Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Monday, October 12, 2020
Polarisation (by Cosmic Egg)
This article https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/they-hate-each-other-s-political-views-so-why-have-they-become-friends/ar-BB19yX3S?ocid=msedgntp
(also reproduced below in a separate post) made me think about polarisation –
how it is increasingly difficult to find people open enough and willing to
entertain a different viewpoint to the one they identify with. To listen to another
without labelling them as: Racist, Fascist, Homophobic, Islamophobic, etc. etc.
when their viewpoint differs from or, heaven forbid, offends, ours.
There’s much talk about building an inclusive world; a world where everyone’s views, beliefs and rights are respected. Yet I see little evidence of the tolerance we long for. Instead of openness to what is unfamiliar, unknown or different to our present value system we hide in bubbles of social contacts, with so-called like-minded people, which do more to isolate ourselves from those deemed undesirable than to bridge the apparent gap.
Social media (my personal experience is with Facebook only) is brilliant at allowing people to hide in various social bubbles, constantly reinforcing our existing views, and feeling free to attack those of a different mind-set in ways not many people would dare to express were they to meet their ‘opponent’ face to face (the bullying I have witnessed and experienced on Facebook is first-rate).
I’d like to add that it’s entirely ‘normal’, i.e. understandable that people like to socialise and live with and near people they can identify with – nobody likes to feel the odd one out. I am no different. Yet I can’t help but notice an increasing polarisation in society, supported by an atmosphere of PC-ness and virtue signalling, that seems to build walls rather than bridges. 'Wokeness' is meant to liberate those who would apply that label to themselves yet I see a mindless conformity to socially accepted, i.e. PC views and opinions.
Do we have any free-thinking people left? Will those willing to take a risk, to have their cherished views challenged, please stand up? What the world needs at this time are true individuals, willing to step out of their comfort zone rather than more people hiding behind a wall of self-identifying labels.
They hate each other's political views – so why have they become friends?
When Glenn Stanton and Sheila Kloefkorn first ended up in the same room together, they knew they were not going to see eye to eye.
Related: 'It gets into your bones': the unique loneliness of coronavirus lockdown when you live alone
Stanton, the director of the evangelical Christian values organization Focus on the Family, had spent years vociferously fighting gay marriage.
Kloefkorn, on the other hand, had married her wife in 2014, on the day gay marriage became legal in Arizona. Having fought for equal marriage for decades, finally being able to wed meant letting go of a life’s share of feeling like a second class citizen.
But today, Stanton and Kloefkorn are friends. They met through Braver Angels, an organization which encourages people to befriend and understand people who have differing political opinions. Today, they laugh when people are surprised at their friendship.
“I don’t believe that Glenn is out to get me in the way I probably would have in the beginning of my activism. I just really believe he feels strongly about the things he cares about, and that’s a great thing,” says Kloefkorn.
For Stanton, those things include being passionately anti-abortion (he believes that life begins at conception); a firm belief in what he calls the “traditional” family structure (he calls fatherless families a “human tragedy”); and he is so against gay marriage, he says he wouldn’t have gone to Kloefkorn’s wedding if they had met before she was married. Kloefkorn, for her part, rejoiced when the rainbow flag was projected on to the White House for Pride. She believes that functioning families come in all different shapes and sizes, and is pro-choice.
Reaching to the other side may sound like self-inflected pain, but Kloefkorn took those steps for a very personal reason: she the only liberal in her staunchly conservative, evangelical family.
Growing up, her mother was the only person she could relate to politically, so when she died in 2015, Kloefkorn found herself increasingly isolated. And Trump’s election only exacerbated this feeling.
“My dad’s wife texted me the day after Trump won and said, ‘We are so happy that Trump won. We are sorry that your life’s work is over,’” Kloefkorn explains. “I kept on thinking, I’ve got to figure out how to handle this. I very much do not want my dad to die and for us to be on a bad foot.”
Stanton’s motivations are less fraught: he sees pairing up with someone different from him as an opportunity. He likes the idea of making new friends, and wants to learn how to become a better citizen.
“Gaining all the friends that we can, and learning all of the different stories that I know nothing about: that’s worth the effort,” he says.
The work can sometimes be tough, revealing, anxiety-inducing. It requires workshops, disabling one’s own ego, and sometimes even being subjected to offensive ideas.
And yet thousands of people across the US are returning every week to do the work and broaden their friendship circles and their minds, in hopes that the country will be healed by learning to get along.
