Question:

Everyday, there are political injustices and attacks on our human rights. What is happening in Minnesota with ICE is heartbreaking. How do we cope with political stress when so much is out of our control?

Coping with political stress in a continually evolving political landscape can feel challenging, namely when it feels as if we cannot do anything to immediately shift our circumstances — or the circumstances of beloved members of our nation’s community. Feeling at the mercy of systemic forces that you do not have immediate agency to control or shift can cultivate a sensation of fear, tension, dis-ease, and at times helplessness.

When considering the insights towards coping, its best to start with definitions as well as defining my chosen path of leaning into this question.

Coping is the conscious, voluntary cognitive and behavioral efforts used to manage internal or external stressful situations that are appraised as taxing or exceeding one’s resources.

For our purposes, I will focus on a two pronged approach to coping that prioritizes focus on our emotions as well as the engagements that we can cultivate. The aim here, is to provide grounding for us as individuals in times of tension, and create an encouragement towards societal engagements that uplift, support, and cultivate safety.

The Grounding and Support of our Bodies and Minds

Coping, within the realm of trauma informed care, is an encouragement to turn inwards towards our bodies and minds to cultivate grounding and safety as we interact with a world filled with omnipresent unpredictability. This is not in aims to engage passively with the world around us, but rather to focus on cultivating a sense of stability to support us in navigating the unknown.

In the work that I cultivate with clients, it is inevitable that sociopolitical tension impacts their day to day lives — even my own life. When we continually witness collective trauma in our news feeds and social timelines, we are subjected to emotional tension and perceived powerlessness. Continual exposure to this type of media shifts our emotional tone, our interpersonal relationships with others, and can augment our mindset towards negativity and anticipatory pessimism.

When this becomes the dominant focus of daily life, we begin to feel the psychological strain of systemic injustice — especially when we are repeatedly confronting problems we can’t immediately change, yet feel compelled to fix. Action and advocacy matter deeply, and so does our mental health. When engagement comes from a grounded place of care rather than reactive frustration, we open ourselves to more sustainable and effective ways of being in the world.

My encouragement as we continually face political injustice is to primarily turn our attention to the immediate needs of our bodies and minds. Take inventory of the psychological impacts of constant negative external stimuli and ask yourself what do you need.

Here are ways that prioritizing your needs can show up:

Setting Boundaries

Boundaries are the strategies used to cultivate safety for yourself and manage your own actions and responses. They are for you only, and not to be confused with rules about how people or things will show up in your life. A boundary says, “I will do X if Y occurs”, a rule says, “You must…”. It is valuable to delineate between boundaries and rules because the former is a focus on managing you and the latter is about controlling others — something that in this lifetime, we will never be able to do. It is important to note that boundaries can in fact change over time, and as you grow, so will your boundaries. When it comes to political stress, ask yourself:

To what degree are my political engagements productive and at what point does my engagement become non productive? What engagements equip you for action and which engagements keep you in a loop of cyclical frustration?
As you discover this answer for yourself, attempt to act accordingly with what you have discovered. Maybe this means reducing the time you spend consuming news for a brief period, maybe this can mean choosing not to engage with perspectives that actively project ignorance and disinformation, maybe this means shifting the dialogue with colleagues or loved ones in service of your current needs. The focus here is not on a “one size fits all” answer, but rather discovering boundaries based upon current assessment of needs and a desire to support your mental health and its growing capacity for navigating challenges.

Engage in Impactful Self Care

Self care can at times be minimized in the face of political injustices and tension — it can even feel selfish. At the same time, self care is the fuel that empowers us to navigate life, and it does not always need to look one particular way. Self care is the intentional, active, and comprehensive practice of providing adequate attention to one’s own physical and psychological wellness. In times of collective trauma, it is valuable to recognize the impact of care for self. Societally experienced injustice impacts both our bodies, and our mind in pervasively negative ways.

The impact of societally witnessed aggression and violence can cause long-term impacts on the brain, the immune response, and the neuroendocrine system, which can lead to increased depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, suicide, and increased cardiovascular risk.

The above represents the cumulative impact of continual exposure to violence and will be experienced differently by different individuals.

