Healing conversations

Benito Teehankee
Managing for Society, The Manila Times
July 31, 2022

The election season has ended but, for many, it has been one of the most stressful elections in memory.  Friends and family members have been unfriending each other on social media because of differences in their preferred candidates.  Some young people I know who used to live with their parents have moved out of their family homes over political differences.

Even after the proclamations, there is a feeling of gloom among many people I know about how the elections turned out.  This is to be expected, of course, since elections always produce winners and losers.  Unfortunately, this election has made it difficult to have civil conversations about the future of the country and what we all need to do together.  People are just so divided and many are still smarting from harsh words exchanged during the run-up to election day.  When I checked Google Trends on the days of the elections, there were several spikes in searches for “migration”.  Are people so despondent that they’re seriously considering abandoning their own country?  Quite troubling.

I think that it’s time for healing conversations.  We are one country and our destinies as citizens are interconnected.  Put simply: we need each other to build our nation.  But to positively co-exist, we need to be more attuned to each other’s needs, even when we don’t always agree.  Mahatma Gandhi understood the interconnectedness of people in one country, even with differences in viewpoints. At the height of the Hindu-Muslim communal riots in India in 1947, one of Gandhi’s followers came to tell him the harrowing story of how his son had died during a clash between a Hindu mob and a Muslim mob, Gandhi advised him to "go and find an orphan child born of Muslim parents, adopt him as your own son, and bring him to worship Allah but with the ideal of non-violence."  

Gandhi believed that hatred can easily blind us to how much we share in common. We need to make an effort to reach out to the other side, and see the good in them, as we hope that they would see the good in us.  By learning to love someone who belongs to someone he hates, Gandhi hoped that his mourning follower would learn to temper his animosity and develop greater solidarity with the hated.

What if Leni and BBM supporters started reaching out to each other?  What if they put the elections behind them and had healing conversations about their dreams for the country, the country they all love? The psychologist Marshall Rosenberg developed the principles of nonviolent communication to help people have conversations even about their deepest differences by focusing on understanding each other’s needs.  

The website of the Center for Nonviolent Communication explains that “NVC begins by assuming that we are all compassionate by nature and that violent strategies—whether verbal or physical—are learned behaviors taught and supported by the prevailing culture.  NVC also assumes that we all share the same basic human needs, and that all actions are a strategy to meet one or more of these needs.”

I suggest that we reach out to someone in the opposite political camp and engage in nonviolent communication.  Our goal is to understand the deep need that the person believes can be met through the leadership of his or her favored candidate.  Let us set aside the temptation to debate, interrogate, argue, convince, chide or demean.  Instead, let us listen deeply with our hearts to find ways to move forward.  We are starting this process at De La Salle University.  This process could prove to be quite difficult but I am sure that we will discover, as far as our dreams for our country are concerned, that we share much more in common than our differences suggest. Then the process of healing for nation-building can begin.