•••
“Where did we get the idea that we can’t be friends with people we don’t agree with?” asks Stanton when I talk to him on the phone, in his chipper, almost singsong voice. “I work in a very partisan world, and I am an advocate for things I believe deeply. But I really am troubled by the divisive nature of our culture and the way we tag each other so dismissively.”
That might sound simple enough, but the polarization currently gripping America is about more than just disagreement.
Most Americans today choose to spend their time with people who vote the same way as them. People increasingly look badly upon – even loathe – people with differing views: a 2016 Pew poll found that 47% of Republicans judged Democrats to be more immoral than other Americans; 35% of Democrats said the same about Republicans. And this year, a Gallup poll recorded the most divided results it had ever seen on Republican (89%) versus Democratic (7%) approval of the president: an 82-point gap.
We find it more and more stressful to talk to people with different views, and people are increasingly also choosing to sort themselves into politically segregated communities.
And while it might feel like politicians have always hurled mud at each other, our political culture is becoming increasingly antagonistic: during the 1960 presidential campaign, only 10% of political advertisements were negative; by Obama’s second election in 2012, only about 14% of campaign ads were positive.
This increasing polarization has devastating effects on our capacity to show compassion, and on our emotional and political health.
“When people become over-identified with a very negative or judgmental stance, it has a way of limiting their ability to perceive larger possibilities in their world,” says Kirk Schneider, a psychotherapist who been researching polarization and its effects on the human psyche for decades.
“Being continually consumed with seeing the other as evil [prevents a person from] experiencing a wider range of relationships in their life, of having new discoveries, and also perhaps feeling a sense of wonder about the world,” he says.
Polarization is also dangerous for democracy. Schneider – who is a Braver Angels moderator – points out that when societies become heavily divided, they tend to reach an impasse. Political objectives seem less achievable. People who have a less mixed range of views tend to move away from a give-and-take approach to politics, and start to endorse the idea that the other side – not their own – is the one that should be doing the giving.
“People have to sit with some discomfort if we’re going to have sustainable peaceful coexistence with one another,” says Schneider.
•••
Wesley Dennis is so terrified of racism in Trump’s America he has already started planning his exit route should Trump win another election. But he doesn’t want to be this scared. He wants to hear why he shouldn’t be afraid of Trump voters – he wants some reason to feel if not optimistic, at least not horrified.
And so, most weeks, he manages to make it to his keyboard, to do the work of depolarizing himself, and hopefully some of the rest of America.
Dennis has been engaged with Make America Dinner Again (Mada) since the 2016 election, an organization that started out by asking people to have polite disagreement over dinner in people’s homes, and has moved online since the pandemic.
Sometimes the posts that he submits to Mada’s Facebook forum take two, three, maybe even four attempts to write. He will carve out six paragraphs explaining why he believes it’s not anti-American to take down statues honoring Confederate generals, and then he will screen his own writing. He wants to be as approachable, rational, and careful as possible to help Trump voters understand his side.
Sometimes the responses he receives are infuriating. People call him over-emotional about racism, or unable to be rational. They suggest that Black people are inherently criminal. Sometimes they don’t even gratify him with a response.
“Some days I spend hours writing comments to people who have said things that are offensively misguided, only for them to say, ‘I don’t like your tone,’” he says.
Dennis points out that while he knows it is not his job to educate anyone, if he doesn’t speak up the “other side” might never hear from a Black American. “Take this idea that Black people are somehow inherently suspect; or that police brutality stories are just an example of ‘one bad cop’,” he says. “People [on these forums] will say, ‘Well, the solution is more education, or for Black fathers to stop being so derelict.’ And I say, look, I grew up with both parents and I have a Yale degree, and I still experience this sort of profiling and harassment.”
There have been small points of relief throughout his work. He is now less likely to lump all conservatives together, which he believes is good for democracy. Sometimes he will see a post about guns that makes him certain someone is an archetypal, evil orthodox Trumpian – and the next minute, he’ll see the same person attending a person of color-led Zoom talk about race that makes him reconsider his assumptions.
And while he can’t be sure he has helped the more conservative members to see his side of things, he has certainly made ground with some. One of his Mada partners, Patrick Yu – who voted Republican until Trump’s election – said he struggled to understand systemic racism in the very abstract ways he felt it was written about in news articles and academic studies. But meeting Dennis helped to broaden his worldview.
