To the catalogue of anxieties her patients explore during therapy — marriage, children, and careers — psychologist Alison Howard is now listening to a new source of stress: the political rise of Donald Trump.
...“He has stirred people up,” Howard said.
“We’ve been told our whole lives not to say bad things about people, to not be bullies, to not ostracize people based on their skin color.
We have these social mores and he breaks all of them and he’s successful.
And people are wondering how he gets away with it.”
Hand-wringing over Trump’s rapid climb, once confined to Washington’s political establishment, is now palpable among everyday Americans who are growing ever more anxious over the prospect of the billionaire reaching the White House.For some, Trump’s diatribes against undocumented immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims evoke unpleasant flashbacks of dictators.
For others, his raw-toned insults conjure memories of high school bullies.
Type “Trump” and phrases such as “scaring me” or “freaking me out” into Twitter’s search engine, and a litany of tweets unfurl, including one posted two weeks ago by Emma Taylor as she lay in bed in Los Angeles:
“I literally can’t sleep because I just thought about how Trump may actually win the Presidency and now I’m having a panic attack.”
“It’s like a hurricane is coming at us, and I don’t have any way of knowing which way to go or how to combat it,” Taylor, 27, a Democrat, said in a phone interview.
“He’s extremely reactionary and that’s what scares me the most. I feel totally powerless and it’s horrible.”
Democrats aren’t alone in their Trump anxiety.
Whitney Royston, 30, a Republican who works as an event coordinator in Littleton, Colo., said the prospect of a Trump presidency scares her because “he’s a side show. He doesn’t have anything to say. All he does is tell other people to shut up. If he were to become president, I fear that our world would come tumbling down.”...
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