Parke is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Richmond, Virginia. He runs Therapy for Men RVA, a small private practice of male therapists working with men dealing with anxiety, stress, pressure, and feeling stuck. The practice offers walk-and-talk therapy along the James River and virtual sessions throughout Virginia. Learn more at www.therapyformenrva.com.

Dude Breathe: one idea. A few minutes to read. Once a week.

By Parke Sterling, LPC

When I was growing up, I didn’t know my neighbor’s political leanings or innermost thoughts because he didn’t have a way to broadcast them every minute of the day. Now he does. Call it misguided nostalgia, but I miss the old days.

It’s sad that the very technologies that were designed, or at least marketed, as ways to bring us together have fueled a rise in anxiety, tribalism, and division unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes.

I think most of us are emotionally worn out by this sense of separateness.

And like most things in life, the main thing we have power to change is our own attitude and perspective. I can’t change what my neighbor thinks, but maybe I can change how I view my neighbor.

On my best days, I can choose to recognize what Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who has spent his life working alongside gang members in Los Angeles, calls kinship. Our shared commonalities that lead to a crack in the sense of “us” and “them.”

Like most tendencies, we have numerous choice points throughout our lives to either strengthen or weaken them.

It doesn’t mean we’ll agree with one another. It does mean we can recognize that we are all trying to do essentially the same thing: move toward well-being and away from pain in whatever way makes sense to us.

Put simply, we all just want to be safe and ok.

I once worked in a jail diversion program treating people with co-occurring serious mental illness and drug addiction. It was a long-term, intensive outpatient program with both group and individual therapy. We saw clients three days a week, sometimes for up to 18 months.

It was heavy work. There was chaos, overdoses, and psychotic breaks. There was also laughter, insight, and recovery.

One thing became crystal clear to me through that work: even when people are trying to find happiness through harmful or self-destructive means, they are still doing the best they can with what they have in that particular moment.

There was a woman I worked with, I’ll call her Krista, who had a heart of gold and a severe heroin addiction. She would get clean for a bit and then relapse, seemingly out of nowhere. She would suddenly find herself prostituting to scrounge up money for heroin.

It’s easy to judge that. To see her actions as below our standard of conduct. And then the next natural mental jump is to see her as less than in some way.

But here’s the truth: you and I are not out prostituting for heroin because we are better than her. We just got luckier.

If we had her exact life experiences, her childhood trauma filled with abusive, neglectful caregivers, and her exact DNA, her genetic inclination toward addiction and bipolar disorder, we wouldn’t be like her. We would literally be her.

Because whether we like it or not, genetics and conditioning are the two main ingredients that make up these recipes called me, you, Krista and everyone else running around out there. Some of us get dealt a much better hand than others, and then we play those hands accordingly.

But the goal is still the same: to move toward relief, pleasure, and okayness, and away from pain, fear, and distress.

Some people chase that through family, meaning, and community. Some chase it through heroin. Regardless, we are all on the same path.

For me, the entryway to kinship is actively reminding ourselves that:

Just like me, this person is trying their best to be happy in life.

Just like me, this person feels the same emotions, joys and fears.

Just like me, this person will lose people that they love in life.

Just like me, this person is sometimes tortured by their thoughts.

And even if we are very different people from very different backgrounds, we are all swimming in the same soup as Steven Hayes likes to say.

Recognizing and remembering this isn’t easy, by the way. I would cringe to see my batting average on this front.

To a certain extent, I think tribalism is a human instinct. It was adaptive to be wary of the “other” tribe on the other side of the river. Better to be cautious and alive then fearless and dead.

Maybe we are working against a bit of a default, which is probably why it’s so hard.

But like any trainable skill, recognizing our shared humanness and wishing the other well on that journey can start to take hold. We can start to have more of a choice in how we see others.

We don’t train this mental muscle because it’s the right “thing” to do, by the way. It’s simply a more pleasant way to go through life.

Recognizing our kinship with every other human won’t eradicate our differences, but it can grow our sense of commonality. And as a result, maybe we will all be a little happier for this short time we are here.

Try This

Think of someone you have recently judged, dismissed, or mentally placed on the other side.

You don’t have to agree with them or excuse their behavior. Just quietly remind yourself:

Just like me, this person was once a baby and then a little kid.

And just like me, this person was shaped by the world they grew up in.

And just like me, they experience fear, grief, anxiety and sadness.

And just like me, this person just wants to be safe and okay.