Ameri Can? Pt2. How Our Bodies Hold Political Conflict
Part two of a three-part series exploring how somatics can help us cultivate co-regulation in the face of widespread societal fragmentation.
Why deal with interpersonal conflict when the world is burning?
“Love and justice are not two. Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change no change matters.” —rev angel Kyodo williams
There are collective harms visited on our neighbors’ bodies. The process of changing people’s minds about this, amplifying awareness, saving lives, and sustaining resilience to build alternatives is multifaceted work. I write more on that elsewhere. This series, however, is dedicated to practices that foster real connection with people and parts of ourselves that we’ve been bypassing—freeing us from unexamined cycles of reactivity that often reduce us to spectators of rather than participant in the democratic process.
In Part 1, I shared:
Political engagement is often hijacked by survival responses. Our nervous systems react before we consciously process events, assigning emotions and supportive narratives in ways that help us stay stuck.
Empathy, without grounding, leads to emotional overwhelm or self-righteousness.
Slowing inner reactivity is key to constructive dialogue.
Lasting culture change requires embodied awareness. Instead of focussing on shaming or changing minds, we need changes in accessing to our own bodies—and others’—especially in moments of political conflict.
Just-agreements cohere best when we aren’t operating in survival mode.
The Story of Somatic Approaches to Trauma
If we want to understand why political conversations feel stuck, we need to examine where the sticking point is. The body keeps score—without conscious awareness, it establishes patterns of attraction and aversion that we use as shortcuts for contacting reality. These sensations and urges operate beneath the surface, emerging as survival demands rooted in disconnection.
We then assign emotions to these sensations and craft stories that reinforce and repeat the emotional landscape. In essence, we re-traumatize ourselves—each knee-jerk reaction is a reenactment of an old wound and our theory about how it happened, replaying our earliest survival strategies. This repeats like a tape on loop, and accumulates into an individual’s personality, spirituality, and identification—which I’ll get into a little further down. But it doesn’t just stop inside of my body or yours.
Externally, in groups such as families, business agreements, or political institutions, these patterns sustain the myth of permanence—what Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call “the immunity to change.” Groups that are immune to change play it safe by replaying old tapes about what is lost, or scarce, or threatening. These same groups experience lower energy and adaptivity when it come to their processes. You could say that the trauma reactions coalesce into a trauma-bond, managing fears that remain unspoken or undischarged.
Inflexibility and rigid structures originate in the individual. Our collective agreements and institutions are only as adaptive as the individuals who have learned to recognize and shift these patterns within themselves and in relationship with others. As the opening quote from rev. angle Kyodo williams states, “without inner change” this collective fixedness will not have the capacity to change.
Getting Unstuck: Working in Reverse
First Explained in terms of the individual (my experience or yours, but not both)
To get a vacation from this looping, repeating tape, or to tap into more purpose and possibility, consider this three centers approach to reversing habituated disconnection1:
Soften mind-based disconnection – Notice the habit of inner criticism that controls how you process information.
Soften heart-based disconnection – Recognize the cynical tendency to reject alternative experiences.
Soften will-based disconnection – Acknowledge the fear of building connection in an unpredictable, sometimes dangerous world.
This isn’t just a theory—it’s how our nervous system actually processes stress and change. To paraphrase a teacher of mine, contemplative psychologist Jim Finley, “Trauma is not just what was done to you, but what ‘what was done’ did to your inner experience.”
For over 30 years, psychological research has confirmed that its not the “mentality” but the body that keeps score. Consider how PTSD treatments have evolved: veterans once received only talk therapy and medication, but now somatic therapies—breathwork, movement, and nervous system regulation—are recognized as more effective.
Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way the mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be [re-traumatized] at any time. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.
—Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
Most political discourse remains in the realm of story telling, and as such thrives on remaining in a mental, reactive loop of of endangerment. The Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr, puts it this way: “We can’t think ourselves into new ways of acting; we must act our way into new ways of thinking.”
So when it comes to political conflict, why do we keep trying to think our way out of it?
How We Got Stuck in Reactive Loops
At the heart of our struggle is something so deeply ingrained we don’t even question it: our point of view.