For Dennis, there is another benefit: he feels less powerless. At least if he chooses to engage with those he disagrees with, he might broaden their perspective – and that is something he can hold on to.
•••
Political divides tear families apart. Some no longer speak to their Trump-voting relatives; they find election season unbearable and already shudder when they think about Thanksgiving..
Depolarizing is not easy. Some people years into the process say they still have paranoid fantasies: they fear the sum of their values could be compromised by them talking to their political opponents; that the other side will take over and destroy society; and that those they care for could be harmed as a result.
Sometimes those fears materialize: after Kloefkorn joined Braver Angels, her own friends berated her, accusing her of compromising her values by being friends with a man who had opposed gay marriage.
That is why the Braver Angels model focuses on techniques taken from marriage counseling to help repair wounds. People listen to their partners talk about the stereotypes they have been subjected to, and how it makes them feel. Ultimately, they are filling out their political opponents’ humanity, putting the parts of them back together in a way that makes them less of a caricature.
“It helps to expose myself to other beliefs and I have an understanding of where people are coming from, even though I don’t agree. It helps me because then I don’t have to feel so bad all the time, especially at family dinners,” says Kloefkorn.
What’s more, she isn’t carrying around the weight of assuming that others are against her any more. “It is just negative for me if I have that as a belief because I am just going to look for confirmation and then I am going to feel unsafe.”
Now, at Thanksgiving, Kloefkorn tries not to persuade, not to rationalize or reason with, but to disarm herself and take in what her father’s fears are. “On a bad day, I just try not to talk about it,” she says. “But when it is good we just focus on the things that we love about each other.”
Blush-inducing sex dreams – an explainer by Katy Baldock
Have you ever had a sex dream that has freaked you out? It is not as unusual as you might think. We are used to our dreams being a bit strange, sometimes hard to understand and cryptic, and sometimes seemingly mundane (actually they are rarely as ‘mundane’ as we think they are but that is another thing….). But what about the shocking ones? The ones which leave you uncomfortable for hours, days, months even afterwards and which you just wish you could banish from your memory? Most people have them.
In such disconcerting dreams we can become monsters. We kill, rape, sleep with utterly inappropriate people. Sometimes people see a side of themselves in the dream which they don’t recognise.
Sleeping with the enemy dreams are a case in point here. It is surprisingly common to dream about sex with someone who you had not been aware that you were drawn to in waking life. People often find it very difficult to come to terms with these dreams, fearing that they are harbouring a desire for intimacy with this (inappropriate) person which is in some way ‘surfacing’. Often this brings great shame with it, and anguished secrecy follows.
So what is it about? I don’t know. I mean I don’t know what THAT dream is for YOU. But what I do know is that it is about something (in the sense that it is probably not random), and it is almost certainly not about actually sleeping with, or wanting to sleep with the person you are dreaming about. Perhaps you want to ‘join’ with them in some way – for example they might have a quality which you need to develop so you are being shown a dream of ‘taking in’ that quality, or of ‘becoming one’ with that way of being. It might be that you long to be close to that person. Perhaps you want to neutralise something about that person and the symbol of sex stands in some way for smothering them or more precisely this aspect that they hold. Deep reflection, and maybe a skilled helper, can help you discern what the dream might be offering you.
You can’t be a fundamentalist about dreams. They are ‘as if’ scenarios. They are revealing your inner world in pictures in order to show what it is like, not what it is. It is AS IF you wanted to join with this person, or as if you wanted to join with someone LIKE THIS. Once you grasp this about your dreamworld it all begins to fall in to place. The unconscious reveals itself in symbols. Dreams tell you what it is LIKE, not what it is.
So welcome the mornings when you wake up and start to blush. It could be the key you need to unlock the next stage of your knowing.
by Alchemical Garden: the Body of Spirit (Katy Baldock's exploration in transpersonal psychotherapy)
Sunday, October 11, 2020
The Safe, Inviting and Eloquent Language of “I Miss” to Bring Another into Your Heart by Vince Gowmon
Language is
powerful. One word can make or break a conversation. Yes, most of what we
communicate lies in the unspoken, the space between the words or energy
underlying them; but the words you choose have the power to bring someone
closer to your heart or further away.
Connection—the tube
The heart of communication is connection. Consider connection to be like a tube
running from my heart to yours. The wider the tube, the larger the connection;
the more can be passed through, felt and experienced between us. That tube is
never static—it’s always changing given how something
is communicated and what is being
communicated. The tube, or openness between two people, fluctuates
moment-to-moment depending on the words chosen, one’s energy and body
language—the three main aspects of communication.
