A Deep Well of Goodwill: Political Conversation with Karin Tamerius

Posted on by suki
The Babblery
The Babblery
A Deep Well of Goodwill: Political Conversation with Karin Tamerius
Loading
/

How do you talk to people you don’t agree with so that you can continue the conversation? Karin Tamerius was passionate about politics as a young person, but she also noticed that her arguments with family didn’t go anywhere. After a stint working for a political action committee, she made a radical decision. Without any training in science, not even basic biology, she set her sights on medical school.

The Babblery explores the way women’s lives often take unexpected turns, and Karin describes this turn as one that even took her by surprise. While in medical school as a young mom, she did her residency in psychiatry, fully expecting that she’d work for more equity for people with mental illness in the criminal justice system.

But serious illness waylaid her in that goal, and when she came out on the other side of treatment and an unplanned time as a stay-at-home mom, she was faced with the ascendence of the MAGA movement. Her organization, Smart Politics, was founded to promote the conversational method that Karin developed, combining her political degree and career, her psychiatry degree and experience, and her deep concern about the way her own family had fractured and divided over politics.

In this episode, we explore Karin’s life experiences and how they helped her form a unique drive to craft a way for political adversaries to speak to each other.

“When we shut down communication, we shut down the most important avenue for people to rethink their beliefs,” Karin explains. “People need space to rebuild their belief systems. They’re not going to do it in isolation—they do it in relationship to others. So the way we can make a difference is to begin by creating those safe spaces where things can be shared.”

[Click for transcript]

For more information:

Credits:

“Failed Rendez-vous” by Alena Smirnova courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

“The Most” by Maya Solov​é​y courtesy of the artist.

Please leave feedback!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

A Deep Well of Goodwill: Political Conversation with Karin Tamerius

Segment 1: From passion to disillusionment
—

[00:00:37] Suki Wessling: I’m your host, Suki Wessling. Sometimes I think that Americans need to apologize to young people who have only known our current political climate. Pundits rightly point out that America has had deep divisions since its founding, but we’re living through something different. In the past, there were many times and places where having different party loyalties didn’t mean you couldn’t work together, [00:01:00] drink together, even start families together.

Today, finding out that someone supports the opposite party is grounds for, well, getting out of the hot tub. That happened to me when I was making this episode. I was having a fruitful dialogue with someone I vaguely know at my health club when I made a comment that made it clear which party I blamed for the issue we were discussing.

This person literally stood up, climbed out and left without a word. Oops.

[00:01:31] Karin Tamerius: Hi, I’m Karin Tamarius. I am the founder of SmartPolitics. That’s a progressive organization that teaches people how to have more persuasive conversations with people they disagree with.

[00:01:46] Suki Wessling: Obviously I failed my first test since doing this interview. But I hope that hearing Karin’s story, which spans the recent political transformation of this country will give us some food for thought and skills so that we can [00:02:00] have some more successful hot tub conversations.

We’ll trace Karin’s path from politics to becoming a medical doctor and then melding the two together. But first let’s hear her explain what smart politics is all about.

[00:02:26] Karin Tamerius: Most of what I do is teach people when they are interested in learning new skills. People come to me when they’re having trouble in their families, for example, and they find that political conversation, political differences are driving them apart. So a lot of families in our current polarized environment have really suffered.

And I think for a long time there were people [00:03:00] who, who thought, well, that’s just the way it is. And I have to live with that. And now there is some reconsideration that’s happening. People are starting to realize, oh, you know, does it, does it, Does this really have to be the end? Um, you know, is there a way to actually have my beliefs and simultaneously stay connected to the people I love who see the world differently?

So a lot of what I do is working with those people and showing them you don’t have to choose between the people you love and, and your beliefs, you’re not compromising what you stand for, uh, by choosing to, to love a Republican. And there are even things that you can do to leverage that relationship to, uh, be more persuasive in your [00:04:00] conversations with them.

[00:04:01] Suki Wessling: As someone whose father once accused her of being on her political high horse, I’m pretty familiar with how not to discuss politics. But like many in this country, including Karin before 2016, I had no idea that there was any other way. So the first thing I wanted to know about Karin is how she got from there to here.

[00:04:21] Karin Tamerius: I grew up in a family where political communication tended to be very, uh, argumentative. We were, even though we were all coming from essentially the same place, our M. O. was to fight. Even, uh, you know, fight over even the tiniest detail. Like we saw that as the way you resolve things.