From birth, our nervous systems, helpfully, accept connection. A newborn baby cannot feed itself, another human is required. Not only that, but human development is slow—unlike a deer that can walk minutes after birth, we spend years dependent on others for help with nourishment, shelter, and mobility. Humans take nearly 25 years to fully develop our brains—interdependency and connection are essential to the survival of our species.
But what about those times when we aren’t taken care of or safe? No one experiences a childhood and adolescence free of wounds.
Well, over that first quarter-century of brain-and-body development, whenever connection was inconsistent our bodies compensated. Our nervous systems build workarounds to keep us safe. These adaptations become deeply ingrained patterns, such as:
“Do it yourself.”
“Never again.”
“They are always…”
“If only…”
It would be one thing if these adaptive workarounds were fire-alarms with glass over them saying “break only in emergency.” It’s another when we realize how inconsistent connection is with any human growing up, and how frequently we sound the alarm (not to mention adverse childhood experiences). Long before we are old enough to subjectively evaluate our personality-strategy or develop emotional intelligence, our mind-body has more than ten thousand reps of practice going to this adaptive grasping to control desired connection. Humans might come ready to allow connection, but as the psyche develops we come to anticipate disconnection.2 And this urge doesn’t simply go away as we age, it just goes under-ground or “sub” conscious.
Gabor Maté describes this reactivity as an addiction: we unconsciously repeat old survival strategies because, at some level, we still believe they will finally work. Fr. Thomas Keating described this as our personal programs for happiness, rooted in our own cocktails of extreme beliefs about control, security, and esteem.
This is why changing our minds is as hard as quitting an addiction.
By adulthood, these automatic survival scripts become our opinions, personality traits, and worldviews. So, the way we respond to threat, unfairness, or uncertainty is not just intellectual—it’s embodied.
The result? Most nervous systems perceive conflict as a physical emergency, triggering the same fight, flight, freeze, or appease responses as other traumatizing triggers.
Note: You may be reading this saying, I don’t run from conflict. And you may be right, you might run toward it, which is also a personal program for happiness.
The practitioners I’ve mentioned so far, like Basel van der kolk, Prentis Hemphill, Gabor Mate, all work in their ways to help address and liberate individuals from the hidden influences of such triggers. Because, true freedom is to walk without our inner anticipation taking charge. The primary remedy to disconnection is co-regulation, which we’ll explain next.
What This Has to Do with Politics
We don’t stand a chance of changing our minds—or coming to new agreements with others—until we address the body’s sense of disconnection.
New or better facts rarely shift people’s highly contested beliefs. People shift because of a radicalizing experience—such as hitting rock bottom, a personal betrayal, a big break, or an unexpected encounter with loving kindness and awe.
But what if we didn’t have to wait for an outside disruption?
What if we could create the conditions for real connection before things fall apart?
Contemplative psychotherapist, Jim Finley, says that access moments of experiential love and purpose can’t be created. Such deep connection is accidental—we can’t force it. But we can create the conditions to be more accident-prone. This is the contemplative tradition’s contribution to leadership. Habits and rituals (group habits) help us overcome the immunity-to-change and be more accident-prone. As such, we rediscover an adaptive, hidden wholeness that is our birthright.
Connection is a human birthright,
expecting disconnection is a human survival strategy.
Disconnection naturally returns to “connection” by accident,
but we can practice being accident prone.
The same is true for getting unstuck in conflict. We can’t force our selves or others to change, but we can create conditions for transformation.
Most nervous systems perceive conflict as a physical emergency, triggering the same fight, flight, freeze, or appease responses as other traumatizing triggers.
Dr. Stephen Porges puts it this way:
“We are not independent organisms; we are interdependent. Our nervous system is designed to seek and respond to signals of safety from others. Co-regulation is not a luxury; it is a biological imperative.”
This is why most political conversations fail before they even begin—because we are unconsciously filtering them through a nervous system on high alert. Before we can truly listen, we have to create conditions for co-regulation.
That’s where Levels of Listening comes in.
A Practice for Listening Through Division
MIT professor Otto Scharmer outlines four levels of listening3 one of many tools/rituals that might help us. I have used this model in facilitating conflict resolution, strategic planning, even marriage coaching. Scharmer points out that not all listening is the same, and we often settle for an earlier/easier/less-mature form, hoping for a more sustainable result. These are the four levels as he describes them:
Habitual Listening- Habitually downloading what affirms our point of view.