Let’s turn to
words…
If someone says to
you, “You need to join that class”, that may make you feel uncomfortable, which
would then shrink the tube and thus connection. But if they say, “I think you
may enjoy that class”, then you are likely to be more receptive and open, and
the connection expands. And when the tube of connection broadens, there is more
room between you to share authentically, vulnerably. You may want to engage
them on why they think this way.
We know what it’s
like when a conversation and connection expands in dimension. There is flow and
openness in the dialogue, an aliveness, a feeling of being present with the
other, even if only for 30 seconds. There’s an unspoken permission to be
ourselves because the spaciousness of the tube invites it. More is allowed in
and out.
Safety & Invitation
With the example of “I think you may
enjoy that class”, you can feel that it is inviting. Inviting
language creates safety to reflect and have
agency or choice. Both “I think” and “may” give room to the other to make their
own decision. They invite consent to the proposed idea.
“May” is what’s called tentative language. Tentative, because like “perhaps”,
“maybe” and “might”, the word “may” implies not being stuck in a rigid holding
pattern of truth or expectation. It leaves safe space for further conversation,
for options and exploration, for a yes, no, maybe or I wonder.
By contrast, “You need to join
that class” is directive, even if said lightly. How it is received depends on
the person’s sensitivity, the context of the conversation and your
relationship. Generally, though, when people are told what to think or do it
often engenders a reaction. “You need…” can instigate quiet or overt push back,
withdrawal or shut down. Less energy is spent on safe reflection (wondering)
and engagement and more on defending one’s interest not to be told what to do—not to go to that class.
When this happens,
connection suffers. The tube closes down a bit, or a lot. It becomes harder to
share from the heart and hear the heart. It can then take time or a time out to
rebuild the connection.
In short, safety is
about invitation and invitation is about safety. In essence they
communicate: I invite you to consider this; I invite you to hear how I
feel; I invite you to know what I need; I invite you into my heart, my
world; I invite you, and you get to choose. Safe and inviting language
brings people into your heart, and theirs. It opens the tube of
connection.
“I miss…”
One of my favourite
ways to demonstrate safety and invitation is by saying “I miss…”. Here are some
examples:
·
I
miss being alone
·
I
miss being alone with you
·
I
miss my friends
·
I miss
(your) touch
·
I
miss laughter
·
I
miss camping
·
I
miss bread
·
I
miss us
·
I
miss you
You can see that
the focus can be on self, other, the relationship, experiences or things.
In the context of
relationship, a beautiful way to express your needs is to say what you miss. In
many communication trainings we are taught to say, “I need…” or “I have a need
for…”, both of which are generally safe and inviting ways to communicate. But
there is something eloquent and soft about “I miss…”.
See the difference
for yourself:
·
I
need more time / intimacy with you
·
I
have a need to be (intimate) with you more
·
I
miss being with you
Can you feel the
difference?
With the third
example, you don’t even need to say “intimate”. The tender eloquence of the
sentence implies it. It’s actually quite a romantic way of speaking.
Feeling into the energy of “I miss…”,
you can sense the fragrance of longing. There is a
poetic, vulnerable and appreciative undertone that touches closer to the soul
that “needing” does not quite reach. The longing of “I miss” has a nostalgia about it that invites the other into
days past when the flicker of light between you shone brighter. It invites the
person into memories (reflection) where feelings arise that create an inner
connection to the heart of old times and lost time, and perhaps a longing to
return to what was.
“I miss” is that
powerful. You don’t need to say much. Just saying those five words—”I miss
being with you.”—, or even “I miss you”, followed by silence, says it
all.
Tending to your heart
This is my
invitation to you. Play with “I miss…”. Remember to pay attention to your tone.
Speak gently, and ideally when you can feel the other present with you. Set
aside a time in the evening after the kids are put to bed and hopefully you are
both not too exhausted. Light a candle. Take a breath. Look into the other’s
eyes and share what you miss.
Remember, by saying
what you miss you are speaking from your heart. You are giving it a voice. And
it’s only from the heart that we can truly connect.
Tending to the
heart is the heart of the matter, here. By acknowledging and thus connecting to
your heart and what it misses, irrespective of how the other responds, you are
giving yourself more to heartfelt living. You are living more true to yourself,
and the other.
The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.