“In this Pickle Together”

I’m trying something new with this edition of Unraveled. After I wrote about the dangers of fixating on the “Identified Patient” in politics and families, I got a note from Gary Friedman, the acclaimed conflict mediator and author. He saw my point — and then upped the ante.

This is something Gary has been doing ever since I took his conflict mediation workshop in Mexico, eight years ago. That was back before he became a central character in my last book (in which he revealed his own struggles with high conflict politics). Again and again, Gary pushes me to keep digging. It’s one of the many things I love about him.

So I called him up, and we had a good chat about the maddening problems of our time — and the healing power of sadness.

Since we spoke, I’ve been trying to allow sadness in more often. It sounds grim, but it really does help. It reminds me of that saying: “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”1

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Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity. And if you’d rather listen, here’s something else new! The audio version:

Please let me know what you think.

Amanda: So I wrote this newsletter about how we can all get very fixated on the “identified patient” in families, but also in countries, and then we miss other problems. And you sent me an email nudging me to go a little further.

Gary Friedman: Yeah, well, the thing is, when you have identified somebody as the problem, you’ve now located the problem outside yourself.

And while that feels kind of good in the moment…

Amanda: It sure does.

Gary Friedman: It doesn’t really help to solve the problem because there’s not much you can do about changing them.

But you can change you. [Pres.] Trump doesn’t exist without us participating in some way. Until we recognize how we participate in making him, it goes on. And we’re all in this kind of cycle where the system continues.

Amanda: Hmm. So I think you’re right, but there’s part of my brain that’s like, “Wait, it doesn’t matter what we do. No matter what we do, this continues.”

So let’s start small maybe. Sometimes that’s helpful. Let’s imagine this is a family.

And you’ve dealt with a lot of family conflict as a mediator. Maybe a couple that’s divorcing, right?

Gary Friedman: Right.

Amanda: And they might get into a dynamic where, one person is clearly the problem, right? Whether it’s the husband or the wife or the kid.

Gary Friedman: Practically every family has something like this.

Amanda: Okay. Not just divorcing couples?

Gary Friedman: Everybody, I think everybody does. Who’s the person we blame when things go wrong?

Amanda: The problem child, so to speak.

Gary Friedman: Or the problem father or mother. You know, the drunk uncle, right? We blame that person.

And then we don’t have to ask the question, “What did we do?”

How did we co-create this problem of the drunk uncle?

And you say it in the article: the first thing is to recognize that we’re in a system. So now we’re looking at ourselves in relationship to the system, and we can say, “What’s our part in this problem?”

Amanda: So let’s say there is a drunk uncle. He’s causing all kinds of problems.

Gary Friedman: Yeah.

Amanda: If I blame him entirely, it means we’re really stuck. Because I can’t make him stop drinking.

Gary Friedman: Exactly.

Amanda: Right. So then how do I look at my own role? I mean, he’s the one, Gary, who’s drinking too much, fighting with neighbors and throwing trash cans. So what do you want me to do?

Gary Friedman: Yeah, well, he’s hurting people, and he may be hurting people in the family. So what’s my responsibility for that, assuming maybe it’s one percent or one thousandth of a percent? How am I participating in the perpetuation of this thing?

Amanda: I’m not kicking him out of the house?

Gary Friedman: Yeah.

Amanda: So you’re saying it could be that I only own one one-thousandth of the problem, but that’s the part I can control.

Gary Friedman: That’s right. And with the drunk uncle, I see that he’s drunk, and I get mad at him. That’s my piece. So I’m gonna tell him how bad he is. So is that helping the situation?

Not really. I am not doing anything but adding to the suffering. I’m piling on. Instead, what could I do to actually be empathetic to him?

Now, it’s really hard to feel empathy for Trump. There’s just no question about it.

But in fact, we know for him to be behaving in this way, which looks so completely unhinged, that there’s got to be some deep disturbance.

I guess I have to begin with some empathy.

Amanda: That’s really hard.

Gary Friedman: Yeah, and I can’t do that for more than a moment.

Amanda: Only if I’ve had eight to nine hours of sleep in a full meal and coffee.

Gary Friedman: And a couple of beers.

Amanda: Exactly. Now I’m curious, I do want to get to Trump, but one more beat in the smaller realm. So this comes from family systems theory, right? From psychotherapy. And this is a known issue.

Do you, do you remember this ever coming up in a mediation that you’re working on?

Gary Friedman: All the time. It’s, “If I can fix them, I don’t have to deal with me.”

Amanda: Right. So it becomes like avoidance?

Gary Friedman: And leaves me gaining no intelligence into my own behavior.

“With divorcing couples, we always talk about what happened in the marriage. And sometimes they’re full of blame. But eventually, at some point, it starts to sink in: We’re in this pickle together.” — Gary

Amanda: So Gary, how are you and I sustaining the system?

Gary Friedman: By focusing on badmouthing Trump.

He’s got our entire focus, as you point out. What if we just took that energy and turned it toward, “What can I do to actually make the world better and use that time to think about anything that could actually make the world better and people less polarized?”

Because it’s the polarization, as you keep pointing out, that is the terrible problem. We are so polarized.

And every time we watch him, we’re feeding his desire for attention, whether he knows it or not.

Amanda: So my husband, one of the ways he deals with it is to not give that attention. He has a very regimented news diet now.

Gary Friedman: Yeah, and that’s a step in the right direction. But there’s another step he could take — which is to feel the pain of the situation. What it’s doing to the world, what it’s doing to him and to the people he loves.

There’s so much suffering. It’s enough to go around, all over the place.

Amanda: It’s funny you say that. I was literally just reading a study about how — you probably know this intuitively — but I did not realize that in conflict, sadness is much more useful than anger.

Gary Friedman: Oh, yeah.

