Contemplating Complexity and Darkness

Thank you for checking out my very first blog. I am a Clinical Psychologist specializing in treating trauma and related clinical problems since 1998. I’m sitting down to write this, humbly hoping to offer some healing thoughts and ideas after making it through the dark and terrifying events of the past couple of weeks. We probably all need to take a moment to reflect, check in with our mental health and identify our supports at this excruciating moment in history.

The Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel reverberated around the globe. They struck an immensely painful chord in the lives of people worldwide, destroying entire communities in Israel with grotesque and sadistic acts of violence and intentionally putting these acts on graphic display. The subsequent and ongoing retaliation by Israel and ongoing conflict in Gaza, whatever your political ideologies, have continued to barrage us with a magnitude of human violence and suffering that is hard to bear and comprehend. Furthermore, these events and the complex and vehemently debated history in that region have broken wide open rifts in families, communities, friendships, and nations.

If you are noticing that you feel off-balance, confused, angry, sad, vulnerable, raw, scared, or despairing, you are not alone. People with personal ties to Israel and Palestine are feeling immense grief and likely rage and terror. People from diverse backgrounds, with varying amounts of knowledge about the Middle East, are forming and expressing strong opinions. Some people and groups are making insensitive or marginalizing remarks, whether driven by ignorance, bias, or more hateful motivations. Jews and Muslims around the world may feel particularly vulnerable and emotional at this time as we react from different identities, affiliations, histories and beliefs, experiences of being targeted by prejudice and hatred, and histories of personal or generational trauma.

How can we bear this overwhelming pain with empathy and without hardening and numbing ourselves? How can we support those we care about and seek the support we need? How can we check our biases and react with gentleness and compassion to other humans in our lives, acknowledging that we are all flawed and biased? These are the complicated questions I have been contemplating. In today’s polarized society and in a time when opinions and information, whether true or false, can make it around the world to thousands almost instantaneously through social media and news outlets, it is especially difficult to hold complexity. I have no magic, authoritative answers to any of these questions, let alone to the conflict in the Middle East. I raise these questions in the hopes of sparking some food for thought, some pause from impulsive reactions, and some compassion for all human suffering, including our own.

As I contemplate the plethora of polarized and often dehumanizing responses to recent events, I have been reminded of my knowledge of social psychology. There are many forces that dictate human behavior and decision-making, easily influencing our perceptions. One common cognitive error is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross, 1977). Essentially, humans tend to view/judge other people’s behavior as caused by their personalities, underestimating the role of context/situational factors. Furthermore, we tend to do the reverse for ourselves (i.e. we place blame on situations, out of our control). In short, we tend to NOT give others the benefit of the doubt, and we tend to not take enough responsibility for our own negative or destructive behaviors. While this is only one small piece of what appears to be going awry in the world at the moment, it is highly relevant. This attribution error is particularly dangerous when it easily expands to entire groups of people, in other words, when we see “our” group’s bad behavior as situationally determined and “other” groups’ bad behavior as due to their persistent, internal character traits.

It is easy and natural for all of us to rush to judgment and take “sides”. It is easy to label “good guys” and “bad guys”, identifying ourselves and our own social groups with the “good guys”. It is easy to lose context. It is easy to assume we are knowledgeable about context from a compelling 1-minute soundbite on social media, when we are missing so much information. It is easy to assume bad actions are always committed by people who are evil to their core. These easy and often automatic assumptions, however tempting and simplifying for our brains, don’t help us understand the drivers of human behavior. They don’t help us find solutions. They don’t create peace within ourselves or in the world.

Perhaps we need to do more of what is harder. In these coming days and weeks of inevitable continued heartbreaking and incomprehensible news, maybe we can allow space for complexity. Step back, breathe, and take a break from the constant news and social media; locate your heart and support your loved ones; feed your well-being with the things that calm you and matter to you (nature, meditation, exercise, therapy, art, music, family, to name a few possibilities); give to those most in harm’s way with whatever aid you can provide. And try, even momentarily, to suspend and question automatic judgment, and see what remains before you.