Depolarization Starts Within

"The only reason we have external conflict in the world is because people are living with internal conflict."

A friend of mine who works in the depolarization movement said that he thought that we as a movement needed to look more like Alcoholics Anonymous: a group of people doing deep, personal work, with the results of that work spilling over positively into our friendships, our family relationships, and our communities.

I think he's right. The depolarization movement is a disparate movement, and as a movement we pull on a lot of different levers to try to knit our great country back together. Many of these levers are wonderful and powerful. But one lever that I think more of us should pull on is personal transformation.

I think a lot of toxic polarization is downstream from our own fear, guilt, and shame. As theologian and counterterrorism expert Jamie Winship says, "The only reason we have external conflict in the world is because people are living with internal conflict."

How do fear, guilt, and shame contribute to toxic polarization?

Fear: when we're scared of the other side, we're less likely to talk to them. If we do have to engage in conversation, we're more likely to lecture them rather than listen to them. We might even insult them and tear them down, because we perceive them to be a threat. We can justify all kinds of awful political tactics to beat them, because we're convinced that our way of life is threatened if they win.

Healthy polarization is what Amanda Ripley calls "good conflict." It's when multiple people come together in a spirit of good faith and common inquiry, each bringing their own perspective to bear on a complex problem. Good conflict is how problems get solved and society improves.

Fear leads to the opposite of good conflict (what Ripley calls "high conflict"). Fear is the mind-killer. When we're scared, we stop listening and problem-solving from a place of open-mindedness and creativity. Instead we start fighting.

Guilt: I've known a lot of families and friend groups that have been torn apart by toxic polarization. I think one thing that keeps these rifts from healing is that, when the rift happens, we say and do things to the other person that we're ashamed of. When that happens, the person we lashed out at then becomes a walking reminder of our bad behavior. As a result we're less motivated to try to patch things up, because we don't want to be confronted with the reality of what we've said and done. It can be easier sometimes to keep people at arms' length, if that also means we get to keep our memories of our worst behavior at arms length too. As the old saying goes, "Some people are still holding grudges against you for things they did to you."

Shame: this word means different things to different people. I like Brené Brown's definition: shame is "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging."

When we feel shame, we're more thin-skinned and reactive. We're more likely to lash out at other people.

If you want a great example of what this looks like, I highly recommend the TV show Frasier (the original, not the reboot). Frasier is a psychologist who is consumed with shame. Every mistake he makes comes from vanity: he feels like he's less than other people, and so he compensates by trying to convince people (including himself) that he's better than everyone else. He gets into all kinds of trouble because he doesn't listen to anyone else. He's insecure, and so when people insult him, he lashes out back. As a result of his shame, he leaves a trail of broken and burned relationships behind him (mostly with women).

Shame escalates conflict and breaks relationships.

I think shame also contributes to toxic polarization in another way. When we feel like we're fundamentally flawed and unworthy, we're more likely to look for a sense of identity outside of ourselves. We feel uneasy in our own skin, and so we try to use our political ideology (for instance) to shore up our sense of who we are. But when we get our sense of identity from our politics, then any criticism of our political ideology can feel like a punch to the face. We can fall into fight-or-flight mode. We become soldiers, not scouts. We lose the ability to see the flaws in our own side, and instead we locate all of the world's goodness on our team and none on the other team. That's a recipe for blind partisanship and dehumanization of the out-group.

So fear, guilt, and shame drive toxic partisanship. So how can we break out of them?

The most effective way that I've found is to change the stories we tell about ourselves.

Let's take a look at how this might look with shame.

For decades, the story I told myself about getting abused as a child was pretty bleak: "I must have deserved to get abused." That's a very shame-inducing story.

But then I started telling myself a different story. This new story was: "The abuse I dealt with wasn't about me, and in fact it had nothing to do with me. Instead, it was just an outpouring of someone else's pain."

This story–-that XYZ painful thing that happened to you isn't actually about you, and doesn't say a single thing about your own worth—is a pretty common story told by people trained to deal with survivors of intense trauma. Winship (who was a police officer before he got started in counterterrorism) describes what he would tell the victim of a sex crime:

"So the very first thing for a good police officer, when you come on a scene like that, the very first thing you say to the victim is 'This is not your fault.' 'This is not your fault. This doesn't even really involve you. This person's poison [was] being poured out in you, but it's not because of you.' […] So you start trying to battle that lie right away. Because the person will say, well, I shouldn't have been out at night. Well, I shouldn't have walked down here. Well, I shouldn't have worn this…they start doing that, and they're now accepting the lie that they did something wrong, that it's their fault."

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey writes that "It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place." I think part of what that means is this: X happens to us, and based on X we start telling ourselves a story: "I deserved X because I'm a bad person" or "X shows that I'm unworthy of love." Those stories are what induce (among other things) feelings of shame, and it's the induced feelings that really hurt.

But these stories are not the facts of the case themselves; they are simply one possible interpretation. And we can change that interpretation. We can tell ourselves other stories about X event that don't lead us into feelings of shame.

But this is only half the battle.

In the book of Luke, Jesus offers the following parable:

“When an evil spirit leaves a person, it goes into the desert, searching for rest. But when it finds none, it says, ‘I will return to the person I came from.’ So it returns and finds that its former home is all swept and in order. Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there. And so that person is worse off than before.” (Luke 11:24-26, NLT).

Here's one lesson I take from Jesus' parable. When I change the story of my abuse from "I must have deserved to get abused" to "The abuse I dealt with wasn't about me, and in fact. it had nothing to do with me. Instead, it was just an outpouring of someone else's pain," that can tell me what I'm not. I'm not defective and deserving of abuse. But the new story can't tell me who I am.

It's as though there was an evil spirit in my house, whispering to me that I deserved all the pain of my past. Telling myself this new story empties the house. It sweeps the house and puts it in order.

But the new story still doesn't tell me anything about who I am, and I need to know who I am if I'm going to protect my house from the demon's return. If I don't have a strong story of who I am, then the shame will just find its way back into my psyche.

So the second requirement, in order to let go of my feelings of shame, is to tell a more positive story about myself.

How can I do this? The depolarization space cannot subscribe to one religion any more than it can subscribe to one political ideology, so I welcome my non-Christian friends to tell me how they've handled this problem. But the only way that I've found to tell myself a more positive story that sticks is through my relationship with God.

When I ask God to tell me who I am, I hear that I am His cherished son. I hear that, as theologian Donna Winship (Jamie's wife) tells her students, I am made holy and worthy and righteous and pure in God's image (part of the daily affirmation prayer that Donna gives her students reads "Thank You [God] that when You look upon me, You only see righteousness, worthiness, holiness, and purity because that is how you created me").

When I tell myself this new story—not just intellectually, but when I really let it marinate in my heart—I find that it fortifies my mental house against the evil spirits in Jesus' parable. It changes how I see myself on a bone-deep level.

And when the story I tell about myself changes, the shame goes away. When the shame goes away, I become less reactive and thin-skinned. I become more grounded in my True Identity, and less likely to try and build my identity on the shaky foundation of my political beliefs.

By inviting us into a new and more accurate view of ourselves and of the world, God can heal our shame. The same is true of our fear and our guilt.

And when we become free from fear, guilt, and shame, we can become vectors of peace for those around us. The folks I know who have done this work deeply find that God's peace spills out of them and heals conflict around them. If Winship is right that "The only reason we have external conflict in the world is because people are living with internal conflict," then it stands to reason that the best way to heal our external conflict is to attend to our internal conflict.

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