During a prayer breakfast Friday September 11th [1998] at the White House, a contrite  President Clinton promised to mend his sinful ways.  “I  will continue on the path of repentance, seeking pastoral support AND THAT OF OTHER CARING PEOPLE so that they can hold me accountable for my own commitment.” ABC News analyst Cokie Roberts’s immediate interpretation was that the President was promising to seek psychological counseling. She added that many had urged him to take this step.

Why might the President need counseling? Can it help him change?

According to clinical psychologist Dr. Paul M. Fick, Bill Clinton’s bad  behavior over decades is rooted in childhood trauma. From age four to fourteen William Jefferson Blythe III (as he then was) lived in a household dominated by his widowed mother’s alcoholic, violent husband, Roger Clinton, Senior.  Young Bill Blythe testified during his mother’s divorce proceedings about the violence of that household. A year later his mother remarried Roger Clinton, despite Bill’s strong objections and correct prediction that his step-father would break his pledge to stop drinking. Once his mother remarried, Bill Blythe took his tormentor’s family name and thus became William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton is an “adult child of an alcoholic” or “ACOA." There are millions of them in the USA. 

Paul Fick presents an unsensational, well documented approach to understanding the President’s illness in 

At least two other Presidents have been ACOA: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s friend Franklin Pierce and Ronald Reagan. Reagan was less harmed by living in an alcoholic household than was Bill Clinton. For Reagan’s father sometimes went years without a drink and was not violent. Moreover, Ronald Reagan’s mother helped him understand that his father’s alcoholism was an illness, not a moral failing (p. 39f). By contrast, Bill Clinton’s mother entered into tacit agreement with her son not to discuss his step-father’s alcoholism, to blot out unpleasant memories and to “get on with” life. This approach was not healthy, Dr. Fick argues. For it induced Bill Clinton to react to his chaotic home life through behaviors which have left him emotionally immature and predisposed  to lie, to create chaos in his work and compulsively, proactively to seek out multiple sexual partners (p. 126f).

The 1998 edition updates (with a Monica Lewinsky foreword) material first published in 1995 and reissued in 1996. To Dr. Fick, Bill Clinton’s bad behavior flows from unhealthy reaction to his childhood trauma. His sometimes bizarre behavior has become so much a part of him that it can be predicted. Absent treatment and a cure, bad behavior will recur. In fact it has recurred: lying to the American people about the Lewinsky affair, new chaos in his administration and family (a compulsion to recreate familar conditions of his early home life) and a steady refusal either to make his medical records public or to seek counseling.

Dr. Fink concludes that Clinton is treatable. But by the time the book was published, the President had shown “very little insight into the impact of his childhood problems as it relates to his current difficulties” (p. 221). At long last, perhaps, Bill Clinton’s September 11th [1998] promise to reform is a first step to become well.  Conceivably, Mr. Clinton now accepts that he himself needs counseling. The Clinton family had once actively co-operated in  similar counseling for the President’s younger half-brother Roger. The President knows what counseling is about and what it can achieve. He has read the literature. Finally, he admits that he is ill and will enter a cure.

Dr. Fick imagines what it would be like if Clinton were to become his patient. He has written up a diagnosis and instructions for any staff involved in such a hypothetical cure. Here are some details of Clinton’s proposed treatment. 
 

• The President’s therapist should be male, “to defuse the potential for sexually acting out.” 
• “Initial treatment should focus on the enhanced awareness of the client and insight into the impact of his childhood.” 
• The patient must confront the underlying issues which an “adult child of an alcoholic” (ACOA) must master. 
• The clinician will lead the President in peer-group psychotherapy. 
• Mr Clinton will join a 12-step ACOA self-help group. 
• He will also be part of an intimate family therapy group. 
• Healing can be on a session-a-week out-patient basis. 
• Treatment will very likely last for considerably more than six months “because of the client’s level of denial and the duration of the problem.”  (p. 222f)

As the President acknowledged at the prayer breakfast, his bad behavior has landed him in more than one kind of trouble. He might yet be indicted and tried for criminal behavior (possibly while sitting as President, more likely after quitting the White House). He may be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried for his bad behavior by the Senate, which might also vote to remove him involuntarily from the Presidency. Bill Clinton has sinned and needs God’s forgiveness.

He also needs to change his ways. But changing a hitherto winning life strategy based on lying, creating chaos and proactively seeking sexual experiences will not be easy. Praying is necessary but will not be enough. Repenting has to be there but will not suffice.  Accepting with good will professional counseling just might work. For the good of the country, the President has to seek counseling and it had better work.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE