Is politics tearing your family apart? 10 reasons to stay hopeful

Vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz hadn’t spoken to his conservative brother Jeff for eight years until a brief phone call in July during the vetting process. According to their sister, Sandra Dietrich, the split was painful. Several siblings of former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. condemned his campaign for office and recently said former President Donald Trump’s support was a “betrayal” of their family values. The former president was also widely criticized publicly by his estranged niece, Mary Trump.

Sound familiar? While many issues related to the political class may seem unrelatable and otherworldly, the clash between family members over candidates and issues is all too familiar to most of us. A 2022 poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that nearly 1 in 5 voters (19%) said politics had harmed their friendships or family relationships. However, a survey conducted earlier in 2021 by the Survey Center on American Life found that only 1 in 10 people (11%) said they had cut off a relationship with a family member because of their political views – a sentiment that is higher among respondents liberal than conservative.

Deseret News is helping promote the “A Braver Way” podcast this fall ahead of the election, in partnership with KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station. The podcast aims to “help you hear and be heard by the people who confuse you” so that you can “disagree with politics without losing heart.”

Recently, the podcast re-released an episode devoted to skillfully alleviating political tensions in families. Many people told host Mónica Guzmán that they had “lost something” as a result of the political conflict that they could not regain in their own family relationships. “They think there is no way out.”

But it is. As shown in the stories of reconciliation and appeasement, surprises, appeasements and miracles can still happen. Guzmán knows this from his own experience in his own family. Even though she is a liberal and her parents are conservative, their relationship is strong and sweet – and she still enjoys and learns from talking about everything, including politics. Below are 10 of their secrets that can help your family – which you can hear them talk about together in the podcast below.

1. Pursuing the more modest goal of “simply understanding”

There is nothing wrong with wanting to convince and persuade people about things that each of us considers good, beautiful and true. However, in the context of family separation, many people have realized that focusing on trying to “change each other’s mind” causes problems.

“Now we just try to present our point of view, listen to what the other side has to say, and maybe we can sleep on it for a while,” says Guzmán’s father, Bernardo, and her mother, Lupita, agrees, describing her transition from “trying to persuade in our opinion” to “trying to make you understand my position.”

“These are the reasons why I think so. I just want you to understand this,” says Lupita Guzmán, summing up her current approach to difficult topics in conversation. “And that’s what happened,” he tells his daughter. – And it’s amazing, you know?

2. “Try to control your initial reaction.”

Bernardo Guzmán recommends that, as part of your openness to others’ points of view, you should try to “control that initial reaction to hearing something someone says that you don’t agree with.”

Because too often, he says, an immediate reaction closes the conversation. After several difficult experiences, this observant father chose not to immediately express his thoughts on a difficult problem that was emerging – instead, he gave family members some time to think about it before “bringing it up again” when people seemed more emotionally grounded, giving thus “a greater chance of resolving the conflict and continuing (their) conversation.”

His daughter appreciates the pattern taken from her dad: “I noticed that several times you said to me: ‘Hey, remember that day when we talked about January 6?’ ….and then we’ll just start over and it’s nice of you to do that.”

3. Don’t let politics define your family

“Sometimes there’s an impasse” when “it’s too hot,” Lupita Guzmán also says, and that’s when “taking breaks is important.” For their family, watching Mulder and Scully’s next adventure on The X-Files was a respite.

“It helps,” says Lupita Guzmán. “Because then you calm down, your heart rate slows down. Then you see it in a different way.”

Linda Messmer, a “Braver Way” listener from Colorado, writes about her divided family that deliberately avoids politics and says they “talk about a lot of other things that give them pleasure.” (It’s worth noting that this is a strategy that mirrors what Thomas Jefferson used to do at Monticello when inviting people to dinner—directing the conversation to noncontroversial topics that united his guests.)

“We realized,” this woman writes, “that how we feel about politics does not define how we feel about each other.”

Bernardo Guzmán also talked about other important issues that the family deals with, apart from talking about politics. “For example, music, going to the cinema, cooking together or just looking at old photos.”

Lupita Guzmán is bragging about her husband’s “amazing ability” to pull out an old photo within three seconds of an old memory. “He can find it on his phone anytime!” adds Monica Guzmán.

Even during a heated conversation, the mother says, “It’s a constant reminder that, hey, no matter what, we love each other. Look, we went through it all together.

4. Learning more together (“both a little good and a little bad”)

“When we come to a point where we disagree on something,” says Lupita Guzmán, “we research together. We’ll google it together. We look for an answer and then we see: “Here you go, you know.”

“We’re usually both a little right and a little wrong, you know?” Mónica Guzmán recalls a debate about the origins of the “kids in cages” policy when her mother said “it started with Obama.”