Factual Listening – Opening the mind to hear new food for thought.
Empathic Listening – Opening the heart to feel another’s experience.
Generative Listening – Opening the will to freely sense and act together.
Think of when these have broken down for you? You might be in a community counsel meeting hoping for a generative result, but Roberts Rules was used to keep the group at the factual listening level. You might get a directive from a boss simply relaying new directives (factual), when you think— does anyone understand (empathize) with the felt impact of this? You might be talking with an old friend about a terminally ill loved one and they move to shock at the facts, trying to fix, when you are past that and just need someone to grieve (empathize) with you. Can you feel the mismatches?
From the bedroom to the board room to the dance floor we’ve experienced such miss-matches. And in American politics, the quadrennial ritual of presidential elections limits us to habitual and factual listening when we’re hoping for empathic and generative results. Simply identifying with a side, or issue, or representative— over-and-over-and-over does not build connection, it rewards reactive, anticipatory disconnection.
The four levels of listening sequence helps us move from reactivity to connection. But to even begin, we have to face a difficult truth:
The more reactive we are, the more we assume our Point of View is already complete.
This is where most conversations fail.
1. Opening the Mind—Releasing Our Fixed Point of View
Every time we enter a political conversation, we carry a Point of View (POV) that feels right, sufficient, and whole.
I come prepared with:
Data that proves my POV
Heartfelt reasons justifying why I feel this way
A course of action I already conclude as correct
From the outside, this looks like confidence.
From a trauma-informed perspective, this looks like a survival strategy.
Criticism of other people’s information protects mine.
Cynicism about other feelings/perspectives protects mine.
Fear of trusting the unknown or the stranger/enemy, keep my actions as the only one.
Our POV isn’t just an opinion—it’s a nervous system response, a simulacrum of lost or unreachable connection. Unlike inner authority, an unexamined Point of View acts more like a loyal soldier defending the right of a weaker part to act authentic.
When our POV is challenged, its not just cognitive dissonance—it is our nervous system defending against a perceived threat as if it were alone. When overwhelmed in our POV stance, dissent and the strange ideas of strangers is sorted as threat… because it is a threat to our POV.
Take for example the power of the following nouns: Imagine you’re in a crowded coffee shop. Some familiar, some strangers. The barista has some intriguing music on. What is your gut response were you to blurt out or overhear someone else say any of following: Hunter Biden, MAGA, DEI, RFK Jr, DOGE, Supreme Court…
Did you sigh or roll your eyes? Did your heart speed up? Did your shoulders tense? Did you feel foggy, or withdrawn? Clear, or assertive? Imagine these somatic (body based) hits lighting up a heat map of your body.
Now multiply that by what is happening to everyone in the coffee shop. The heat map would begin to look like a pinball machine when bonus balls are dropped in. These are only nouns. No one offered new data, or a felt experience… and yet it would seem these words cast a spell granting unexamined access to nervous system—collective reactivity has enormous authority to deploy countless POVs.
This is what polarization has done to us: we react without awareness.
Instead of intellectual curiosity or desire to co-create change, we’re stuck in nervous system activation.
When teaching the movement from POV to Level 1 listening to clients and groups, I ask participants to imagine their head is like a large dry-erase board, already filled with markings and data. To enter a conversation aware of, but not overcome by criticism, we each agree for the time of the exercise to wipe half of that board clean and record what the other is telling us. We pause the POV cycle by asking:
What news are you seeing that matters to you?
What experiences have shaped your perspective?
What patterns do you see that could give me food for thought?
This isn’t agreeing or debating. It’s just making space in our minds to hear what someone else perceives as true. Scharmer describes this as moving past or through the voice of criticism, that part of us that the body’s nervous system uses to prevent the threat of disconnection.
This practice reduces knee-jerk reactivity by shifting the brain from threat detection to curiosity.
2. Opening the Heart—Beyond Data, Into Felt Experience
Once the mind is more open, we shift from intellectual distance to emotional presence.
The key question here is:
Why does this issue matter to you?
Most of us aren’t used to being asked this.
What are you afraid will happen if this issue goes the wrong way?
How does this fear or grief show up in your body—tightness, heat, numbness?
What emotional words describe this sensation?
What past experiences make this issue feel so urgent?
We often think validation means agreeing. But true validation is just acknowledging the reality of someone’s experience.
