We’re coming up on Inauguration Day in the U.S. Since the election, I have wanted to write this post. It took me a long time to get to it, and in that time, its message has come to feel increasingly true. I’m posting this less edited than my usual preferred degree of polish.

My belief is that the political environment is profoundly impacting interpersonal relationships.

In my experience and opinion, in the culture here, we don’t adequately conceptualize the political as personal. Naturally, this is heavily mediated by privilege: those who can afford to consider politics as a distant if not intellectual consideration, versus those directly impacted and endangered who cannot. But as a generalization, I think of ours as a naive culture when it comes to the depth of influence political changes have on our daily lives. How existing in a system means that everything we experience occurs within that context, from the environmental and communal to the familial and dyadic. Down to the intrapsychic, down to the body, and all its component parts.

We may not even realize all the operative elements influencing our one-on-one connections under present conditions.

Non-exhaustively:

• Many people are consciously and/or unconsciously braced, dreading, or in terror. Whether or not they are thinking about this all the time, it’s impacting their physiology, their feelings and behaviors.

  
  

• Many people are consciously and/or unconsciously in grief: for the world that is not ours, for the world in which they are not raising their children, for all that has been lost both pragmatic and ideational, and for all that may be lost.
  

• Many people have already experienced direct interpersonal conflict, rupture, or estrangement over/about/prompted by the election within their relationships, family, and/or community.
  

• Many people are consciously and/or unconsciously remembering the previous four years of Trump, including the pandemic. Like other negative-valence anniversaries, this remembering may be traumatic and have the impact of post-traumatic memories on the bodymind as we face similar or worse.

  
  

• Many people who have experienced trauma in any way associated with the themes of those taking power, such as narcissistic abuse (to name only one of many), or have experienced dynamics of power in their own lives that resulted in loss of safety, may be living within the physiology of their own traumatic memories.

  
  

• Many people have already been pushed to the edge of their cope by the demands of life in this society, and know they are about to be pushed further, in one way or another, resulting in increased physiologic threat responses such as panic, rage, and dissociation.

  
  

• Many people are living with a disturbing sense of uncertainty, knowing there will likely be disruption to their way of life, but not able to predict exactly what nor prepare in a way that feels adequate.

  
  

• Many people are dreading and fearing the possibilities for true and total catastrophe and chaos, as well as direct threat to life and liberty under the stated policies of the administration.

  
  

• Many people are impacted by the cumulative effect of the above occurring in the hearts and minds of many people around them, creating both general and specific relational instability.

  
  

• Lastly, living in a culture that does not value or validate felt experience nor teach how to identify, express, or metabolize it, much of this gets sublimated.

This means that individual relationships are being conducted by people under more strain and reactivity. Families are trying to function under more strain and reactivity. Communities are attempting to operate under more strain and reactivity. Likely with very few tools to recognize and address the full depth and breadth of the impact, especially as it is widely believed to not have begun yet, this having been considered a "calm before the storm."

Wherever the fissures, whatever the fragile points in the system, they are being load-tested now in a different way.

Fights break out, both overt and covert, both loud and quiet, both enmeshed and disconnecting — fights that may be true in that they reveal a real misalignment, a real miscommunication, a real inequity — but whereas there was more resilience and robustness prior, whereas before people physiologically had more grace to offer each other, now people may be increasingly beyond their cope, the scaffolding not holding the same way around the weak spots. More and more, it feels like people are in nervous system states that predispose us to the types of behaviors and interpretations that make connection, vulnerability, intimacy, and trust harder.

I am seeing this everywhere. I am experiencing it myself in many ways. I don’t have a solution except to say: take notice.

Try to observe what is occurring in your relationships. Understand that those around you may be compromised in ways both knowable and scarcely conscious to them, scarcely able to be pointed to or named, and so might you. Do your best to approach relational ruptures as earnestly as you can, repairing when you can and letting things crumble when you must, but with recognition that what’s happening now may be part of a broader inflammation that isn’t going anywhere, and that we must develop capacity to manage.

If, beyond the tasks of survival, you’ve got any energy left, dedicate yourself to learning how to strengthen and repair your social fabric. These are interpersonally trying times, but without a doubt, we’re going to need each other.