“And I said, ‘No, that didn’t happen,'” but “then we checked and found out that some of it actually started during the Obama administration.”

5. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from each other!

As helpful as breaks and time for light talk can be, in some families it’s common for those breaks to become semi-permanent — when people say, “No, we just don’t talk about politics. We just don’t talk about religion.” Addressing this common conclusion, Lupita Guzmán says, “No! But you are missing the opportunity to learn from each other and see how the other side thinks. Because we don’t have the full picture. We never do this.

“One thing I learned is that every issue can be looked at from a much bigger perspective than I thought,” said Bernardo Guzmán, recalling situations in which he oversimplified certain issues in the past. “But there is more, there is always more.”

“There are many groups of people who have completely different life experiences and situations,” this person says. “So I learned to present more than one, two or three points of view on a given topic.”

6. “Oh, that’s a good point.”

Mónica Guzmán emphasizes the value of saying, “Oh, that’s a good point,” when a helpful insight comes along, “even if we don’t agree on the whole.”

Instead, our default reaction can often be, “No, that doesn’t make sense!” — signaling that “nothing about the other person makes sense because it’s my job to stand up for what I believe in and I will never budge an inch.”

“Saying that’s a valid point,” Guzmán explains, “doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly going to weaken or that I’m generally going to give way to you.” But while avoiding getting caught up in “winning and losing,” she says this kind of validation actually strengthens the conversation because it “encourages us to dig deeper.”

7. Asking how someone came to their point of view

“We all want to hear and be heard, understand and be understood,” Guzmán says, asking parents during the podcast the following question for each of us to consider: “What life experiences have influenced and guided your values ​​and beliefs about public policy and the public good? you to your political side?”

By asking “how people came to have their beliefs, not why they believe them,” Guzmán suggests, we can deepen understanding in any relationship.

8. Repeat what you hear to make sure you understand

“My left-wing brother-in-law has extreme political views,” says Meg from Utah, who has conservative leanings. “Whenever the family is together, they cannot avoid talking about politics,” he shares, “everything he reads as if it were common knowledge and as everyone knows and agrees with it.”

“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” this woman admits, describing a Braver Angels workshop where she learned to repeat what she heard in conversation to make sure she understood it correctly. It was something she had never tried before.

“The next time I was with him, I challenged myself to tell him what I heard from him and what I understood.” And that made a difference: “It helped me understand what he was saying, and it helped him feel heard and understood.”

“And before I knew it, we found common ground and loved spending time together.”

9. Listening for a long time

For families who are close to giving up and who are trying to “gain hope” of being able to talk to a child, sibling or parent, Guzmán says this: “I have met many people who really felt that the door was closed forever, ( but) you never know, because there may be cracks in them.

“There might just be a little light. Often the way to widen these cracks is to do something counterintuitive; the thing you often don’t want to do if you feel like things have gone too far, which is to just listen.

“Just listen, that’s all,” he says. “It’s really hard because you might feel really hurt or invisible or unappreciated,” but “people don’t hear if they don’t hear.”

“You listen for a while and then a long time may go by and the person may want to listen to you for a while.”

This can be especially true and helpful when relationships are at their most strained. The podcast host says one thing the Guzmán family does “really well,” although “not a perfect Zen practice,” is “listening for long periods of time.” Guzmán recalls calling her mother in 2016, the night of Trump’s surprising election victory. As she recalls, her mother was really happy, but “she didn’t show it.”

“Because you wanted to hear me and how brutally sad and disappointed and scared I was.”

“You were there,” says Lupita Guzmán. – You sounded so hopeless.

“But you listened to me and didn’t gloat about it. You could gloat,” her daughter adds.

10. “Just try to keep the relationship going.”

Some may feel ready to try some of these ideas. But “if it’s not now or whenever, whatever comes to people’s minds,” Guzmán said, “don’t feel like you have to force it. Relationships are so mysterious and personal.”

“Sometimes the best thing you can do with a link to someone you love who is completely different is not to test it, but to just try to keep it.”

Ultimately, family relationships that seem difficult now may still have a bright future ahead of them. Tim Walz’s mother, Darlene, who is also a Democrat, recently said she is staying away from the political conflict between her sons and hopes their estrangement will eventually heal. “This too shall pass,” he says. “Family is forever.”

“We are with each other no matter what,” sums up Lupita Guzmán. “Whatever you do, my love will always be with you. I don’t care what you do. I may not agree with what you do… but I won’t stop loving you.

Those interested in further assistance for their families can watch a video series on Braver Angels titled “Helping loved ones divided by politics” hosted by Braver Angels co-founder and family therapist Dr. Bill Doherty.