Making Space For Humanity

There are moments in politics when humanity is degraded - when a cheap phrase holds disgust for others and creates a sense of us vs them. I feel that disgust when I see naked racism in politicians on the news or in my feed.

People are treated as numbers, threats, burdens, or problems that somebody else has to solve. Trigger words can symbolise and hide what is really being said. When I hear them, I often hear something underneath - a contest for power, attention or resources in which another person's humanity has become negotiable. Talk about refugees conveys the idea that the long journeys they travelled through fear and isolation did not really happen, and that these are just people who want to take away 'our stuff'. Or we hear stories about children carrying intergenerational trauma which treat them as outcasts, dangerous, and somehow responsible for all our grievances.

In my own experience, I find it very hard to hear that kind of language without feeling a strong reaction. Anger, grief, alarm - disgust - at the world, even at myself and my inaction. It can hurt deeply, and I know how easy it is to react in ways that just deepen the divide, the anger, the loss of hope. Words spoken on radio, in social media, even in the news can be very good at finding our rawest emotions and putting them to work. We cry, argue, panic, fight, or keep scrolling long after we have stopped thinking clearly. The feeling is real. That doesn't mean the people or systems who provoked it should get to decide what we do next.

I think we do need to feel that pain. We need to let it speak in us, and through us. For me, counselling has begun to offer opportunities to move in the other direction.

What I mean is that when I have counselling conversations with people, it is about creating a mutual conversation - one that moves back and forth. Neither person remains an object in the other person's story. Together, we can create a space where a human life is not small. We can slow down. We can listen to the history around a person's fear, the relationships around their choices, and the hopes that have survived alongside the problem. We lose the need to just react.

In that space, care is not passive. It is something we practise. We pay attention. We notice these urges: to reduce a person to the worst thing that has happened to them, the hardest thing they have done, or the category somebody has placed them in, then we consult our souls for alternative ways of thinking.

When I hear language that discards parts of our humanity, I am trying to let the pain deepen my care rather than hand my reaction over for someone else to use.

I am still learning how to do this. I still react. But sometimes, if I stay with the pain for long enough, it becomes a reminder of what I refuse to give up: the humanity of the person in front of me, and my own.