Aaron Matthew Laxton, LCSW
3 min readNov 4, 2020

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Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

As I awoke in the middle of the night to see what had happened across the country with the election, I found my heart heavy and my soul aching. Some of you might read this and say cry on liberal while others say, I feel how you feel.

I am sad about the expectation that I had for America’s character. A chance for us to right the many wrongs that have been inflicted during the last four years, some of those wrongs even longer than that. Being a new father, I know the values, morals, and character I want my son to possess, and it is far removed from the America that I saw in last night’s election results. In the lead up to the election, I thought we had come to a point as a country where we could finally denounce things that, to me, are no-brainers. My hope was that our vote would show a clear and unwavering denouncement of racial inequality and other behaviors that we have come to expect in authoritarian countries. That’s not what the voting results showed.

Three years in Donald Trump is what Donald Trump is. His flamboyance and flair for drama are not surprising. But to me, what is hard to swallow is that millions of tens of millions of Americans voted in a variety of ways and what they said for a majority is that everything that Trump stands for is okay and acceptable. So for me, the morning after that’s what is hard to swallow. I don’t know what the outcome of the election will be I don’t think any of us will know for possibly up to a…

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Aaron Matthew Laxton, LCSW

I am a psychotherapist who writes about mental health, addiction, recovery and the impact of substance use from personal experience. Views are my own.