If you grapple with family, or any relationships, at the holidays, the hard part is listening well. After opening gifts, those thingamajigs you never use, eventually you have to talk to each other. As Bessel Van der Kolk wrote, “The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love; these are complex and hard-earned capacities.” Amen. Managing our inner tides of wild emotions and differing opinions is work.
While we’re trying to connect with each other during the holidays, our inner fears, criticisms and difficult disagreements about politics can be floating around the room. But, getting along is what most of us want, as Naomi Klein puts it, “The point is to make our way out of this collective vertigo and get somewhere distinctly better together.”
This year a lot of us are worried about how to be in relationship with people who differ in their political views. I want to remind you that holding onto your good intentions and using careful communication skills is a challenge. I even ran into a kerfluffle the other night myself, with a woman during a pot luck that morphed into kitchen table politics. She vocalized loudly her opinions on illegal immigrants. I sat on my thumbs for a while. Then I ventured into the conversation. “I want to make it safe for you to speak your truth here,” I said. “But I need to add a few of my own concerns.” It landed well, perhaps because I made clear my positive aim before launching my disagreement. We both managed to stay in a curious state of mind and hear each other.
Dr. Orna Gurlnik interprets our divides interestingly: “From a psychoanalytic perspective, I see how political disputes follow dynamics similar to disputes between couples, albeit amplified. People typically come to any event with differing views of the world, informed by their life and background. Grasping the degree to which each of their ‘truths’ emerges from a deeply subjective place is their most important challenge.”
She describes the “splitting” we do in our heads. To cope with life, we divide our perceptions of people into either all-good or all-bad. This allows us to avoid feelings of vulnerability, shame, hate, ambivalence or anxiety by externalizing unwanted emotions onto others. Then we categorize them as negative, while seeing ourselves as good. This produces the kind of ideological warring we are caught up in now.
She adds, “I do believe that progressive ideological positions, at least in theory, are better set up to facilitate that kind of discourse, while conservative ideologies often promote submitting to strong men. But refusing to settle into a discourse of splitting is available to us all.”
I see it in my counseling office too, while facilitating polarized families. I see them repair ruptures, but it takes work, maturity and some skill. Sometimes I say about being a psychotherapist, “it’s like sitting in the front row of a panoramic movie theater watching a wild whitewater rafting trip with gushing water ripping their boat apart. When I slow the pace down and people listen, the river flows again.”
In unsettling relationships, say your respectful wish or intention first before entering the delicate dialogue. And if you rock the boat, try not to tip it over.
Katy Byrne, LMFT, is a psychotherapist in Sonoma.
Be First to Comment