Taking Stock

The results of Tuesday’s election continue to reverberate around the world. There are many who are celebrating and just as many experiencing alarm and even dread. Regardless of a person's political leanings, the results are extraordinarily potentially destabilizing. Taking stock of that destabilization and learning how to navigate through it and with it is important if this momentous event is to eventually produce a better world for us all. Hannah Arendt, a major figure who devoted her life to the study of totalitarianism, having escaped in 1933 to America ahead of being hunted by the barbarism of Naziism’s growing reach, said, “when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.”

Her words ring loudly in the aftermath of the election results. Whether celebrating the results with a renewed sense of influence and power after feeling silenced and overlooked, or fearing the results in anticipation of a further erosion of influence and power, Arendt’s appeal to draw on our creativity, courage, and capacity to think beyond simplistic solutions is needed. To her list, I would add three more “Cs”: curiosity, compassion, and connection.

Curiosity can lead us to adopt an open mindedness in our interactions with others, especially with those with whom we may disagree. Compassion invites us to remain openhearted with others; to understand their concerns, fears, and convictions. Stronger and more stable connections can arise in such an atmosphere. Life, after all, depends on opposing forces for its very existence. Our muscles grow in opposition to gravity. Without it, they atrophy. Nerve impulses resist electrically firing unless the press of transmitting a pulse of electrical energy reaches a critical threshold. Too easy a transmission and we’d be flooded by too much nervous activity, while too resistant a force would condemn us to an electro-magnetic silence and death. In short, a healthy biological life requires active tension, and, I suggest, so does our political life.

Implications

You’ve heard the phrase, “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” My clinical experience has taught me that what is good for our personal relationships is often just as good for our communal and national relationships. We’ve seen too little of that nationally over the past eight (or more) years. Our leaders have spent an awful lot of time demonizing one another. Whatever we have achieved has often been at the expense of the other rather than through active collaboration with one another.

Here are three lessons from my work with couples that seems to me to apply both personally and politically. Perhaps we can work to mirror in our public behavior what can be so helpful in our personal relationship behavior.

• Conflicts can be seen as the moment when the potential for a transition to a new and better relational structure is at hand. Conflict needs to be viewed as creative tension and not a catastrophe to be avoided at all cost.

• Seeking to learn more about the other person, no matter how long you’ve known them, opens us to notice their depth, complexity, and mystery. This requires adopting an attitude involving less certainty, less self-righteousness, and less stridency. Paradoxically, living an “I don’t know but I’d like to learn” attitude actually infuses our days with the benefits of new discoveries and the experience of joy, even as it reduces the experience of fear and disconnection.

• Picture two circles that overlap. That zone of interaction is where “the relationship” lives. For some, the circles are like a solar eclipse, overlapping so completely that one circle (the moon) almost totally obscures the other circle (the sun). For others, there is hardly any overlap at all. Other than the two extremes, every other degree of overlap is to be negotiated between the partners.

To What Will We Commit

These relationship “lessons” seem, to me, to be relevant to the relationships that can be fostered with people who have different political persuasions. If we are going to successfully navigate this post-election landscape, we will face conflict but we can engage conflict and differences with curiosity and a commitment to mutual respect. Expect to receive what you offer. If in response to this other-directed behavior you receive nothing but disdain, rejection, and disrespect, step back but don’t lose hope. Look for other opportunities to re-engage and re-open a constructive dialogue. Our country’s health depends on it, as would any relationship’s long-term health.

I’ll close with a quote from Abraham Lincoln, expressed when our country was in the bitter middle of our Civil War. It remains as true today as it did on November 19, 1863, the anniversary of which we will soon honor. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…It is for the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work…It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.