On Becoming a Witnessing Professional

“Donald Trump Sexually Abused and Defamed E.Jean Carroll, Jury Finds”

“A jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse against Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages.’” – May 9, 2023, New York Times

During these weeks that I have been reflecting on how violations of women’s and trans rights have impacted and inspired my work, writer E. Jean Carroll’s civil trial against Donald Trump has raged here in New York City. I cite the above headline and lede because they remind me that I would not be writing here – and I would not have been writing, speaking, teaching and even podcasting about the social and political impact of the traumas of sexual assault; of gender and race-based discrimination; and of the importance of seeing the intersections between psychology and politics for the past seven years, had it not been for Donald Trump’s election.

E. Jean Carroll’s courtroom triumph sent me back to the fall of 2016, when, following Trump’s election to the presidency, I was stirred to write an opinion piece for the news site Vox.com. At the time, while training to be a psychoanalyst, I was also working as a trauma therapist for the Office of Victims Services of a New York City hospital. There, I treated adult survivors of sexual assault, childhood molestation and domestic violence. Through the campaign season, we watched as Donald Trump bragged on tape about “pussy grabbing,” and was accused, over a dozen times, of sexual harassment or assault – including by E. Jean Carroll (“US election: Full transcript,” 2016). Yet this did not prevent him from becoming president of the United States.

For most of my patients, Trump’s win held the gut-punch message they feared: that the perpetrator always wins. Moreover, it delivered a second, perhaps more painful blow: that only the powerful matter, and might makes right. Throughout that November, I sat with the twenty some survivors I treated, many of them in their early- and mid-20s. They were of different races, religions, ethnicities and genders. I listened as they absorbed these blows. “We elected a rapist to the presidency,” one lamented. Another decided against reporting her assault to the police.”How could it matter anymore?” she asked. “No one would believe me now.” A trans patient forwarded a social media post of an attack on a transman whose perpetrators yelled, “Team Trump!” after they scraped his face on the pavement.

I could not hold their disappointment, anger, betrayal and fear – feelings which mirrored my own – without doing something. So I wrote. This is of particular personal irony; writing was the last thing I expected to do as a therapist. In fact, having suffered from writer’s block for decades, I had made a midlife career change from being a filmmaker – specifically, a writer-director – to become a psychotherapist and leave the tortures of writing behind. As a trauma therapist, I much preferred to help others piece together their stories, rather than struggle daily to write my own. As much as this felt like I had given up on my battles against writer’s block, I also experienced great relief in no longer fighting. I had hung up my spurs.

Following Trump’s election, however, I could not stay silent. Wrestling down old demons, I wrote the Vox.com opinion piece for my patients – to demonstrate to them and to myself that dehumanizing harms enacted by powerful men like Trump must not be sustained without protest (Teng, 2016). Soon afterward, Dr. Bandy Lee invited me to contribute a chapter to a book she was editing, one which collected pieces from 27 professionals from all branches of mental health – including psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts – commenting, psychologically, on Trump and his impact upon the United States. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was released in the fall of 2017, and to our collective shock, it became a New York Times bestseller. This led me to join a group of coauthors, spearheaded by Dr.s Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman, as “witnessing professionals,”¹ Lifton’s term for an expert who uses her skills and training to alert and combat “malignant normalities,” or the regularization of dangerous social phenomenon.

This unexpected path contained no Hollywood-esque ease; I have since suffered many a panic attack before facing students, audiences, and the computer screen. Yet I persisted – and with respect to writer’s block, prevailed – because, as the ongoing popularity of Donald Trump; and the roll-back of abortion rights; and the passing of anti-trans legislation attest, the ongoing war against such malignant normalities demands it.

Notes

1 Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealots (New York: The New Press, 2019) p. 190.