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Over the last year, politics and social justice are moving to the front of the discussion in my exchanges with friends, family, acquaintances, the personal and professional groups in which I participate (both online and in person), and the conversations I am having with my patients in my work as a psychotherapist. The topics my patients want to talk about have changed. They feel that they are living in a new context since the election. None of my patients support the Trump administration. They often want to talk about politics during sessions, and I have dispensed with whatever illusion of neutrality there may have been previously, sometimes commiserating when it comes to these topics. Many of my patients are now struggling more than they were before with questions of balance: how to tolerate the constant flow of new information, much of it distressing; how to take action on issues that seem urgent; and meanwhile, how to go about the business of being alive and being their “old selves” at the same time. In some cases these needs seem at odds. I find many of my patients to be swooping dramatically back and forth between the feelings of anger, fear and helplessness associated with following the events in our government, and daily life activities like preparing meals for themselves and, in some cases, their families, getting enough sleep, and completing whatever tasks are demanded by jobs or other pursuits. For many who had not been as politically tuned in or outraged previously, these two poles seem utterly unintegrated. It is almost as if each of us is two people, and we are allotting great effort to the job of being each of these two people, exhausting ourselves. My hope is that, over time, a more integrated sense of ourselves grows out of the current crisis, where an idea of ourselves as both grocery-shoppers and protesters can co-exist in our minds.
If you go by what is happening in my practice, people have become politicized. Some already were, and those that were