When it comes to political stress, ask yourself:

Do I balance engagement with restoration? If I take inventory of my day to day or week to week, how much time do I carve out to assess my needs and intentionally care for them? How often to I metabolize challenging emotions through movement in order to decrease their impact on me and encourage more value aligned engagements with my life?
Self care is not a one size fits all paradigm, and it most certainly does not need to fit with a consumerist model of caring for self. Care can be cultivated without consumption and my encouragement to you is to intentionally ask yourself: “Am I showing up for myself in the same way that I show up for the causes you support?” This level of inquiry will only support how you balance your efforts aimed at yourself for restoration and at the external world for a reinvention of how we navigate our society.

Focus on Communal Care

Rounding out this particular section on attending to the body and mind, I will focus on the importance of communal care and working to cultivate environments where bodies and minds are cared for and nourished. What always rings true for me, and what I frequently share in session with my clients, is the importance of recognizing yourself and others as collective strands in a larger tapestry of social change — each one important, each one valuable, and each one different though complementary and interdependent. From this perspective, we need to focus on what communal care looks like as a form of coping and defensive strategy towards societal injustice that we collectively experience.

A major tenet of communal care is that there is a perspective shift from individual self care to collective wellness.

When I say communal care, I am focusing on the beneficial impacts of existing within, engaging with, and working to cultivate healing communal spaces. A major tenet of communal care is that there is a perspective shift from individual self care to collective wellness. Think: mutual support, shared responsibility, equity, compassion, and building community capacity to thrive and express resilience. This piece is incredibly valuable because we shift the focus away from ourselves momentarily and ask what can we provide to our communities in order to support others and create a breeding ground for mutually driven support and care. In times of challenge, community has been an enduring support system that has allowed individuals to regulate, share conflict, share stories, cultivate solutions to shared challenges, and feel a sense of belonging. Belonging reverberates deeply within me here as I write because in a contemporary view of society, we are continually witnessing the harmful ideologies perpetuated that “those people” do not belong. What I find incredibly restorative in the midst of challenge is to connect with a community of people that understand you, welcome you, and encourage you to show up as your most authentic self — and even confront you from a space of compassion to encourage growth.

My encouragement is to take a moment to reflect upon the following:

How often do I engage with my communities when I am feeling drained or depleted for support? How often do I turn to my community in times of challenge and check in? How often am I being a proactive member of my community in order to support those who need an aspect of care or engagement that only I can bring to these spaces?
Your community is a place of connection, restoration, and a sense of belonging — it can even be your resting place when the world feels bleak. The intention here is to lean into communities that support you, and asking how can you contribute to your community in your way. Let’s return here to the metaphor of the threads of societal change, your thread might look different from your community members, but how can you work alongside others in value aligned ways even if the engagement looks different?

Meeting the Political within Ourselves

Moving forward here, I will shift focus from the emotion focused support of ourselves in times of political stress to problem oriented forms of coping that allows us to cultivate engagements that uplift, support, and cultivate safety.

When I frame this as, “Meeting the Political within Ourselves”, what I mean is taking an introspective look at how we interact with political themes within our everyday lives and cultivating a pivot where necessary to shift how we show up. Much like the therapeutic work that I lead with clients, I often share that discovering the solution to a complex problem (or coping with it) begins with introspection, so we are thoughtful about what is being projected outwards, inadvertently and overtly, as we interact with the world.

When I frame this as, “Meeting the Political within Ourselves”, what I mean is taking an introspective look at how we interact with political themes within our everyday lives and cultivating a pivot where necessary to shift how we show up.

Take interpersonal conflict for example, this is something that shows up within our personal lives, but conflict also shows up within the larger macro view of our society. Take a moment to consider when conflict shows up within your life:

When you are presented with conflict how do you respond? Do you shrink or expand? Do you address or suppress? Do you ignore or confront? How do you feel? What do you think about yourself? What do you think about the person or thing you are in conflict with?

