Concerning those childhood traumas, part 2!

FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2024

The New York Times reports: Yesterday afternoon, we wrote about the part of Usha Vance's convention speech in which she referred to her husband's "childhood traumas."

For us, the unusual reference triggered recollections of her husband's best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, which we speed-read in a bookstore when it first came out.

Based on the mistreatment and neglect which lay behind those childhood traumas, we recommended pity for the child. But we also suggested possible concern about the effect those traumas might have on the grown man, later in life. 

In this morning's New York Times, Sharon LaFraniere offers a report which covers much of this same ground. Her report appeared online two days ago. We hadn't seen it until it appeared in today's print editions.

What kinds of mistreatment and neglect were we vaguely referencing? At the start of her report, LaFraniere offers examples:

J.D. Vance Has Written of His Struggles to Control His Anger

Senator J.D. Vance’s rapid political evolution from a moderate Republican to a leader of former President Donald J. Trump’s movement is one of the best-known aspects of his life.

Less so is his personal struggle to gain control of his anger, a battle that he documented in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016. “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote.

There is not much question why. Violence and conflict were part of his upbringing.

Mr. Vance’s grandmother, infuriated by her husband’s alcoholism, poured gasoline on him after he fell asleep on the couch in a drunken stupor, then dropped a flaming match on his chest. He survived.

Mr. Vance’s mother, who battled drug addiction, was so enraged at J.D. once that she threatened to crash their car and kill them both. He fled the car in terror and then watched her being driven off in the back of a police car.

When he was very young, Mr. Vance wrote, he tried to hide from the fights between his mother and whomever was her current partner. Later, he would run downstairs or listen through the wall, heart racing, simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the conflict. “When she lay sobbing in bed after another failed relationship, I felt a rage that could have driven me to kill,” he wrote. 

Experiences of the kind described may well produce "childhood traumas." For the record, the woman who poured gasoline on her husband, then set him on fire, was being praised for her moral greatness at the convention this past Wednesday night.

The highlight of Vance's convention speech was his rumination about his desire to return to the nation's tenth poorest county when it comes time for him to be buried. 

He hopes his children will also be buried in that tenth poorest county, alongside their troubled ancestors. Especially from a candidate who is supposed to represent youth, this may have been the strangest ambitions ever described at a national party convention.

For obvious reasons, we recommend pity for any child who grew up amid such abuse and neglect. In her report, LaFraniere describes the way Vance eventually tried to deal with the aftermath of those traumas:

Once he eventually realized he had to confront his inner demons, he tried counseling, he wrote, but “talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit.”

Instead, he hit the library. He read about how the consequences of childhood trauma last far into adulthood. He talked to his sister and his aunt, trying to understand his past.

But the real antidote, he wrote, proved to be Usha, whom he married in 2014. Close friends of the couple describe her as a steadying force.

“I continue to struggle with conflict, to fight the statistical odds that sometimes seem to bear down on me,” Mr. Vance wrote. “The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha.”

“I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself,” he wrote, “but that Usha has learned how to manage me.”

To be clear, that's what Vance wrote roughly a decade ago, before he published his best-selling book. Also, all praise and great thanks to Usha Vance, assuming the book's account is accurate.

That said:

Vance has had an erratic political career. All in all, after graduating from Yale Law School, he has led a somewhat erratic public life. Now that's he's a Trumper, his career has been marked by a fair amount of unnecessary, inappropriate hostility directed at various political targets.

For obvious reasons, we pity the child who's been raised in the way Vance's book describes. Tragically, the price that may get paid for such abuse and neglect may show up later in life.