And I was trained as a debater. You know, I was, I was a competitive debater in high school. So to me, um, it was hurling, [00:05:00] uh, Facts and figures at people and trying to defeat them was, was how I approached things. and that all started to change when I got to, uh, after Trump was elected, actually, um, I, I had kind of a moment of, wow, you know, it seems like the way I’ve been approaching this isn’t making a difference.

And it’s not like I’m changing anyone’s mind with all of my arguing and stomping of my feet and righteous indignation. And it seems like we have a lot at stake. So maybe I should figure out what actually does change minds. And, and the thing that, that actually, uh, interestingly, I discovered kind of worked was as part of this process of [00:06:00] discovery, I decided I really need to talk with the Trump supporter and find out what is driving the support. So I reached out to a family member on Facebook because at the time I lived in Berkeley and there weren’t any Republicans. So, so my best option was, was to reach out to a family member on Facebook and I started a conversation. And for the first time, I wasn’t telling him what to believe or condemning him m for his views.

I was actually just being like, Hey, what’s this all about? Uh, can you explain this to me? I don’t understand. And what came out of that, the amazing thing I discovered was that once I shifted my orientation from telling him to think and [00:07:00] criticizing his beliefs to just understanding where he was coming from, he actually started changing his views on his own.

And, and that was a big moment of revelation for me. And that was when I, it, it kind of dawned on me that, Oh, what, what I’m looking at here is I’m interacting with him the same way I interact with my psychotherapy patients. And just like psychotherapy helps people change without telling them what to do or making them feel bad about themselves, this is the same process that works in politics.

And it was after that that I founded Smart Politics and it’s, it’s why I’ve been doing this ever since.

[00:07:57] Suki Wessling: And that sounds amazing, but how does [00:08:00] someone build such a particular skill, which is made up of so many different parts? Karin says to her early political self was a character we all recognize, the passionate partisan who got into yelling matches with people she otherwise loved.

[00:08:13] Karin Tamerius: My family, uh, saw politics as kind of a do or die sort of thing. They were very, everybody, um, who cared about politics was incredibly invested. and so became super impassioned And so it, that fed into it. But there were, I think there were a lot of things where there was fighting, not just around politics

But the other thing I’ll add is that it was also partly who I was. Like, I have two siblings, who didn’t get into fights the way I did. and so it [00:09:00] was mostly me fighting with my parents and my siblings were not particularly interested in politics the way I was and were more willing to just go with the flow than I was.

Like I, I, I was much more inclined to push back and have strong opinions and voice them. So yeah, I think, I think it was a mix of who I was and, and who my family was.

[00:09:30] Suki Wessling: So you were clearly, really deeply interested in politics. And so when you went off to college, that’s what you chose to study.

[00:09:38] Karin Tamerius: Yeah. I think I knew I was going to study political science when I was in middle school. I think I wrote an essay about that.

 

[00:09:54] Suki Wessling: You’re listening to the Babblery, and we’re speaking with the founder of Smart Politics, Karin [00:10:00] Tamerius. One of the things I love about exploring women’s lives is the unexpected paths that many of us take. Karin has an M. D., but she started out studying political theory, so how did she get from there to here?

[00:10:15] Karin Tamerius: As an undergrad, I wasn’t interested in medicine. If you had asked me whether I had any interest in going into medicine when I was an undergraduate, I would have laughed.

[00:10:26] Suki Wessling: Interesting. So how did that happen?

[00:10:29] Karin Tamerius: You know, it’s hard to sort that one out completely. The clearest story I can tell has to do with being in graduate school, studying political science there. I was working on a PhD in political science at the time. And I was focused on political psychology. So I was learning a lot of psychology during this period, not [00:11:00] just political science. And the more I learned about psychology, the more I really started to get interested in the brain and, uh, and that led me to an interest in biology and, uh, and that kind of opened the door for me to a world that I hadn’t really been thinking about before at all. And so suddenly, I was just very fascinated and doing a lot of independent reading.

The other thing that happened during this period was, was that, um, I was getting frustrated with graduate school. I really liked, uh, learning about politics and political science, but I didn’t like the academic lifestyle necessarily. I was kind of looking ahead and [00:12:00] seeing, you know, I’m going to be spending my life in in an office doing, you know, experiments, and writing papers that nobody but other political scientists read.

And I had the sense that I wasn’t going to be able to make much of a difference in the world for the better. And so that also kind of pushed me in the direction of medicine. And then another thing that happened at that point was I, I thought, okay, I’m going to take some time off from my graduate study.

