Minibabble: Tapping that Well of Goodwill with Karin Tamerius

Posted on September 30, 2024September 30, 2024 by suki

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The Babblery

Minibabble: Tapping that Well of Goodwill with Karin Tamerius

00:00 / 18:04

How do we talk to people on the other side of the political divide? It used to be commonplace—Americans lived, worked, and went to school with people from a mixture of political backgrounds. But in the MAGA era, our ability even to talk to each other has degraded to the point of broken families and stalled friendships. Political psychiatrist Karin Tamerius unknowingly spent her life preparing for this moment. With a background in political science and an MD in psychiatry, she melded her training into an approach that seeks to help people bridge political divides. In this short piece excerpted from a full-hour episode (“A Deep Well of Goodwill: Political Conversation with Karin Tamerius”), we feature Tamerius’s basic advice on how to start the conversation and hopefully break through the walls that divide us. [Click for transcript]

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[00:00:37] Suki Wessling: This is your host Suki Wessling. Are you a passionate, partisan wondering how you can do better influencing people around you?

[00:00:45] Karin Tamerius: Hi, I’m Karin Tamerius. 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.

[00:00:59] Suki Wessling: [00:01:00] Round about now you might think that talking to people who are voting for the other side is hopeless.

But many of us are now living with fractured families and damaged friendships and Karin’s approach offers new skills in restarting conversations with those we feel we’ve lost.

[00:01:17] Karin Tamerius: 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.

People are starting to realize, oh, you know, does it, does it, Does this really have to be the end? Is there a way to actually have my beliefs and simultaneously stay connected to the people I love who see the world differently?

You don’t have to choose between the people you love and your [00:02:00] beliefs, you’re not compromising what you stand for, by choosing to, to love a Republican. And there are even things that you can do to leverage that relationship to, be more persuasive in your conversations with them.

[00:02:17] Suki Wessling: Karin didn’t start with any of the tools she now uses to have productive political conversations.

[00:02:23] Karin Tamerius: I grew up in a family where political communication tended to be very, uh, argumentative. Even though we were all coming from essentially the same place, our M. O. was to fight. Even, fight over even the tiniest detail. Like we saw that as the way you resolve things.

I was a competitive debater in high school. So to me, Facts and figures at people and trying to defeat them was, was how I approached things. And that all started to [00:03:00] change after Trump was elected, actually, 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. 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 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 [00:04:00] what came out of that, the amazing thing I discovered was that once I shifted my orientation from telling him to think and criticizing his beliefs to just understanding where he was coming from, he actually started changing his views on his own.

[00:04:20] Suki Wessling: So let’s back up a bit from 2016 because Karin didn’t pull her approach out of nowhere. She started, like many of us, a passionate partisan who wanted to work to help her side win. But the more she learned about the psychology of politics, the less she wanted to take part in that partisan world.

She ended up restarting her education from the ground up, going to med school for a degree in psychiatry. Karin at first planned to use her psychiatric career to promote equity for the mentally ill in our criminal justice system, but another unplanned event changed her focus yet again.

[00:04:56] Karin Tamerius: I graduated from medical school. I, was [00:05:00] in my fourth year of residency, and early in the year, uh, I was, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

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.

[00:05:45] Suki Wessling: Karin Tamarius had made the unusual choice to start medical school as the mother of two kids in diapers, and the third had been born before the diagnosis. She had been so driven, it might have seemed obvious that she’d want to go back.

[00:05:58] Karin Tamerius: I know a lot of people, they get, [00:06:00] 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.

[00:06:15] Suki Wessling: Karin became what she’d never wanted to be, a stay at home mom, and to her surprise, she enjoyed it. And to her further surprise, mothering her children may have provided her with the final piece that she needed to put together the career she now has.

[00:06:29] Karin Tamerius: I use a lot of what I’ve learned as a mother in my work. And I think a lot of it comes down to distinguishing behavior from the person. 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 [00:07:00] in adults when it comes to politics.

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, but ultimately when it comes 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 understand kind of intuitively that we need to do it for children. You know, no, that isn’t okay. You know, [00:08:00] 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 names and questioning my motives.

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

[00:08:40] Suki Wessling: Karin admits that there’s a big difference when adults are talking to other adults.

[00:08:45] Karin Tamerius: 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 [00:09:00] 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 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 [00:10:00] 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 things, but they make all the difference.

[00:10:15] Suki Wessling: Perhaps you’re listening to what Karin is saying and you still aren’t convinced. You still want to bombard people with the data that you know is right.

[00:10:25] Karin Tamerius: 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.

There are some people who still want to stick with that method because they just think it, it should be the right way. Where I try to appeal to them is saying, you know, I, I get that that feels good when, when you tell someone that, but it’s not effective. And we need to make a [00:11:00] choice between doing what’s effective, something that can actually change minds, and doing something that feels emotionally rewarding.

[00:11:12] Suki Wessling: Still, even if we concede that facts and figures aren’t the way, many of us balk at meeting people where they are because where they are is simply repugnant to us. Karin points out that we’re forgetting one of the strongest factors in politics.

[00:11:28] Karin Tamerius: I think the question always comes down to why are Republicans willing to vote for this guy? 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, partisanship is the most important force in American politics.

It’s more important than ideology. It’s more important than [00:12:00] 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.

[00:12:25] Suki Wessling: So instead of taking on partisan battles, Karin suggests, bring it back to the relationship you have with that human being on the other side of the conversation.

[00:12:35] Karin Tamerius: 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 [00:13:00] 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 toward me.

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 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. When we shut down communication, we shut down the most important avenue for people to rethink their [00:14:00] beliefs. 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.

[00:14:21] Suki Wessling: Still not feeling like you have a handle on this? Karin recommends two specific conversational techniques to get started.

[00:14:28] Karin Tamerius: 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.

That’s important because it lets them know that you really are listening and that you really have heard them. next step is to find [00:15:00] 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 tremendous well 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 now you’re [00:16:00] coming at this problem together, rather than, you know, fighting each other to solve the problem.

[00:16:07] Suki Wessling: I’m Suki Wessling, and this has been a Minibabble. Check out SmartPolitics at joinsmart. org.

Find the full episode and links to other information on B A B B L E R Y dot com, that’s Babblery dot com.

Thanks to Karin Tamerius for her time and advocacy. Thanks to two independent women artists for the music, Rendezvous by Elena Smirnova from the freemusicarchive. org, and the most by Maya Solovey at mayasolovey. com. That’s M A Y A [00:17:00] S O L O V E Y. com.

Thanks for listening.

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