Notes On… The Right, the Left, and the In-Between

There’s a certain kind of client I’ve been seeing more often. Thoughtful. Heartful. Politically awake. And yes, tired, but not checked out, yet worn down from holding too much truth. They sit across from me with something like emotional vertigo, torn between the urgency of one world and the nuance of another, pulled between loyalty to community and loyalty to their own conscience. I get it. I feel it too.

We talk so much about red and blue, conservative and progressive, but we rarely discuss what lies beneath those labels. When I step back, not just politically but psychologically, I start to notice something else. The Right often holds something primal, something of the id. It’s rooted in the body, in survival, in order, control, and familiarity. It clings to tradition, not always out of hate, but often out of fear. Beneath that rage, I hear grief. The Left, on the other hand, tends to carry the superego. It leads with conscience and critique, with vision and moral clarity. But when wounded, it can become sharp. It can tighten into rigidity and performance, into judgment that forgets that healing and justice, though deeply connected, are not quite the same.

And then there’s the in-between. Not the centrist shrug, certaintly not the “both sides” thing. I’m talking about the people who are trying to live inside the tension. Who want to grieve, not cancel. Who want to fight for trans kids while still sitting down with their Christian parents and asking, gently, what they’re so afraid of. The in-between is the ego at its most grounded. It tries to mediate the extremes without losing its center. It listens without needing to agree. It asks questions instead of memorizing arguments. It knows when to speak, when to be quiet, and when to say, honestly, “I’m still working it out.”

Let me be clear: this is not a political statement. I’m not a strategist. I’m a therapist. I’m speaking from what I see in the room. People are unraveling, not just because of policies, but because of polarization itself. Families torn. Friends gone. Clients are ashamed that they aren’t mad enough, or overwhelmed by how much they care. Because politics touches identity, it reaches into the unconscious. It stirs up grief, longing, fear, and the need to belong. That’s why it hurts so much.

I get nervous when I see moral purity replacing relational integrity. Not because I don’t believe in accountability. I believe in it with my whole heart. But I also want us to be careful. I want us to hold each other to something real without becoming the kind of fundamentalism we claim to oppose. Hate, like trauma, knows how to change costumes. It can speak the language of revolution just as easily as tradition. Any system that tells you who to hate without asking you to examine what you’re avoiding, what you’re projecting, what you’re grieving, might not be one that actually heals.

I’m not interested in politics that demands perfection. I’m interested in the kind that makes room for humanness. For contradiction. For change. For truth spoken softly. For conversations that don’t always have to end in someone being declared wrong. And yes, not every view is valid. Some ideas are violent and must be named as such. But even then, the question matters. “Where does that belief come from?” Not because we need to agree, but because we need to understand. That is what stops us from becoming strangers to ourselves.

That’s the work I keep coming back to. Not purity. Not certainty. But staying human in the face of everything pulling us apart.