In my family mediation practice, I often encounter an inexperienced, fearful, person – frequently but not always a woman — who is trying to negotiate against someone perceived as a bully, over marital property or child support.   I will ask what her goal in the mediation is.  She will tell me, and then hopelessly shrug: “but there’s no way he’ll agree to that.”

I respond: “I’m not asking you what he will or won’t agree to.  My question is, what do YOU want?”

A light flickers in her eyes.  It seems almost a novel concept that she could WANT something, and be entitled to have it, without her desire being fundamentally limited by the boundaries set by her ex.

It’s my job to strive for fairness in the process.  That begins by each party defining what they fundamentally want, irrespective of what will “sell” in the other room.  The crucible of negotiation comes second, and it will always involve tradeoffs and compromise.  But unless each person comes to the table with at least a basic handle on themselves, then the conversation will be one-sided, and the outcome skewed.

The current debate among Democrats about whether our candidates are veering too far to the left reminds me of that person coming into mediation too scared to say what she wants.  Our concerns over “electability” are clouding our ability to have an honest discussion about more fundamental issues of income inequality, health care, immigration, the environment, and racial justice, that should drive our search for a candidate that can arouse the passions of the party.  And our hunt for a candidate palatable to a wide cross-section of voters distracts us from finding the person who, first and foremost, has a clear sense of themselves.

There’s new data to suggest that a bold agenda consistent with Democratic policy ideals has broad public support.  A New York Times/SurveyMonkey poll from early July showed majority nationwide support for a wealth tax on households worth over $50 million, Medicare for all, and free college tuition.  Of course these proposals are controversial, subject to withering attacks from the right, and endlessly mocked by you-know-who.

But that is how he sets the agenda in advance of the debate.  Trump is nearly the ideal type of what sociologist Max Weber called “charismatic” authority: “charisma is self-determined and follows its own limits. Its bearer seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his mission. …  He does not derive his claims from the will of his followers, in the manner of an election; rather, it is their duty to follow his charisma.”

Our negotiating alternatives against this type of opponent are stark.  The most relevant historical examples are the efforts to deal with Adolf Hitler before World War II.  Neville Chamberlin attempted one approach, in which he let Hitler fundamentally define the discussion before it began.  The result came to be known as “appeasement.”  It is not fondly remembered.  Winston Churchill epitomized the other approach.  In 1938, he famously articulated the case for collective action against Nazi aggression: “You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.  … Between submission and immediate war there is this third alternative, which gives a hope not only of peace but of justice.”  Many thought the speech reckless when he gave it.  But Churchill, who had known many failures in his professional life, also knew himself, and knew who he was dealing with.  The rest, as they say, is history.  If you want an overdramatized, but basically accurate, refresher, dial up “The Darkest Hour” on Netflix.

I’d love to say this is our darkest hour, except that it is getting darker by the day.  Now is not the time to appease, nor to allow a bully to define the agenda, nor to craft an agenda that we think will least displease the greatest number.  We must know our own minds, hew to the truth of our own traditions, speak from our own hearts, and reclaim the country — and the planet — that we want to see survive this ordeal.  Future generations, who depend on us to make it to the farther shore, will not look sympathetically upon our fear.

In the “where were you during the Kavanaugh hearings” sweepstakes, I’ll have a unique entry: sitting in our AirBnB in Chiapas, Mexico, clawing like a crazed rodent at the crappy signal on my iPhone.  The Mayan cybergods did grant me a short window to watch Dr. Ford’s testimony, and to profoundly identify with her story.  But my reactions did not end there.  There are things about Judge Kavanaugh’s story too that paradoxically resonate with mine.

