Are politics driving your family apart? 10 things to try

Vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz hadn’t spoken to his conservative brother Jeff for eight years, until a quick phone call in July during the vetting process — a rift that has been painful, according to their sister, Sandra Dietrich. Several siblings of former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced his campaign for office and recently said it was a “betrayal” of their family values to endorse former President Donald Trump. The former president has also been publicly criticized extensively by his estranged niece, Mary Trump.

Sound familiar? While much about the political class can feel unrelatable and otherworldly, this clash of family members over candidates and issues is all too familiar to most of us. A 2022 poll by The New York Times and Siena College found nearly 1 in 5 voters (19%) reporting that politics had hurt their friendships or family relationships. However, an earlier 2021 poll by the Survey Center on American Life found only 1 in 10 (11%) saying they had ceased relations with a family member because of their political ideas — sentiments higher among liberal respondents than conservative ones.

The Deseret News is helping promote the ”A Braver Way” podcast this fall before the election, in partnership with KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station. The podcast aims to ”help you hear and be heard by people who confound you” so you can “disagree about politics without losing heart.”

The podcast recently re-released an episode on navigating political tensions skillfully within families. A number of people have told the host, Mónica Guzmán, that they’ve “lost something” due to political conflict that they can’t get back in their own family relationships. “They feel that there’s no way forward.”

But there is. As demonstrated in stories of reconciliation and softening , surprising relational shifts can still happen. Guzmán knows this from her own experience in her own family. Although she is liberal and her parents are conservative, their relationships are strong and sweet — and they continue to find enjoyment and learning in talking about everything, including politics. Below, we break down 10 of their secrets that could help your own family — which you can hear them talk about together in the podcast below.

1. Aiming for a more modest goal of ‘just understanding’

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to persuade and convince people of things we each find good, beautiful and true. Yet in the context of family estrangement, many people have realized that a focus on trying to “change each other’s minds” causes problems.

“Now we just try to expose our points of view, hear what the other side has to say, and maybe sleep on it for a while,” says Guzmán’s father Bernardo — with her mother Lupita agreeing, describing her shift from “trying to convince you come to our view” to “trying to make you understand my position.”

“These are the reasons why I think this way. And I just want you to understand it,” Lupita Guzmán says, summarizing how she approaches difficult issues in conversation now. “And you did,” she tells her daughter. “And that’s amazing, you know?”

2. ‘Try to control that initial reaction’

As part of being open to people’s perspectives, Bernardo Guzmán recommends trying to “control that initial reaction to hearing something that somebody says that you don’t agree with.”

Because too often, he says, an immediate reaction closes the conversation. After some challenging experiences, this attentive father decided to not bring up his thoughts immediately about a difficult issue flaring up — instead, giving some time for family members to think about it more, before “bringing up the subject again” when people seemed more emotionally grounded, thus giving them a “better chance to resolve the conflict and continue (their) conversation.”

His daughter appreciates this pattern from her dad: “I’ve noticed you a couple times with me be like, ‘Hey, remember that other day where we were talking about Jan. 6?’ .... and then we’ll just restart and it’s kinda neat that you do that.”

3. Not allowing politics to define your family

“Sometimes you get to an impasse” where “it’s too heated,” Lupita Guzmán also says, and that’s when “taking taking breaks is important.” For their family, watching Mulder and Scully’s next adventure in “The X Files” was a reprieve.

“That helps,” Lupita Guzmán says. “Because then you calm down, your heart rate slows down. Then, you see it in a different way.”

Linda Messmer, a “Braver Way” listener in Colorado, writes about her divided family intentionally avoiding politics and says that they “talk about a whole lot of other things they enjoy.” (A strategy, worth pointing out, that mirrors what Thomas Jefferson used to do at Monticello when inviting people over for dinner — directing conversation to noncontroversial matters that would unite his guests.)

“We have realized,” this woman writes, “that how we each feel about politics doesn’t define the way we feel about each other.”

Bernardo Guzmán also spoke about the other important things the family does aside from talking about politics. “Like music or going to movies or cooking together, or just looking at old photos.”

Lupita Guzmán brags about her husband’s “amazing capacity” to pull up an old photo within three seconds of an old memory. “He can find it on his phone at any moment!” Mónica Guzmán adds.

Even amid a heated conversation, the mother says “it’s a constant reminder that, hey, no matter what, we love each other. Look, we’ve been through all this together.”

4. Learning more together (we’re ‘both a little right, and a little wrong’)

“When we come to a place where we don’t agree on something,” Lupita Guzmán says, “we do research together. We Google it together. We search for the answer, and then we see, ‘Oh, there you go, you know.’”

“Usually we’re both a little bit right and a little bit wrong, you know?” Mónica Guzmán recounts debating the source of the “kids in cages” policy, when her mom said “this started with Obama.”

“And I was like, ‘no, it didn’t’” — but “then we looked it up and parts of it did start during the Obama administration.”