Amanda: It sounds like what you’re saying is, “Feel the sadness.”

Gary Friedman: Yeah. Anger pushes away. Sadness brings us together. Sadness connects us.

Amanda: It’s interesting, right?

Gary Friedman: You know the Sam Keen book, Faces of the Enemy?

He goes to visit this guy that killed this family in Seattle. And Sam says, I’m crying the tears for you that you can’t cry for yourself.

[Side note: Here’s that moment from that encounter from the film Faces of the Enemy. The actual quote is: “I feel all your uncried tears and all the pain of your life you can’t feel. But I feel for the victims more.”]

Amanda: Wow.

Gary Friedman: We are connected, and Trump is in fact a human being.

You know, I’m not saying I know what to do with him.

Amanda: I think if you can’t get to empathy for Trump, you could get to empathy for people who voted for him.

Gary Friedman: Yes, that’s right.

Amanda: And that’s who’s still here after Trump is gone.

It’s funny because once in a while I’ll come across something I wrote or an email back and forth I had with somebody when Biden was president.

And I’ll notice that some of the same problems seem to be setting the country on fire.

Gary Friedman: Yeah.

Amanda: Not exactly the same, but remember all the school board meetings? Where people were freaking out and just turning on each other? Those kind of fractures, those are still out there.

Gary Friedman: Here’s I think the real key to it: Nobody wants to hold all the different layers, contradictions and inconsistencies because it’s so hard to do that. But it’s so much closer to the truth of the situation than blame or identifying somebody as the problem.

We know in our hearts that that’s not the whole story.

With the drunk uncle, the fact that his father was an alcoholic and beat him, I don’t want to take that information in. Because if I take it in, then I will feel more empathy.

And then I’ll realize that, you know, it’s sad. And when you move from anger to sadness, you’re actually moving to someplace deeper inside yourself.

Amanda: This study, it said that people who were induced to states of sadness rather than anger exhibited lower polarization and false polarization in the context of Hurricane Katrina and in the context of a mass shooting.

So sadness increased people’s willingness to negotiate and their openness to their opponent’s perspectives.

It makes you think that when you’re bringing people together in conflict, maybe starting with an acknowledgement of shared sadness would be better than any alternative.

Gary Friedman: With divorcing couples, we always talk about what happened in the marriage. And sometimes they’re full of blame. Sometimes they blame themselves. Sometimes they blame each other.

But eventually, at some point, it starts to sink in: We’re in this pickle together.

Amanda: In the pickle together, that’s where we need to get to, right? Accepting that there is no way out of this except to deal with each other.

Gary Friedman: And so the question is, how do we get over our addictions to this blame cycle, and live in more complexity?

Amanda: Maybe the biggest way we’re all contributing to the polarization is by not knowing each other?

Gary Friedman: Yes. Yes.

Amanda: After Trump’s first election, I was trying to report on these organizations that do bridge building — you know, where Democrats are talking to Republicans and vice versa. And this liberal friend of mine was like, “I don’t want to talk to them. They’re racist.”

And it’s always stayed with me. That is how we stay where we are, right? We don’t talk to each other.

Gary Friedman: Yeah. I had a great friend, really one of the most smartest women I’ve ever known, and she was keeping her distance from some person. And I said, “I don’t know why you’re doing that.” She said, “Because I know that once I hear their story, I’ll never be able to hold them in that same way again. I’d really much rather hate them.”

Amanda: Wow. It’s so honest.

Gary Friedman: We’re constructed in some way where, the complexity, it just, it just takes a toll on us. It’s exhausting.

“Nobody wants to hold all the different layers, contradictions and inconsistencies because it’s so hard to do that. But it’s so much closer to the truth of the situation.” — Gary

Amanda: This woman I know, who works [to build relationships] with Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, she says that she does go to protests sometimes against [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. But she calls it “work avoidance.” Because the relationships between the Palestinians and Israelis, that is the thing that’s gonna get us out of this.

But the problem is, that’s a very long time horizon and it requires vulnerability, whereas protesting, you don’t have to look at yourself.

It’s funny, when I wrote that last newsletter, I got some messages from people who did not like it. Including a woman who was like, “Are you complaining about Trump because he’s stopped all these wars and lowered inflation?” And she listed like 10 things she felt he had done.

And of course my first reaction was defensive. But I’m really glad she said that because it’s a reminder to me how she’s experiencing this. She’s experiencing this same moment totally differently.

Gary Friedman: Yeah.

Amanda: And so are millions of Americans.

I don’t know that we’ve solved it, but I feel like there’s something about sadness that I’m gonna come back to.

Gary Friedman: I do think it’s the Buddhist thing, the suffering, that’s what binds us all as human beings.

Amanda: Yeah. And so maybe sometimes the thing you can do is just feel the sadness.

Gary Friedman: Yeah, to really feel it.

Here’s to knowing each other, in sadness and in health,

Amanda

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1. CityCast: If you live in Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake, Washington, DC, Philly, Portland (OR), Madison, Austin, Nashville, Seattle or the Twin Cities, you should be listening to your local CityCast. Started by my friend David Plotz, it’s a network of daily podcasts and newsletters that help you understand the place where you live. What I love about it is that I can tell the hosts are rooting for the health of the communities they are covering, even when they are critical.

2. Unforgiving Places: This captivating book by economist Jens Ludwig reveals the cause of most shootings in America. Not gangs, not drugs, not robberies. Are you ready? Arguments. Yes, fleeting, interpersonal disputes that go sideways in minutes. Then Ludwig shares a powerful, practical solution. The only question is, which state will do it first?

3. Why isn’t Everyone Talking About This? Denver cut street homelessness by 45% in two years. How did this happen? And why isn’t it happening in every city? Check out this Governing story for details.

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