I’m going to go to Washington DC and see if doing like some hands on political work will actually be more fulfilling for , for me, like maybe I’ll feel like, oh, I’m making a change in the world. Instead, how I felt from that was, [00:13:00] Oh, this is incredibly, incredibly anti intellectual and cynical. I am not being fulfilled by this either.

So I, I got out of there too. And, and it was at that point that I was like, I didn’t want to go back to grad school. Um, wasn’t satisfied with the practical political applications and, and so I, I decided medicine with a plan specifically to, to focus in psychiatry was, was where I was headed. Um, I did think at that point that I would probably end up in forensic psychiatry, which kind of blends you know, a lot of political knowledge, legal knowledge with, uh, medicine. That didn’t happen.

[00:13:51] Suki Wessling: So just briefly, when you were in Washington, were you working, for a politician or for a, what were, what were you [00:14:00] doing?

[00:14:00] Karin Tamerius: I was working for a political action committee,

[00:14:04] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

[00:14:05] Karin Tamerius: was, uh, working to elect women to, to public office. Um,

[00:14:11] Suki Wessling: Which sounds like a, uh, uh, not at all a cynical, um, sort of thing. The, the goal sounds lovely, but what, what did you find? Because it’s interesting that you’ve ended up In a career where you’re teaching people to engage with the other side, and you started in a career where the whole point was not to engage with the other side, in a sense, to push our side.

Right?

[00:14:34] Karin Tamerius: Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. It’s hard for me to, to remember, like, the specifics of that period other than a sense of, You know, being dissatisfied. Um, I, I really think it had a lot to do with just,

I wanted [00:15:00] to think about and talk about ideas to some extent, I wanted a lot more intellectual curiosity and, and people just didn’t have it. And I, I felt like this just, these aren’t my people in some way.

[00:15:16] Suki Wessling: That’s interesting. So, in the meantime, you also started a family. And.

[00:15:23] Karin Tamerius: Yeah.

[00:15:24] Suki Wessling: I’m assuming you didn’t have all the biology and everything you needed as an undergrad. So, so talk us through these years when, when you were now getting ready for something completely different.

How, how did you go from the budding intellectual, I’m going off to have a PhD in political science to make that transition?

[00:15:47] Karin Tamerius: Yeah, the first thing was I had to get all of those prerequisites, um, for medical school. And, and to be, to give you an idea, I had none of them. I, I, I, I had [00:16:00] not taken biology. I had not taken chemistry. I had not taken physics. So I think of that as my turning the Titanic period. Like, like I was like full steam ahead in one direction and now we’re just gonna turn this giant ship in and go entirely new way.

And so it took a while, it took like three years and during that period, I was very aware of, um, wow, I’m getting older. Like, my biological clock is ticking, like, and, in the middle of that, my husband and I started dating and then we got married and kind of, as soon as, as we got married, it was like, I had to make a choice.

Like, are we going to have kids now while I’m still getting ready for medical school? Or are we going to [00:17:00] hold off? And for that, I remember very clearly. Like sitting down and thinking to myself, okay, imagine I’m on my deathbed and I’ve either gone to medical school successfully and become a doctor and I have no children, or I have children, but having children got in the way of going to medical school in some way and I just couldn’t pull it off. And which would, um, Which outcome would I prefer? And ultimately I, I felt like I’ve got to have the kids. Like if, if like, I just was like, I would feel unfulfilled somehow in my life. So we decided to go ahead and start having kids. It was just like, we were just like taking the leap.

[00:17:53] Suki Wessling: Mm hmm.

[00:17:54] Karin Tamerius: At some level, you know, people around us were like, this is crazy. Like, how can you [00:18:00] go to medical school and have kids at the same time? But it felt like the right thing to us.

[00:18:08] Suki Wessling: And that’s something that’s, you know, it’s a constant in women’s lives, except for women who just simply know that they don’t want, want to have kids, so that leaves the rest of us to negotiate that question of how having children will affect not only our, you know, our relationship with a spouse, if we have one, our education, our future employment. So when you looked at that, that, you know, going to med school with kids, did you feel like, like you knew that that could, interrupt your plans and, but you were okay with it?

[00:18:50] Karin Tamerius: Yeah, I knew that it would definitely make it harder. I knew there was a chance it just was gonna derail everything [00:19:00] completely. But, at the same time, I felt like I had a pretty good shot.

[00:19:05] Suki Wessling: Mm hmm.

[00:19:06] Karin Tamerius: I, I thought, it was this, very plausible that I can pull this off.