First, Dr. Ford’s story.  For her imprecise surrounding details, my shrouds of misty memory clouding that bright summer when I was five.  For her sudden island of crisply focused memory as she climbed the stairs and was pushed into the side bedroom, an itinerant gardener’s invitation for me to enter the little shed in our side yard. For her noise of the turned-up stereo, my smell of potting soil and spiders.  For the hand smothering her mouth, the wood grain of the workbench a half-inch from my eyes, the press of it against my cheek and nose, just before the blinding pain.  For the ring in her ears of the boys’ uproarious laughter, the man’s voice warning me not to tell anyone about our “little game.”  For her decades-later need to build a second front door, my angry run-ins with the gardeners I’ve hired, those few times I’ve brought myself to hire them at all.

Beyond this wrench of recognition, I took in the hearings with the weary disgust I imagine I share with other survivors, as yet another public man’s private abuse comes to public exposure.  While some predations were open secrets committed by powerful brutes, other deeds were truly concealed, done by men of outward virtue, progressive champions, people whom “you’d never think would do it.”  When exposed, like Judge Kavanaugh, they advance the principal defense of their outward “good character”, evidenced by the belief among those around them that they are incapable of such crimes.

I don’t believe it for a second.  For there is a third layer of experience I felt watching the Kavanaugh hearings, that is perhaps less common.  Mixed with my fury and disgust, there lurks in me a sad understanding of Kavanaugh’s cornered rage.  I think he suffers from a pathological case of one of the more common traits of the male psyche: the divided self.  I know something about this.  Although I’ve done none of the deeds of which he, or any of the other parade of recent perpetrators, have committed, I’ve lived with the pain of a split psyche for much of my life.

In my case, it was the trauma of the rape that did it.  The manipulative bastard who cleaved my little body also cleaved my young mind.  From that moment forward, I was not one person.  I was the sweet boy who remained innocent, who got good grades, was never angry, and remembered nothing.  And I was the angry, ashamed boy with dark thoughts, whom nobody knew.  As the years went on, my selves grew more distant still.

I’m no psychologist, but I can see less extreme variants of this divided male self all around me, not necessarily induced by trauma.  Boys are routinely shamed into rigid gender roles at very young ages.  Whereas girls are now encouraged into a broad spectrum of healthy gender manifestations, boys too often are forced to confront a narrow path of masculinity, from which deviation is punished and ridiculed.  Those aspects of the self which do not conform – perhaps, the feminine aspects of one’s personality that cannot be owned — are hidden, rejected, despised.  And a host of institutions, from the Catholic Church on down, offer prayers, rituals, codes, societies, sects, and traditions, to bring the “good” to light and keep the “bad” in shadow.

When threatened with exposure, the controlling, outward self will fight tooth and nail, because he perceives his survival to be at stake. Not only the survival of his career, or reputation, but of his core. I know something about this too.  A major obstacle to my recovery of the memory of my abuse was the tight grip my outward self kept on the explosive rage inside me, and the fear that if I let go I would be annihilated. I was nearly thirty before I finally broke through.  And I would be over fifty before I finally excavated down to the crucial memory, of a bathroom in the basement of my childhood home right after the rape.  I remembered standing there, looking in the mirror, and thinking, What do I do now?

In that desperate moment, a separate me emerged.  It was as though another boy was standing next to me, looking at me sorrowfully. A voice, that said, Give it to me. I’ll take it. And then vanishing like a woodland deer.  I don’t remember knowing what “it” was, but somehow I felt I could cope. And so I did.  I went on being the good boy who must at all costs remain blameless, and not remember. And my disappeared twin went on being the bad one, who must have done something to deserve what had happened.

Until finally, in my decades-later moment of remembrance of that moment in the basement, the wall between my two selves collapsed. From that time forward, I have no longer been two.  I have been one.   As a single self, I have felt a power, and a love, that up to that point had been denied me.

So now I am trying to hold some love and compassion for Brett Kavanaugh, and for those scared, brittle, fulminating old men who surround him.  Not for the damage they have done, nor for the decades of damage they will do if they succeed in embedding their poisonous brand of denial into our Supreme Court.  But for the struggle they would face – and the true public service they could do — if they were ever to move beyond their fear.