emotionally abusing each other, failing to listen to one another, and exploiting each other’s failings.
The fact that we increasingly can’t hold fruitful conversations with people who aren’t like us – which is the key to finding common ground and thus achieving political, social, and cultural progress – illustrates the depths of our civic crisis. Productive discourse in spite of our disagreements is “the arch stone of democracy” – it’s what holds us together – according to David Blankenhorn, cofounder of Braver Angels, a nonprofit that teaches Americans from different backgrounds how to communicate. “Conversation is the very heart and soul of self-government,” Blankenhorn said. “It always has been. You can’t run a democracy without that.”
In view of the parallels between familial discord and our crisis of polarization, it would seem appropriate to look to family therapy for clues on how to improve our national dialogue. And that’s precisely how Braver Angels got started. Originally known as Better Angels, the nonprofit was founded in the wake of the 2016 US election by a group of politically diverse Americans who were determined to catalyze healthy conversation about the issues that divide us. “Family therapy has been dealing with” polarization for as long as there has been family therapy – just in a different context – said Brookings Institution political scholar Jonathan Rauch, a former member of the Better Angels board. “Typically, when you have a marriage or family that’s having problems, you’re dealing with . . . strong emotional feelings, which are blocking communication, exacerbating stereotypes, [and] causing discursive loops that go in the wrong direction where people escalate.”
Sounds familiar, right? That’s what we see all around us.
Bill Doherty, one of the nation’s leading family therapists and a cofounder of Braver Angels, designed the group’s community workshops to bring together an equal number of Republicans and Democrats – or what he calls “reds” and “blues” – in small-group settings. The participants typically spend several hours immersed in a series of conversations moderated by trained volunteers to learn how to more effectively communicate with people on the other side. “So when they speak, you have to create a structure that makes it unlikely that they will go on the attack and a space that gives them an opportunity to listen to the other,” Doherty said.
That approach comes directly from couples counseling, where the therapist is firmly in control of the conversation from the beginning. “You don’t let them turn to each other and then start processing an argument that they had – because if they could do that on their own well, they wouldn’t be paying you,” Doherty said. “Careful attention is paid to minimizing the likelihood of flare-ups and meltdowns because you have trouble recovering from that.”
While people are allowed to express their views in the Braver Angels workshops, they’re also encouraged to examine the limitations and flaws of their own side. This concept also comes directly from counseling strategy. “In working with couples, the real takeoff point occurs for people getting better when they see that their problems are not just due to their spouse’s bad behavior or rotten personality, but they see themselves as contributors, if you will, to the polarization that has occurred,” Doherty said.
From a practical perspective, Braver Angels places one group of politically like-minded people in a circle to have a conversation with each other. The participants from the opposite side of the aisle are positioned in a circle around the original group and are instructed to listen but not speak, creating the feeling of a fishbowl. The people in the inner circle are then asked to discuss their values and consider why their preferred political policies are good for the country. That gives them a chance to crow about why their side is superior.
“The second question is, ‘What are your reservations or concerns about your own side?’” Doherty said. “There you get people to be self-reflective, to be selfcritical, to recognize that their side doesn’t have it all nailed. And there is this almost visceral softening you can feel in the room. People on the outside have exactly those criticisms. And you’re not coming across as a fanatic.”
Then the groups trade places. This exercise helps members of each group see that people on the other side recognize some of their own flaws and that people on both sides might have something in common. The lesson here? When you display a degree of vulnerability and humility, you can begin to make genuine connections with others.
In another exercise, the groups break off and examine negative perceptions about their respective sides, listing the most common stereotypes about them. “Typically, the reds would make lists of things like, ‘We don’t care about the poor,’ or, ‘We’re a bunch of racists,’ and blues will make lists like, ‘We’re unpatriotic,’ and, ‘We’re all for open borders,’” Rauch said.
Each group is then asked to examine whether there’s a kernel of truth in the other side’s perceptions. “And people say, ‘Well, racists are attracted to our side and some of our leaders are, and it’s disturbing to us,’” Doherty said. It’s only after these sessions, which force the participants to consider each other as human beings, that the groups begin to discuss hot-button issues directly with each other.
Braver Angels has achieved extraordinary results by teaching people how to communicate. By April 2020, the group had nearly 10,000 dues-paying members and 1,240 volunteers, including 630 moderators trained to lead sessions on their own, according to Blankenhorn. Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down in-person gatherings in early 2020, the nonprofit was conducting a total of 15 to 18 sessions per week throughout the United States. When the pandemic hit, Braver Angels temporarily switched to online sessions, holding dynamic conversations on topics ranging from the 2020 election to race relations in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. Membership more than tripled during the year.
The group’s goal is to help people “see the little bit of humanity that you recognize is shared with you in the other person to the degree that you have an inner desire to do good to them, even though you disagree strongly,” Blankenhorn said. “That’s really all we’re trying to do.”
From the beginning, Braver Angels had no interest in the pursuit of political consensus among the participants. “We were not that much interested in having people agree on policy. We were not that much interested in having people adopt a centrist political philosophy. We were not that interested in getting people to modify or change their views of public policy issues. Nor were we particularly interested in having them agree on facts,” Blankenhorn said. “Our point of view was that what one views as a fact depends on questions of social trust, not the facticity of the fact.”
Without reestablishing social trust, we’ve got no hope of getting on the same page. “The diminishment of social trust was the reason that we believe that people couldn’t agree on facts,” Blankenhorn said. “So what we were trying to do was establish social trust, which we believe is a precondition for all these other things.”
Doherty said Americans won’t get on the same page until they recognize that everyone must be part of the solution – just like for couples to be successful in therapy, both people must embrace the role they can play in pursuit of relational reconciliation. “It has to be a we problem, not just a you problem,” said Doherty, who is also a former president of the National Council on Family Relations. “And if we have a problem, then more of us may have some motivation to try to be curious and understand the other side.”
Doherty recalled that after one Braver Angels session, one group member walked away with the transformational realization that he was part of the problem – much like drivers complain about congestion: “This person realized, ‘I am traffic.’”
Yet even if the entire nation entered into the political version of family therapy, we’d still struggle with the purely human magnetism of polarization. It will never go away in full. But that doesn’t mean we