[00:19:13] Suki Wessling: When we come back:

[00:19:21] Karin Tamerius: I didn’t actually find it that hard to step back from work. I know a lot of people, they get, they get a diagnosis and they want to keep working. And I was like, I was tired by then anyway.

Segment 2: A view from both sides
—

[00:20:00]

[00:20:28] Suki Wessling: I’m your host, Suki Wessling. Of the many things I think would be literally impossible for me to have done, going to med school with two children in diapers is very high on the list. But smart politics founder Karin Tamerius, having decided that her future was not working in the political realm, changed her focus from politics to medicine.

In these years, she had no idea how her life would be changed, first by medical school and her residency, then by serious illness, and then again by the ascendance of Donald Trump to the White [00:21:00] House.

In the beginning, she was literally just trying to get by with a little help from friends and family.

 

[00:21:14] Karin Tamerius: I had just given birth to my second, so he was three months old when I started medical school, and my other son was almost two.

[00:21:26] Suki Wessling: How did you do that?

[00:21:29] Karin Tamerius: Uh, with a lot of help, honestly, honestly, uh, that was really important. We hired my husband’s youngest sister to come stay with us, and she had just graduated from college, didn’t know what she wanted to do, so for her it was an opportunity to come live in San Francisco for a while, and, uh, you know, we knew she would be great with the kids.

That was fabulous. Kind of [00:22:00] my thought about all of this was that we needed, a safety net built into our lives to make this work, that it couldn’t just be me and my husband. Because he was an attorney who was early in his career. So, you know, if the partner said do this, he had to do it, and that often meant traveling around the world, and if he was going to trial, he was out of pocket.

But, the other thing that, that is really important to mention is that we were making enough money to pull this off. And that was always in the background. I wasn’t making money, but my husband was making enough money to always be able to, have someone available for the kids, someone living in with us.

So eventually, my sister in law, you know, moved on. She had other things to do [00:23:00] and we brought in an au pair who, who lived with us. And we did actually we went through a variety of configurations based on a number of different factors, but there were points where my parents like moved in, like when my youngest child was born while I was in medical school. So then we had three kids in diapers and it like, and my sister lived with us at one point.

And so it, it, there was a, it was a team effort.

[00:23:32] Suki Wessling: So when you went to medical school, you were significantly different from your fellow students. And how did that affect, do you think, how you saw your education and what you got from your education?

[00:23:47] Karin Tamerius: By that point, I saw my education more as a job than I did as like this fully, was as my life, I guess. I, I, had a [00:24:00] certain distance from it that people who have gone straight from college into medical school I don’t think have. So it just kind of consumes them. Like every aspect of their life is medical school. For me, because I had kids, I was like, okay, to the best of my ability, I’m going to make going to medical school, a nine to five job. you know, I’m going to go to my classes, I’m going to study, but I’m going to try to be available for my kids, at the end of the day, you know, so I can still, um, give them what they need. And, that definitely was, was a, a different experience. I, I think I wasn’t as good of a student because of that, but I, in some ways was more well-rounded maybe because of that. Yeah.

[00:24:59] Suki Wessling: [00:25:00] Yeah. So you at that point had somewhat of a plan, right? You wanted to put psychiatry together with what you had already done in political science. Can you explain what what your goal was then?

[00:25:14] Karin Tamerius: it certainly wasn’t a, uh, neat, nestling of the, of the two paths, but, I, I was very interested in the way, people with mental illness were basically, um, abandoned and, and, and abused in many ways by the criminal justice system. and so I really wanted to be in a position to help individuals who are mentally ill, get fairer treatment in the criminal justice system.

[00:25:51] Suki Wessling: Mm hmm.

[00:25:52] Karin Tamerius: You know, that probably would be working with, you know, defense teams around doing, psychiatric [00:26:00] evaluations, testifying about mental status, and hopefully, getting people who have been convicted of crimes lighter sentences, and more opportunities for rehabilitation, and maybe even avoiding any penalties at all because of a recognition that actually this person is, is sick, not, bad.

[00:26:26] Suki Wessling: M-hmm. Yeah, there’s always been this moral component to how our culture views mental illness as, as this, lack of willpower or lack of self discipline or all sorts of other things that people tie up into what they see from the outside when they’re dealing with someone who’s mentally ill.

Our justice system clearly reflects that, this idea that if we just punish them hard enough, maybe we’ll fix it.

[00:26:59] Karin Tamerius: You know, people [00:27:00] talk about the insanity defense as if it’s, you know, the general public seems to think that’s a viable option, but actually the way it’s been enacted in the United States, it’s almost impossible to, to use the insanity defense effectively, which always struck me as incredibly problematic.

