When the World Feels Fractured: Psychosocial Strain, "Othering," and Dialectical Empathy
It can be deeply upsetting to bear witness to civil unrest. Beyond the physical disruption of protests, there is a profound emotional toll in watching empathy disappear from our lexicon. Dialogue rapidly collapses into binary extremism, name-calling, and fear-driven "us versus them" thinking. When society feels chaotic, our nervous systems naturally crave certainty — all too often, that need for safety drives us to locate a scapegoat to blame.
As an American mental health consultant, counselor, and coach living in France, I often find myself stepping back to process these turbulent moments through an integrated lens. My background spans public mental health, criminology and crime statistics, social ecology, and clinical social work. This perspective allows me to view expressions of psychosocial strain not as isolated, random outbursts of hostility, but through a broader, more holistic frame: as human beings responding to acute structural and environmental pressure.
When individuals experience systemic injustice or chronic powerlessness, the resulting emotional strain must go somewhere. Often, how someone vents that pressure depends on their culture's social contract:
Outward Collective Action: In societies with strong civic traditions like France, strain is frequently directed outward into street protest and public demand—disruptive and uncomfortable, yet serving as a collective safety valve.
Inward Self-Destruction: In hyper-individualized, market-driven environments where collective bargaining channels are suppressed, that same strain turns inward, manifesting in elevated interpersonal crime and "deaths of despair."
When fear takes over, our instinct is to protect ourselves by "othering" — reducing complex human beings and identity groups into enemies. But true emotional resilience and collective peace require something much harder: dialectical empathy.
In dialectical thinking, we learn to accept that two seemingly contradictory truths can exist at the exact same time without invalidating each other. We can have both valid distress about disruption and property damage while simultaneously maintaining deep, unwavering compassion for marginalized communities demanding systemic change.
Healing — whether in an individual counseling relationship or across a divided society —begins when we stop flattening human pain into rigid sides and choose
dialectical empathy over fear.
Read my complete, expanded essay on Substack.
