Social-Political Life, Chronic Stress, and Striking a Balance

In a recent survey of 2,000 adults, the American Psychological Association (APA) found that 84% of adults reported feeling ongoing stress about the state of the country. The sources of our stress are almost too familiar to need naming: a global pandemic, political instability, and collective uncertainty. Thus the APA reports that “The majority of adults reported the future of our nation (81%), the coronavirus pandemic (80%) and political unrest around the country (74%) as significant sources of stress in their lives.” The last year, in a sense, has witnessed a blurring of the distinction between public and private. Our lives, it seems, are inseparable from the vicissitudes of political life. This is easy enough to overlook during times of relative calm and in environments of privilege. Now, it seems impossible to avoid.

One of my biggest therapeutic priorities is helping people sort through the many, and often conflicting, demands that arise from social-political life. On the one hand, I recognize the importance of being publicly and politically engaged. I, personally, am attentive to and involved with contemporary politics. On the other hand, I am sensitive to the more private psychological needs that we all have. 

I think a lot about a relatively simple idea: during times of chronic political stress equanimity, or inner freedom, is one of the only reliable forms of freedom available to us. To be engaged responsibly with the world means, in part, protecting ourselves from the highly visible social-political difficulties of modern life.

Striking a balance between our own inner needs and the demands of the social-political world means, in part, thinking about how we relate to the media, and how we relate to our bodies. I’ll briefly talk about these two.

The Media and an Environment of Fear

I think that moderating our relationship with news, social media, and our phones, is an important part of preserving our equanimity. It is important to establish boundaries with the media primarily because the media tends to generate fear. I recently read an interview with the philosopher Paul Virilio published as The Administration of Fear. Virilio thinks that the media has produced an environment for us: a constant backdrop of our daily lives. My sense is that media organizations know that fear will lead to more consumption of the news, and thus better ratings. If we do not moderate our relationship with the media we may find ourselves chronically preoccupied, anxious, or fearful about the world.

It is important that we be connected and attentive to the world. But we can also sacrifice too much equanimity, too much of ourselves, if we are merely responsive to the emotional cycles of news and social media. We want to attend to and engage with social-political life, not be beholden to it. How, then, to stay grounded and in touch with ourselves? How to moderately engage the news as a source of information, rather than a necessary environment of fear?

Listening to Ourselves and Others With a Settled Body

I think it is important to maintain some distance from news, media, and politics because fear is at odds with empathy and listening. Growth and well being, I think, require an effort at listening, both to ourselves and others. Listening means being attentive and responsive to what is unique in a situation, rather than what is familiar or generic. 

Fear is not conducive to listening carefully, either to ourselves or others. When we are afraid we are concerned with basic questions about our safety and survival, and thus our perception of reality becomes relatively crude: “Is this person or situation a threat? Am I safe? Do I need to fight/freeze/flee?” We know that fear literally affects our brains and bodies so that listening becomes challenging: faces are harder to interpret, our voices lose their relaxed prosody, and we are generally unable to engage socially (Porges, 2011; van der Kolk, 2014). Fear, in short, unsettles the body, and makes listening an enormous challenge. Who could pay attention with a hot face, tight chest, and racing heart?

Learning to listen to ourselves and others, then, means learning to have a body that is settled enough, has enough distance from fear to preserve a sense of safety. Life is often scary, and I have never been able to avoid fear altogether. But listening to ourselves and others means finding a way to maintain empathy, curiosity, and openness, at an embodied level, despite fear and the desire to shut down or flee. Soothing ourselves, maintaining a settled body, with smooth breathing and a relaxed heart rate, is a necessary part of being able to listen.

Listening to ourselves with a Settled Body: I have been highly influenced by Eugene Gendlin’s work on ‘Focusing’. Focusing is Gendlin’s name for a technique of listening to our embodied ‘felt sense’ of situations, or our felt, intuitive judgements. By slowing down and attending to our bodily sensations, we can learn to perceive the subtle signals by which our body tells us how we are feeling. Above all, listening to ourselves means attending to whether or not a word ‘fits’ or ‘clicks’ with our sense of things. This feeling of when a word ‘fits’ is similar to the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon: we know there’s a word that is just right for this situation, we can feel it, but can’t quite find it. In therapy, I spend a lot of time helping people find just the right word or phrase that clicks with a unique problem. Being able to listen to ourselves in this way, and find the words that match our felt experience, requires us to be settled, curious, and free enough (not entirely) of fear.

Listening to others with a Settled Body: Learning to listen to ourselves with a settled body is also a crucial part of being able to listen to others. The trauma therapist Resma Menakem has written beautifully about the important ways in which having a settled body, one that is composed in spite of fear and stress, can positively impact our relation to ourselves and others. “Few skills are more essential,” Menakem writes in My Grandmother’s Hands, “than the ability to settle your body. If you can settle your body, you are more likely to be calm, alert, and fully present, no matter what is going on around you. A settled body enables you to harmonize and connect with other bodies around you, while encouraging those bodies to settle as well” (p. 151). This means, again, being able to notice a hot face or rapid breathing, and to soothe oneself, regulate distressing bodily sensations.

One of my chief tasks as a therapist is to be the settled body in the room. I have worked hard at learning to be present and openly greet whatever arises. This does not mean I do not experience fear or receive messages from my body that say ‘run, get away, this isn’t safe.’ I do feel fear. But I have learned to acknowledge and lean into uncertainty and fear, soothe myself and others, and proceed into the unknown with a settled enough body. Learning to settle your body, and learning to listen to yourself and others from that settled body, seems to me a vital skill.

We live in undeniably scary times. Political instability, a global pandemic, and national uncertainty have only exacerbated our already demanding lives. It is important that we pay attention so that we know how and when to be responsible and engaged. But we must also learn to attend to ourselves, and prevent ourselves from sacrificing too much of our own well-being. In particular, I hope that we can all learn to recognize the difference between having a settled and an unsettled body. The media, which often generates fear-based narratives, can contribute to the unsettling of our bodies: dysregulated heart beats and breathing, difficulties with sleep and digestion. A settled body, by contrast, is crucial to compassionate listening and engagement with ourselves and others. The process of learning to listen, to ourselves, to others, and to communities, can only benefit from the presence of settled bodies. 

References

APA - “U.S. Adults Report Highest Stress Level Since Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic” - https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/02/adults-stress-pandemic

Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/administration-fear

Eugene Gendlin, Focusing - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/59035/focusing-by-eugene-tgendlin-phd/

Resma Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands - https://centralrecoverypress.com/product/my-grandmothers-hands-racialized-trauma-and-the-pathway-to-mending-our-hearts-and-bodies-paperback

Stephen Porges, “The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system” - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108032/

Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps the Score - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313183/the-body-keeps-the-score-by-bessel-van-der-kolk-md/

Riley Paterson is a Self Space Seattle therapist who works with individuals who are healing from past traumas; who are looking to recover a sense of wholeness in the face of depression and demoralization, and those working to get a handle on anxiety. He is also interested in questions around queerness and/or gender.