[00:27:22] Suki Wessling: Why is it so hard to use?

[00:27:25] Karin Tamerius: Because the standards have to do with, whether or not you, you knew something was, was wrong rather than your ability to conform your behavior to your, to a moral recognition of right and wrong. Um, so a lot of times someone can know something is, is, is wrong, but have a compulsion to do it that is entirely beyond their control.

They can be psychotic and, uh, believe that there are [00:28:00] reasons to do it that supersede, you know, conventional morality. Um, and, and, we are not in a position under our current system to really take those things fully into account.

[00:28:15] Suki Wessling: So life then threw you a big curve ball. Could you talk a little bit about how you got the cancer diagnosis and, and when that was and how you dealt with it?

[00:28:31] Karin Tamerius: Yeah. Uh, so fast forward a few years, I, I graduated from medical school. I, did my, my residency. I, was in my fourth year of residency, and early in the year, uh, I was, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The diagnosis came about the way it does for a lot of women. You know, I noticed a [00:29:00] change in a breast and, and I was like, huh, that’s concerning. Uh, I should go get it checked out. And, um, Sure enough, uh, you know, I found out not only did I have one tumor, but I had two, one in each breast. And, and they were both quite, quite large.

So my oncologist was very You know, straightforward. Look, we’ve got to move on this. We’ve got to move on it fast. And, we’ve got to do chemo. We’ve got to do, surgery and, uh, we may even have to do radiation. So I, I ended up having all the works, the whole, the whole shebang.

When I, when I first found out about it, you know, I, I was my thinking was all about my kids. Like, I was not [00:30:00] thinking about myself at all. It was just like, oh no, how, uh, if I’m not there for the kids, what happens? And, um, I think one of the first things I did was I went and got the kids a dog. I was like, they’re gonna need a dog if I’m not here, you know?

I don’t know what to say. It was, it was totally the last thing I needed. But, um, there were, you know, I just needed, uh, I kept looking for reassurance that the kids were going to be okay if, if I wasn’t there.

[00:30:41] Suki Wessling: We’re speaking with political psychiatrist Karin Tamarius, who was driven to forge an idiosyncratic path melding politics with medicine. She thought she had a path laid out, but her unexpected experience being a stay at home mom during and after her illness was instrumental in what came next.

[00:30:59] Karin Tamerius: [00:31:00] I didn’t actually find it that hard to step back from work. I know a lot of people, they get, they get a diagnosis and they want to keep working.

And I was like, I was tired by then anyway. So to me it was like, okay, I, I can, is a break sounds all right. It took, I don’t know, about a year, year and a half to get through all the treatments. And when I came out on the other side, I, I didn’t have a strong drive to go back to my training program.

There was this, uh, this feeling of exhaustion on the, on the one hand, I actually was enjoying spending more time with my family. I was fearful that the cancer was going to come back. Yeah, we’d done everything we [00:32:00] could, but you know, until you’re five years out, who knows? And so eventually I made a decision not to go back to my program.

And it was really hard. I went around in circles about that for a long time because it felt like this was something I’d been working for for so long and I was so close, but it just didn’t feel right to go back. So, at that point I really moved to being a stay at home mom. And that was lovely, which was really surprising to me because my whole life I’d kind of assumed that I would never be the kind of person who would enjoy being a stay at home mom and yet here I was just kind of loving the time with my kids.

[00:32:54] Suki Wessling: So what did you think that you wouldn’t like about it? And what do you think made you feel that it was [00:33:00] fulfilling to be a stay at home mom?

[00:33:02] Karin Tamerius: It’s hard for me to remember in retrospect, but I think I thought I would be bored with the day to day tasks of, you know, cleaning house, cooking, driving the kids around, the kind of redundancy of it. I think, I thought would just be unfulfilling. And, and yet I had kind of the opposite experience, which was during that time, it was kind of comforting.

I enjoyed talking with my children and I, I just enjoyed their presence. like having them nearby was, it was, I guess in a way, comforting too.

[00:33:46] Suki Wessling: What do you think that mothering taught you that you use in your career now?

[00:33:53] Karin Tamerius: I use a lot of what I’ve learned as a mother in my work. and I [00:34:00] think a lot of it comes down to distinguishing behavior from the person, knowing like people behave all kinds of ways and it isn’t a reflection of, of who they are. So, acting out is a very common thing in children and in adults when it comes to politics.

