Person-in-environment: How a therapeutic approach can help the political divide.

Giving credit to another’s identity allows us to see their worldview

We as a nation have become so divided, over how we should govern, who we should govern and how we identify as a nation. These issues can seem to be overwhelming and distant. We see the talking heads on the news, our news feeds are full of negative or slanted agendas. We are simply up to our eyeballs in trying to navigate all of this drama.

Unfortunately though, when we isolate our minds, we tend to isolate our physical bodies as well. We become isolated. Not engaging with our neighbors, friends, or even our family. We have this fear or anxiety that something political or social is gonna come up and it's gonna cause a disagreement and erupt into this battle of ideologies!

This fear is keeping us isolated, we only interact with those of the same views and ideologies. We feel comfortable and safe. We are with people who just get it! How the world is! How things are and how our world needs to be!

This locked-in viewpoint has to do with how our minds keep us safe. Just because we are in this highly technical and Info driven age, does not mean our brain has kept up with the change. The core part of our brain is still in the stone age. We need to do what is necessary for survival, which includes finding others that we share goals and viewpoints, back in the stone age these shared views would have related to hunting techniques or migratory patterns, and even foraging just to name a few. Today we look for those that share perceptions on resource distribution, how and which laws govern our lives, and who we want to be the tribal leader.

Those very biological mechanisms have kept us alive for thousands of years. Going from tribes of 50 to no more than 150 we were able to know one another and keep account of the tribe's actions.

As our society has grown we rely on larger social forces, such as government, religion, and the legal system to keep our (tribal members) citizens in check and on the honest path.

So with the U.S. having a large population, technology at our fingertips, and information overload on a daily. This creates a vacuum that pulls us right back into our little…