On our wounded children, a collapsing culture, and a conviction that they are the same problem.
Despite their unique circumstances, many of the children and adults I've worked with over three decades share one common trait, regardless of their personal histories. They had learned, often at a very early age, that the world was not safe—specifically, that other people were not safe. The experience of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, or neglect, frequently haunted their days and nights. Often, those others were caregivers who betrayed their children by victimizing them. The strategies my clients developed to survive were varied and creative, sometimes ingenious, and they almost always came at a high personal cost. Some became aggressive, pushing relationships to the breaking point to avoid further hurt. Others became invisible, effacing themselves so thoroughly that no one, including themselves, could genuinely connect with them. Still others oscillated between the two, impulsively reacting one moment and then shutting down and disappearing the next.
Healing, when it came—and it did come, more often than I expected—did not look like the elimination of those strategies. It looked like recognition and appreciation of the value they provided, along with the recognition that they were no longer necessary. What made the difference was almost never a technique. It was a relationship: sustained, honest, and willing to be present with the full weight of what the child carried, validating their experience, not flinching from it, and not trying to solve it away. They came to believe, against all prior evidence, that genuine contact was possible. That conviction, once established even tentatively, changed everything.
I have asked myself, for the better part of a decade, whether what I watched happen in those consulting rooms and residential treatment centers has anything to say about what I watch happening in the culture. My provisional answer is: more than I initially thought, and in ways that go deeper than metaphor.
The political fragmentation we live in—the retreat into defended identity, the inability to encounter genuine difference without seeing it as a threat, the preference for an echo chamber over an argument, the transformation of disagreement into grievance and grievance into a false, protective identity—these patterns resemble the dynamics I have seen in many of the children and adults I have known in therapy, scaled up to civilizational proportions. Not as an analogy. As the same underlying logic, expressed in different circumstances and at a far greater scale.
Martin Buber, the twentieth-century philosopher whose work has shaped my thinking longer than I can account for, had a name for the condition I am trying to describe. He called it the closure of the between. For Buber, the between is the space that opens between persons when each is willing to genuinely allow the other to be other, in all their difference, not as a projection of their own expectations, needs, or fears, not as an instrument for their purposes, but as an actual, distinct, irreducible human being. That space, Buber argued, is where the most important moments in human life happen. The small daily encounters with other people, with nature, and art, where growth and healing occur. Where genuine community is possible. It is where, in the deepest register, we become ourselves.
When the between closes—when fear, pain, or the accumulated weight of past injury causes a person to stop risking genuine contact—the consequences are profound and, if left unaddressed, self-reinforcing. The closed person cannot encounter difference without experiencing it as threat. Cannot be wrong without experiencing it as annihilation. Cannot revise a belief without experiencing it as the dissolution of the self. These are not merely character failures. They are adaptations to a world that has increasingly proven unsafe.
The book I am writing, Distracted by Difference, is an attempt to trace that logic across scales—from the individual to the clinical relationship, from the clinical relationship to the philosophical account of what makes genuine encounter possible, from there to the cultural and political crisis we are living through, and finally to the question of what healing, at every level, actually requires. It is a long book. It draws on various fields in psychology, philosophical theology, cultural criticism, and the contemplative tradition. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whom I have read since graduate school, appears often.
I have been writing it in various forms for more than twenty years. Some of that time was necessary—the argument needed to mature, and the connections needed to deepen and clarify. Some of that time was due to fear or the ordinary human capacity for avoidance. It is risky to share one's innermost thoughts and questions. The discipline of this site is, among other things, a discipline imposed to counter that avoidance.
I will write here about ideas from the manuscript—not chapter summaries, but essays on the questions the book seeks to address. I will write about the thinkers who have shaped the argument. I will write about what people like Martin Buber and Thomas Merton have taught me, what the writing process itself is teaching me, and, more importantly, what I continue to learn from my clients. I will not write often. When I do, I will try to make it worth your time.
Distracted by Difference is a nonfiction manuscript in progress, expected for completion in late 2027.