And, uh, when a child acts out, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad kid, right? They, they are just as good and worthy of love. And honestly, the same comes down to adults when it comes to politics. They act out and call each other names and say horrible things to one another and sometimes propose horrible policies, uh, but you know, ultimately when it comes [00:35:00] down to it, we’re just human beings and we’re all pretty decent.

I guess the other thing is understanding what it takes to set boundaries. Like setting boundaries for children really isn’t that different from setting boundaries with adults. We, we understand kind of intuitively that we need to do it for children. You know, no, that isn’t okay. You know, you can do this and you can do that, but you can’t hit your brother.

And, a lot of times it’s the same with adults, you know, if I get into a conversation with someone and they start hurling insults and impugning my motives, you know, I set boundaries. I say, Hey, I really want to have this conversation with you, but I can’t do it if you’re attacking me, you know, calling me [00:36:00] names and questioning my motives.

But if you’re willing to stay within those guard, you know, guardrails, I’m, let’s, let’s do this. And I promise I’ll do the same for you. That, that isn’t that different from what we do with kids.

[00:36:18] Suki Wessling: But it’s, it’s interesting because I think most people would think that when we set boundaries with children, we’re teaching them. And that there’s an inherent, I don’t know if the right word is power relationship, but there’s an inherent imbalance in the relationship. You are the adult, you are the one in charge, and you are the one who knows and you’re teaching them: if you do this, then your friends won’t want to play with you. If you do that, then it makes our household not run the way we would want to. But once you apply those to adults, how do you keep from being condescending? Or I think that’s the fear that most people would have, or certainly the fear that I’d have, that if I’m [00:37:00] having a conversation with someone that I deeply disagree with, that if I tried to set those boundaries, it would sound like I’m, you know, wagging my finger at them. Now, now, little child!

[00:37:11] Karin Tamerius: Yeah, so, so what you’re getting at there is the, the power imbalance, right? With, with kids, there is a power imbalance and part of our power, to influence them comes from the fact that we’re the authority figure. When we’re talking with someone about politics, we’re talking to a peer. we’re not coming at them from a place of authority. And in any of my conversations, establishing that this is a peer to peer relationship rather than an authority to underling relationship is really important. So part of how that happens is tone of voice, word choice, mannerisms. There are a [00:38:00] lot of things you can do to signal that you’re both equal in this.

So if I’m having a conversation with someone, I try really hard initially to make that clear, you know, and simply signaling that you want to listen to what they have to say, really is a sign. Like, I don’t think I’m, I’m better than you. I recognize I could be wrong about this. And really when I set boundaries and ask them to change their behavior, it’s a request. It’s not a you must change your behavior. And it’s also, expressed as a need. So, this is what I need from you in order to be in this conversation, rather than, you’re misbehaving in this conversation, and you need to change, right? And those are subtly different [00:39:00] things, but they make all the difference.

[00:39:07] Suki Wessling: When we return, Karin talks about her work with SmartPolitics and her goal in trying to get people to talk to each other again.

 

Part 3: How to talk to each other
—

[00:39:54] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling. As I said at the top of the hour, I don’t feel like I’m so great [00:40:00] at talking to people who fundamentally disagree with me. Let’s face it, like many people in the U. S. today, I live in a bubble. Even my parents, once a great source of argument, are united with their children against the ugly politics of the right. But I know that it’s important for citizens of a country to talk to each other, to resist demonizing each other, because people don’t communicate when they feel they’re under threat. My guest in this episode, political psychiatrist Karin Tamerius, has spoken about her training, her search to meld her divergent interests into a career, her years of illness and parenting, and how all of that led to an understanding of how to get people to talk to each other and actually listen.

In this last segment of our episode, Karin talks about the nuts and bolts of communication. She admits that you probably aren’t going to stuff a MAGA adherent into one end of a conversation and squeeze them out on the other side, a flaming liberal. And I want to pause right here and point out that although Karin is a progressive talking to conservatives, her techniques go both ways.

All of us can, by [00:41:00] entering conversations thoughtfully, establish common ground. You and a person you might have thought of as an adversary might find that you have more in common than you thought, and you might exit the conversation with more understanding, less vitriol, and possibly a chance at small but important shifts in how both of you see political choices.

[00:41:21] Karin Tamerius: I teach workshops, uh, and I get invited by other organizations to teach workshops for, for their people. The workshops tend to be, you know, how to talk with your friends and family about Donald Trump, for example, or how to talk with your friends and family about abortion, how to talk with your friends and family about democracy and do it in a way that, that is more effective.

