A grievance is a real or imagined wrong or cause for complaint. Grievances manifest themselves in the form of people taking offense at, or being upset by, perceived unfair treatment. Aggrieved persons who feel rebuked or marginalized often have unmet needs from their childhoods.
Harboring a grievance can actually feel good. People frequently cling to their grievances rather than try to solve them. Nursing a grievance absolves you from the trouble of trying to make your life better because, after all, “life ain’t fair” and “the cards are stacked against me.” Absolving one’s self of any responsibility for one’s problems can be comforting, even addicting.
It turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.
James Kimmel, Jr.
Giving up control
Whining and feeling sorry for ourselves is also a way of seeking attention. People with common grievances oftentimes get together and commiserate about how awful things are. Such “pity parties” can create and strengthen social bonds.
The central concept in modern conservatism is victimhood. Responsibility, accountability—those are standards they apply to others, never to themselves.
David Frum
Still, people who blame others for their circumstances in life, have essentially given up responsibility and control over their own lives. This is dangerous because it allows others to step in and control their lives. The type of people who like to manipulate and control others do not have their victim’s best interests in mind.
Identity politics
Donald Trump is a magnet for people who feel aggrieved. Perhaps whiny people recognize themselves in him. Many older, less-educated, white men identify with Trump’s racism, misogyny, self-centeredness, boisterousness, and ignorance. They see themselves in him and he reinforces their self-righteous grievances.
There is great injury, anger and redirectable energy for hatred, which Trump harnessed and stoked for his manipulation and use. The emotional bonds he has created facilitate shared psychosis at a massive scale.
Tanya Lewis
Trump lies to and manipulates his followers in such a way that they come to identify with him personally in a shared psychosis. His reality becomes their reality. His fight becomes their fight. His enemies become their enemies. When Trump is criticized, they feel personally attacked.
One of the most impressive [and] politically utile things Trump has done from the beginning is get his fans to internalize their support and perceive even a mild rebuke of him [and] his actions as a personal attack on them.
Liam Donovan
Getting revenge
At the more extreme end of the relationship, Trump provides a channel for people to get revenge for their grievances. In addition to validating their grievances, he casts the blame for those grievances onto a handful of specific scapegoats (immigrants, people of color, Democrats, the media).
Essentially, Trump provides his followers with enemies. Hating those enemies provides a cathartic release for the grievant’s pent up anger. Hating those enemies in a crowd of like-minded people, at a Trump rally, helps to bond them together. This reinforces the group’s co-dependent relationship with Trump.
When group anger has been inflamed, and an enemy has been provided, it doesn’t take much for the group to begin to seek active revenge against the “enemy.” At Trump rallies it is common for Trump to slam the news media. This is always immediately followed by the crowd heckling and harassing the reporters in the room.
On January 6, 2021 the desire for revenge for perceived grievances reached a new and more violent stage. The mob not only wanted to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, some wanted to take, and possibly harm, hostages.
The desire for violent revenge can also be addicting. The anger takes control. The blood runs hot. Even more frightening is that revenge addiction can be contagious. This is how a protest crowd becomes a violent mob.
Because of his unique position and use of the media and social networks, Trump is able to spread his grievances to thousands or millions of others through Twitter, TV and rallies. His demand for retribution becomes their demand, causing his supporters to crave retaliation—and, in a vicious cycle, this in turn causes Trump’s targets and their supporters to feel aggrieved and want to retaliate, too.
James Kimmel, Jr.
Is there a cure?
The addiction cycle we are discussing is as follows: People who are addicted to grievance identify with and become addicted to Trump. Trump (who is addicted to the adulation of his fans) provides his fans with scapegoats to blame for their grievances and uses his rallies and Twitter to orchestrate anger against those scapegoats. This shared anger bonds them more tightly to Trump and, at the same time, increases their feelings of grievance. They turn to Trump for relief and the cycle repeats.
Our society, and Trump, would seem to have little chance of healing until we (and he) realize how the politics of grievance is damaging us. Political parties and interest groups have come to rely upon inflaming grievances and stoking vindictiveness to generate donations and motivate voters. Media, entertainment and social networking giants also rely upon grievance and revenge-based content to attract viewers and users and increase advertising and sales.
James Kimmel, Jr.
The election of Joe Biden can be seen as a giant intervention in the nation’s Trump addiction. The unaffected people have stepped in to remove the primary source of the problem so the country can heal. But interventions can backfire. That is what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. The addicts have reacted to their treatment with denial and violence.
It remains to be seen whether the country can help these people recover and return to sanity. It is entirely possible that the Democrats who are now in the White House, and have the majority in both houses of Congress, will simply return to governance as usual and pretend the problem is over. This would be a mistake.
Nearly half the country has allowed their long-standing grievances to boil over to such an extent that they have lost sight of reality. The new administration must quickly demonstrate that they are firmly on the side of the average working American. If not, these people will only grow more violent.
Sources
James Kimmel, Jr., “What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump,” Politico, December 12, 2020.
Derek Thompson, “The Deep Story of Trumpism,” The Atlantic, December 29, 2020.
Tom Nichols, “Engaging With Trump’s Die-Hard Supporters Isn’t Productive,” The Atlantic, December 21, 2020.
Peter Wehner, “The Unbearable Weakness of Trump’s Minions,” The Atlantic, December 31, 2020.
John Pavlovitz, “Why Do You Stand Behind Cruelty?,” Stuff That Needs To Be Said, February 23, 2020.
David S. Chester & C. Nathan DeWall, “The pleasure of revenge: retaliatory aggression arises from a neural imbalance toward reward,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 11 Issue 7, July 2016, pages 1173-1182.
Paul DelGrosso, “How Schema Therapy Can Help ‘Grievance Addiction’,” December 12, 2020.
Kevin Christensen, “Grievance, Entitlement, Resentment, and, it turns out, Actual Addiction,” Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board, December 12, 2020.
David Frum, “The Conservative Cult of Victimhood,” The Atlantic, January 11, 2021.
Tanya Lewis, “The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists Scientific American,” Scientific American, January 11, 2021.
Yes. As disturbing as the Jan 6th footage continues to be, it is refreshing to look at the difference in the footage from November, of the spontaneous dancing in the streets in many cities all over the US when the Biden/Harris Victor was announced. And also consider the difference in the million women March on DC protesting Trump’s election despite many allegations of abuse and the grab them… When you are famous you can get away with anything tape.
Joe Biden has saved us from a fascist dictatorship, at least for a while.
Very interesting article because it would seem that after Jan. 6, maybe we’d see the true danger to our country and democracy but what I found with comments on Facebook, after news articles, on Twitter, and with family is that those that believe in Trump have now doubled down. Even some that were sitting on the fence not really supporting Trump’s antics but supporting his policies are now fully committed to upholding Trump. I even saw on my way to work a couple of Trump supporters replace their Trump flags with the “Stars and Bars.” So to me it seem rather obvious that we are in for a long haul to try and right this ship we call the United States of America. Thanks Brian for pointing out the hazards of doing it with a grievance mindset. We need to literally make a constant stand for the values that will make the USA become a nation of “We the people…..”