On Tuesday morning, as I laid on my acupuncturists table, a bubbling of sadness began to well up within me and salt water poured from eyes and pooled in my ears. On Tuesday evening, the tears came again as I washed the dishes and heard the news in the background. On Wednesday morning I rose before the sun did, checked the numbers, and cried myself back to sleep for a couple more hours.
As every one of us tried to do, I needed to figure out how this happened… yet again. And so I threw my psychological brain into the ring and here’s what I came up with.
Harris ran a campaign of hope. Trump ran a campaign of fear and fear always wins.
Fear is our most compelling emotion. It’s the emotion most closely linked to survival and there is no stronger urge within us (and every living thing) than to survive. When we’re in a fearful place, we perceive most things as potential threats, even if they’re actually benign. Our lizard brain (the primal part of our brain where all our survival instincts reside) takes over and our frontal cortex goes dark. Our frontal cortex is what makes us wonderfully human. It’s in charge of our judgment, creativity, and abstract thinking. Our lizard brain makes the world black and white, whereas our frontal cortex gives us a kaleidoscope of magnificent colors to play with.
When we’re afraid, it’s remarkably easy to get locked into lizard brain; to identify an enemy and do whatever necessary to annihilate it. This was the compelling nature of Trumps campaign. He recognized the fear and helped to assign an enemy.
“This country is falling apart because of those damn liberals.”
“You’re not safe because of illegal aliens that steal and rape.”
“They’re the enemy from within.”
Every time we give into fear, the consequences become greater because of the compounding friction on the psyche. Every time we give into fear, the necessity to continue to worship it only grows deeper. Because fundamentally, fear makes you want to be right, not effective. Because if you’re right, your judgment must be sane, and then you can keep yourself safe.
And here’s the biggest disillusion of all… being right doesn’t keep you safe.
But when we’re in complex situations, like literally any interpersonal relationship, we need complex thinking in order to be effective. What’s the point of being right if you’re going to end up alone? What’s the point of being right if you’re still suffering?
So how do we relax the lizard brain so our frontal cortex can come back online? We take a deep breath, get back into our bodies, manage the big feelings coming up, and have the difficult conversations from the perspective of being effective, not right. Perhaps if every one of us is able to do this in our personal lives, it will work its way up into the fabric of our culture and then our country, and every single community within it, will truly be able to thrive.
So after we’ve grieved and mourned deeply, when the time feels right to pick ourselves up and entertain the next steps, let’s choose to be effective and give up the desire to be right.