[00:41:53] Suki Wessling: Let’s talk about organizations. Because that’s actually a really interesting point that a lot of organizations will have an [00:42:00] organizational culture, of course, that we’re right, they’re wrong,

[00:42:04] Karin Tamerius: Yeah.

[00:42:05] Suki Wessling: that’s sort of what the point of an organization is. We have this idea, we’re right, they’re wrong, we need to fix them. Uh, say you are working with a group of people who are trying to work in the arena of abortion rights.

[00:42:21] Karin Tamerius: Mm hmm.

[00:42:22] Suki Wessling: And they know they’re right, because when you look at any numbers based way of looking at whether we should have a ban on abortion or not, more people suffer if there’s a ban on abortion.

This is just, you know, the numbers are there, but the numbers don’t work when you talk to people who, are on the other side. So how do you, how would you take someone who’s just like, I’m going to go in and I’m going to tell them, look, you can see that the maternal death rate in places that have, no abortion rights is [00:43:00] higher and that will convince them and it’s not going to.

So what do you say to them?

[00:43:05] Karin Tamerius: The first thing that, that has to be accomplished is, is a recognition of what you’re describing, the, the fact that, you know, using facts and figures, using reason and argumentation and debate isn’t gonna change minds. And that’s a really hard thing for people to come to terms with. Uh, it, it, it takes a lot.

But once they really do come to terms with it, then the next challenge is usually, there are some people who still want to stick with that method because they just think it, it should be the right way. You know, there’s a certain righteous indignation and they want to go to people they disagree with and just tell them how it is and tell them the facts.

And because that’s the way it is. And where [00:44:00] I try to appeal to them is saying, you know, I, I get that that feels good when, when you tell someone that, um, but it’s not effective. And we need to make a choice between doing what’s effective, something that can actually change minds, and doing something that feels emotionally rewarding.

And, that’s, that’s challenging for people. And a lot of times they go back and forth, but once they, they make that choice, like, yeah, I want to do what works, then we can get down to the brass tacks of like, how to actually go about having conversations that change minds. And, and then that really means opening the door to, being much [00:45:00] more humble in the way we talk with people. Not going in there and insisting that we have all the answers. Not insisting it’s our way or the highway. And that takes work.

[00:45:15] Suki Wessling: It does. So you started doing this as a reaction to Trump winning in 2016, correct?

[00:45:26] Karin Tamerius: Yeah.

[00:45:26] Suki Wessling: So he’s run twice since then. How did you feel about the MAGA movement after, the election of 2020? Where, where were you as far as your work and feeling like, did you feel like there was movement toward people understanding, toward a shift in, the way people were viewing that movement?

[00:45:50] Karin Tamerius: Well, like a lot of people, I was relieved when Trump lost the 2020 election. Um, that [00:46:00] quickly morphed to concern that, that progressives were a little too relieved. I didn’t see it as the fight being over. I, I saw it as, okay, we, we dodged that bullet, uh, now we’ve gotta, like, prepare for the next controversy, or the next challenge.

What really changed things was, I think, January 6th and the insurrection. That was the first time I really felt like Democrats and progressives more generally started to be open to conversations with people on the right. Which, which is really interesting. Like up to that point, the notion that, well, we can just shut them down, cut them out of our lives and not talk to them, seemed to be the [00:47:00] prevailing sentiment among progressive organizations.

And after January 6th, they started to be like, huh. Maybe we need to rethink that, that strategy.

I think the question always comes down to why are Republicans willing to vote for this guy? Why are so many Americans willing to vote for a convicted felon? Felon. Uh, somebody who’s done so many horrible things that, you know, it’s kind of beyond counting at this point, right?

A pathological liar, a malignant narcissist. The, the answer to that fundamentally comes down to partisanship and, and more significantly negative partisanship. I always find it weird that we don’t talk about that more because, [00:48:00] partisanship is the most important force in American politics.

It’s more important than ideology. It’s more important than race. It’s more important than sexual orientation. It’s more important than religion. It’s more important than sex. It’s more important than gender. I mean, it, it is where the action is. If you know which party someone aligns themselves with, or at least which party they hate, then you know almost certainly how they’re going to vote. And what the Trump phenomenon demonstrates is that even having an utterly reprehensible figure at the top of the ticket doesn’t change that fundamental calculation. The conversations I’m always encouraging people to have aren’t so much about the people at the top of the ticket. [00:49:00] I’m not, you know, I’m not really about having conversations about Trump or about Kamala Harris.

My interest is having conversations about what matters to you. What do you want to see happen in politics? To me, most of the influence that our conversations have actually comes through what I think of as political transference. I take the transference word obviously from psychiatry and psychotherapy.

