The Tender and the Tough
Why do some people get hardened by life while others get bruised and more bruised as life goes on? Is this a function of the thickness of our skin or is it more of a nurture rather than nature issue that reflects the environment and societal forces that have weighed upon us? When you look at certain people, like an obvious candidate for such consideration, Donald Trump, you can actually find the tender just below the very tough exterior. Bullies are the most contradictory example of this phenomenon and they may, indeed, be bullies as a defense mechanism to protect their otherwise extremely soft and vulnerable inner core. The fact that Trump plays the victim so quickly and wonders aloud why the whole world has conspired against him when, indeed, he may be one of the most blatant examples of vested privilege we can find, is hard to fathom. He was born into privilege. He was raised in a privileged manner and he somehow found a path that has allowed him to stumble through the commercial and political world without the requisite skills or the commonly accepted demeanor. That is privilege of the highest order and it seems to be something he is carrying with him despite having failed miserably in his reelection attempt, in his selection and endorsement of 2022 candidates and now in his multi-faceted legal comeuppance (both civil and criminal as well as federal and local).
There are some people who you might think don’t have a hard edge to them. The word tough never occurs to you when you think about that person. Kim would be that sort of person, but I know better. I’ve seen her get tough in two specific situations. To begin with, she takes the performing arts very seriously and when she is the director of a show, when she is a very different person than she is in every day life. I would go so far as to say that you might not recognize her in those situations. The instance that jumps out at me was a time in the first year or so that we were together. She took a job teaching drama to some elementary school girls at a private girls school in Manhattan. Specifically, she was putting on a musical with them. One day I stopped by to pick her up and was also curious to see her in action. What I saw gave me pause. This was not the nice sweet woman that I knew. This was the drama teacher version of a parochial school nun who might rap her students across the knuckles if they misbehaved. She was as tough as I could imagine someone trying to manage a bunch of young and privileged girls. I’m sure it was necessary and good for them, but as for Kim, she definitely has a tough side. The other instance where she has shown me her toughness is over her staunchly liberal political views, especially those where someone unfortunate is getting the raw end of the stick. She simply has no tolerance for injustice and insists on standing up or put-upon people (and animals). I consider that an admirable trait, but it is another out-of-character side of her that is pretty tough.
I am not going to psychoanalyze myself in this piece because I’m sure my perspective is too self-serving and while I pride myself as having a high degree of self-awareness and an ability to self-deprecate, I may or may not be as tender or tough as I think, so let’s leave me out of this. But I have some pretty tough friends (or so they seem) and they are the ones that surprise me the most. Having spent 45 years in the rough an tumble of Wall Street, where everything gets distilled down to dollars and cents and people train themselves to be dispassionate, whether on the trading floor or in the board room, the thinness of the skin is quite amazing at times.
We used to say that you couldn’t be a good derivatives trader unless your mother didn’t love you. That was our way of understanding and saying that the drive needed in certain arenas is most often derived by some external factor in one’s upbringing that causes enough pain to spur an inverse reaction as compensation. The excessive ambition and drive to become a ruthless and shrewd trader in a complex area like derivatives where the knowledge and effort to gain the expertise are extreme and the internal strength and stamina needed to compete successfully on the field of commercial battle were and are equally great. It is so far outside the bounds of normal human development that it only comes from external stimuli and there are few more powerful such stimuli than the compensatory ones raised in the primordial parent/child relationship. Derivatives trading is not the only such arena for success, but it was the one we saw every day up close and personal. The hard part is assessing which roles demand outscaled levels of drive and which fall within the bounds of normal range of development. It’s a bit subjective, but the measures of wealth and fame are such that they become more or less obvious sooner or later. The added barriers like race, ethnicity, age and gender play into the equation as well. This is part of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” line of thinking.
I recently had an encounter with such a friend. I don’t know enough about the person’s upbringing to know what specifically had scarred them so badly that they were driven to extreme success, but it was clearly present in their make-up. The level of accomplishment was significant and the result of a steady and determined career progression. Without getting into the details, the person was and is extremely accomplished and well-regarded and has held positions commensurate with that status. When that all happens quickly, it is not hard to understand how an imposter syndrome can set in, where the person wonders when they are going to be found out and deemed not as good as everyone thought they were (this is a well-documented phenomenon in the business world). This is their tenderness beneath their requisite toughness. But when the progression is paced and hard-earned, it is harder to understand the psychological tendencies that govern the similar gap in the person’s confidence.
Going back to myTrump example, we see all these attributes on display. The man puts on obvious and thinly-veiled toughness while being filled beneath with tender frailties. And yes, in his case, we have learned enough about his personal history to see clearly the rupture and damage that came from the imperfect parent/child relationship. And we see clearly that the wounds run so deep that no amount of success, whether in wealth accumulation, fame or power can heal them.
My casual, non-threatening, social encounter with this person yielded two unanticipated wounds, only one of which was obvious to me on the spot. One was a comment of agreement that followed a stated concern. Big mistake on my part in that it revealed a lifestyle point of view that should have been kept to myself. It was of no consequence and not a strong opinion, but passing at best, and yet it struck an apparent nerve and required and received an immediate apology and an admission that it was driven by my own inadequacy (which it, indeed, was). That seemed to end the issue. But then a full ten days later, I was called and a need to bear the person’s soul was laid out to me. I had stumbled on a frailty I had not realized. It is always surprising when a person of great accomplishment shows signs of feelings of inferiority, because they are so clearly unjustified. Once again, my failing. I should understand by now that whatever the wounds of youth there are, do not necessarily resolve themselves easily, quickly, or, in some cases, ever.
What is worse than impeding the success of your children by giving them psychological baggage? Making them so tender than no amount of toughness and success will leave them secure and happy. Such is the nature of the tender and the tough.