The news is inescapable. Violence and senseless cruelty abound. As I write this, 92 countries are currently involved in conflicts beyond their borders. 110 million people are either refugees or internally displaced due to violent conflict, with 16 countries now hosting more than half a million refugees*. Areas affected by armed fighting have grown by 89% since 2020 and now cover 4.9% of the world’s six permanently inhabited continents, up from 2.6% five years ago**. These figures don’t include the conflict happening on the streets in the United States where the National Guard is deployed in cities across the country and protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gotten violent, resulting in the shootings (murders?) of two protesters in Minneapolis. It’s almost impossible to avoid seeing videos of human beings being humiliated and/or killed by other human beings. Our children are seeing these videos as well. As someone who was a young child in the 1970’s, I can attest to the long-term impact on this sort of imagery on children. My mind is still scarred by images of soldiers fighting in Vietnam and white protesters throwing, bricks, rocks and bottles and yelling racist slurs at school busses filled with Black children headed to predominantly white schools. Even though I do not live in one of these war zones, my heart is hurting. I imagine that your heart is hurting as well.
It’s easy to slip into a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, sometimes tinged with fear, anger and dark thoughts. Just as the political rhetoric of the current administration and many conservative news outlets, and perhaps the ICE agents tasked with the mission of finding and deporting as many undocumented people as possible, have focused on demonizing undocumented people and people who are protesting on their behalf, many of us have been demonizing “them” – aka the current administration, ICE agents and the congress people and senators who have done little make the war on undocumented immigrants stop.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Psychodrama can help. J.L. Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, gave a great deal of thought to issues such as these. In his early years, living in Vienna, a city that at the time was a hotbed of “othering,” he took great effort to welcome immigrants. Along with Chaim Kellmer, András Pető, Jan Feda, Hans Brauchbar, J.L Moreno created the House of Encounter, which much like Hull House in Chicago, provided food and shelter to immigrants, helped them fill out emigration papers, deal with the Austrian government. They also created a community where migrants found emotional support. Moreno later developed sociometry, the study of interpersonal relationships, which measures the hidden as well as the observable connections between members of a group to identify hidden group dynamics. He championed the use of sociometric tools to uncover and change harmful group dynamics in order to promote a more equitable, anti-oppressive society.
These tools can break down the social patterns that lead to polarization and othering. With in groups, not only do sociometric tools allow group leaders to identify schisms, subgroup formations and isolates, they also allow group leaders to help group members find hidden commonalities that may make it easier for members to feel connected to each other. Being able to find common ground is a first step towards humanizing the “other.”
Moreno also believed that being able reverse roles with others – that is to step into the other’s position – in order to feel their thoughts, feelings and embodied experience and to see oneself through their eyes was way to build empathy, gain different perspectives and resolve conflict. We can bring these tools to our work with our clients, students, and members of our communities.
At the most basic level, instead having a knee-jerk reaction of judgement towards people who hold different perspectives, perhaps we can try to remember all that we share with them in terms of our universal experiences of love and loss, triumphs and defeats, moments of pride and moments of shame. This allows us to humanize those with whom we disagree. And perhaps if we can imagine ourselves in their shoes, we can understand the fear that drives them and have compassion for the hurt they have experienced. If we change our responses from angry “othering” to calm compassion, we can begin to bridge the divides that separate us.
*18th edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI) from international think-tank, the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP).
**Verisk Maplecroft.
