As I type this the US election is razor close. I know a lot of people haven’t slept much overnight and are racked with tension and anxiety and disbelief (whatever side they’re on). As a psychotherapist my job is to listen to people and that means people who sit across the political spectrum. It’s been very eye opening.

What I’m continuously struck by is that US politics is very much akin to a bad marriage or a horrible couples counseling session. Nobody is listening to the other side. Everybody is shocked and horrified that approximately 50% of the country are voting as they are.

In Imago couples therapy, founded by Harville Hendrix, they often speak of walking over the bridge into your partner’s mind and looking at the world from their perspective. Only very rarely is your partner clinically “crazy”. Usually what they’re seeing and thinking and saying makes sense given their childhoods, history and experience. If we don’t make the effort to walk over that bridge and see what they’re seeing then we just continuously loop into “f*ck, why is the election this close, it doesn’t make sense”. Which is the political version of “my wife is bat shit crazy, I don’t understand her”.

Unless we improve our listening then we’ll just continue to do what in psychology is called “splitting”. One group of people are “all good” and the other are “all bad” or “evil”. And everybody hates the other side. Nobody takes the time to have a conversation. In fact there’s already so much rage and projection in the air before a conversation starts that any kind of real exchange becomes impossible.

It’s a therapist’s nightmare couple. Which pretty much always ends in divorce. It’s where we’re at right now. As a European psychotherapist based in California I’ve got my more liberal tendencies – I’d always vote for a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body for instance. But I’m not sure beliefs are what’s needed now. It’s actually curiosity, conversation and connection which are the things nobody seems that interested in.