In this series I will explore the way that thinking and feeling can work together to activate our common sense, tracing opportunities to engage one another from an emerging scientific consensus that does not demonize people who are different than we are. It is my hope to contribute to a new wave of understanding that will help us remember how to be a people. With that in mind, here we go.

I am a clinical psychologist in Northern California, and I come from a family that has been politically active in this state since before it was a state. We’ve been in the Napa Valley since California briefly existed as its own country, before joining the union in 1850. These two inheritances, the psychological and the political, have shaped everything I do. For most of my adult life I have been trying to weave them together: attending to our inner suffering through the tools of psychology, and to our outer, public suffering through organizing, advocacy, and no small amount of folly.

In the mid-90s, I stood before our county Board of Supervisors to support funding for a neighborhood park. I made the case not only on its merits as a public space, but as a response to what I called a community-level depression. The supervisors stared back at me in flat-faced stony silence. They did not ask questions or offer me a thank-you, no acknowledgment of any kind. It was one of my earliest painful lessons in trying to bridge psychological insight with community life.

Winston Churchill defined success as going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. This spirit helps with the work.

That was thirty years ago. A great deal has changed. We now widely recognize that our communities have a deep psychology and that each individual psyche carries a core political dimension. Therapists are bringing their full training into community spaces. Universities have launched programs at this integration point. Community organizers who have done their own psychological work are weaving that self-knowledge into how they lead.

Two friends of mine run public discussion groups at the local library on community issues. They first train participants in reflective listening before a single policy debate begins. I have borrowed that practice for the groups I convene. I gather community leaders, activists, psychotherapists, students, and curious citizens who want to work together.

There are not political solutions alone to the challenges before us: climate change, global conflict, the culture wars, the rise of authoritarianism. We are learning to turn to psychology, not just for therapy but also to cultivate our community intelligence.

That is the work I engage in my in-person and Zoom groups. Through this blog series I will weave personal reflections, my own and other stories, and the challenging thought required to integrate differing points of view whether they be driven by disciplinary or ideological differences. I invite you to also see my vlogs on my website under Video Presence.

I offer real stories, genuine failures alongside the breakthroughs, and my faith that the inner and outer paths to freedom belong together and provide us with opportunities to cultivate our “moral attention,” which I’ll discuss in the fourth blog. In my next blog I’ll turn to the current epidemic of loneliness.

COMING UP IN THIS SERIES:

• First belonging and the threat of loneliness
• Convening community groups where we integrate healing and justice values
• Developing our moral attention
• Supporting each other’s best selves: the freedoms of human development
• Working with our own ideologies: strengths and limitations
• Developing our group’s immune system in response to the culture wars, social media, and the rising authoritarianism
• What psychotherapy can teach organizers — and vice versa
• Authoritarianism from the inside out — a psychological lens on our political moment
• Running the groups — how storytelling and structure create transformation