Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she is in therapy due to Former President Donald Trump and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, asserting during an appearance on a radio show Friday that members of Congress basically “served in war.”
“Oh yeah, I’m doing therapy but also I’ve just slowed down,” Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview on Latino USA. “I think the Trump administration had a lot of us, especially Latino communities, in a very reactive mode.”
The congresswoman also called the Jan. 6 events at the Capitol “extraordinarily traumatizing.” Earlier this year she said the events that day made her fear for her life.
“After the 6th, I took some time and it was really [Rep.] Ayanna Pressley when I explained to her what happened to me, like the day of, because I ran to her office, and she was like, ‘you need to recognize trauma and that this is something that you went through, but we’re all going through,'” Ocasio-Cortez told the radio show.
“I feel like I learned this the hard way after my father had passed away when I was a teenager,” she added. “That happened at a young age and I socked it away. I had to live with that for years.”
The New York lawmaker described those who disagree with her about the severity of the Jan. 6 incidents as engaging in the “protection of mythology” regarding “American exceptionalism.”
“I think the attacks on the right are about there are certain mythologies that are really important to this idea of American exceptionalism,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But there’s also certain mythologies that are very important to maintaining white supremacy; white supremacy in and of itself is a mythology. And you have to protect it in order to protect that political power, which has now become a very important base in the Republican Party. And that’s why that response was so vociferous — to make it seem that it wasn’t as bad as it was, and it was bad.
“There are things that happened that day that if 60 seconds went differently, if a different door was opened, if a chair wasn’t barricaded in a certain way, we could have a completely different reality right now,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez reiterated her support for therapy in a tweet following the interview, adding that she would prescribe it to other congressmen and women if she could.
“Mental healthcare is healthcare. It should be guaranteed as a right along with dental and vision. If you get a bad cut, you go to the doctor to heal it faster and healthier. Same goes here. If I could prescribe it to other members, I would,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Monday.