And in this understanding, we, as the people having conversations with, for example, a Republican become their transference object, right? So I form a relationship with a Republican when I talk with them. If it goes well, it’s a positive relationship. They feel more positively [00:50:00] toward me.

[00:50:00] Suki Wessling: They trust me more. They start to see our political ideas as being more aligned. And then when they think, oh, well, that person is a Democrat, they start to see other Democrats, have more of a positive feeling toward Democrats, the way they have toward me. To me, that’s the most important way these conversations work. Part of your approach is to match like with like. You encourage people to approach people who are more similar than different. So you’re not telling someone who’s a member of a marginalized group to have these conversations with a wealthy white man. You are saying if you’re a woman and you have a female family member that that would be the person to approach. So it sounds like what you’re, [00:51:00] you’re saying is that if we start from what we have in common and then move outward, that it’s going to be more successful. So if that’s the case, starting from now, which is so different from, you know, just thinking about how angry we teenagers and young adults were about Reagan.

But Reagan, you know, the most scandalous thing about Reagan was that he was divorced, you know?

[00:51:30] Karin Tamerius: I know. It’s so quaint.

[00:51:32] Suki Wessling: Now we have, we have a, twice divorced, guy who, one of whose children was fathered while he was married to another woman. So, you know, we have definitely moved to a whole different time. What do we do about this in our own lives how do we, starting with, with our household first, how do we look outward and say, what can I do in my little small way?

[00:51:59] Karin Tamerius: I think [00:52:00] people really underestimate how much of an impact they can have when they start talking with family and friends, as opposed to, you know, trying to reach out and influence members of Congress. You have so much power at home and we ignore that or actively. run away from it. If we begin just by creating safe spaces for people to express their political views without judgment, right?

Just, just withhold that instant reaction inside ourselves that compels us to say, no, you’re wrong, right? How could you believe that? You know, I can’t believe that you’re saying that or, you know, causes us to say, that is so racist. That is so sexist. Like [00:53:00] all of those responses shut down communication.

And when we shut down communication, we shut down the most important avenue for people to rethink their beliefs. People need space to, to rebuild their belief systems. They’re not going to do it in isolation. They do it in relationship to others. So, the way we can make a difference is to begin by creating those safe spaces where things can be shared.

That’s why it’s important to keep in mind this is peer to peer, right? I’m not saying that black women need to make space for, you know, racist white men. No, right? I’m talking about creating space in situations when you’re mostly dealing with [00:54:00] peers, people of equal power. Once people feel more comfortable, then they’re going to start to open up.

And they will open up pretty quickly with very few questions, you know, general inquiries about, so what do you think about this? You know, what’s your take on that? That gets the ball rolling. So, you can really start to hear where their head is at and also help them clarify what they’re thinking.

There are two other things that I strongly recommend people do in these conversations. One is to verbally reflect back what the other person has said. And so that means, you know, if they tell you they’re a big fan of Trump because he wants to build the border wall, then you say, okay, so you’re a big fan of Trump because he wants to build the border wall.[00:55:00]

That’s important because it lets them know that you really are listening and that you really have heard them. And then the next step is to find something to agree on. And people often get hung up here. They think, how could I ever agree with them about liking Trump building a border wall? There’s nothing to agree on here.

I look at that and I think, actually, you know what, I, I think we do have a problem with our immigration system. I do think our immigration system is broken and something needs to be done about it. I don’t think it’s, uh, serving, immigrants and I don’t think it, it is serving our country well the way it is being run now.

So putting that out there creates a [00:56:00] tremendous well of, of goodwill that allows you then to, to continue to work through to a place where that person, they’re going to trust you more. They’re going to take your ideas more seriously. And, and now

You’re coming at this problem together, rather than, you know, fighting each other to solve the problem.

[00:56:25] Suki Wessling: Karin Tamarius is currently working on a book about her work in political psychiatry and what we can do o to expand that tremendous well of goodwill that Americans should have for each other, despite our differences. Her organization, Smart [00:57:00] Politics, is also pioneering the use of AI to give people a safe way to practice their conversational skills when it comes to politics.

Obviously, though I’m no big user of AI, I think I might need some of that practice. Thanks to Karin for speaking about her life and advocacy. You can learn more at joinsmart. org. Thanks to two wonderful independent women artists for the music, Rendezvous by Elena Smirnova and The Most by Maya Solovey.

Thanks for listening.

​

END
—

[00:58:00] [00:59:00]

 

Close
Powered by