5. Don’t ‘miss a chance’ to learn from each other!

However helpful breaks and nonserious-conversation times can be, it’s become common in some families for these breaks to become semi-permanent — when people say, “No, we just don’t talk about politics. We just don’t talk about religion.” Referring to this common conclusion, Lupita Guzmán says, “No! But you’re missing a chance to learn from each other, to see how the other side thinks. Because we don’t have the full view of things. We never do.”

“One thing I’ve learned is that there are way more angles to every issue than I realized,” said Bernardo Guzmán — reflecting on times he has simplified things too much in the past about a certain issue. “But there’s more, there’s always more.”

“There are so many groups of people that have totally different life experiences and situations,” this man says. “So I’ve learned to account for more than one or two or three points of view about a particular issue.”

6. ‘Oh, that’s a good point’

Mónica Guzmán highlights the value of saying, “Oh, that’s a good point” when a helpful insight is raised, “even though we’re not gonna agree on the whole thing.”

Instead, our default reaction can often be, “No, that doesn’t make sense!” — signaling that “nothing in this other person makes sense because my job is to stand for what I believe and I will never give an inch.”

“Saying that’s a good point,” Guzmán clarifies, “doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly weak or that I’m gonna give ground to you in the overall thing.” But while avoiding getting absorbed in “winning and losing,” she says this kind of validation really strengthens a conversation as it “encourages us to dig deeper.”

7. Asking how someone arrived at their perspective

“We all want to hear and be heard, understand and be understood,” Guzmán says — posing the following question to her parents during the podcast that is a good one for any of us to consider: “What life experiences have influenced your values and beliefs about public policy and the public good, and sent you toward your political side?”

By asking “how people came to their beliefs, rather than why they believe them,” Guzmán suggests, we can deepen understanding in any relationship.

8. Repeating back what you heard to make sure you understand

“My left-leaning brother-in-law is extreme in his political views,” relates Meg in Utah, who leans conservative. “Whenever the family is together he can’t avoid talking politics” — sharing “whatever he’s been reading like it’s common knowledge and like everyone knows and agrees.”

“I’ve had a hard time knowing how to deal with this,” this woman admits — describing a Braver Angels workshop where she learned to repeat back in conversation what she was hearing, to make sure she was grasping it clearly. That was something she had never tried before.

“When I was with him next, I gave myself the challenge to say back to him what I was hearing and understanding from him.” And it made a difference: “It helped me to make sense of what he was saying, and it helped him to feel heard and understood.”

“And before I knew it, we were finding common ground on things, and loving our time together.”

9. Listening for a long time

For families out there close to giving up and who struggle to “get hopeful in any way” about being able to talk with a child, a sibling or a parent, Guzmán says this: “I have met a lot of people who really thought the doors were closed forever, (but) you kinda never know, like there might be cracks in those doors.”

“There might be just a little bit of light. And oftentimes the way to make those cracks a little bit wider is to do the counterintuitive thing; the thing that you often don’t wanna do if you feel that things have been burned too far, which is just to listen.”

“Just to listen, that’s it,” she says. “And it’s really hard because you may feel really wounded or unseen or unappreciated,” but “people can’t hear unless they’re heard.”

“You do a little bit of listening, and then a long time may go by and that person may want to do a little bit of listening to you.”

This may be especially true and helpful when relationships have been strained the most. One thing the Guzmán family does “really well,” the podcast host says, albeit “not like a perfect zen practice,” is “listening for a long time.” Guzmán recalls calling her mother in 2016, the night of Trump’s surprising victory in the election. Her mother was really happy, she recalls, but “did not let it show.”

“Because you wanted to hear me and how brutally sad and disappointed and scared I was.”

“You were,” Lupita Guzmán says. “You sounded so hopeless.”

“But you listened to me and you didn’t gloat. You could have gloated,” her daughter adds.

10. ‘Just try to keep a relationship’

Some may feel ready to try out some of these ideas. But “if it isn’t right now, or ever, with whatever people may come to mind,” Guzmán said, “don’t feel you have to force it. Relationships are so mysterious and personal.”

“Sometimes the best thing you can do with a link you have to someone you love who’s wildly different isn’t to test it, but just to try and keep it.”

In the end, family relationships that feel hard now, can still have a bright future. Tim Walz’s mother Darlene, who is also a Democrat, said recently that she stays out of the political conflict between her sons and remains hopeful their estrangement will eventually heal. “This too will pass,” she says. “Family is forever.”

“We’re there for each other no matter what,” Lupita Guzmán concludes. “Whatever you do, my love is always gonna be there for you. I don’t care what you do. I might not agree with what you do … but I’m not gonna stop loving you.”

For those interested in more help for their families, they can check out a video series at Braver Angels called “ Helping Loved Ones Divided by Politics ,” hosted by Braver Angels’ co-founder and family therapist Dr. Bill Doherty.