Trump’s Female Staffers Are Like Women Who Marry Convicted Murderers. They all Probably Have Childhood Daddy-Trauma

In this era of women’s empowerment, #TimesUp and #MeToo, I’ve been wondering why women like Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders continue to promote and defend the policies of a man like Donald Trump, and are even, admittedly, perpetuating his lies.

Interestingly, these political women strike me as very similar to the women who write love letters to convicted serial killers and end up marrying them.

I believe that women who attach themselves to powerful, narcissistic or sociopathic men can be viewed as belonging to one of two groups: pleasers or users. These two groups are related in that all of the women involved are dealing with the repercussions of their childhood trauma, and it’s the trauma that’s driving their adult choices.

Women from the pleasers group are trying to curry favor with corrupt, dominant males; women from the users group are scheming opportunists riding the coat-tails of powerful, wicked men in order to gain some advantage. All of these women have a history of painful childhood experiences with rejecting and/or abusive fathers (or father-figures).

Both the pleasers and the users are apologists for men like Trump because they’re seeking approval. The pleasers are trying to get their surrogate Daddy’s love in order to vicariously heal their relationship with their original Daddy. The users have learned from painful past experiences that it’s far more advantageous to align themselves with the dominant males in their lives than to defy them.

When these political women spout bucketsful of falsehoods to the press there are two possibilities: one, they don’t realize that they’re lying because they’re so blindly following Daddy’s lead that they’ve totally bought in to his BS; or two, they’re willingly lying in order to please the Daddy-figure.

The pleasers are attracted to sociopathic and narcissistic men because they’re driven by something Freud called the “repetition-compulsion.” This is a pattern of behavior in which someone (unconsciously) recreates traumatic experiences from their early life in order to find resolution and emotional healing today.

In both their personal and their professional lives, the pleasers are unconsciously attracted to men who remind them of their father (figures) because they’re trying to get the critical, rejecting “Bad Daddy” to transform into a loving, approving “Good Daddy.” This is how they believe that they’ll be healed.

Significantly, these women have a huge blind spot when it comes to recognizing the truth about these awful men. They don’t see how destructive these men are because the men’s toxic behavior is so familiar that it’s become “normal” to them.

Earlier, I mentioned that women like Kellyann Conway, Hope Hicks and Sarah Sanders remind me of the women who pursue relationships with serial killers. The truth is that whether they’re political operatives or the pen-pals of incarcerated murderers, all these women are strongly attracted to men who manifest the darkest of human impulses, and all these women are doing it because of early traumas involving their Dads.

Sadly, all these women are extremely likely to defend and protect the destructive male figure even as he hurts them and/or others. For the pleasers, their desire for Dad’s approval is so strong that they’d never risk angering him and losing the chance for healing. For the opportunistic users, well, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

For the pleasers, their need to find a positive resolution to the events of their past blinds them to the facts of the present and turns them into unwitting enablers and apologists for these awful men.

They’re so determined to find emotional healing through transforming the “Bad Daddy” into a good one that they’ll do just about anything for these horrible men, in the false hope that their needs will finally be met.

Their hope is false because we can’t heal our emotional wounds of the past through our relationships in the present. We can’t become whole by getting an abusive “Bad Daddy” to transform into a loving, approving “Good Daddy” today.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that a hurtful man will change his ways because we need him to, but even in the rare event that he were to change, it would provide us with no healing or resolution, as the “repetition-compulsion,” like all other dysfunctional defense-mechanisms, doesn’t work.

Our traumas from childhood can’t be healed through our present-day relationships. The only way we can heal the emotional wounds caused by an abusive or rejecting Dad is to take responsibility for ourselves today and face our hurts, grieve our losses, release our anger (in constructive ways), let go of our pain and learn to love and accept ourselves.

The opportunistic users are just as wounded as the women engaging in the repetition-compulsion, but their childhood trauma has hardened them and (perhaps permanently) damaged their capacity for empathy and compassion toward others.

These women are willing to behave hurtfully and unethically in support of the powerful men they’re associated with because they’ve become just as self-serving and insensitive as these men are. For them, emotional healing will only come when they connect with their pain, develop self-compassion, and open their hearts to others.

So, whether they’re the groupies of serial killers or political operatives allied with cruel, corrupt politicians; whether they’re self-serving opportunists or troubled souls searching for some sort of emotional resolution, all these women are pathologically attracted to the horrible men in the world because of their deep-seated childhood trauma.

Just the other day, senior White House aide Hope Hicks admitted that she told “some white lies” for Trump, and then suddenly, she resigned from her post. It make us wonder what she knows and what else she did in service of the president’s — and her own — ends.

In my opinion, these women are troubled by unfinished business from the past and unless they find a way to heal their emotional wounds and become whole, they’ll continue to seek out these men, be in thrall to them, and as Hope Hicks just admitted to us all, these women will continue to do the men’s dirty work for them.

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