A nice Tea Party

No, I’m not offering marriage advice to every citizen of the land.  But a good friend sent me an interesting piece of political writing from the New York Times, and pointed out the connections it made between Imago couples therapy and the way Professor J.M. Bernstein writes about anger.

Bernstein’s article looks at what he calls “The Very Angry Tea Party”.  Here’s a quote. “This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down.”

My friend, Bob Drezner, a retired Imago Couples Therapist, wrote this.  “. The apparent disappointment in the Other (in this case, government) is remarkably like the disappointment one can at times feel towards your partner in a primary relationship.  The depression/anger/rage appears equally in both of these instances.”

Bernstein manages to write about the Tea Party movement without appearing to make any political judgment about whether they are “right” or “wrong”.  Instead, he listens to what they say, and more particularly, to the underlying emotions with which they say it.  That in itself sounds like a page out of a text book about dialogue.  He talks about how all of us have chosen a relationship with government, which mirror’s marriage in some ways.  We long for a good government, who responds rationally and with care for our needs.  When it appears to become ineffectual, it does feel like a loss of faith, and bring forwards the emotions that one might reserve for a lover who fails us.

The saddest warning note in Bernstein’s article was when he pointed out that one word for divorcing your government is revolution. 

Imago is about listening and hearing, and recognizing the emotions of those we hear, and as Drezner wrote to me ” I was just struck by the parallels presented to the world of Imago. It seems to me a wonderful way to understand the Tea Party issue especially in light of the article you sent out about Harville and Helen.”

Ah yes!  There was indeed another article published this week, in the Toronto Globe and Mail.  Writer Susan Hampson noted Hendrix’s early history as a preacher, and called her article “The Love Gospel according to Dr. Hendrix.”

Hampson inspired Hendrix to deliver some characteristically powerful material.  From the Globe and Mail: “We have discovered that the violence on the planet arises out of the dysfunction in the family, the core of which is the couple.” The statement gets put out there, just like that. No gentle introduction. He rephrases for clarity. “All violence on the planet is the family writ large.”  He pauses as if to let his audience absorb it. “We now know where the demon is of the human tragedy, the human problem. The demon is in the family.”

On one level we have a national family breaking down.  Bernstein points out that the concept of the old fashioned political meeting is going out of style, because people are so angry that the meetings become disrupted.  The national family has left the dinner table discussion in a rage, and slammed the bedroom door behind it. 

Yet here is Hendrix saying that to restart real discussion we need to start within our own families.  It is there that we can learn the language of listening and understanding.  We can learn how to understand our deepest fears and not let them overcome us, but to enable us to share the fears of others. 

Hendrix’s marriage advice for United States of America seems to be to learn to listen again, and to understand, so we can all work together to create the world we dreamed of, and which now sometimes feels beyond our grasp.