I reference this because with respect to how we show up within our world, we have to be mindful of how we authentically deal with internal conflicts to discover what are our ways of meeting external conflict and tension as we interact with the world around us. Upon a recent read of My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, the author eloquently references the concept of “Dirty Pain” vs “Clean Pain”, which resonated with me deeply as I was putting together ideas for this post. He describes clean pain as the necessary, courageous, and uncomfortable experience of confronting challenge, trauma, and adversity. Meanwhile, dirty pain is the harmful, avoidant, and retaliatory reaction to fear, conflict or tension — that allows for pain to be projected outwards as opposed to healed within the individual. This conceptualization of our responses to pain and conflict really characterize the message here that, your work is the world’s work. This message is an invitation to consider the parts of yourself that still need healing that may be unintentionally projected outward. Our micro interactions and the macro world are deeply linked. The individual shapes the societal and the societal shapes the individual.

When considering change within societal systems that can cultivate dysfunction it is easy to think of big picture, large scale reformation out of a dire need and desire for change to arrive now. Though well intentioned, I encourage a shift in focus to small, consistent efforts that steadily reshape how we navigate the world and create meaningful change.

Meeting the political within the self can look like (and is not limited to):

Examining where your personal conflicts meet the world

Take a moment for introspection and ask yourself, how do the values that lead my life, lead how I show up in the world? How do the ways that I cope with pain or challenge inform how I show up as I navigate life? What characterizes the interactions I have with people who I agree with? Disagree with?

If you find in assessment that you express avoidance in the face of personal conflict, do you also show up avoidant in the face of conflict that our society is experiencing?

This is not a question of judgment, it is a question of honest personal reflection about how you are showing up, what you are creating, and the micro engagements that you are cultivating within the larger macro world that we all inhabit.

Examining your biases from a perspective of non judgment

When discussing coping with political stress from a perspective of cultivating solutions, it is important to turn an inquisitive eye inwards. How often do implicit biases show up in your life and how do you equip yourself to recognize them courageously and ignite a pivot? Recognizing a bias does not mean you are a bad person, what it is rather is a personal invitation to explore the impacts of this bias, even if subtle, and how it impacts the world that you are a part of. Take a brief moment to ask yourself:

Are there groups of people upon which I have automatic judgments about?
When was the last time I noticed an example of prejudice, how did I show up for it? What did I do?
Do I unconsciously prefer one group of people over another?

To take a deeper dive, refer to Harvard’s Implicit Association Test as start to recognize biases that might even be hidden from you. Again, it is important to notate that recognizing biases don’t make you bad, rather the active choice to do nothing with what you discover can lead to hidden negative implications in the communities that you inhabit.

Cultivating a pivot through the experience of “Clean Pain”

No matter who you are — we have all experienced or witnessed the impact of cultural, intergenerational, ancestral and collective trauma upon our nation and beyond. Denying this fact is harmful. In order to cultivate pivots in the face of the pervasive impacts of trauma in its many forms, we need to confront it courageously to truly envision progressive movements forward. This is not a monolithic movement forward, and will look different for each person. My encouragement is to take space for the following questions, and notate the insights that show up for you in order to meet pain where it shows up and work to confront it rather than avoiding it:

What discomfort do I experience as I reflect upon the impact of trauma upon the world — and am I trying to escape it, explain it away, or sit with it to understand it more?
Where am I rehearsing blame, certainty, or righteousness to avoid feeling grief, fear, or helplessness?
What happens in my body when I allow this pain to be here without turning it into an argument or a strategy?
Am I willing to feel what this moment costs me, without demanding an immediate outcome?
Who feels threatening to me right now and what sensations arise when I think of them?
How has unhealed historical or collective trauma shaped my reactions to the world around me?

Thank you for your readership and engagement! As we might all be keenly aware, the “answer” to societal ills can at times feel elusive. My hope is that this read moved something within you. Maybe you are more curious, unsure about the next steps, or cultivating a new perspective that will support you as you navigate the ever changing political landscape of our nation. Either way, I appreciate you being here and if any questions arise, feel free to reach out to me directly. I deeply appreciated this question and my role as a therapist and coach, engaging with a diverse range of clients whose shared narratives continually deepen my understanding of our collective human experience.

Before you leave, take a look at the links below to see what supported the development of this post.

Supportive Links:

The Effects of Violence on Health

Social Determinants of Mental Health and Disorder

Potential Global Effects of the Rise of the Far Right on Public Health

More about Dr. Resmaa Menakem