Blog Post #19

At present in our society there is no shortage of things to get upset over and to feel outrage about. Depending on your point of view, your politics, it can be the president, the Democrats, impeachment, the environment, the war in Syria, the healthcare system, etc. etc. The question we should probably ask is Dennis expressing outrage really work to move things forward. On social media certainly will get you more clicks and if your goal is to sell advertising expressing outrage works. But if you're really interested in changing other people's mind. It probably doesn't. In fact, psychologists who have been studying this believe that expressing outrage over and over again, turning the volume up to 11, eventually results in fatigue and disengagement. If your goal is to really change people's minds about an issue speaking to them in a respectful and measured way tends to work best.

And here's how this relates to resilience. Obviously, we need a lot of it these days to deal with the issues that we are facing. We also need resilience skills to find allies, people who will support us in our way of looking at things. If we are to really connect with people we must communicate in a way that gets people's attention and keeps their attention and motivates them to think critically and to take positive action. To do this we need to manage our strong feelings. Taking them out on someone with a different point of view will only alienate them and push them father into the silo and echo chamber that they may already be in. We need to listen more, especially to the people that hold different points of view and with whom we disagree.

Finding a purpose to do this is easy. If we continue on the course that we are on there will only be more division and talk of Civil War. We need to see the big picture. We should be concerned with winning the war together. We need to prioritize what is important and take action in a way that moves things forward. And if we need to discharge a lot of the feelings that we have in order to do this, we need to do it with someone who is already supporting us and agrees with us.

We need to be flexible and look for ways to bring people together not to create more division. We need to problem solve, not just with people we agree with but with the people that we disagree with. We need to be open to their ideas and see if we can find a way through this. Compromise should not be a dirty word. To take no prisoners, mentally is wrong. It will destroy our democracy and our country.

We are all in this together. Whether we like it or not. The advice that I've just given is for all of us no matter what our point of view or our politics. I assume we all love this country and would like to keep it together and in one piece. As Lincoln said, “A house divided cannot stand.”

Ron Breazeale, PhD