When we gently disengage with the inner urge to correct each other, we create space for what is deeper than agreement—connection, both internal and interpersonal. Finley writes:
“When you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can discover within yourself … the pearl of great price, your invincible preciousness in the midst of your fragility.”
For all of our differences, when we open our hearts together, whether we are the listener or the speaker, we create the conditions to lift the spells our POVs hold over us. We create space to practice dialogue and conflict without external forces pulling at our most cynical, self-protective parts.
This is how we ready ourselves to share agency, to clarify the ways we commit to be connected, to take trust falls.
3. Opening the Will—What Can We Do Together?
This is the moment we ask:
What can we do together that we couldn’t do alone?
This is not about conversion—no one is switching political parties here. Outside of politics, using these levels of listening in team conflict or process work, this is about acting on something new, a new arising path forward that was missed before when we were settling for polarized POVs. This is habituating behaviors that don’t double down on our immunity to change.4
Instead, this is about clarity:
What new possibility are we noticing together? What is one action we might do to stay with that?
Having heard the other, is there a possible shared action we want to take together?
What would constitute a line for you, and what would connected support look like if that line were crossed?
What groups, committed listeners, or sources demonstrate, for each of us, this sort of head-heart-will listening? What commitments could we make to connect to those as habit shifting resources?
What is a gratitude that has been unspoken or a gift that you’ve been holding in exile that you’d like to share?5
By the time your group or conversation reaches this step, you may sense the immunity to change momentarily lifting. The breath slows down. You might feel your feet. In groups I often notice a little more laughter. It feels like a split in the curtain that previously separated. Scharmer describes this as the “crack” like the first pop of a popcorn kernel. For the moment, the spell of the culture wars feels softened.
Instead of seeing each other as simply political opponents, we begin to humbly acknowledge the humanity in our reactive selves, and the shared human capacity to change together—beyond our solo reactions.
The key here is to name it. In spiritual terms, Finley would say “How do I not break faith with my newly awakened heart?”
In coaching terms we might say, “having arrived at this insight, what is one next action would you like to take?”
Commitments and contemplative practices aren’t about manifesting an idealized fanticy, they’re about anchoring the body in those moments when we weren’t confined by our survival responses—building a liberated life by repeating liberated conditions.
Even if we don’t agree, we may still find ways to stand together or stay in touch.
Final Thought: Why I Tried This With My Dad
I’m so fortunate—I have no reason to be afraid of my dad. He has not crossed boundaries with me as an adult that would warrant vigilance. But for many people, familial relationships are unsafe. If that’s the case, this exercise isn’t for every situation. Begin by trying the levels of listening with someone who has already demonstrated that they will not invade or abandon you.
All said, culture wars do not have to define our relationships.
Manipulating, canceling, or tiptoeing around each other still gives fear the upper hand. True inner authority frees us to be conscientious objectors to the ways powerful interests deploy our POVs, enlisting us in the culture wars.
What if we saw decision-making and democracy not as spectator events marketed to our POV’s, but as practices of engagement—where fellow citizens learn to pause, co-regulate, and stay present with one another, even in dissent?
Next, I’ll share how my father and I actually did this—and how our first try went.
These are based in the work of Otto Scharmer, more on that below.
Note: even a enthusiastic optimist personality (Enneagram social 7 type), like I was in adolescence and early adulthood, settles for a cause and affect control— if I act upbeat or deferential then I can have connection.
See Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies. or visit the Presencing Institute. Here’s one short Youtube video teaching the Levels of Listening.
Cynthia Bourgeault describes this as a contemplative phenomenology of change using George Gurdjieff’s Law of Three—when, out of the midst of two intractable affirming and denying forces, there arises a reconciling force. Combined together, these show up as a different and new lay of the land. Now, this process is not always synthesis or even improvement, but when experienced, can move change forward and out of POV-rooted violence or abandonment. She writes “One can only imagine how greatly the political and religious culture wars of our era could be eased by this simple courtesy of the Law of Three: (1) the enemy is never the problem but the opportunity; (2) the problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction. Imagine what a different world it would be if these two simple precepts were internalized and enacted.” —The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity
Many of these are adaptations of adrienne maree brown’s questions in Holding Change and Peter Block’s Six Converations, as described in Community: The Structure of Belonging.