Holding Difference: Staying in Relationship When We Disagree

We seem to be living in increasingly polarised times.

Some subjects can change a room's atmosphere almost instantly. Israel and Gaza. Russia and Ukraine. Gender. Race. Immigration. Politics. Religion. Sometimes it takes only a sentence — occasionally only a word — and people begin moving into opposing camps.

And once that happens, curiosity tends to pack its bags and leave.

We stop wondering about the person in front of us and start deciding what sort of person they are.

I’ve thought about this a great deal as a psychotherapist, a group facilitator, and a human being. Earlier this year, I ran a workshop called Holding Difference: Facilitating Dialogue in Polarised Times. It grew out of a question that feels increasingly important:

How do we remain in relationship with people whose views disturb us, challenge us, or occasionally make us want to run screaming from the room?

Not how do we agree with them, persuade them, or abandon our own values in the interests of being terribly nice.

How do we stay present enough for an actual conversation to still be possible?

The temptation to divide the world

Human beings are very good at dividing the world into opposites.

Good and bad. Right and wrong. Victim and perpetrator. Enlightened and ignorant. Us and them.

Splitting helps us manage emotional complexity by dividing people and situations into good or bad, right or wrong. It protects us from ambivalence — the harder truth that someone can be loving and hurtful, wise and foolish, admirable one moment and infuriating the next. It gives us certainty, but flattens reality.

If I know I am right and you are wrong, I don’t have to entertain the irritating possibility that I may have missed something. Even better, I don’t have to look too closely at myself.

Jung wrote about our tendency to project onto others what we cannot bear to recognise in ourselves. Whole groups — even whole nations — can carry another group’s projections.

Then the person in front of us stops being a person and becomes a category.

A Tory. A leftie. A Zionist. A trans activist. A TERF. A racist. A woke liberal. A boomer. A millennial.

Choose your label.

Once we’ve reduced someone to a single word, there’s little left to be curious about.

Difference isn’t the problem

I don’t think difference itself is dangerous. Actually, I think we need it.

A room in which everybody agrees can be very comfortable, but it may not be particularly alive. It may simply mean that those who think differently have decided it is safer to keep quiet.

The difficulty begins when difference becomes intolerable: when somebody has to be corrected, defeated, silenced or expelled from the conversation.

I draw on Arnold Mindell’s World Work and Deep Democracy: the principle that all voices within a system matter, including minority and awkward voices, and the things everybody knows are in the room but nobody dares to say.

They don’t disappear. They just retreat backstage and start plotting their return.

This doesn’t mean every opinion is equally wise, factual or harmless. It means that refusing to engage with difficult material doesn’t make it go away.

The roles we fall into

When conversations heat up, people often occupy particular roles.

Someone defends safety, another freedom; one speaks for justice, another compassion. Somebody gets angry, somebody goes silent, and often one poor soul tries desperately to calm everybody down.

Mindell calls these roles timespirits, a term I rather like because it reminds us that they are temporary, not fixed identities. They belong to the moment and can move quickly around a group: today’s rebel may become tomorrow’s authority. Thinking of them this way makes it harder to turn one person into the problem and easier to stay curious about what the role may be expressing.

What interests me is what sits underneath these positions.

Sometimes it is a deeply held value, fear, an old wound, or personal history we know nothing about.

A baffling position can make more sense when we understand what the person is trying to protect.

So alongside What does this person believe?, I find these questions useful:

What is this position protecting? What are its values and fears?

I may not agree with the answer, but I may understand the person better.

Rank enters the room too

Difference doesn’t take place on a level playing field.

Some of us enter a room with more social power, professional authority, confidence, money or psychological resilience than others. Some forms of rank are obvious; others are almost invisible to the person who has them.

And rank moves around.

I can have considerable authority in one setting and feel powerless in another. Most of us know both positions, although we tend to notice the second more readily.

Becoming aware of rank isn’t about guilt. It is about noticing our effect on others.

Someone with a great deal of rank can say something casually and it lands with enormous force. They may have forgotten it by lunchtime. The person on the receiving end may remember it ten years later.

Staying in the room

For me, holding difference is partly about resisting the urge to leave psychologically when things become uncomfortable.

We can leave without moving an inch.

We stop listening and start preparing our answer. We roll our eyes, retreat into silence, or become morally superior — which can feel extremely satisfying for a while. Or we talk only to people who already agree with us.

Staying doesn’t mean submitting.

Sometimes remaining in relationship means saying plainly:

I disagree with you.

What you’ve just said has had quite an impact on me.

I can’t let that pass without challenging it.

Holding difference isn’t about becoming so open-minded that our brains fall out. Some things are worth standing up for.

But curiosity and challenge can exist in the same conversation.

The lost art of not knowing

Psychotherapy has taught me to be a little less frightened of not knowing.

We spend much of our working lives listening to incomplete stories. A client tells us something, we form an idea, then another piece of information arrives and the picture changes. If we become too attached to our first interpretation, we are in trouble.

The same applies outside the consulting room.

There is a difference between having strong convictions and believing that we possess the whole truth. The latter leaves very little room for another person.

Psychotherapy asks us to tolerate contradiction, something most of us naturally dislike.

Two things can be true at once.

Someone can have hurt us and still be more than the hurt they caused. We can disagree profoundly with somebody and still recognise their humanity. We can listen without agreeing.

We can even discover that we were wrong.

Painful, perhaps, but survivable.

Repair matters more than getting it right

Of course we are going to get some of this wrong.

Anyone who has facilitated groups knows the moment when someone says something, another person reacts, the atmosphere shifts, and you realise something important has happened.

Sometimes you catch it. Sometimes you realise what you should have said three hours later while making a cup of tea.

This is one of the occupational hazards of being a psychotherapist. We are often astonishingly insightful retrospectively.

Perfect communication isn’t the goal. What matters is whether we can recognise that something has gone wrong and find a way back.

Can I say:

I think I misunderstood you.

I got defensive there.

I hadn’t realised how that landed.

Can we go back to it?

Simple sentences. Not always simple to say.

Repair usually requires us to give up something — pride, certainty, the need to be right, the wish to have the last word.

Perhaps that is what holding difference asks of us: not to float serenely above conflict like some spiritually evolved being, but to

stay present when difference appears and find our way back when things go wrong.

A few questions to sit with

Think of somebody whose views you find difficult.

What happens inside you when they start speaking?

Do you become angry, frightened, dismissive, superior or silent?

What role do you take when conflict enters a room?

What are you protecting?

What might the other person be protecting?

Where do you have rank, and where don’t you?

And perhaps the hardest question:

Can you remain curious about somebody while still holding firmly to what matters to you?

We don’t have to resolve every tension or manufacture agreement where none exists.

Sometimes it’s enough to leave a difficult conversation knowing a little more about the other person — and perhaps a little more about ourselves, too.

For more information about workshops on this topic, contact lynn@lynnsomerfield.com