent nepo baby whom people "just wanted to get a beer with" seemed like the worst it could get.
For my birthday in 2016, my husband Alex took our daughter and me away for a few days. It was the weekend after Election Day, so it felt less like a celebration and more like an attempt to escape and tune out. We didn’t realize that the part of New Hampshire we were staying in was quite rural, replete with pick-up trucks decked out with gun racks and Trump/Pence signs fanning every yard. We kept hearing about the blatant hate crimes rippling through the country and panic started to set in. I envisioned our anti-Trump bumper sticker drawing attention at gas stations. I worried that Alex’s brown skin and almond eyes made him an inhuman target to people just waiting to release their pent-up rage and racism. I remembered the unmasked harassment we received as a mixed race couple and suddenly feared for our daughter’s safety. As we continued on to our hotel, we discussed whether we should buy a gun for protection.
I didn’t recognize this life, this world. A few short days before, I was proudly sporting an “I voted” sticker with my then-two-year-old daughter, beaming at the camera and confidently captioning the photo with “Just voted for the first woman president of the United States.” The 2016 election result was the beginning of an entirely new reckoning with my privilege and ignorance, and the start of a prolonged personal and collective national trauma. I had to learn how to carry my love for conservative family members and friends- some of whom are women, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community- alongside my anger and betrayal at their unfathomable political alignment. It was a crash course on coded language, and a disheartening realization that those in power will stop at nothing to keep the majority of us in our place.
As we saw in 2016 and 2020, the 2024 election was largely about people voting against their own best interests, and against the best interests of the people they care about. Immigrants in favor of mass deportation? Gays against trans rights? Women clamoring for the decimation of reproductive autonomy? It seems to defy logic. But when you know about abuse and generational trauma, you start to connect the dots.
In early childhood, we are just starting to understand the world and our place in it, which we’re learning from the people closest to us (usually parents, siblings, and other caregivers). When that dynamic is marred by abuse, neglect, oppression, and violence, it distorts what we believe about ourselves and others, and informs what we think needs to be done in order to survive. When trauma goes unresolved, perhaps due to the absence of a trustworthy support person, our sense of worth is skewed- whether that is to buy into the idea that we’re worthless or that we’re entitled- and we become untethered to a sense of belonging, which is a fundamental human need.
Unmet needs- especially unconditional love and safety- make us susceptible to manipulation and the power of suggestion. We can all relate to confirmation bias, which is when we seek out only information that will support what we already believe. When you’ve experienced prolonged abuse, trauma, and invalidation, what you believe is that the world is dangerous, people are going to harm you, and you can only rely on yourself. Combine that with a lack of insight and unwillingness to heal wounded parts, and you can see how so many have felt comforted by finger-pointing and hateful rhetoric. It really isn’t counterintuitive at all; it’s fear and self-loathing.
I’ve often heard that grief is love with nowhere to go. I see this collective national trauma as the result of pain with nowhere to go. All too often, pain transforms into anger, defensiveness, and desperation. Gone unchecked and unhealed, transformed pain can push us to do harm.
This isn’t meant to invalidate the righteous fear and anger about the very real harm that has been and will be done to people, particularly marginalized folks. It's also not meant to excuse bad behavior and abuses of power. It is a sharing of the ways that therapy has helped me understand what used to feel inaccessible. It is encouragement to discover ways to spend your precious time and energy- our most sacred and limited resources- on efforts that align with your values and contribute to the things that matter most to you. It is an invitation to harness the power of empathy at a time when there is a severe shortage of it.
My daughter is only just about to turn 11, but she too is starting to understand the high stakes of politics and representation, especially as she continues to form her identity. Fortunately she is going out into the world with the youthful drive to spread kindness, and the security of having a soft place to land. For me, fighting off resignation has been exhausting, but I'm grateful for being able to do this work, for being entrusted with holding space for those who need it most, and for the strength to instill a sense of safety and confidence in my clients, so that we can all change the legacy burdens that we carry. It’s hard work and it can be exhausting, but luckily we aren’t doing it alone.
