Link to article: As a Couple’s Therapist, I See the Same Destructive Patterns in Our Political Discourse + 🦃 + How to Live with Election Results
As I’ve been preparing a dharma talk at my Zen place of practice about what “understanding” is and how the way we understand leads to misunderstanding, I read this insightful op-ed below, which I’m sharing with you all for free:
As a Couple’s Therapist, I See the Same Destructive Patterns in Our Political Discourse
I hope these few paragraphs whet your appetite enough to read it in its entirety:
As children, early in our psychological development, we all resort to a defense mechanism identified by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as “splitting.” To cope with negative or inexplicable experiences, we divide our perceptions of people into either all-good or all-bad.
This splitting allows us to avoid dealing with feelings of vulnerability, shame, hate, ambivalence or anxiety by externalizing (or dumping) unwanted emotions onto others. We then feel free to categorize these others as entirely negative, while seeing ourselves as good.
In political environments, this kind of splitting manifests in an “us versus them” mentality — where “our” side is virtuous and correct, and “their” side is wrong and flawed — which produces the kind of rigid, extreme, ideological warring we are caught up in now.
The technologies that mediate our access to reality only exacerbate this dynamic. The algorithms used by social media prioritize sensationalist and divisive content, creating “bubbles” that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives, rather than fostering a balanced discourse…
What I find most striking when talking to people in my practice is how intensely afraid they are of what they describe as “the other side.” Much as Louisa and Isaac sometimes felt they no longer knew each other even after decades of marriage, many of us have become frightening strangers to each other across the political divide.
Over on Fire Philosophy 🔥, Dale and I discussed the election results and How to Live with them:
Oh, and in time for Thanksgiving, you may wish to
Click on the book image to read about the book over at Bookshop.org ☝️Peter Singer is one of our most thoughtful philosophers writing today.
May we find thanks and gratitude for all the mysteries of life.
How do we hold strong differentiated emotions and remain in relationship with one another?
Practice 🪷