Reflections from a powerful conversation with Esther Perel, Bill Doherty, Mónica Guzmán and Mary Alice Miller in Washington D.C.
A few weeks ago, I sat in a packed auditorium in Washington, D.C., listening to Esther Perel, Bill Doherty, Mónica Guzmán and Mary Alice Miller explore one of the most pressing and painful issues of the current day: how we stay connected across political and ideological divides.
They spoke with warmth, wit and courage about family estrangements, relational betrayals and the growing impulse to sever ties when our values clash. For many working in psychotherapy, these themes are now entering the room in ways that feel less clinical and more existential. Clients are asking how to stay in relationship with parents, siblings, partners and friends whose worldviews feel not just different but threatening.
And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I found myself thinking about my brother.
He supports Trump. I do not.
There have been moments, not many but sharp and real, when I have felt afraid – not of him but of what our differences might do to our bond. I have worried that a silence might grow between us, or a kind of emotional distancing that feels safer than being honest. I fear that speaking to him about what I think is right or wrong may have disastrous consequences. We are both quite incendiary individuals. I have wondered whether our relationship could survive the weight of the world we are living in.
And yet… I love him.
That is the truth I kept returning to, listening to this extraordinary panel. Love, despite the discomfort. Love, through the disorientation. Love, not as sentimentality but as a resilient tether that can hold tension without snapping.
‘A couple on the brink of divorce’
… is how Bill Doherty, who founded the cross-partisan dialogue organisation Braver Angels, described the left and right in America. “But one that cannot actually get divorced,” he said. “We are stuck with each other.” It was a line that landed with the clarity of a therapist naming a pattern that everyone in the room already knew to be true.
Photo taken at Psychotherapy Networker in Washington DC.
In couples therapy, as many of us know, the work begins not when blame is fully justified, but when both people start to see how they are co-creating the dance. The shift comes when someone says, ‘this is my part’.
Esther reminded us that complex problems do not have simple solutions. We crave certainty and clarity, but real relationships and real democracies ask us to live in paradox: of love and anger, of interdependence and disagreement. She spoke about the rise of cut offs, and said something I will not forget:
‘Cut offs happen when we lose the ability to tolerate complexity. We stop engaging, and we retreat into certainty. But what we lose is not just the relationship, it is also a piece of ourselves.’
Mónica, whose book and podcast explore what it takes to stay curious in dangerously divided times, spoke movingly about her parents’ support for Trump and how long it took her to let go of the need to convince them. She said something that stopped the room: ‘If I were my parents, I might have voted for him too.’
Not agreement. Not approval. But understanding.
Psychotherapists often hold space for people to reflect on the stories behind their convictions, what Bill called ‘the how,’ rather than just the what or why. It’s the story of where a belief came from, the life experience that shaped it and the pain or fear or hope that still lives beneath it. It’s in that space that something begins to soften – not necessarily change, but soften.
We live in a world that rewards outrage
We are told, explicitly and implicitly, that engagement equals endorsement and disconnection equals safety. But there is a cost to this teaching: we forgo conversation, dissolve community, and prevent the ability stay in relationship the presence of difference and complexity – the very skill as therapists you’re helping your clients develop.
When I left the panel that day, I texted my brother – not to debate politics, just to say hi, just to keep the thread intact. I do not want a world where the bridges I burn light my way, but one where bridges are mended, slowly, shakily, imperfectly, with love and the shared hope that we can still meet somewhere in the middle.
