A friend sent me a reel recently by a therapist talking about division, belonging and who gets included or excluded in certain spaces. I don’t remember his exact wording, and I don’t want to pretend I do, but there was an image of a protest where someone was holding a sign with the word “fascist” on it. I kept thinking about it afterwards, not because I agreed or disagreed with everything in the reel, but because it touched something I’ve been noticing for a while: how quickly disagreement can turn into a judgment about who someone is. One opinion, one badly worded comment, one political position, and suddenly we seem to know the whole person.
I care about inclusion. I care about human rights and about the ways people have historically been excluded or silenced. I’m also aware that I carry privilege and that I have blind spots. I don’t want to go backwards on any of that. What worries me is how afraid people seem to have become of getting something wrong. There can be this feeling that there is a right way to say things, a right response to have, and that you should already understand what you’re talking about before you open your mouth. Some of that makes sense; people have been hurt by ignorance and prejudice. But I wonder what happens when people become afraid to say what they actually think unless they already know it will be received well.
Belonging Has an Unconscious Side
This interests me psychodynamically because belonging is incredibly powerful. We learn very early what keeps us connected to other people and what risks rejection, and that doesn’t disappear because we grow up. Groups can give us safety, identity and community, but groups also have unconscious lives. They develop rules, often without anyone consciously deciding them, about what can be said, what can be questioned and what might threaten our place within them. When a group becomes anxious, difference can start to feel dangerous.
I think about splitting here too. It’s a psychodynamic term for something very human: our tendency to divide complicated things into good and bad, right and wrong, us and them. Ambiguity is uncomfortable, especially when we feel threatened, and we all do this. I do it too. The problem is that people are rarely that simple. Someone can care deeply about social justice and still question parts of how we talk about it. Someone can hold an opinion I strongly disagree with and still be thoughtful, loving, frightened, defensive, generous or confused. Someone can say something insensitive without that one moment telling me everything I need to know about who they are. And yes, people also say genuinely harmful things. Curiosity doesn’t require pretending otherwise.
Shame Changes What We Are Willing to Say
Shame gets involved quickly. If someone believes that saying the wrong thing could get them humiliated, labelled or pushed out of a group, they learn what not to say. They may even learn all the right language without really examining what they think or where it comes from. That concerns me as a therapist because therapy should be one of the places where people can bring in thoughts they are not proud of, contradictions, resentment, confusion, uncomfortable opinions and things they may eventually change their minds about. That doesn’t mean everything gets endorsed. It means we have somewhere to look honestly at what is there.
If a client brings something prejudiced or harmful into therapy, I want to understand what is happening underneath it. There may be fear, shame, anger, something learned in a family, an identification with a group, a personal experience that has become generalized, or something the person has simply never had reason to examine. Understanding where something comes from is not the same as agreeing with it. That distinction matters enormously to me in therapy.
Therapists aren’t outside any of this either. We have our own politics, identities, biases, blind spots and need to belong. We can split too. I sometimes hear people in helping professions talk about entire groups of people with a level of certainty or contempt that makes me uncomfortable. I’m less interested in which group is being talked about than in what happens when we stop seeing the person and start seeing only what we think they represent. Buddhist thought has also influenced how I understand this. We tend to think about attachment to people or things, but we can become very attached to our beliefs, our identities and our need to be right. I certainly can. Compassion does not mean agreeing with everyone, and inclusion does not mean there are no boundaries. I do think people need somewhere they can think honestly. If someone is too ashamed of what they think to actually say it, I’m not sure how they are supposed to become curious about it, question it, or understand themselves any better.
Why is belonging so emotionally powerful?
Belonging is not just a social preference. From an attachment perspective, connection to other people is tied very early to safety, regulation and the fear of being left alone. From a drive and conflict perspective, we also carry competing wishes: to belong, to be accepted, to be free, to express aggression, to protect ourselves and to remain separate. Sometimes those wishes pull against each other. We may want to speak honestly and still fear what honesty could cost us. That tension can make disagreement feel much more personal than it appears on the surface.
Why is it so hard to stay curious when we strongly disagree with someone?
When we feel threatened, ashamed or certain that something important is at stake, it becomes much harder to hold complexity. Strong disagreement can make us feel threatened, angry or defensive, which makes it harder to stay curious about what another person might be thinking or feeling. Psychologically, we may move toward splitting things into right and wrong, good and bad, us and them. In therapy, we sometimes call the ability to wonder about our own inner world and someone else’s mentalization. It means being able to hold in mind that another person has their own history, feelings, fears and reasons for seeing something differently, even when we don’t agree with them. When emotions run high, that capacity can temporarily disappear and people can become much more certain about what the other person thinks, means or represents.
Does understanding someone’s point of view mean agreeing with them?
No. Understanding and agreement are not the same thing. In therapy, curiosity can mean trying to understand where a belief, reaction or opinion comes from without endorsing it. That can include looking at fear, shame, family learning, group identity, past experiences or the need to belong. Sometimes understanding something more deeply is what allows a person to question it rather than defend it.